Readers of this blog have been informed of the misuse of taxpayer monies to pay off campaign contributors in Ohio, if they were canny enough to invest in charter schools. The general public is not. They keep hearing from the mainstream media that Kasich is the moderate in the race. The MSM forgets that Kasich tried to eliminate collective bargaining, but the voters of Ohio overturned the law Kasich pushed through. The MSM is completely clueless about the ongoing charter scandals in Ohio, where for-profit charter owners give big bucks to the Republican party or individual legislators and get preferential treatment.
Here is one effort to tell the charter scandal story.
Here is another. This is a big story, the story of ECOT, the state’s most profitable online charter, whose owner donates about a quarter million to politicians every year while he cleans up.
Here is an excerpt from the story linked above in “Plunderbund” about ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) and the plundering of taxpayers and children:
Question: Would the Columbus Dispatch cover a story in which the Superintendent of the Columbus City Schools hired his own two privately-held companies to provide services for the school district at a cost of over $22,000,000 per year without having to disclose how that money was being spent?
And then what if that same Columbus City Schools superintendent bought two $300,000 homes, paid them off, gave one to his daughter (who he hired to help run one of his companies), then proceeded to purchase a million-dollar estate?
And what if he did so while still managing to donate well over $200,000 per year to political campaigns?
And what if this all occurred while the district was putting up performance numbers that are lower than the district’s results that the Dispatch loves to criticize on such a regular basis?
Would that superintendent have lasted the sixteen years that Lager has been in power while receiving significant raises every year?
Ask yourself a question, what would your annual income have to be to so readily give away $246,000 per year to people who “supposedly” aren’t giving you anything in return? If Lager worships at the Republican altar, then his “tithe of 10%” would put his annual income in the neighborhood of $2,460,000!
Would the Columbus Dispatch ignore this story if the Columbus City Schools superintendent was making over $2 million per year?
Now to be fair and bring this to an apples-to-apples comparison, since Columbus has 3.5 times as many students as ECOT, the Columbus City Schools superintendent’s annual salary would have to be at least $8,610,000 to be comparable to equivalent to Lager’s annual take. Would the Columbus Dispatch write about that? Would they create a cheap graphic to post in the left margin every time they wrote about this scandal?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
I can’t believe he is still considering himself a candidate for President of the United States. He’s a bad governor and a would be a worse POTUS
Right now Kasich is sitting in the back of the clown car while Trump and Cruz fight over the steering wheel. What criteria do MSM use to call this incompetent a “moderate?” Watching the Republicans fight over the nomination is almost like watching “Black Sails” on cable. “Black Sails,”by the way, is a show about pirates fighting over booty and control of a Caribbean island.
Ohio newspapers have actually gotten a lot better at covering the charter situation. For a long time they were cheerleaders, but less so now.
The Columbus Dispatch is now something of an outlier in their bias towards charters. I think it’s egregious to people because they went after Columbus Public Schools like it was a personal vendetta. The public schools had a data-fixing scandal and there were perp walks and arrests that were over the top ridiculous- the auditor busting in like a raid, etc. They covered that like it was the biggest scandal the state had ever seen and they were SO slow to admit the charter scandals existed, let alone cover them in an even-handed way. It’s disturbing because it makes you think the fix is in down there, as far as state government. It’s a tough thing to get used to, that the state doesn’t support its own public schools, because obviously one would expect they would since 93% of children attend one.
Like President Obama, I think the proof is in the pudding as far as Kasich’s commitment to public schools and the one and only question for public schools should be “are they better or worse under ed reform leadership?” If the answer is “worse” then ed reform is not “working” for 93% of kids and they can push vouchers and charters all they want and it doesn’t change that reality. The theory is nice but there’s still those 93% of kids and the schools they actually attend.
Today, the Cincinnati Enquirer circulated an Associated Press Report about a call for federal education officials to seek an independent audit of Ohio’s state Department of Education.
The request for a federal audit is a well-intended effort by attorney and retired judge A. J. Wagner, member of Ohio’s state school board, to get Stefan Huh, the USDE Charter Schools Program director to pay attention to what happened in his own office and explain what happened in Ohio’s charter oversight office last year.
I applaud the effort to get some accountability, but USDE’s Charter School Program director also needs to be audited for sending money out the door to Ohio without due diligence—giving a $71 million grant to support Ohio’s charter schools based on a deeply flawed review process at USDE.
Ohio’s grant application was submitted by David Hansen who has admitted that he omitted failing grades from certain charter-school sponsor evaluations to make the application look good. Hansen has resigned but he and others in the Ohio Charter office have not been held accountable for lying.
Why not?
A rhetorical question.
Hanson’s wife manages Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign and the State auditor Dave Yost—who is reviewing the fraud in the application—is co-chairing Kasich’s campaign.
I hope A. J. Wagner finds some support for what looks like another example of corruption in Ohio, with Kasich and his supporters enabling that.
The state is also releasing 25 million in state money for facilities grants, presumably based on the same “rigorous” evaluation they sent to DC and DC didn’t verify at all.
It just never ends. A full year of local media coverage of the problems with charters and it hasn’t slowed any of it down- if anything they have increased the focus on charters and decreased support for public schools. They can’t regulate the charters they have now and they are building more as fast as they can.
Diane –
Both the MSM and ALL of the Presidential candidates seem clueless about the on-going crisis in public education, the parent revolt against hi-stakes mass testing, and the corruption endemic among so many of the Charters. I wish someone could get through to the networks even to ask the questions about all of these. I have, so far, heard none.
John
John V. Knapp, Editor,
Style
Professor of English, Emeritus.
Northern Illinois University,
330 Reavis Hall
DeKalb, Ill. 60115 USA
jknapp@niu.edu
(608) 345-0509
Even former Minnesota Governor (and ex-pro-wrestler) Jess Ventura is up to speed on this:
JESSE VENTURA: “Ohio schools area national joke, so let’s elect the man behind the mess as our next president?
” … ”
(a brief overview of charter school self-dealing with leases… i.e. IMAGINE SCHOOLS… THEN)
( 02:41 –
( 02:41 –
JESSE VENTURA:
“THERE is the POINT I want people to grasp.
UNDERSTAND this CLEARLY.
“Corporations are there TO MAKE PROFIT.
Governments is there TO PROVIDE SERVICES.
“When you start mixing the two, like they’re doing now — bringing corporations and the private sector into educating our children, it is still, for them (private sector profiteers, JACK), a for-profit business, which means in the end, that kids are going to suffer.
“Because THEN, IT’S NO LONGER ABOUT PROVIDING THE SERVICE — it’s about providing PROFIT FIRST, and SERVICE SECOND.
“If the government is going to provide public schools, and everyone is going to get a fair public education, then I believe we don’t need for-profit, corporate industry coming into education. This is a prime example of this, when, all of a sudden, it isn’t about educating the kids. It’s about citing big money leases, so that somebody can profit tremendously, because it’s the tax dollars, in the end, that all of us are paying. Right?”
CO-HOST: “That’s right, and there’s more to this story … ”
and then goes into the David Hansen corruption fiasco, where Hansen’s wife is Kasich’s campaign manager.
And here’s MOTHER JONES magazine’s on this:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/ohio-charter-schools-john-kasich-imagine
Let’s also remember that Kasich eliminated the tangible personal property tax last year. This tax on businesses helped fund school districts (along with other entities dependent on levies such as park districts), and a lot of school districts are hurting as a result.
It wasn’t so much that years ago state Republicans decided to do away with this tax in the name of making the state “more business friendly,” it’s that they intentionally did not take action to find another source of support for the entities that would be affected. There was push back, and a freeze on what had been the gradual phase-out of this tax was put in place.
Kasich lifted the freeze and ended the gradual phase-out in one motion. Poof — an important revenue stream was gone!
One result will be school districts asking for higher levies, as mine is about to do. The effect is money from my and my neighbors’ pockets will go to fund a tax break for businesses. And even if the levies all pass, there will still be cutbacks, just not as severe.
This is similar to what happened when Kasich did away with the Ohio estate tax. Local governments lost a fair amount of revenue, and local services were cut and taxes were raised to make up the difference.
When Kasich gets teary-eyed and starts talking about America’s strength being its people, how it is up to all of us, he is really saying, “When I am President, all of you are on your own.”