Jan Resseger reports here on the uncertain status of legislation intended to repeal Ohio’s state takeover law, which was shoved through without deliberation or debate.
She writes:
You will remember that on May 1, 2019, the Ohio House passed HB 154 to repeal Ohio state school takeovers, which have been catastrophic failures in Lorain and Youngstown under HB 70—the law that set up the state seizure of so-called failing school districts. HB70 was fast tracked through the Legislature in 2015 without hearings. Youngstown and Lorain have been operating under state appointed CEOs for four years now; East Cleveland has been undergoing state takeover this year.
Not only did the Ohio House pass HB 154 six weeks ago to undo HB 70, but its members did so in spectacular fashion, by a margin of 83/12. The House was so intent on ridding the state of top-down state takeovers that its members also included the repeal of HB 70 in the House version of the state budget—HB 166.
Yesterday afternoon, the Ohio Senate released an amended, substitute HB166—the Senate’s proposal for the state budget. In the Senate version, there is a detailed 54 page School Transformation Proposal to replace the House’s simple action to undo HB 70. (The Senate’s School Transformation Proposal begins on p. 14 in the linked section of the Senate Budget.)
The three districts Ohio has already seized with HB 70—and 10 others slated to be taken over in the next two years—are all school districts that serve Ohio’s very poorest children. Last evening, as I plodded through the statutory language in the Senate Budget Proposal, I found myself wondering if the people envisioning this laborious, top-down, state takeover plan—a plan that pretends not to be a state takeover—have spent time trying to transform a complex institution like a school in the kind of community where many children arrive in Kindergarten far behind their peers in more affluent communities. And I wondered why the Senate’s plan relies on so many of the failed “turnaround” strategies of No Child Left Behind—the federal law that imposed imposed a rigid plan for raising test scores and that left an increasing number of American schools with “failing” ratings every year until the law was scrapped when it was itself deemed a failure. No Child Left Behind was a test-and-punish law; the Ohio Senate’s School Transformation Proposal is also very much a test-and-punish law—at a time when extensive academic research demonstrates that standardized tests are a flawed yardstick for measuring the quality of a school.
We can only hope the Ohio House will determinedly oppose the Senate’s plan and stop it in the Senate-House Conference Committee.
She goes on to explain how the Senate’s new plan for state takeover is supposed to work.
And she adds:
What is clear from this very brief summary of the Senate’s School Transformation Proposal is that, although the Senate has proposed a state school district takeover plan with more local control over the members of the local School Improvement Commission, and while district and individual school improvement plans would have the input of community stakeholders, this is still a plan that puts all the power in a district School Improvement Director—a czar who can fire the principals and the teachers, charterize the schools, privatize the schools, abrogate collective bargaining agreements, and even shut down schools. And the district’s School Improvement Director’s power grows in later years if the district fails to show progress. In the fourth year of no progress, “A new board of education shall be appointed… However, the Director shall retain complete operational, managerial, and instructional control of the district.”
Make no mistake. This is a Republican plan to end local control of public schools in poor districts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“This is a Republican plan to end local control of public schools in poor districts.” Since mostly minorities attend these poor schools, it is an plan to create and separate and unequal education for poor minority students. I hope the NAACP causes a big stir in the press. In my opinion, test scores are a tool to deny minority students equal access to educational opportunity. There is no evidence that indicates that state takeovers are successful, and there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.
When are states going to learn that real change starts from the bottom up and not from the top down? Real change takes investment, and it is an evolutionary process in which stakeholders learn, reflect and tweak instructional practice. Also, as so many “reformers” have learned, schools can only do so much. The family has more than a 60% influence on students, and poverty is a systemic problem for poor students that generally results in low test scores. Low scores does not necessarily mean that teachers are not doing their job or that the school is a “failure.” We should be looking at other additional criteria before a school is declared a “failure.”
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Republicans need to be thrown out of office. Ohio’s policies are following the template of ALEC, and the well informed resistence needs a lot of help to continuing exposing how the public school haters and no-nothing corporate turnaround specialists are demolishing local control and democratic governance of our schools. https://publiceducationpartners.org/about/who-we-are/
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following an outsider-written template with little interest in understanding what that template will bring: THIS is what is so harmful about the ‘body politic’ acting as if it has one body but no independent thought
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Expected- wined and dined by the Koch’s ALEC and funded by the ruling class.
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It strikes me that all the derogatory stereotypes I’ve heard about teachers in my life—you all know them, so I won’t recount them here—actually apply to virtually every state legislator I have known or paid attention to in my life. There are a few exceptions, very few. That’s why they gravitate toward ALEC. Easy money, no homework, knowledge, experience, or interest needed.
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