Timely! What Kasich has been doing to OH education (ruining)

[NewOrleans]

My honest assessment is that his education record is worse than Jeb!'s, Obama's, and *possibly* worse than Jindal's.  I'm undecided about on that matchup who has done worse for students and the Constitution when it comes to education.

With two-term Ohio Gov. John Kasich joining the crowd of candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, it’s a good time to look at the public education mess that has developed in his state under his leadership.

Kasich has pushed key tenets of corporate school reform:

*expanding charter schools — even though the state’s charter sector is the most troubled in the country

*increasing the number of school vouchers that use public money to pay for tuition at private schools, the vast majority of them religious — even though state officials say that fewer than one-third of those available were used by families this past school year)

*performance pay for teachers — even though such schemes have been shown over many years not to be useful in education

*evaluating educators by student standardized test scores in math and reading — eventhough assessment experts have warned that using test scores in this way is not reliable or valid.

Meanwhile, the Ohio Education Department in Kasich’s administration is in turmoil. David Hansen, his administration’s chief for school choice and charter schools resigned over this past weekend after admitting that he had unilaterally withheld failing scores of charter schools in state evaluations of the schools’ sponsor organizations so they wouldn’t look so bad. (Hansen’s wife, incidentally, is Kasich’s chief of staff, who is taking a leave from that post to work on his campaign.) There are growing calls now for the resignation of the Kasich-backed state superintendent of education, Richard Ross.


Under his watch, funding for traditional public schools — which enroll 90 percent of Ohio’s students — declined by some half a billion dollars, while funding for charter schools has increased at least 27 percent, with charters now receiving more public funds from the state per student than traditional public schools, according to the advocacy group Innovation Ohio. This despite the fact that many charters are rated lower than traditional public schools. Meanwhile, local governments have been forced to pass levies to raise millions of dollars in operating money for traditional public schools because of state budget cuts.


If Kasich’s goal for his reform efforts was to close the achievement gap, it hasn’t worked. The achievement gap in Ohio — when calculated by the Kasich-approved assessment method of using student standardized test scores in math and reading — is bigger than the national average, according to a new White House report. According to the report, Ohio has the country’s ninth-largest reading gap between its highest- and lowest-performing schools, as well as the second-largest achievement gap in math, and the fourth largest gap in high school graduation rates.

If the goal of his reform efforts has been to expand “school choice” then he has succeeded — but not in any way that he would want to trumpet on his upcoming campaign. Ohio charters, which in 2013-14 educated more than 120,000 students, or 7 percent of the total public school enrollment in the state, as, according to this recent story in the Akron Beacon Journal, misspends tax dollars more than any other public sector in Ohio.

The newspaper reviewed 4,263 audits released last year by the state, and said that Ohio charter schools appear to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It says that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”

The amount of misspending could be far higher, it says. Though Kasich promised in December 2014 to overhaul the charter sector and require more oversight, strong legislative efforts have gone pretty much nowhere so far.

Meanwhile, school vouchers — the vast majority of them for religious schools — have at least doubled in number under Kasich’s administration; Ohio spent $99 million in public funds to pay for private school tuition in 2010, a year before Kasich became governor, and it was more than $200 million in the last school year. As Innovation Ohio noted, Kasich initially said he supported vouchers to help children from poor families escape awful schools, but now, middle-class students from great districts can get vouchers too. The advocacy groups says, “And since voucher money is deducted from the amount public school districts would otherwise receive, the end result is that taxpayers are now subsidizing religious and private school educations at the direct expense of the traditional public schools attended by their own children.”

If Kasich’s goal was to curb union power and reduce public oversight of public schools, then he has succeeded. Last week, he signed a controversial bill that “drastically changes how the state can step in to run ‘failing’ school districts,” according to the Plain Dealer, “by creating a new CEO position, allowing mayors to appoint school board members and giving the CEO power to override parts of union contracts.” The measure, the newspaper wrote, was introduced in the House and Senate, which held hearings on it, and approved it — all in one day. Aside from what can only be called a secretive process to get the bill approved, critics say it strips power away from voter-elected school boards.

The Plain Dealer is now reporting that Ross helped push that plan — which was hatched to allow official intervention in the troubled Youngstown district but will also affect others — without telling members of the state school board, which hired him … “even as the board planned, took and discussed a trip to Youngstown to review how an existing improvement plan was working.”

And if Kasich’s goal is to work deliberately with people in the education world, he needs some lessons in how to get along. Earlier this year, he said he would “take an ax” and slash funding of Ohio’s public universities and colleges if they didn’t cut costs themselves. The Columbus Dispatch quoted him as saying:

“I reserve the right … to say that within the course of the next year, if they do not enact these changes … I think you just start cutting funding and tell them to deal with it,” Kasich said after meeting privately for an hour with presidents of two- and four-year colleges and universities in his cabinet room.

Kasich, incidentally, supports the Common Core State Standards and has criticized Republicans who turned against it, saying they were playing politics. He did support the Ohio legislature’s recent decision to dump the federally funded Common Core test known as PARCC, after schools administered it in the 2014-15 school year and faced numerous problems with the online exams.

That is Kasich’s public education record. In some crowds, it may be a great record to run on. To public school advocates, not so much.

from WaPo

[litebright]

UGH. I grew up in Ohio. This makes me so sad, because I think schools -- particularly its colleges -- have been one of its strengths.

Granted, I grew up in a tiny little farm town where football ruled and academics definitely weren't prized comparatively. There was one elementary, one middle and one high school and no private schools in town. I went to public school for K-8 and think I got a very solid education, and then my parents paid for me to go to a private Catholic HS an hour away.

I'm sure my parents wish they could've used vouchers. But I think they really hurt public schools SO much.

The expansion of shitty and for-profit charters also scares the hell out of me, because that is unquestionably the goal of the JeffCo BOE. Which we are working to recall!

[sushi]

Someone tag Julie. I can't remember her current name

[FloFTW]

YEP. I posted the article about the charter chief resigning in his other thread.

This man is a woman-hating education-destroying dickface.

[NewOrleans]

oscarnerdjulief

[oscarnerdjulief]

Thank goodness SB 5 was repealed by the voters. It could've been much worse had those reforms been implemented. (collective bargaining, etc.)

The news just hit this past week about how the cronies were cheating to make charter schools look better. They took out whole groups of students who were not performing well. The whole point of the Common Core tests (we had PARCC until it was dumped at the end of June) is to make public schools look bad and lead to the elimination of tenure and job protections for teachers.

I have to comment on the "performance pay" even though it is not linked specifically to Kasich. I believe that Obama supports "accountability," too, because I thought that I read that we started performance pay/value-added a year early so that we'd get Race to the Top money. I am really concerned about half our evaluations here in Ohio being linked to this one test. We're not judged on whether the kids pass or fail the test, but there's a "value-added formula." Two years ago, I had the best year of my career. The kids were wonderful, and I had 30% of my kids get advanced and another 40% get accelerated. Only one kid failed, and that was by two points. I was still "average" with value-added. So I know that basically I can never get "above average" in my career. Very frustrating.

I'm expecting the crap to hit the fan when our PARCC scores hit in November. They're going to be VERY low, and I think activists want that to happen so that they can talk about those nasty teachers and how they don't need their tenure and benefits. Never underestimate the disdain that some people have for teachers----they hate our benefits, they hate our tenure, and the f---ing HATE that we have summers off. Seriously. (but oh well, I decluttered my whole house, walked an average of 6 or 7 miles, and lost 11 pounds during the time I've had off)

Sorry my story is tangential to the thread. We don't have it as bad as some states, I know. In TN, I think that they're already linking licenses to the test scores.

*My biggest problem is that there's not one incentive currently for my students to do well on the test. Some intrinsically want to do well, luckily for me, but there were plenty of kids who blew through it in 20 minutes. My whole career, my livelihood, linked to DH's health care coverage... and these kids really could've given a shit less and blew through it. There's no way they could've answered any of the writing questions effectively.

[oscarnerdjulief]

The way it works in Ohio is half your evaluation is based on your principal's yearly walk-throughs and evaluations. The other half is value-added scores if your kids take a standardized test, SLOs if they don't. It's not fair because with SLOs teachers make the pre and post tests themselves. Of course they can fudge it.

Luckily, we have "safe harbor" this year from the PARCC test, so only our principal evaluation matters. Next year probably will be the same because we are taking a brand new test that as far as I know doesn't have a practice version yet. (The AIR test)

Sorry for my verbosity. I am glad I saw this thread; kept me from eating some chips.

[stephm0188]

AND funding for schools here is STILL unconstitutional.

[NewOrleans]

Yes indeed!
"Proving" public school is a failure so schools can be privatized in corporate schools that don't allow unions or tenure is the goal!