On April 17, the race begins.  The General Assembly will have only 17 days on which to adopt a variety of pieces of legislation that are projected to have a massive effect on the future of Ohioans.  This year’s slate of changes includes an unprecedented budget revision bill that includes significant revisions to all the various layers of last year’s HB153, two bills introduced to modify JobsOhio, concurrent bills legislating “The Cleveland Plan” with SB5 components, and a separate, extensive education bill modifying HB153 items while also introducing new ideas from the Kasich Administration.

17 days

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Last week John Kasich submitted his latest education reform bill to the legislature via Senator Peggy Lehner.  We’ve posted about that introduction of ideas now known as Senate Bill 316, and I personally wrote about a proposal referred to as the Third Grade Reading Guarantee.  The proposal is an ill-conceived method of enforcing big-government ideas onto local school board decisions under the guise of providing the “best” solution for students.  But when the administration revealed the research that is the driving force behind this recycled plan, they revealed their own flaws in reading and [...]

On Thursday, Governor Kasich introduced the education version of his “budget reform” bill via Senator Peggy Lehner.  As had been anticipated, Kasich is rolling out his mid-biennium budget revisions in multiple bills in the hopes that by dividing the legislation across different committees he has a chance of getting them passed by the General Assembly before Memorial Day when it is expected that the House of Representatives will adjourn in order to campaign for the November election.

The full text is 521 pages long, though as with the other sweeping legislation a great deal of the pages are taken up [...]

When the Ohio Department of Education unveiled its waiver request from certain items in the No Child Left Behind law, they revealed a major change in the rating system for public schools that resulted in a lower ranking for the majority of schools and school districts.  To say that this change to a system that would assign letter grades was not received well by all stakeholders would be an understatement.  We explained the new (down)grading system and offered our thoughts on how it would adversely effect homeowners in districts assigned lower grades by the Ohio Department [...]

Once again, Ohio missed a chance to move progressively forward in helping to improve the state’s public education system.  Instead of promoting a clearer understanding of the (already off-target) measures that Ohio’s elected officials and, by law, the Ohio Department of Education use to rate schools and districts, the state’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Waiver Request proposed a regression to the uninformative and out-of-date practice of using a letter-grade system.

As an educator and parent I could rail for days about the lack of actual meaning behind any letter grade, whether an A or an F, and [...]

Last week, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on Kasich’s teacher retesting law that was passed through his budget, HB153.  This was the first second time that the eye-popping story of the punitive law against teachers had been published in one of Ohio’s main newspapers (The Columbus Dispatch posted a story the day after we created the list of affected teachers).  It’s an appalling law so we would like to congratulate the Enquirer for getting the scoop on the other rags around the state.  With that effort, surely they have earned their self-appointed byline.

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