The Dispatch today (Sunday, 9/10/06) is dedicated to raising taxes; and if you don't want to raise taxes, then you're an idiot!

The title of this post is an actual quote in today's lead editorial. This is the type of analysis one would expect from a 10th grader's social studies essay. Of course, what else would you expect from the best high school newspaper in Ohio? Of course, the head sophomore, Joe Hallet, spells it out in his usual stirring and pithy syntactic formulations as only a seasoned professional scribe can:

The truth about fixing school funding in Ohio is that we can’t handle the truth. It involves tax increases...

Wow! I feel dumber for just having to copy-and-paste that. He also includes a quote from Republican expert Andy Douglas, "a wily politician and former Ohio Supreme Court justice. He led the court four times between 1997 and 2003 to declare Ohio’s property-tax-based system of funding schools unconstitutional because of its inherent inequity."

In the political atmosphere today, the practical problem is that nobody can talk about properly funding government and then expect to get elected," said Douglas, now executive director of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association.

This is the same Andy Douglas that The Dispatch found last week for their pro-Strickland pre-emptive strike on Blackwell issue, only then he was a labor and prisons expert:

The largest union representing state employees, including prison workers, fired off a news release with a tongue-in-cheek welcome to Blackwell for supporting the Lima [Correctional Institution] reopening.

"Blackwell is arriving at this party about three years late," said Andy Douglas, executive director of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association and a former Republican justice on the Ohio Supreme Court.

Of course it has been shown time-and-time again that the "increase spending-increase education" paradigm is a shameless fallacy perpetrated by the single largest obstacle to education reform-- the NEA. From a Buckeye Institute analysis:

The total revenue variable was insignificant, meaning that increasing the total amount of funding for Ohio’s schools is unlikely to create any difference in student achievement. However, the variables for how schools spend their funds provide instructive results. Instructional spending per student had a positive and statistically significant relationship in 16 out of 21 models. Administrative spending, by contrast, was largely insignificant. When it achieved significance, the impact was [sic] on student achievement was negative. This shows that how schools spend their funds is indeed important to student performance. Making sure that our education dollars get into the classroom, as opposed to ending up in the administrative bureaucracy, is critical to improving student success. Ohio doesn’t need to increase its total funding for these schools, but rather needs to ensure that the current dollars are being spent in the classroom for instruction. Such a student-centric spending approach is the best way to ensure that education spending will result in increased student achievement.

Hmm...which candidate has been saying that? Read the whole study.

I also urge you to read The Dispatch's condescending and intellectually vapid editorials (on-line; don't actually spend money on it). This will give you an inkling of the bereft thinking inherent in the conventional wisdom espoused by the teacher's lobby, "moderate" to leftist Democrats (and Republicans), and in particular, the Strickland campaign. Let me give you just one more 'tater of a hint of what you'll find in The Dispatch:

Blackwell, to his credit and his bane, was more precise. Find his education plan under cockamamie in the dictionary.

They rail on about how neither candidate has serious ideas on how to fix education funding in Ohio-- in the case of Strickland, this is true-- but what they really mean is: serious = increase taxes.

However, in The Dayton Daily News, in their editorial reprinted in The Dispatch, they actually revealed the problem like a real newspaper, which also confirms some of the findings by the Buckeye Institute. Some excerpts:

Salaries and benefits are the biggest and fastest growing expense.

...

Dayton's public schools, for example, had 19 percent fewer students, and lost 22 percent of their teachers. Cleveland's enrollment was lower by 13.9 percent, and the teachers in the district dropped 26.9 percent. Columbus lost 6.5 percent of its student body, and a whopping 28.5 percent of the teacher population.

These districts, though, weren't less expensive to operate once they had fewer students and teachers. Total expenditures in Cleveland were essentially level (down just 1.8 percent), while Dayton's rose 7.9 percent, and Columbus' were up 14.9 percent.

Where did the money go? "Instructional" expenditures were up significantly on a per-student basis: Columbus' rising by 16.6 percent, Dayton's by 30.4 percent and Cleveland's by 22.3 percent.

...

On a per-teacher basis, instructional spending was up 35.4 percent in Dayton, 44.1 percent in Cleveland, and 52.6 percent in Columbus from just five years before.

What does this suggest? That rising compensation costs are hidden by attrition. School districts are using personnel cuts to fund "instructional" budgets, applying the savings to pay higher salaries and more expensive benefits to fewer teachers and other employees.

...

In education, the trend is the same. On average, $1,690 of the cost of educating an Ohio public school student went for employee benefits in 2003, according to a report by Standard & Poors — representing 19.75 percent of all public school spending, and a 42.38 percent increase over benefits in 1999.

Cutting staff has been the only way to swing healthy salary increases, year after year, while also paying 14 percent into the pension system, and absorbing double-digit increases in health insurance costs.

State officials and local school districts don't make it easy to find the particulars of cost increases, so some numbers aren't precise. But what's clear is that the growth in spending can't be sustained under any funding scheme.

Read the whole thing. It's illuminating.