Currently viewing the tag: "Education"
After he was elected, Governor Kasich said that the state’s teachers unions should take out a full page ad to apologize to him. He also told unions and other interest groups to “get on the bus” or he would run them over.
It didn’t take long. In the state budget, Kasich and the GOP-controlled legislature drained nearly $2 billion from public education, resulting in new levies and drastic cuts at schools across the state. The budget also accelerated the transfer of public money to private and for-profit charter schools and implanted the same controversial scheme to tie teacher pay to [...]
Full Story... →Tonight we’re getting the results from a number of special elections being held around the state and the results tell the tale of the Kasich budget in a nutshell:
step 1 – cut taxes on the wealthy, privatize everything, give your staff raises, keep state government the same size and pass the tough choices down to the locals in the form of reduced school funding and revenue-sharing step 2 – as tax collections come in ahead of forecast, amass a war chest in the state’s rainy day fund but refuse to share any of it step 3 – watch as [...]
Full Story... →Greg’s already explained how the Governor’s proposed new school district rankings are basically a fancy way to tell us which districts have the best standardized test scores. Steve Dyer of 10th Period calculates that under the plan, 77% of schools will see their rankings drop.
But there’s another very practical reality of this plan, and that is that it undercuts homeowners in suburban school districts across the state by taking away what has traditionally been a very effective selling point for their homes. According to the [...]
Full Story... →We are the watchdogs my friends, and we’ll keep on guarding to the end.
This is my part two post about last weekend. The thread running through my day, (which started with RootsCamp Ohio 2012, was followed by the Plunderbund Party at Smokey Bones, and finished with the WVKO Annual Democratic Party), was the word, “watchdog.”
All of you who are paying attention, are the Watchdogs of Democracy. You help keep politicians accountable to the people. You’ve created tools to make that job easier. You created ProgressOhio. You created Plunderbund. You created WVKO 1580 AM, the [...]
Full Story... →The Ohio Department of Education has released the State Report Cards for schools and districts (though school report cards have incorrect state data that has yet to be corrected) and that means the names of the teachers who will be required to take the Praxis exams is also available. I’ll be posting the list of 349 schools and over 5,900 teachers on Plunderbund later today.
To help catch you up, here is some light reading about the “Retesting Teachers” provision in House Bill 153 (Budget Bill):
As prepared by the Legislative Service Commission:
Retesting Teachers
RC 3319.58
[...]
Full Story... →In the final months of the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Governor Strickland’s campaign and his allies in education starting warning people in rural districts that a vote for John Kasich was a vote to consolidate your kids local school district out of existence.
And the Kasich campaign called it a totally untrue “smear” designed to scare voters:
“John has never talked about consolidating schools. John has talked about sharing services," Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols told the Toledo Blade on Wednesday.
Kasich, at a campaign stop later that day, noted it was Halloween season and accused the Strickland campaign of making things [...]
Full Story... →Welcome Kasichstan, where the Governor issues veiled veto threats if the legislature considers more funding for schools, seniors and local governments!
Here’s Governor Grumpy Pants in today’s Columbus Dispatch:
Gov. John Kasich said the Senate’s version of the two-year budget shares his overall vision, but he warned that he soon will grow cold to additional spending.
"We are watching spending very carefully," Kasich said. "We cannot put ourselves back in the hole by spending too much. There can be some give, but if there’s much more, we’re going to have a problem with it."
John Kasich is still seething [...]
Full Story... →It’s hard to capture every nuisance and change in the budget when it takes the Senate GOP caucus fifteen pages just to describe the amendments, and I haven’t the time (or yet present ability) to read the amendments myself.
WHAT’S OUT:
Workers Compensation Council. InnovationOhio was quick to declare a partial victory in that the Ohio Senate’s omnibus budget amendment eliminates the unstaffed Workers Compensation Council. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider ordinarily such a move should have been made in the separate budget for Workers Compensation that has already been signed into law. Also, we all know that [...]
Full Story... →The merit pay provisions contained in Senate Bill 5 and House Bill 153 (Kasich’s Budget) have been contentiously debated by both sides for their, well, merit. While supporters might claim that it brings these public sector jobs in line with the private sector, opponents will fiercely debate the lack of evidence that these methods have proven to work. When merit pay existed in the union-busting Senate Bill 5 legislation, it was easy to draw the conclusion that it was a power play by the Republicans, but now that merit and performance pay language has been lumped into the budget, one [...]
Full Story... →InnovationOhio has released a new report that examines the nexus between e-schools’ academic performance (or lack thereof) and yet their political popularity with Republicans that might, just might be, influenced by the rather large campaign donations made by e-school businesses, like… White Hat Management executive David Brennan.
Among the findings of the report:
Of Ohio’s 7 state-wide E-schools (which account for 90% of all E-school enrollment), six are not even rated “effective” by the Ohio Department of Education. 5 of the 7 have graduation rates worse than Cleveland Municipal Schools, which has the lowest graduation rate of all traditional [...]
Full Story... →Yesterday was a train wreck. Speaker Batchelder held a press gaggle in which he declared, definitively, that the CAT tax on gross receipts amendment that the House Finance Committee added on Thursday would be struck today:
Reporter: What about the CAT tax? There seems to be concerns on both sides.
It will be part of the changes, it’s out of the bill. We have a memo from LSC that language we put in is in the law. There have been meetings between the Governor and the industry. We are seeing a lot more action now. The budget will not say [...]
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