Michelle Dillingham describes the privatizers’ assault on the public schools of Cincinnati, the best urban district in Ohio. Cinncinatti has spent years developing its community schools model, only to face the reformers’ thirst for power.
She writes:
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Michelle Dillingham is a resident in Kennedy Heights and a member of the Cincinnati Educational Justice Coalition.
It’s no easy task providing public education in a large urban school district these days. The landscape is a literal minefield of tough issues: shrinking funding, misleading state report cards, and competition from vouchers and charters. Yet Cincinnati supports our schools. Taxpayers have made huge capital investments in our public schools; support for renewal levies has increased; and enrollment is up. Young families are moving back into the urban core and want their children to attend neighborhood public schools. Yet despite proving the value of our schools and the Community Learning Center model, and even outperforming every other urban district in the state, it seems we are not immune from the charter industry looking to profit.
The well-funded national anti-public education agenda beats a loud and constant drum – “public schools are failures” – and Cincinnati is no exception. Last March the corporate-backed Accelerator Fund made the case, with the help of a “study,” that CPS schools were not offering enough “quality seats” and parents needed more “choice.” The Cincinnati Educational Justice Coalition immediately called them out for their pro-charter agenda, which they denied.
Recently Accelerator Fund CEO Patrick Herrel introduced Earl Martin Phalen to a Board of Education committee meeting, where he gave a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation asking the board to sponsor a new charter school. Phalen is a fellow at the Mind Trust organization in Indiana, the same organization that Herrel was hired from. The founder of Mind Trust, David Harris, is a national leader in the school privatization movement. They actively work for charterization of public schools. Phalen’s company, Phalen Leadership Academies, has been working to expand its blended-learning (computer-based instruction) schools in Indianapolis and other cities, and now it has come to our district to do the same.
Ohio is known as the “Wild Wild West” of charter schools, yet despite every study, every scandal and every fraud exposed they simply repackage the same “school choice, failing public schools” narrative and resell it to local school boards time and again.
At the June 13 Board of Education meeting speakers from all walks of life testified for over an hour – parents, social workers, advocates for students with disabilities, community members, teachers and more – asking them to postpone their vote to enter into an agreement with Phalen to build a new charter school on the West Side. Speakers reminded them of the pervasive fraud, waste and abuse among charter school operators, and that they should ask Phalen, at the very least, to share the basic information necessary to ensure our children would receive a quality education.
After some discussion, the board amended the motion to soften the language of the resolution, changing it to “explore the possibilities” of working with Phalen. The last to speak was Board Member Melanie Bates, who explained that the resolution before them was against board policy. Phalen only has one year of data, which is not enough to evaluate the charter school, a requirement of CPS board policy to sponsor a charter school. Despite this noncompliance with board policy, the board proceeded to vote and pass the resolution anyway, the lone “no” vote from board member Bates.
Many were perplexed how was it even possible for the board to move forward with any agreement to partner with Phalen, since they do not meet minimum standards according to the board policy on sponsoring charters? We urge the board of education to follow their own rules, and seek other solutions for a new school on the West Side, not a charter school. Our kids deserve better.
To sign up to receive updates from the Cincinnati Educational Justice Coalition, send your email address here: cincinnatieducationjustice@gmail.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They really want to expand charters in Ohio at this time? It seems that Ohio has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re unwilling or incapable of regulating these schools.
It’s crazy to pretend that ed reform is going just great in this state. It simply isn’t true. They can’t regulate the charter schools they have and the existing public schools are completely and utterly ignored by lawmakers- why open more and more charters?
They push this in city after city with no regard for reality. This isn’t “data based”- it’s pure ideology.
The federal government isn’t any better- the Obama Administration based a huge federal charter grant on bad information they were given by an ed reformer who then had to resign- there wasn’t any “analysis” – they swallowed a bunch of nonsense and treated it as fact.
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Here’s today’s ludicrous ed reform story out of Ohio:
“A Franklin County judge has ruled that the Ohio Department of Education can try to figure out whether the $108 million it sent to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow last school year was overpaid by tens of millions of dollars.
Well, that’s a relief.
ECOT sued the state last week to keep it from determining whether students were actually participating in their educational program, rather than just receiving it. ECOT’s Superintendent called the ODE effort “underhanded” in an email over the weekend — an email in which he confirmed that if ODE followed through on its efforts to ascertain ECOT’s actual participation it could force the school to close.
So now ODE can find out if ECOT should have been paid $108 million, or a substantially smaller amount. At stake is nothing less than the existence of the country’s largest for-profit charter school — the size of which made even the staunchest charter school advocates blush.”
This is AFTER lawmakers spent a solid year reforming charter schools and utterly ignoring public schools, other than piling on another round of gimmicky mandates.
It never ends. They need adult supervision- some kind of intervention. They can’t seem to show any restraint at all. They can’t say “no”, to anything.
http://www.10thperiod.com/
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There needs to be a recall election of the board. If they are not following the guidelines that they are suppose to follow then they community needs to oust them.
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Wonderful.
Thank you for featuring the good work of Michelle Dillingham and others in Cincinnati. Thanks to her alert I joined with others in offering one of the permitted three-minute comments on the Plalen Leadership Academy proposal.
Dillingham had made the key points, as she does here. I added some ammunition about a failure of due diligence in rushing to approval, in the absence of full information, including the job description for the role of the corporate hire, and Accelerator.”
The Board has a TFAer. I think they are intimidated by the Accelerator and charter promoters.
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“DeMaria most recently worked as a consultant in the education industry, but has held numerous posts in state government – executive vice chancellor at the Ohio Board of Regents, associate superintendent for school options and finance at the Ohio Department of Education, director of the Office of Budget and Management for Gov. George Voinovich and chief policy advisor for Gov. Bob Taft.”
Yay! Another ed reformer who comes in with the same “market based” agenda we’ve been following for 20 years.
I hope he refers to public schools as “government schools”. That’s always delightful. Nothing I like better than paying hundreds of public employees to attack public schools.
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“Paying public employees to attack public schools” An example from the Dayton Daily News, on Monday, “ODE spokeswoman Brittany Halpin…competition is good for our schools and incentivizes everyone to work harder to meet the needs of all students.” This was in response to the surprise that Fordham Institute’s new report showed, “Voucher Users Lag Peers on State Tests.” The privatizers were given lots of article space to spin. And, what came out was that most of the local vouchers were used at Catholic schools, where they don’t teach to the tests. But, its good for them not to engage in the competitiveness of testing because the benefits (of Catholic schools)… are harder to measure-things like study skills, values education and discipline.
Contradictory defenses within the same article… attacks on public schools require contortionists.
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Dillingham is one of the best things to happen to Cincinnati in a long time. It’s an uphill fight all the way — I don’t know how or when it exactly started, but the city’s economic elite have taken over to an alarming degree and there is very little pushing back on them.
The school/charter issues are just a part of their overall effort. They are intent on shaping the entire city to their neo-liberal vision and they have a lot of momentum. Too many examples to list here but this is not the neighborhood-focused, more or less progressively-governed city I moved to in the early 1980’s. It is a lab experiment being run by the one-percent of the one-percent.
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