I read the following commentary by Bill Phillis of Ohio Coalition for Adequacy and Equity, and it gave me an idea:
The HB 70-triggered chaos continues in Lorain City School District
While state officials fiddle with the potential of repeal of HB 70, Lorain City School District continues to burn.
The HB 70 CEO claimed and then retracted that school employees would not be paid; the Board of Education filed a lawsuit; Representative Joe Miller asked for public records regarding contracts and expenditures; HB 70 CEO makes a request for mediation to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Government Conflict Resolution Services; etc. The chaos is ever present.
State takeover of school districts do not resolve the problem of low grades on the state report card. Poverty is the problem. The delivery of public education programming and services is a function of local communities via elected boards of education. State takeover of school districts would be akin to a federally-appointed commission replacing the functions of state government. That would not sit well with elected state officials or Ohioans.
State officials should repeal HB 70. JUST DO IT!
What if the federal government announced a Race to the Top for all 50 states and territories?
Suppose the feds established certain goals that every state had to meet (percent of population that votes, that has a budget surplus, that is healthy, that pays its taxes on time, that has a postsecondary degree, etc.).
The states with the highest scores win a bonus. The states with the lowest scores are subject to takeover by the federal government and will be run by a federally appointed czar, with all the powers of a dictator.
This may sound far-fetched, but Michigan has done something along these lines when it created state takeovers of financially strapped districts and appointed an emergency manager to supersede all elected officials.
Why not states?
Take it from there.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I appreciate your line of reasoning to create a metric for state support of public schools. Implementation of a metric followed by a takeover would have many states screaming federal overreach. Yet, what you describe is exactly what happens in many states in which the state overrides locally elected school boards to take over struggling schools and public school systems.
There is nothing keeping NPE from scoring states on how well or poorly they support and fund public education in any number of categories. While NPE would have no power to takeover state education departments, it could influence the public to push for states to do better job supporting its democratic public schools. It would be no less valid than all the ratings and rankings generated by Great Schools and other such algorithms.
Don’t give the Deformers any ideas. They would be fine with this.
Sarcasm? Yes?
This is a script for ‘The Perfect Storm: Public Education”
Meaningless or at least arbitrary numbers and rankings (most likely correlated with poverty, low salaries, hight class size, and minimal support services)
No root cause analyses or acceptance.
in…
A red state governor with a red state legislature with a red state appointed supreme court taking over a red state strapped or dysfunctional school district by a red state appointed commission (like Ohio) monitored by a red state devos-like commissioner and allllll of these people appointing a CEO with maybe some broad/tfa “education” background and no management experience.
Perfect storm. Then they bring in the privatizers to fix it.
Seriously? :You’re also describing red state Indiana. It has given charter schools more money in this year and next year’s budget than has been appropriated for public schools. It’s a much smaller population but charters are favored.
Schools in poverty areas are being taken over and given an appointed person to ‘fix’ all the money problems and have the students be tested on state standards. Raising those test scores are considered really important.
Nobody in power cares about whether or not children actually learn anything.
For many years, EducationWeek has issued an annual report ranking states, with “Quality Counts,” with “Chance of Success” metrics assigned to each state.
This framing of “Chance for Success” makes my stomach turn. Why? There is an arrogance in the premise that the state where you and your students reside is somehow predictive of your life chances for “success.” If you attend school in one of the lowest ranking states you are condemned to failure of success? Baloney. But, there is no surprize in the fact that this ranking system had early support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In the most recent Quality Counts report, states were ”scored and graded on 13 separate indicators.”
“Four of them deal with conditions related to early childhood that can make a big difference in the years before formal schooling. Six others focus on formal education from preschool through the college years. And another three offer a snapshot of adult outcomes, completing the cradle-to-career trajectory.
All these calculations then are blended for each state’s final A-F grade and numerical score.”
This report is published by the research and Editorial Projects arm of EducationWeek. I hope you can access the report. I still subscribe to EdWeek in order to see how it covers topics preferred by the foundations that support it. Although Education Week claims to have editorial independence, too many of the supporters are intent on undermining public education.
Here are the funders of Education Week and Editorial Projects in Education, including operating support and topics some wish to have covered:
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (operating support, college and careers, innovation),
Carnegie Corporation of New York (general operating support),
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (EdWeek’s technology infrastructure and “whole child” learning),
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (afterschool learning),
Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation for Education (policy, government and politics, systems leadership).
Jack Cooke Foundation (low income high achieving students),
Joyce Foundation (school leadership, teacher quality, early childhood education, charter schools, job preparation),
Leona M. and Harry D. Hemsley Charitable Trust (general support for video work, STEM learning, college and careers),
Novo Foundation (social and emotional learning),
Noyce Foundation (math, science, reading, career pathways),
Raikes Foundation (learning mindsets and skills),
Schott Foundation for Public Education (data-driven journalism),
Wallace Foundation (video work of Editorial Projects, leadership, summer and afterschool learning, arts learning),
Walton Family Foundation (parental choice, “bold transformation of K-12 education),
William E. Simon Foundation (general operating support).
https://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/quality-counts-2019-state-grades/
How about rating states on the happiness scale? Currently the US rates #19. We are not doing well in income, freedom, trust or healthy life expectancy. I’d like to see states competing to make their people happy. Indiana continuously brags about its budget. There definitely is no long term thought to making people in this state happy, except for bragging about the low taxes.
The 2018 the World Happiness Report charts the steady decline of the US as the world’s largest economy grapples with a crisis of obesity, substance abuse and depression.
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These are the world’s happiest (and least happy) countries in 2019
Sara M Moniuszko, USA TODAY Published 11:18 a.m. ET March 20, 2019 | Updated 4:01 p.m. ET March 20, 2019
For the second year in a row, the world’s happiest country is… Finland!
Finland topped the list of 156 countries, which were ranked in the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s 2019 World Happiness Report. The report ranks countries on several well-being variables including income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy and more.
Two other Nordic countries came in second and third place, Denmark and Norway, respectively.
On the other hand, South Sudan ranked the least happy on the list.
Where does the United States fall? At No. 19, a slip from last year’s 18th spot (which was already down four places from 2017).
Check out this story on USATODAY.com: https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/03/20/finland-worlds-happiest-country-2019/3221328002/
Here is the belief of the Chicago Tribune editorial. I”m not a subscriber but I get the tone of what they think. It’s disgusting since teachers and aids are asking for what is essential to have a decent education.
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Editorial: CTU’s lame apologies: The damage to Chicago students a strike settlement can’t undo
The Chicago teachers strike has hurt some students, athletes seeking college scholarships included, in ways that can’t be unwound, writes the Tribune Editorial Board.
I am in a wealthy well resourced suburb of Chicago, so I have absolutely no right to pontificate about Chicago schools. That being said, there is no question that the conditions in many schools are unacceptable at best. The question is whether Lightfoot should be expected to correct the years of underfunding and poor policy by previous administrations in the first year of office.
The strike is hurting some kids more than others. To claim otherwise is not reality. They are being asked to sacrifice for the benefit of all students now and in the future. It has happened before; it will happen again and will never be easy for the kids affected. Let’s hope that an agreement is reached sooner rather than later, for the benefit of all parties.
speduktr: “…there is no question that the conditions in many schools are unacceptable at best.”
I subbed in Chicago many years ago. At that time, some of the schools had holes in the floor. The windows wouldn’t open when the weather was in the 90’s and rooms were miserably hot. There were weeds and broken glass in teacher parking lots. There was poop on the floor of the toilets that didn’t get cleaned.
I’d hate to think about what is happening now.
Yeah, I have friends who have war stories from their time in Chicago schools. I volunteered at one school in an after school reading program for a few years before the sex scandals hit and they didn’t want to be bothered with vetting the volunteers. The library was closed and toilet paper was rationed. I’m sure there were other cuts that I didn’t see because we were after school. The dispenser was outside the bathrooms. Fortunately the custodian was a dedicated community member and kept the place clean. When the principal “retired,” the new one had no elementary experience and had little interest in our program since the kids we had were not tested. The woman who ran the program went above and beyond to keep the program going, but the district eventually managed to kill the two volunteer, after school reading programs. Nothing replaced them.