Posts by: Greg
The Marcus Garvey Academy, a Cleveland charter school already slated to close at the end of this school year, instead closed its doors today, February 20. The closure leaves approximately 100 students without a school with a little more than half of the school year remaining. These young students lives will be disrupted just a few months before they were scheduled to take the state’s standardized tests to measure the school’s impact on their educational progress.
This is so weird, isn’t it? I mean, I thought public schools had a responsibility to offer a free education to residents. [...]
Full Story... →Ohio House Bill 191 is generally known as the education bill that promotes tourism by altering the restrictions around when schools can begin (after Labor Day) and end (before Memorial Day). There are exceptions to those parameters, but the main impetus of the bill remains a change from a required minimum number of days a district is in sessions to a minimum number of hours. I posted a critique of the legislation a couple of weeks ago.
Yet ever since that post I’ve been wondering how Bill Hayes (R), one of the sponsors along with Bill Patmon (D), could have been [...]
Full Story... →I am sick and tired of all of the attention being given to women and their reproductive organs. It’s complete bullshit. At every turn here in Ohio there is new legislation focusing on a woman’s uterus, ovaries, or eggs and what she can or cannot do with these reproductive components of her body. And those personhood amendments that solely target a woman’s body make me sick. As if that’s something she should get sole credit for.
Um, excuse me? Aren’t they forgetting something?
Hi, I’m a man. Usually known as the other half of reproduction. I’m the one with [...]
Full Story... →[UPDATED 9:34 pm - added information about O'Connor Campaign's Press Release]
If I could nominate a phrase for this year’s campaigns in Ohio, my 2nd choice would be “Talk is cheap.” As vocal supporters of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other organized labor unions over the past year, my friends and I felt the depth of that phrase often and on many different levels. While I spent the majority of my time in front of a computer screen reading and writing, I know literally hundreds of people who first collected signatures, then went door-to-door to encourage Ohio residents to oppose [...]
Full Story... →Last week, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson collaborated with school district Chief Executive Officer Eric Gordon to submit their plan for “transforming” the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The report, subtitled “reinventing public education in our city and serving as a model of innovation for the state of Ohio,” was delivered to some high-ranking elected officials:
Ohio Governor, John R. Kasich Ohio Speaker of the House, William G. Batchelder Ohio Senate President, Thomas E. Niehaus Ohio House of Representatives Minority Leader, Armond Budish Ohio Senate Minority Leader, Eric Kearney
The full proposal is worth reading to see how it seems to [...]
Full Story... →Ohio House Bill 191 basically has two specific outcomes. First, changing the definition of a school year from a minimum number of days to a minimum number of hours. Second, restrict districts to beginning school after Labor Day and ending the year before Memorial Day (with exceptions for calamity days and year-round schools). This second component is specifically intended to lengthen the summer break (because there’s SO much research showing how valuable a longer summer is for students).
To be fair, co-sponsors Bill Hayes (R) and Bill Patmon (D) aren’t really interested in having a positive outcome for children. This [...]
Full Story... →There’s a nice Q&A with Former Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch over on Ohio’s NPR StateImpact website. Ravitch was in Cleveland discussing school reform last week when she sat down for the interview. Ravitch used to be a major proponent of charter schools before personally discovering that they did not work in practice. Since then she has become an outspoken critic of these attacks on the public education system. As a said, it’s a nice piece and I recommend following Diane Ravitch’s work if you don’t do so already.
But at the end of the interview there was [...]
Full Story... →Governor Kasich received approval from the General Assembly to pack up the family truckster and head to Wells Academy in Steubenville to deliver Ohio’s State of the State address. And make no mistake, Wells Academy and Steubenville are more than deserving of receiving accolades for their student achievement scores, but Kasich is certainly an unlikely messenger given his push to overhaul public education, especially his disdain for public school teachers.
Wells Academy and the Steubenville City Schools, however, were just too much of a political pawn for Kasich to ignore as he still seeks to enact major changes in [...]
Full Story... →With the resignation of Bob Sommers last week it appeared that some of the friction between the Governor’s office and the Ohio Department of Education would begin to dissipate. You may recall that Sommers had his heart set on the role of State Superintendent, but had to withdraw from consideration after lawyers informed him that ”state ethics laws would keep him from having contact with the governor’s office for a year.” At that point, Stan Heffner was plucked from the millions of Ohioans who had also not applied for the job (after backing out of his Educational Testing Service [...]
Full Story... →Governor Kasich’s new budget law, HB153, implemented a new required evaluation process for all Ohio teachers (Ohio Revised Code 3319.111). The new law requires that 50% of a teacher’s evaluation include student growth measures. I’ve been wondering for a while whether the state also included a definition of “teacher” in the evaluation and finally looked it up after being sparked by a post by our friends over at Join the Future. Stunningly, Ohio Revised Code (ORC) does contain the definition of a teacher. And not surprisingly, following the trail of codes reveals that some educators appear [...]
Full Story... →After attending many legislative hearings in person and watching even more full sessions on the Ohio Channel this year, I am convinced that the addition of teachers to the mix of elected officials can have a dramatic positive effect on the productivity of the Ohio House of Representatives. Among all of the various traits of teachers, two key attributes stand out.
Number one, a teacher’s knowledge doesn’t exist in the mastery of a narrowly defined area of expertise such as banking or law, but is instead required to be spread out across a wide array of topics and the way [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
