Earlier this year, Peter Greene wrote two major posts about the state takeover of Lorain, Ohio, under HB 70
Greene started his teaching career in Lorain.
The takeover meant that local democratic control was abolished and all authority was vested in one person, the CEO, David Hardy Jr.
Greene wrote:
The law is nuts; it establishes the CEO as an unchecked tsar of the district with all the powers of both the superintendent and the school board. The only job requirement under the law is “high-level management experience in the public or private sector.” So he could be an education amateur. But that’s not all.
The ADC must also expand “high-quality” school choice options in the district. They may appoint a “high-quality school accelerator” as an independent entity to oversee the non-district schools, including getting underperforming schools up to speed, recruiting “high-quality” sponsors, attracting new “high-quality” schools to the district and increasing the overall capacity of these schools to deliver “high-quality” education. Please note the the “high-quality” quotes are not mine, but come from the state’s write-up of the law. That write-up also notes that “high-quality” is not defined by the act.
And if a building in the district keeps producing low scores within two years, the CEO can convert it to a charter.
Hardy is an alum of Teach for America. He has golden Reformer credentials. He is a member of Jeb Bush’s Future Chiefs for Change and the Pahara Institute. He was a principal of a no-excuses Achievement First charter school. He has worked in other takeover districts.
Greene followed up with another post about Lorain. Hardy swiftly surrounded himself with other TFA alums, then told all teachers at the Lorain High School that they had to reapply for their jobs. This was the Big Purge.
Hardy’s argument is that LHS has to break “patterns of low academic achievement stretching back many years,” but he’s not going to evaluate teachers based on their academic strength, their teaching skills, their content knowledge– they are going to be judged on whether they have the right commitment and belief, whether they are, in fact, team players. Is this about the “no confidence” vote that 98% of the staff made public last week? The board vice-president and the teacher union president both think so.
With his top-down, non-collaborative management style, Hardy did not endear himself to teachers.
This past week, the Academic Distress Commission of Lorain, Ohio, formally evaluated the district’s CEO David Hardy Jr. and rated him ineffective.
Hardy earned a 1.6 for the 2018-19 school year and a 2.6 for the 2017-18 school year. The evaluation levels were based on teacher evaluation standards defined by the state: 1 is ineffective; 2 is developing; 3 is skilled and 4 is accomplished. Ineffective is the lowest score possible.
It is unclear what this means for Hardy’s employment with the district. His current contract runs through Aug. 8, 2020
The local union president Jap Pickering said that if he were a teacher with such a poor score, he would be fired.
School Board President Mark Ballard said:
Other than spending a bunch of money, calling people chiefs, there’s been nothing accomplished under him since he’s been here, in my opinion,” he said. “Other than destruction, deterioration and unrest in our district.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is so sad that the state continues to allow Hardy to run our school district into the ground. His time is up, he has done nothing positive to turn things around. Would you go to a Doctor who hasn’t passed the state required boards? No! So why are there unqualified “teachers” employed for LCS making big bucks? Please do what’s right for the students and get this joke of a CEO out of here.
Corruption in Ohio’s plutocracy is rampant. “Expand high-quality school choices”- if that means Catholic schools, the taxpayers’ money, intended for public, community schools, is already being squandered on welfare for the Catholic schools to the tune of the estimated $50 to $130 mil. spent on vouchers that don’t improve outcome.
Evidently, Catholic schools thumb their noses at the majority of voters who voted for a Democratic president in in 2016 by sending their students, wearing MAGA hats, to D.C. for a campaign that puts the lives of the students’ mothers and sisters at risk when abortions are prohibited.
It’s the Catholic Church, British overlords and Ireland’s great hunger all over again.
The only job requirement under the law is “high-level management experience in the public or private sector.”
Here’s the thing about ignorant people (think, for example, of your president and mine): they don’t know what they (and others) don’t know.
Education Deformers, ofc, belong to the genus of Ghoulish peoples. Identification of the species in the field is somewhat challenging because of their capacity for shape shifting. However, one useful classification is into the following subspecies: Tyrant Ghouls and Vichy Ghouls.
Tyrant Ghouls know nothing of education and don’t care to but nonetheless have prescriptions for it intended to enrich the few. They completely discount any experience as an educator or any learning in the field of education. Their ignorance enables them to believe whatever conveniently serves their privatizing ends. They believe all kinds of completely crazy, demonstrably false stuff–that American public schools are failing vis-a-vis other schools worldwide, that the high-stakes ELA tests validly and reliably measure reading and writing ability, that the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list is a set of “higher standards,” that charter schools and online schools and takeover districts produce better results than public schools do, that school grades distinguish good schools from bad, that teachers are best evaluated according to student tests scores, that personalization is achieved by replacing teachers with software, that high-stakes testing improves outcomes and lowers achievement gaps, that all Prole students require identical education, and so on. All these beliefs, of course, are transparently, demonstrably false but feed the narrative the schools need to be privatized for profit. More tests, more education databases, and more depersonalized education software means more sales of computers, for example. The Tyrant Ghouls are completely impervious to being educated about education, for they think they already know everything that there is to know about the subject. Why? Well, a) they were successful in some other field, b) they are not used to being contradicted, c) they went to school, d) and they really don’t care about improving education–they want to produce a more docile, accepting workforce and to increase oligarch’s profits in every sector, from education to defense to corrections. Tyrant Ghouls are perfectly happy with having other Tyrant Ghouls, with little or no education experience–the Arne Duncans and Ditzy DeVoids of the world–running things.
The Vichy Ghouls actually have some experience and knowledge of education but choose to ignore both because, like aphids who feed on honeydew produced by ants, they feed upon the river of green running from the Tyrant Ghouls’ spigots. These include such subcategories as the Vichy Education Pundit Ghouls who work in the Tyrant Ghouls’ subsidized astroturf PR organizations or in subsidized university departments, where they take fat contracts to develop standardized tests and testing-based scorecards and accountability systems and specious arguments; the Vichy Administrative Ghouls who ensure that teachers have their data walls and their data chats and do all test prep all the time; and the Vichy Brown-nosed Ghouls, whose bowers have particularly cute, colorful, and regularly updated data walls.
This is a very rough field guide, but I hope it helps in identification.
Most of the $50-$130 mil. Ohio taxpayers are forced to fork over to private schools in the form of vouchers (a scheme proven to have no positive effect) goes to Catholic schools.
In 2012, “The History of Roman Catholic High School Teachers Unions…” was written by Chesnavage (Fordham University). He wrote, “…the failure of educational and ecclesial leadership to uphold (social justice) teachings as it applies to Catholic high schools…The majority of Catholic schools are non-union.”
Has that changed in the intervening 7 years?
Broadies and TFAers are like a viral, epidemic. How do we get rid of epidemics like that?