Bill Phillis writes that Ohio’s State Takeover law punishes districts that serve children of color who are poor. The Republicans who run the state do not believe in local control, except in their own districts. Beware! They may come for your district next!
School districts that the state has seized and others it plans to takeover have two things in common: extremely high percentage of disadvantaged students and very low median income
Beware of the state’s motivation for plans to rescue poverty kids. The current statewide, near universal voucher programs were initiated by the “noble” effort of the state to rescue children from the poverty-stricken Cleveland school district. (The State Attorney General argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that vouchers were an escape route for Cleveland children.) Charter schools were initiated as another means to rescue children from urban districts. The state’s “beneficent” effort is now an $11 billion boondoggle that is rife with fraud and failure.
HB 70 is a “virtuous” strategy of the state to rescue children from the boards of education of poverty-stricken school districts. The table formulated by Mandy Jablonski, Lorain County Parents Supporting our Children and Teachers, displays the percentage of disadvantaged students and the median income.
If the state gets entrenched in these poverty districts, the takeover plan will move towards districts that are less-poverty-stricken.
Beware.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
What’s the big deal? When you’re poor or poor and of color, just let some better off politicians handle everything for you. They have, after all, YOU in mind and are VERY interested in you. Just relax and be passive and let Big Patriarch take the steering wheel for for you so that you don’t have to drive the car.
At some point on the long road trip, they’ll push you out with no wallet or cell phone, and take off like a band of speeding thieves.
Ans those who are rich enough will have their only locally elected school boards. After all, democracy and social justice are wonderful things, as long as they stay out of the hands of the disenfranchised and are gripped by hands of the privileged.
This is just so SICK.
Public Schools and Public School Teachers, are two of America’s TREASURES.
The people of this country are being “sc***ed” by the DEFORMERS who like Jim Crow and the Plantation Model.
HB 70 is a scheme to monetize poor children of color in Ohio. It is another way to wrestle control of public education from the local community to put public tax dollars in the hands of private corporations.
I do not think the corporate (reformers) that are really vampire pirates care if the schools are bad or not. They do not care that the problem is poverty and that poverty arrives at school and is the cause for low test scores that are used to label the schools as failing schools.
This is my grade for the low-life, money-worshiping, corporate vampire pirates claiming they are going to attack poverty by closing the public schools those children attend.
While they are sucking public money with an industrial size vacumn hose into their bank accounts, the children living in poverty they hijacked from closed public schools will still end up living in poverty. Nothing will change. In fact, poverty will become worse.
FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL
Ohio just did a huge expansion of voucher funding, and, as the icing on the ed reform cake, exempted private schools and students from the state tests ed reformers mandate for public school students:
The standardized tests the echo chamber markets and sells to public school districts are not good enough to administer to the (favored) private school students:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/ohios-voucher-students-no-longer-have-take-state-tests-heres-why-matters
When the legislature comes back from break, ed reform lobbyists will again descend on lawmakers pushing their newest testing craze- “end of course” exams.
Their publicly-funded private schools won’t be subject to this new mandate- only public schools.
It’s bad enough that the echo chamber refuse to support the schools 90% of Ohio students attend- can we at least be spared their gimmicky, expensive and ENDLESS testing schemes? If they can’t see their way clear to providing any practical benefit to students in public schools, can we at least ask that they stay out of our schools?
Why is the anti-public school lobby writing policy for the public schools and students they have utter contempt for? Who asked for their “help”? Can we pay them to go away?
Those tests were weapons designed to be used to close public schools, never to improve them.
The leaders of the corporate charter school vampires always knew the tests were weapons and that their charter schools would probably end up with worse results so they want to get rid of them for their corporate schools so thier weapon is not used against them, only the real public schools.
Everything the publicly funded, private sector charter school industry has done for the last few decades was revealed in an LA Unified memo from one board member who supporters the charters of the public schools:
One memo reveals that the charter school industry set a goal that they were going to close every public school in California and replace them with their corporate charter schools by 2030.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-edu-charter-leaders-confidential-planning-20190702-story.html
I think this goal also applies to the entire country and all of its territories like Puerto Rico.
When Ohio state representatives get back from break call yours and ask them to specifically cite what they have accomplished on behalf of public school students and families this calendar year. The answer is nothing- nada. They expanded private school vouchers and exempted private school students from state testing.
They didn’t serve public school students at all. Nothing. 100% of their effort went towards benefiting some 6% of students. For that you paid them 100% of their salary. Thousands of them.
We can do better than this. These jobs are desirable and in demand. We could hire and pay people who actually support public schools and public school students. Or we can continue to pay millions of dollars a year to hire ed reformers and get no value back for students in public schools. They simply add no value to existing public schools. It’s crazy to hire them.
Thank you SO much, Diane, for getting rid of the distracting school bus & all those lines that made the well-worth-reading Phillis posts difficult to decipher.
& thank you, Bill, for the very important information, as always. Will forward to people in Ohio.
Oops, I like that school bus. So few graphics here. Just pure beautiful words.
natalie Wexler was featured on Morning Joe without Morning Joe today. My God….somebody do something…I sent a tweet to Young Zhao,,,,,,,this looks like some sort of major move by the wealthy powers…….
I have read some of her articles. She seems to be saying commonplace things and treating them as a discovery, while ignoring the political and economic context of education.
a VERY strategic move
Does Ohio aspire to be like New Jersey—twenty years of district takeovers in Jersey City, Paterson, Newark, then slithering out after no academic improvement?