Stop letting Ohio's leaders act like they care about Ohio's public school students
Ohio's lawmakers and governors have long lost their credibility on good-faith efforts to reform Ohio's education system. Let's stop acting like they haven't.
Can we stop pretending that the Education Reform plans perpetrated here in Ohio were ever done in good faith?
I read Laura Hancock’s story about how Youngstown is trying to get out from under state control (state control that was established by creating a CEO-led dictatorship there in 2015). Throughout the well-researched and written piece, people credulously talk about improvement metrics, growth measures, success, etc.
But all I heard was blah, blah, blah.
Folks. The state takeover of Youngstown was never about improving Youngstown City Schools. It was all about shoveling money into the pockets of for-profit Charter School operators so they could presumably help fund then-Gov. John Kasich’s nascent presidential campaign.
How do I know this?
I was there.
A Little History Lesson
The Youngstown Plan was literally done at the last minute, behind closed doors and passed in a day. Don’t believe me? Here’s how the Ohio School Boards Association described it:
Let me ask you, Dear Reader, is this the result of a good-faith effort to reform Youngstown City Schools? Is this how you would create a sweeping education reform plan for kids in a struggling city?
Yet this is how the Ohio General Assembly and Gov. John Kasich did it. What was House Bill 70 before the changes? Essentially, it was a bill permissively creating Community Learning Centers in all urban school districts —expanding on the largely successful wraparound services model pioneered at the Oyler School in Cincinnati.
The changes were so anathema to Driehaus that she removed her name from the legislation.
How do I know that the effort was meant to simply shovel money to Ohio charter schools?
Because at the same time the Governor and General Assembly were putting together this secret plan, David Hansen — the husband of Kasich’s Chief of Staff Beth Hansen who fancied himself the state’s new Charter School Sheriff because he closed a couple of small schools and ignored the ones run by Kasich’s donors — was breaking state law by lying to the Obama Administration about Ohio’s Charter School performance. Those lies led to a $71 million federal grant that was meant to allow Kasich to dump $71 million into Ohio’s infamously failing Charter Schools. Hansen — who later resigned in disgrace — stated reason for the grant in the grant’s cover letter. It kind of gave away the ghost:
“Integrate quality charter development into the State’s new authority to create achievement school districts serving the children of the most dysfunctional school districts”
That’s right. The $71 million was originally meant to substantially grow Charter Schools in Youngstown. Even though at the time, I found that Youngstown-area Charter Schools were lower performing on nearly every measure than Youngstown — the district so poor performing that the state had to take it over.
As I wrote at that time,
“In only 1 of the 20 comparable performance tests do Mahoning County charters perform better on average than Youngstown – and that by a mere two-tenths of 1 percent. In the 19 other categories, Youngstown outperforms the average Mahoning County charter school by an average of nearly 14 percent, from as high as a 34.5 percent difference in 9th Grade English Language Arts to a 0.7 percent difference in 4th Grade math. In 13 of those 19 categories, Youngstown outperforms the average Mahoning County charter by more than 10 percent.
Beyond just using the average scores, it is also rare for any Mahoning County charter school to outperform what the Ohio General Assembly says is the state’s worst-performing school district on any comparable proficiency assessment.”
Thankfully, the Obama Administration realized that Hansen had lied about Ohio’s Charter School performance and the ability of the state to grow high-performing models (because there weren’t any scalable models at the time) and put the kibosh on the Kasich plan — finding that Ohio “did not articulate a plan … to disseminate best practices for recruiting, enrolling, serving, or retaining educationally-disadvantaged students.”
Among other things.
Eventually, the state had to return $63 million of the $71 million the federal government provided, with only 5 — that’s right, one more than 4 — Ohio charter schools ever receiving expansion money.
Back to today’s Youngstown story.
What people need to understand is that the state leaders who created Charter Schools, private school tuition subsidies, state takeovers, you name it … never do these things because they give a shit about kids’ public school education.
They do all these things to destroy public school teachers unions1 and shovel money to donors.
That’s it.
When you look at Ohio’s education policy failings over the last 30 years through that lens, it all makes sense. It explains why there’s never been real oversight of Ohio’s charter schools. It explains why the state’s never publicly audited the billions of our tax dollars it’s shoveled to private, mostly religious schools. It explains why it keeps moving the goalposts on Ohio’s public school educators and students. And it’s why Ohio’s national education rankings have plummeted to West Virginia levels.
Explaining how Ohio’s education reform plans have been politically based rather than policy based has been one of the most challenging communications issues I’ve had with folks who aren’t from here when I try to explain Ohio’s horrible education reform results.
For as Ohio’s Charter School and Voucher Godfather David Brennan put it in 1999 after the state’s Charter School law was created in another backroom deal, “This is a political, not education fight”
As much as I bust the Fordham and Buckeye Institute’s balls, they are not running education reform in Ohio.
Ideologues and party apparatchiks in the Ohio legislature and Governor’s mansion are.
All Fordham (and to a lesser extent Buckeye) does is sane wash the indefensible policies adopted by legislative and gubernatorial leaders obsessed with power.
How do I know this?
Look at the data.
Youngstown City Schools have a better star rating than the nearly 15,000-student Ohio Virtual Academy and the same or better star rating than more than 1/2 of all Charter Schools that house nearly 60 percent of all Ohio Charter School students.
Is the state taking over those schools? I mean, the precedent’s been set, right? Any school that performs worse than Youngstown should be taken over, shouldn’t it? Yet it’s worse for Charter Schools. Because the state lets unaccountable, private non-profit entities run these schools. They are even more hands off than a regular public school district!
Youngstown is nowhere near the worst-performing school in the state anymore. It is now comparable to Cincinnati — long regarded as the highest-performing major urban Ohio school district — and performs better overall than Massillon, Euclid, Trimble, Toledo, Canton, Dayton and other districts political leaders never even considered taking over.
So why are they under state control still?
Power.
At the core of this issue for me is this: the state has NO business running any school district. Let alone Youngstown.
This state has utterly failed to live up to its constitutional obligation to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools. It’s invested more than $2.5 billion in failing Charter Schools and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies, preventing the full funding of its own school funding system. It’s providing a smaller percentage of its budget for kids in public schools than any time in history.
And every major education reform effort the state has undertaken since the early 1990s has been done to destroy teachers unions and fund Republican party donors.
And they claim they can fix Youngstown?
Child, please.
Can we please quit pretending that this state’s education reform efforts have anything to do with actual education reform?
Ohio’s education policy remains, in the inestimable words of David Brennan, “a political not an education fight.”
Ohio voucher and Charter School creator David Brennan would say this all the time while he ate dinner at the Diamond Grill in Akron.