Posts by: Greg
Representatives Hayes and Patmon have reintroduced legislation to allow schools to count their school year in terms of hours instead of days in the form of House Bill 32. In the previous General Assembly, this was House Bill 191 and it fizzled out in the House Education Committee. This Wednesday, May 8, the House Education Committee will take up HB32 by hearing testimony from the sponsors.
You can read our writing about HB191 here.
In addition to allowing public schools some flexibility in the crafting of the school year (the bill removes the 182 [...]
Full Story... →From the “not news” file comes the continuing sad saga of ECOT, the largest charter e-school in Ohio. We’ve reported about ECOT many times in the past and this post is a continuing update of the damage that ECOT continues to cause statewide.
ECOT’s 40% graduation rate doesn’t stop them from siphoning students and funding away from over 300 of the top-rated school districts in the state. A whopping 327 of the 353 districts rated Excellent or Excellent w/Distinction (“A” or “A+”) are losing students and the associated funding to ECOT this year, totaling over $33 million dollars pulled from [...]
Full Story... →Senate Bill 21 seeks to change provisions relating to the Third Grade Reading Guarantee (TGRG) passed last year. A key component of this bill has been overlooked, but was highlighted yesterday by Senator Peggy Lehner as she introduced it to the House Education Committee.
According to Lehner in her testimony, the original legislation was never intended to affect teachers in grades K-2, and it was misinterpreted by the Ohio Department of Education after its passage (this is debatable as the original language could be claimed to be faulty and/or ambiguous). Lehner’s SB21 (passed 30-1 by Ohio Senate) corrects the confusing [...]
Full Story... →Last October, we wrote about the exorbitant cost of obtaining a Reading Endorsement to meet the requirements of teaching the primary grades under Ohio’s Third Grade Guarantee law. At the time, we projected the cost to be over $17,000. That figure may have dropped a bit as universities have been scrambling to find a way to address the thousands of panicked teachers seeking to obtain the endorsement, but will still cost thousands of unnecessary dollars.
We have a message for those panicked teachers: Stop it.
Senate Bill 21 has moved on to the Ohio House with [...]
Full Story... →Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman’s Education Commission could clearly fill a necessary role in coordinating services throughout the city as long as they don’t alienate too many people along the way.
Beyond the Columbus City Schools, the Columbus area has many educational and community services for children that are fragmented and often a challenge for families to navigate. These services might only be coordinated if they are willing to turn over their public/private management to a city oversight group such as the mayor’s commission. The Columbus Zoo, the Columbus library system, Columbus Parks and Recreation, COSI, and even COTA, [...]
Full Story... →At the Columbus City Schools Board of Education meeting last night, the Board introduced a resolution that takes aim at the questionable direction of Mayor Coleman’s Columbus Education Commission. Following on the heels of the resolution adopted by the AFL-CIO, the Board of Education is seeking to reaffirm the local community’s right to formally elect school board members through a democratic election while seeking clarity around the actual intentions and goals of the Mayor’s commission.
The resolution (shown below) was read into the record and is slated to be discussed by the Board and [...]
Full Story... →ECOT, the Ohio online charter school, is recruiting students to enroll in the school in time to take the Ohio Graduation Tests with the opportunity to get paid up to $100 (maximum $20 per test). How is this “public” charter school using taxpayer dollars as an incentive to students through a check “made out in the student’s name”?
Furthermore, the stated requirement that a student must complete the test and answer all questions appropriately implies that someone at ECOT will be looking at student test booklets and answers — isn’t that a clear violation of test administration rules from the [...]
Full Story... →In the last General Assembly, Representatives Hayes and Patmon passed legislation in the House to modify the definition of the minimum school year requirements. House Bill 191 sought to change from requiring a minimum number of school days to a minimum number of school hours. When we analyzed the bill’s second iteration last year we discovered that the change to hours actually resulted in an increase in the number of hours required by school districts, possibly requiring an increase in funding to help augment this increase.
Hayes and Patmon are both back in the 130th General Assembly and so is this legislation, [...]
Full Story... →The Senate Education Committee will be discussing Senate Bill 21 this week, a bill that seeks to change the requirements of the teachers involved in reading instruction under the Third Grade Guarantee. The legislation likely does not go far enough in providing schools the flexibility they need to roll in the required changes to reading instruction, but the introduction of legislation to modify the rules is a start.
Senate Bill 21 seeks to remove the requirement that students “…shall be assigned a teacher who has been actively engaged in the reading instruction of students for the previous three years…”
[...]
Full Story... →The Columbus City School Board has hired a search firm to help find candidates to replace retiring Superintendent Dr. Gene Harris. This is a fairly typical practice that can be witnessed all over Ohio, especially in Central Ohio, as school superintendents in the area are retiring en masse. In Columbus, however, the Columbus Education Commission‘s director plans on stopping the Board’s process and has his own plans for the School district.
Director Eric Fingerhut is less than pleased that the Board of Education is proceeding with the hiring process and ignoring the work of the Commission [...]
Full Story... →On February 4th, we posted about the resolution the AFL-CIO passed in opposition to the actions of the Columbus Education Commission and their apparent leanings toward staging a hostile takeover of the Columbus City School District. This week, the AFL-CIO began running full page ads in local newspapers aimed at getting the message out to the community that their opposition to a corporate takeover of the Columbus City Schools is not something to be taken lightly.
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