Ex-Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio wrote a blistering letter to Arne Duncan to complain about the $71 million awarded to Ohio’s floundering charter sector. Strickland is now running for the seat of Republican Senator Rob Portman. Strickland was joined by other high-ranking Democrats. Also joining in: U.S. Rep Tim Ryan, the Democratic caucus of the Ohio Senate, state school board member Mary Rose Oakar and State Rep. Teresa Fedor, the ranking democrat on the House Education Committee.
Duncan’s gift went to a sector that has been under fire in the Ohio media for scandals, corruption, and political payoffs.
Here is Ted Strickland’s letter:
The Honorable Ame Duncan
Secretary, U.S. Department of Education Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) Department of Education Building
400 Maryland Ave, SW Washington, DC 20202
October 5, 2015
Dear Mr. Secretary,
I write to add my name to the growing chorus of disbelief and disappointment with your recent recommended award of $71 million for charter schools in Ohio. As we have discussed many times, I am not against all charter schools and am certainly not opposed to high quality, not-for profit school choice. But too many of Ohio’s charter schools are an embarrassment. Those who care about kids are ashamed that these failing schools are being funded by the taxpayers, and that Ohio is still allowing kids to be educated at these clearly ineffective institutions.
And it has only gotten worse. Less than a year ago, the very same organization whose research the Department cites in its press release (Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes) found that, “On average, students in Ohio ‘s traditional public schools learned significantly more than students in charter schools in both reading and mathematics.” The Center also finds, “The disadvantage for charter students is 14 fewer days of learning in a school year in reading and 43 fewer days of learning in math for the same time period .”
Why is the Department rewarding this unacceptable behavior? Not only are these poor performing charter schools undeserving of millions of additional funds, this grant to charters comes at a time when many of Ohio’s traditional public schools are facing significant cuts and are being asked to do more with less. Surely this money could be better invested in public schools that have a proven track record of better serving Ohio students.
And if dismal charter school performance isn ‘t enough, we now know that Ohio’s State Department of Education was illegally propping them up. In July, Ohio’s chief charter school oversight officer-the very person who filled out Ohio ‘s application for your grant money-resigned when it was discovered that he deliberately tampered with charter school sponsor evaluations to mask just how horrible charter schools are actually performing. You just awarded $71 million in taxpayer dollars to a state department of education that has been rigging the books. The Department should go back over Ohio’s grant application and see whether it was rigged as well.
It’s not only me, or the Democrats in Ohio, or the editorial boards that are concerned about what is happening with charters. This charter situation in Ohio is so bad that even the Republican Auditor of State, a supporter of charter schools himself, said he was shocked to learn of your award. This is because in a recent audit he concluded that Ohio has a, “broken” system of charter schools.
Secretary Duncan, you need to be concerned when a state’s auditor and a supporter of charter schools has this type of reaction to your grant announcement.
All of these things have been widely publicized , and I cannot for the life of me understand why the Department awarded a state whose charter school office is riddled in scandal the largest sum of money of any state.
I fear ideology has clouded good judgement in this decision, and I urge to you go back and look at the hard data. If you do, I am confident you will reconsider. There is no way this award is justified , and what bothers me the most is that it is Ohio’s children that will suffer.
Sincerely,
Ted Strickland
Former Ohio Governor
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So let me get this straight: for the shot-callers in the self-styled “education reform” movement and their enforcers and enablers, repeated failure and an inability to self-correct leads to—
$tudent $ucce$$! For a few adults!
Say it isn’t so!
😎
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The free market dream, give money to the failing? Not much of a game if everyone is cheating.
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Well, well, ain’t the pot calling the kettle black here! Former Gov. Strickland blasted Arne Duncan for giving Ohio $71 million dollar for charters (can’t blame him) but at the same time, blasting what Ohio done with ODE illegally setting up charters, funding.. while he done the same for Ohio for Common Core! He is the one that sold our children down the river for federal funds of Race To The Top, signing the MOU and now Ohio’s education is a mess.. because of Common Core..with ties of profiteers of edreformers, want to get their hands in the “pot”. He has a lot to talk about.. he needs to answer to us Ohioans that have gone unanswered.. WHY?!!!! Hypocrite indeed.
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Strickland answered, with Democrats for Public Education. Last time I looked at the site, it still hadn’t been registered with Act Blue and several Board members voted for expansion of charter schools. The site was last updated in January 2015 and, it had no physical location.
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How incompetent and clueless can government get? It’s like, here’s 71 million for El Chapo Charter. It’s got charter in its name, it must be legit.
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This made me laugh. Thanks.
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This is another taxpayer ripoff. They allow this untried, unproven corporations play with students’ lives at the expense of public school children in Ohio, and they should get preferential treatment? We have gone off the rails.
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Here’s a link to a review of Robert Reich’s new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few.” Although he tends to blame conservatives rather than liberals, he explains how the free market is poisoning our world creating mass instability. http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reichs-dire-warning-americas-free-market-obsession-poisoning-our-world
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As I see it, there is another aspect to this that puts into stark relief the differences between the promises of rheephorm and its results…
As I see it, there is a very heavy reliance among the leading organizations and individuals in the self-proclaimed “education reform’ movement on that old saying: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” *Rheephorm version: The beatings will continue until morale and productivity and efficiency improve.*
Over and over again the emphasis is on punishment: use anything with a number attached to it [no matter how trivial and/or misleading and/or misused] in order to shame, humiliate, degrade and fire/expel teaching staff and students—and sucker punch their parents and their associated communities. Ignore or distort any indicator to produce the “correct” rheephorm result, i.e., public schools suck and everything rheephorm is wonderful. This goes from the misuses/abuses of VAM and its kin to graduation rates and dropout rates and suspension rates and expulsion rates and so on. Rewards are [increasingly and predictably] few and often consist of nothing more than not administering punishment. Supposedly this approach will inspire one and all to bring out all the “good stuff” they’ve been holding back on all these years.
But this is just like the schools that the rheephormsters send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to like Lakeside School [Bill Gates]. They are very different from what the rheephormistas are trying mightily to mandate for and impose upon the vast majority of students aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
Double think. Double talk. Double standards.
So how does the rheephorm approach work when it becomes a question of their own efforts and results? The exact opposite of what they want to force others to follow. Immoral and colossal failures are REWARDED not PUNISHED.
So it is no surprise that they want to double down on whatevers [to paraphrase the NJ Comm. of Ed.].
After all, as long as the $tudent $ucce$$ keeps rolling in for a few adults and their advantaged children at the expense of the vast majority of other adults and their children—
Rheephorm is working!
Just look at the bottom line. Black is good. Red is bad. What, are you color blind?
😏
Can things just keep going on this? Isn’t there some kind of limit to what the rheephormsters will do to swell their egos and fatten their wallets?
Perhaps a very dead and very old and very Roman guy will help out here:
“For greed all nature is too little.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
And he wasn’t even Greek.
😎
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Great post, KrazyTA! So TRUE.
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It’s a shame it took so long for someone in either Party to provide some oversight on Arne Duncan.
I guess I’m glad former Governor Strickland has finally spoken up but I can’t help but notice that 1. Arne Duncan has already resigned, and 2. Ted Strickland (now) has to run for office again in this state and there are near-daily local media reports on the charter situation here, and, 3. the statewide privatization plan is already in place.
President Obama was re-elected by this state in 2012 and I didn’t hear a word from state Democrats on how his plan for our public schools was identical to John Kasich’s.
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I also think we’re past the point of this generic ed reform boilerplate in this state:
“As we have discussed many times, I am not against all charter schools and am certainly not opposed to high quality, not-for profit school choice.”
What does that mean for existing Ohio public schools? Would Ted Strickland replace public schools with charter schools if he were somehow assured the charter schools were “high quality and not-for-profit”?
This fiction that they can continue to expand charter schools and private school vouchers while pretending public schools don’t exist and aren’t affected by these decisions is nonsense. If one of Duncan’s new federal charters goes up across the street from my son’s public school what happens to his school? is it designated the back-up school for the “choice” system? Why don’t public schools have any voice in this?
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Excellent.
“pretending public schools don’t exist and aren’t affected by these decisions is nonsense. If one of Duncan’s new federal charters goes up across the street from my son’s public school what happens to his school? is it designated the back-up school for the “choice” system?
That seems to be the objective and public schools have no voice in this.
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Is it possible that the REAL reason Duncan resigned is because he is part of the charter school fraud and was warned from an insider that someone is coming after him—like the FBI?
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The Arne sock-puppet has no ears. He cannot hear the reasonings of those who seek to provide him with information from outside his tiny bubble. Nor can he hear the cries of the children he is harming or the curses of their parents. His corporate puppet-masters have fashioned him well. They will care for him, though he leaves destruction in his wake.
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I bet Florida could give Ohio a run for its money in corrupt charter schools. Check out this story about a Florida charter school that fired all of their teachers a month into the school year or asked them to take a pay cut from $36,000 to $30,000. Here is a quote from the article: “It doesn’t make sense for them not to have an office, for them to fire their teachers and hire substitutes, which are cheaper,” she said. “It sounds like it’s a money issue, which is not right, because if you are going to be in education, you need to be teaching these children, not taking the state’s money and replacing the teachers with substitutes.” http://www.local10.com/news/sunrise-charter-school-had-warning-signs-before-teachers-were-fired-resigned/35692744
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A simple Google search yields the following results
Charter school scandals — 567,000 entries
Public school scandals — 48,800,000 entries
There are 86 times as many public school scandal entries as compared to charter school scandal entries as per Google search. But there are only 19 times as many public schools in existence as compared to charter schools. Does this mean that charter schools are the only ones with scandals?
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I’m laughing.
I’m laughing a lot.
It is obvious that you know very little about the media. Each hit doesn’t represent an individual crime. There were not 48.8 million individual scandals in the public schools and there probably also were not 567 thousand individual scandals in the corporate Charters.
First, a large portion of the national media (90% is owned by six corporations) often ignores Charter school scandals but focuses heavily on public school scandals—even those where teachers and administrators are later found innocent. For instance, one public school scandal could represent millions of those hits but each of the half a million Charter school scandals could all represent just one story out of a small, local newspaper or a report from a local TV or radio station.
For instance, if one teacher out of more than 3 million allegedly sexually molested one of his students, almost every media outlet in the country will report this story not once but several times, but when some CEO of a corporate Charter school cheats taxpayers out of millions of dollars, that story is usually only reported by the local media near the source of the crime, and fraud in Charter schools is often ignored by most of the national media media.
Then when the public school teacher who was accused of molesting that student is found innocent, the national media doesn’t place the story on the front page like they did when the alleged teacher was first accused. In fact, they will place the story far back in the magazine or newspaper or just ignore it.
In addition, those hits for public schools might represent scandals covering almost 300 hundred years while corporate Charters have only been around for about a dozen years.
But what if those hits only reported scandals after the internet was launched. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s.
And NCLB is the act that opened the door to corporate charters in 2001.
Therefore, if the internet has only been keeping track of public school scandals since the late 1980s, then 100,000 public schools and 15,000 public school districts have had their scandals reported for almost 30 years compared to corporate Charter school scandals that have only been reported for about 13 years (probably less because it took time for the numbers to grow from the few hundred charters that existed before 2001 to the 6,400 of today.
Second, and this one is a big BUT, I have read online about public school scandals in the U.S. that happened in the 19th century.
Therefore if we look for an average and divide 48.8 million over 200 years, that would be 24,400 a year.
If we do the same with corporate charters for the last 12 years, that’s 47,260 annually.
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Because a Google search is a legitimate source. You would lose a lot of points in my 8th grade history class for not properly using and citing sources, Raj.
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Oh Raj,
You surely have no clue what each and evert single scandal represents. If you have enough time and energy to go check out all 49,367,000 entries (combined Charter & Public schools scandals), then you should be able to tell what the article is all about.
This is so lame.
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Raj,
Charters have been around since about 1990. Public schools since about 1825. Check your data and calculations. Scandals in public school usually involve a theft of a few thousand. In charters, a theft of millions because no one is watching.
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Y’all have got it so so wrong!
😱
Look, this was just a clever way of illustrating Andrew Lang’s observation that:
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than for illumination.”
C’mon, no one would be so ham-handed and inept on purpose, now would they?
😏
Please, a tip of the hat and many thanks to someone that is helping us follow doctor’s orders:
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Dr. Charlie Chaplin]
Admit it, one and all: was this day, and this thread, wasted?
Give credit where credit’s due, for Arne’s sake…
😎
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I nominate the commenter in question for the “Cat Out Of The Bag Award” for the month of October 2015.
Even if unintentional—and given the seriousness of his sound research methodology and the impeccable step-by-step procedures he followed to come up with his assertion this seems highly improbable—I am struck by his utter contempt and dismissal of the notion that charters are public schools.
After all, the entire comment is meaningless if charters are, indeed, public schools as rheephormsters continually assert. Then they would all go into one big numbers/stat pot, all mixed up together, the former indistinguishable from the latter. On the other hand, if they are so obviously distinct, the one from the other, that there is some profoundly important point to be made based on fundamental differences, then his comments do indeed concord with what those for a “better education for all” have claimed and [IMHO] proven to be true—
Charters are public schools when they want public money but in many other important respects, are something very very different from public schools.
I applaud him for having the courage and acuity to publicly admitting to a fundamental point of agreement with the owner of this blog.
So I proffer this bit of friendly advice: forewarned is forearmed; you now run the risk of, as Jonathan Alter puts it, being labeled a Diane Ravitch Acolyte.
But wear the badge proudly.
You did it the old-fashioned way: you earned it.
Congratulations!
😎
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For all of those who do not like data and or my comments: Here is my response.
1. Google does not have data for 200 or 300 years. Most of Goggle data is for the last 20 years, almost the same as the existence of charter schools.
2. I know that each hit on Google does not represent a crime. But for lack of other more precise data, the number of Google hits is a reasonable metric for comparison of public and charter schools.
3. It is inconceivable that there is no fraud/scandal in the public schools.
4. There is one charter school for every 20 public schools.
5. There are lot more than one public school teacher found guilty of sexually aberrant behavior with his/her students each and every year.
6. The legal definition of a charter school in a vast majority of states is that it is a public school in spite of Diane’s redefinition. No one can change the law of the land.
7. I do not accept the statements that I would loose points in this teachers 8th grade class. It is demeaning and he does not have the right to say it.
8. My comments are just facts and immediately people in this blog start attacking me and not rebutting my comments.
9. I do not judge anyone here. It looks like everyone here is judging me and not providing a rebuttal of my comments. I am just stating the facts for all of you to understand the big picture.
10. This blog is definitely not a place to discuss education for all, but for just a few who agree completely with Diane Ravitch. This is my opinion.
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Raj,
If you believe the blog is limited to people who agree with me, what are you doing here? You have never been censored. I find you arrogant and obnoxious, but I tolerate it.
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Raj,
Actually, some of us already made a thorough rebuttal to all of your straw-man arguments. You just simply don’t pay attention to Lloyd’s, Krazy TA’s responses. Or you just can’t handle them because, as you say, “you just don’t like” them. Too bad it eventually gets right back at you.
Contrary to your statement #9, most people here are educators and way ahead of you the big picture of education reform.
You are making this kind of stunt numerous times, and ending up making “this blog is …” excuse, shown in #10. That’s totally fatal as an apologist.
No one is at fault for your obnoxious behavior. You are the one who made that choice to challenge people in a high-handed manner, and got burnt. No excuse. It’s just too terrible to look at.
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Raj, you claim Google doesn’t have data for historical material that goes back 200 or 300 years.
Here’s one example for “Education in Early America”
“During the early and mid-1800s, education reformers pushed to establish free public schools throughout the U.S. Their efforts also led to the establishment of American universities and the first generation of American writers.”
http://study.com/academy/lesson/education-in-early-america-birth-of-public-schools-and-universities.html
And here’s a few in your FACE—all easily found through a Google search for “Scandals in public education in 1850 in the United States” that resulted in more than 5 million hits.
“By the time financial recovery measures were instituted, with help from the state legislature, public confidence in the city’s schools had weakened significantly. Scandals over corruption and nepotism continued to plague the schools through the late 1940s.”
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1124.html
Questions on the state teachers’ examination leaked out of
Sacramento on one notorious occasion and created a major scandal. On
Friday, November 29, 1878, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin printed
the questions that were to appear on the examination scheduled for the
following day.
Click to access CTC-history.pdf
“Publicly funded and publicly controlled education in Philadelphia originated in 1818, when alarming changes in the commonwealth’s largest city prompted the Pennsylvania General Assembly to establish the “First School District of Pennsylvania.” Poverty and crime were spiraling out of control as the city’s size increased and its economy expanded. No longer intimate and communal, Philadelphia was becoming what historian Sam Bass Warner once called a “private city.” Turning to the free market in 1802, the legislature provided for the city’s poor children to be taught in private schools at public expense. When this approach to the dual problems of diversity and disorder proved to be inadequate, it authorized the creation of a pauper school system and the election of a Board Controllers to organize and oversee it.”
http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/public-educationthe-school-district-of-philadelphia/
Then searching for “teacher scandals in 19th century America, Google came up with 2.1 million hits.
Searching for “infamous American teaches in history” Google came up with more than 7.7 million hits.
Searching for “education scandals in 18th century America” Google returned 733 thousand hits.
Searching “public education scandals in 19th century America” Google returned 685 thouasnd hits, and one of them was this with no mention of any scandals:
Nineteenth Century American Education is often referred to as “The Common School Period.” It was during this century that education went from being completely private to being available to the common masses.
http://www.chesapeake.edu/Library/EDU_101/eduhist_19thC.asp
Why is that? Becasue Google searches for hits that match even one key word in the search parameters and in this case the word was Education.
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Not all crimes are relevant to a discussion about reform. Sexual predators exist in the general population and can be assumed to be equally represented in schools, private, charter and public. Without information proving that safeguards are greater in private and charter schools, there is no reason to assume any per capita difference among the three. We know that in Ohio, public schools require background checks, based on finger printing. Felons are prohibited from employment in leadership positions. Unless charter schools prohibit employment of felons, they may be making themselves more vulnerable to recidivist crimes. As an example of a relevant discussion topic, charter schools in Ohio, took tax money and failed to open. In our public schools, there is no parallel to that crime.
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By redefinition and thus evasion of what was written, I much appreciate that the commenter in question agrees that my interpretation of his remarks that charters are fundamentally different than public schools—
Is correct.
I, of course, did not engage the question of legal definitions and laws and trial rulings, which in many cases [e.g., labor relations to name one critical area] would support said commenter’s distinction between charters and public schools. You could say that my assertions are reality based, rather than rheeality based.
It takes courage to become an acolyte of Diane Ravitch.
Given some deep differences between my views and those of the owner of this blog, I won’t be joining that club but I do admit to some very crucial agreements with her on a “better education for all.”
Again: as boxing refs advise before the bell rings, “protect yourself at all times.”
Jonathan Alter may be comin’ after ya.
And again, thank you for: “Your moniker is most appropriate.”
😎
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Reading #10 has saddened me more than words can describe.
It turns out that the thousands of negative comments here about the owner of this blog and public education and the supporters of a “better education for all” never actually appeared. It’s all a figment of my imagination, those comments (some quite long) that Diane Ravitch was not the leader that she was supposed to be and that her staff of 92 or 120 is just like what Michelle Rhee enjoyed at StudentsFirst and that she and other commenters here are pure evil children-hating non-accountability bums that defend lazy LIFO teachers and union hooliganism and that Diane Ravitch is making out like a bandit with all the money she’s making from attacking children and all the rest.
Never happened. Never ever never. I guess THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE had it right all along: my memory has been altered and I am under some form of nanotech mind control by those opposed to 21st century cage busting achievement gap crushing creative disruption.
Incoming email…
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
Wow! For once she’s right.
Really!
I can rest easy now.
And so can the owner of this blog.
😎
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As a student in Ohio that did not grow up here, my only accounts are based on the friends of my fellow students at my university. The ones who went to church schools and public said they received a fair education, nothing to complain about – but a couple of the charter kids said they wished they were in a different institution. I think that the whole veil of politics is enough to sabotage the futures of many children who are faced between the two evils of desecrated public schools and desecrating charter schools (similar to how we have to vote on a two-party basis when you look at it that way…). We often do not focus on the long term, when it comes to political theater, but rather the short term solutions that we find appeal to our insecurities and our own experiences. By we, I mean politicians. I hope if I ever find myself in a position of leadership I will be able to view things more objectively..
We’ve come to a turning point in America. Many schools are failing. The schools that are succeeding either are doing so because they are located in education-based areas (like college towns) or are funded well by the state. We have millions and millions of children who are either receiving extremely bunk education, or none at all. It’s about time we focus on them. After all, no matter how often the older generation complains about the new, they will be the ones spoon feeding us when we no longer have control.
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Thanks for adding your voice, in Diane’s living room.
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