A reader sent this comment about the Van Wert, Ohio, public schools, and how the state grades them. It shows how wacky Ohio’s school grading is.
“Van Wert is a rural community where half the district’s 2,000 students come from low-income families yet 96% graduate from high school—on time. With top-line results like that, you’d expect the district would be getting top grades in Ohio’s standardized school assessment system, but you’d be only half-right: A’s for graduation rate and progress in math and reading, but F’s for achievement gaps and K-3 literacy.
“So where did DeVos focus her post-visit remarks? On school choice, of course. Faced with the dearth of charter schools and private schools and vouchers in rural Ohio, she seized on the fact that the parents of nearly 20% of the students in Van Wert city schools choose to send their children to public schools in other districts.
“She also promised to lift the burden of government-mandated paperwork that takes time away from teaching. When asked for examples of that burdensome paperwork, however, she couldn’t cite any. Suggesting that she’s been getting alternative-fact lessons in Washington.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The trip was a publicity excercise of use in getting the press to pay attention to all things choice. Ohio’s current testing regime, offered up as if accountability, is projected to leave many charter and public school students failing to pass muster for high school graduation. Some of the politicians are worried about that.
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No surprise there. Her boss, the malignant narcissist in the White House, and most of his cabinet members, all get their alternative facts from the racist, hate-filled Alt-Right misleading, lying, conspiracy theory driven media machine.
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She’s probably thinking of those pesky special education paperwork requirements! If she had her way they would be erased ~ you know the regulations we’ve been working towards since at least 1973!!!
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I’m not a big fan of Randi Wiengarten but she did a really good job highlighting a school district where DeVos’ reforms offer absolutely nothing positive and might do a lot to hurt those public school students.
From what I read in the local news, the public school leaders attempted to explain this to DeVos but she just kept repeating “choice”- which is all she ever says.
These reformers are irrelevant to places like Van Wert. They offer nothing of value to kids who attend existing public schools – often they do ACTUAL HARM.
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Chiara,
Could you please provide a link to “what I read in the local news”, please.
TIA,
Duane
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“So where did DeVos focus her post-visit remarks? On school choice, of course. Faced with the dearth of charter schools and private schools and vouchers in rural Ohio, she seized on the fact that the parents of nearly 20% of the students in Van Wert city schools choose to send their children to public schools in other districts.”
Anything to avoid talking about the kids in the schools she was visiting, right?
If she did that she’d have to admit she offers them absolutely nothing.
The Trump Administration went to the PTA convention. What did they talk about? Charter and private schools. Even IN A ROOM full of public school advocates they refuse to address actual public schools.
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I’m not an expert but my sense is the people who work at my local public school take a very wary view of ed reformers bearing gifts 🙂
It’s been almost 20 years now in Ohio where lawmakers have followed the directives of this “movement”. I have had 4 children thru Ohio public schools and I have seen more “reforms” than I can count- I think my youngest child has now been measured and ranked under four different state testing schemes. That’s one child, and he’s not even in high school yet.
I think people in public schools feel they have been subjected to an endless parade of experts scolding them. There’s an exhaustion with the reforms- a sense that we need a break from these schemes. Obviously I’m just one district so I don’t speak for the whole state but the exhaustion is real.
Why don’t they just focus on one or two things in public schools and do those two things really well? Stick with something longer than 20 minutes. It was just two years that we revamped our whole school system with Common Core. No one even knows if they can do that well and now we have DeVos with these giant privatization initiatives.
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” …A’s for graduation rate and progress in math and reading, but F’s for achievement gaps and K-3 literacy.”
This looks like the picture of a district doing an pretty good job, I’m guessing, with limited resources. Let’s guess that the achievement gaps are between those whose struggles are most extreme and those with more advantages. It would seem logical to me that K-3 would be the place to see the most obvious literacy struggles when children are learning to read. How come they don’t have such poor performance later? Maybe because the students begin to catch up?
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Praying for the Meteor to “drain the swamp” creatures once again . Just not this Saturday 89 and partly sunny, a nice day for a stroll down Pennsylvania avenue.
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The Van Wert school system the Weingarten and DeVos visited together in Ohio is certainly “traditional” even if it’s rural.
Like many other school systems, the Van Wert schools have bought in to the latest fads in education “reform. Their emphasis on STEM is a good example.
The Van Wert Independent, a local paper, reported last Spring that the Van Wert city school board heard presentations on the middle school STEM program, which “began in the 2007-2008 school year.” The superintendent told the board that “We’re trying to do as much STEM as we can…” STEM is alive and well at the elementary level too, and the Van Wert Times Bulletin reported on STEM pre-engineering classes being offered at the high school.
Meanwhile, in the STEM world, GE has been laying off hundreds of engineers in Ohio and thousands more across the country, including layoffs at its research labs. Reuters reported last August that Cisco was laying off nearly 6,000, Intel was laying off more than 12,000, and Dell cut more than 10,000. A tech industry expert said 2016 saw 370,000 layoffs. Information Week reported last Spring the top 10 tech companies that would shed workers over the next year, included VMware (2,000), Symantec (3,000), Yahoo (3,500), EMC (10,000 – 14,000), Cisco (14,000), HP Inc. (14,000), Microsoft (18,000), Oracle (26,000), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (72,000), and IBM (95,000). Surely all those jobs are not STEM-specific, but an awful lot are. Just two months ago, the VP for engineering for Boeing said that the company “plan calls for us to reduce our engineering staff…The engineering buyout package will be offered to employees in Washington state, Southern California and South Carolina…” Two additional rounds of cuts are in the works.
So, there’s a STEM glut. More layoffs are planned.
Now, no disrespect meant to Van Wert — which struggles with resources and the effects of poverty like all similar-situated public school systems — but, the fact that this is the kind of schooling Weingarten deems essential for DeVos to observe seems, to me at least, to indicate the Weingarten is clueless herself.
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