Ohio’s legislature is determined to wreak havoc on the public schools that most students attend. Vote these vandals out of office!
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Diane Ravitch's Blog by Diane Ravitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
The saddest part of the whole mess is the students who were forgotten.
They were so consumed with jamming the voucher expansion through they got nothing done for public school students.
This is how it goes in states dominated by ed reformers. Entire legislative sessions are taken up with their demands met first, and any issues pertaining or relevant to public school students only addressed as an afterthought, if at all.
You can see public school students are the last priority. They met the demands of the charter school lobby for additional special funding, then expanded vouchers. They still haven’t gotten around to doing anything for the other 90% of students in the state.
The only bright side for public school students is the ed reform lobby was too busy lobbying for funding for the schools they support to impose yet another round of gimmicks and fads on the schools they don’t support- public schools. We may actually be better off completely ignored, given the alternative.
The only reason they addressed the impact on public schools at all was because of wide public opposition. That’s why they’re scrambling to fix this- because they put it in without doing any analysis at all.
If it had been up to ed reformers, there wouldn’t have been any analysis at all. They were simply not interested in what happened to public schools or public school students as a result of their massive voucher program. They weren’t even mentioned. Once again, the dead last priority in this state are public school students. They’re included only when their advocates insist they be considered.
And now they bring in the biggest charter and voucher lobbyist of them all- the US Department of Education:
“State lawmakers have talked to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an advocate of school choice, as they’ve been negotiating how to change Ohio’s private school voucher program, according to sources with information on the matter.
People who favor private school scholarships in Ohio first reached out to DeVos, asking for her help. DeVos made the first call to lawmakers, and offered counsel that the Education Choice program shouldn’t be dismantled, according to one source.”
Nothing accomplished for public school students, but they have time to intervene personally on behalf of private school students. It’s really unfair to the public school kids in this state. No one works for them.
https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/01/us-secretary-of-education-betsy-devos-talking-to-ohio-lawmakers-as-they-negotiate-voucher-legislation.html
This is not likely to be corrected.
It is the dream of the Republicans who control Ohio aided by Chad Aldis who is in charge of Ohio policy and for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the strength of the religious groups who operate private schools. Those schools are also permitted to discriminate, a fact that is not publicized. Parents/guardians of students must apply for admission. The charts in this link are spot on but also have not been widely circulated in time to delay action on the Feb 1 legislation.