Education Now & Then - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Education Now & Then

Politics and natural disasters dominate the news these days, to the point where the problems with our country’s education system seem to be pushed to the sidelines. As shown in the chart below, the US is no longer in the top 20 internationally (24th in Science, 39th in Math & 24th in Reading). And nationally, Ohio is ranked all the way down to 31st in this recent US News & World Report assessment.

According to an Oct. 8th SDN article, locally the news is much better with 5 area schools placed in the top 10 within the Dayton Region: Ft. Loramie (2nd), Botkins (3rd), Russia (5th), Anna (6th) & Versailles (8th). Congratulations to these school systems for such exemplary educational results.

The US fell out of first place back in 1980 and has gradually declined ever since, in spite of national, state and local efforts to stem the tide. Ironically, the top state for education is Massachusetts but would only rank 6th internationally if it were a country on its own. The earthshaking fact is the best US schools don’t match up to the average of other countries.

The US education system was apparently at it’s peak during the 50’s and 60’s when fortunately I was being educated . As documented in this previous blogpost about memories of my elementary education, our first grade class, held in the now demolished school building shown above, had 42 students, so class size must not have been a detriment. Not surprisingly, the quality of the teachers seemed to be the most critical success factor and likely remains the case today in our local schools. Great teachers coupled with strong family support leads to a successful educational system.

However, I do recall a problem period while growing up when support for schools was lacking, especially prevalent in agricultural communities. Because schools are funded by taxes on the value of property, in rural communities during that period, farmers paid a disproportionate share of school taxes due to the assessed values of farm land compared to in-town residences. I distinctly recall my father indicating that he, along with most other farmers in the district, would not be supporting a school millage ballot proposal in the late 50’s, even though he had 5 children in school (Mom kept her opinion to herself but my guess is she would have been for it). As I recall, the measure was never even put on the ballot because of the resistance, so the school board had no choice but to cut costs. The route they chose was to hire new graduates from Appalachian two-year teachers colleges at significantly lower salaries than graduates of Ohio’s 4 year colleges. As I recall that period, the new teachers were predominantly assigned to grades 5-8, while the longer-tenured local teachers taught the younger grades and high school. My guess is the school administrators figured the new teachers may not measure up, so they “book-ended” them with the better teachers before and after the middle school grades. That way the younger grades would get the benefit of the more qualified, senior teachers, building a solid educational foundation, while the experienced high school teachers could help students “catch up” before graduating. The strategy seemed to work ok based on the successful transition at that time by many local high school graduates to college. That being said, many of my teachers in those middle grades were indeed real beauts!

By the 1970’s, the problem was so widespread around Ohio's rural school districts that a state constitutional change was voted in to restructure the property tax valuation for agricultural land so the school funding burden would be more evenly shared between farmers and town residents. The State created what is called the “current agricultural use value” or CAUV for short, a value based on the agricultural income generated by the land rather than the higher market value. This concept influenced farmers to be more supportive of subsequent school millage ballot measures, thus providing another contributing factor to our outstanding local schools.

That all being said, in recent years, with land values appreciating to record levels coupled with low interest rates, high commodity prices and constrained residential values, a tax revolt may be re-emerging as outlined in this on-line article from LimaOhio.com. Note that bills have been introduced in the Ohio State House to tweak the CAUV formula, since there are now school millages again being voted down by farmers because of the imbalance. Stay tuned.

I’m especially grateful for the wonderful teachers in my life and am please to know the quality of area education remains exceptionally high.