Public School Ratings

I picked up a copy of this at the local library a couple of weeks ago.




This week I decided to look at it. I noticed that it ranked public and charter schools and listed the number of students for each school. I grabbed a piece of paper and then I did some number crunching since those of us who live in Dayton are facing an emergency school levy vote next month. Dayton Public Schools is wanting to raise $30 million a year to support their $225 million a year budget.

Here are the results. I must state that all of the information came from this booklet so if you don't believe me, go get yourself a copy and do the research! I won't be biased either and all opinions expressed are my own (not that I'm giving one).

The booklet lists 86 schools. Dayton Public Schools make up 34 of those and charter schools account for 17 the rest are private or special schools and they aren't required to release performance results.

16121 students attend DPS (73%) while 5885 students attend charter schools (27%) the number of publicly funded students totals 22007.

Of the 34 DPS schools 4 are new and have no rating from the Ohio Department of Education. The rest are as follows

Academic Emergency 4

Academic Watch 11

Continuous Improvement 13

Effective 1 (Stivers)

Excellent 1 (Dayton Early Colledge Academy)

The "No child left behind" law requires that schools exhibit "adequate yearly progress". For DPS only 8 achieved this while 23 failed (3 of the new schools have no statistics).

Now for the Charter Schools

Academic Emergency 3

Academic Watch 2

Continuous Improvement 9

Effective 2

Of these, 4 achieved the AYP while 11 failed.

The Dayton Daily News reported several months ago that the DPS annual budget is $225 million. Divide that by the 16000 students they claim to have (and this report verifies) and you get $14062 per student. If the results don't improve the number of DPS students will decrease and charter school numbers will increase.

You can play around with the numbers to accommodate this and maybe the real reason for the emergency levy will reveal itself. I will give you a hint.

If every child attended DPS the cost per child drops to $10,227. If the attendance drops to 15,000 students the cost goes up to $15,000 per child.

If you multiply the difference of $4800 by 6250 charter school students ( DPS students have to go somewhere) you get $30 million.

Can you imagine what a homes schooler could do with a $10,000 budget!