Jan Resseger describes a grassroots effort to stave off the persistent assaults on public schools by the Republican-controlled legislature and state officials. Ohio has a large and low-performing charter sector, as well as a well-funded voucher sector that has produced no gains for students.
The privatization movement has harmed the public schools that most students attend without providing better schools. While the nation has struggled to survive the pandemic, Ohio’s legislators have remained focused on expanding their failed choice plans.
Resseger describes the work of the Northeast Ohio Friends of PublicEducation and their decision to create a website to educate the public.
Resseger writes:
In this leaderless situation with schools struggling everywhere, no matter their efforts to prepare, questions of policy have just sort of faded away—except that the privatizers are doggedly trying to co-opt the chaos in every way they can. In Ohio, the Legislature has taken advantage of the time while the public is distracted by COVID-19 to explode the number of EdChoice vouchers for private schools at the expense of public school district budgets, to neglect to address the injustices of our state’s punitive, autocratic state takeovers of the public schools in Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland, and to put off for over a year discussion of a proposed plan to fix a state school funding formula so broken that 503 of the state’s 610 school districts (80 percent) have fallen off a grossly under-funded old formula.
In recent years, most Ohio school districts have been getting exactly as much state funding as they got last year and the year before that and the year before that even if their overall enrollment has increased, the number poor children has risen, or the number of special education students has grown. And all this got even worse under the current two-year state budget, in which school funding was simply frozen for every school district at the amount allocated in fiscal year 2019. That is until this past June, when, due to the revenue shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Governor cut an additional $330 million from the money already budgeted for public schools in the fiscal year that ended June 30, thus forcing school districts to reduce their own budgets below what they had been promised. With much hoopla in the spring of 2019, the new Cupp-Patterson school funding plan was proposed. A year ago, however, research indicated (see here and here) that—partly thanks to the past decade of tax cuts in Ohio and partly due to problems in the new distribution formula itself—the new school funding proposal failed to help the state’s poorest schools districts. The analysis said that a lot of work would be required to make the plan equitable. New hearings are planned this fall, but nobody has yet reported on whether or how the Cupp-Patterson Plan has been readjusted.
In this context, discussions in the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education focused on our need to help ourselves and the citizens in our school districts find our way. What are the big issues? What information will help us explore and advocate effectively for policies that will ensure our schools are funded adequately and that funding is distributed equitably? In Ohio, how can we effectively push the Legislature to collect enough revenue to be able to fund the state’s 610 school districts without dumping the entire burden onto local school districts passing voted property tax levies? How can we help stop what feels like a privatization juggernaut in the Ohio Legislature? And how can federal policy be made to invest in and help the nation’s most vulnerable public schools?
The idea of a website emerged, with the idea of highlighting four core principles—with a cache of information in each section: Why Public Schools? Why More School Funding? Why Not Privatization? and Why Educational Equity? Although we have noticed that much public school advocacy these days emphasizes what public school supporters are against, we decided to frame our website instead about what we stand for as “friends of public education” even though our opposition to charter schools and private school tuition vouchers is evident in our website.
Educating the public is a crucial step in reclaiming the narrative from entrepreneurs, libertarians, and cultural vandals.
“Under DeVos, we have watched four years of lack of attention to the public schools by the Department of Education,”
Agreed. When we talk about the impact of the education reform “movement” we have to include the impact on public schools. What it has meant for public schools and public school students is they are neglected by policymakers and lawmakers and that has been true for 20 years and through three Presidents of both parties.
I watch it in the Ohio legislature. Every single session is wholly consumed with ed reform priorities on charters and vouchers. They simply don’t get anything productive accomplished for our schools. Public schools are always, always the last priority. If they’re mentioned at all it’s in a throw away paragraph about how they also support “district schools” and ed reform is such an echo chamber that no one questions how ludicrous it is that our entire K-12 policy and lawmaker apparatus treats the schools that serve 90% of children as an afterthought.
Our kids are poorly served by ed reformers because the focus of ed reform is to replace their schools. Of course they don’t invest or support or improve public schools- the goal is to replace them. Where does that leave the 90% of students in public schools? With no one working on their behalf.
Just think about this- it never occurred to anyone in the Obama Administration that their agenda for PUBLIC schools was wholly negative. All they offered public school students and families was testing and teacher measurement. This was fine in the ed reform echo chamber- no one objected. None of them feel any pressure at all to offer anything positive to 90% of students and families.
Go look at ed reform sites and look for ANYTHING positive they’re offering to students in public schools. There’s nothing. Even in the pandemic they have offered nothing, other than predictions that this may mean the demise of public schools completely.
90% of students and families- nothing. That’s how much they value our kids.
We have a K-12 “public education” apparatus that is entrenched and simply chooses not to serve the 90% of students and families who attend the schools they disfavor, public schools. That’s nuts. It’s a measure of how captured they are.
check out these latest Gates grants to Ohio education initiatives.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2020/09/INV-017204
Ohio Excels
Date: September 2020
Purpose: to inform policy solutions to increase equitable access to high quality P12 education and post-secondary success
Amount: $952,054
Term: 24
Topic: K-12 Education, Postsecondary Education
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Columbus, Ohio
Grantee Website: http://www.ohioexcels.org
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2020/09/INV-017228
Data Quality Campaign, Inc.
Date: September 2020
Purpose: to provide a landscape analysis of Ohio’s data system
Amount: $300,000
Term: 12
Topic: K-12 Education, Postsecondary Education
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Website: http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/
It is not fair to Ohio public school students that Ohio policy and practice is dominated by lobbyists and think tanks who do not support public schools and hope to replace them with charters and vouchers.
That’s not fair to public school students.Obviously. What that means for them is no one works on anything that will support or improve their schools. I don’t want another glossy 10 page report card on my son’s public school. I want at least a few of the thousands of people I’m paying in government to contribute something of practical and positive value to the schools 90% of kids in this state attend and if ed reformers can’t or won’t do that I want to hire new people who will.
Chaira, why do voters in Ohio keep electing these people?
Why do people dislike libertarians?
🤔❓
Libertarians are against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, food stamps or anything that helps ordinary folks. Why? Libertarians say that taxation is theft and that everyone is responsible for themselves and should just work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That sounds reasonable superficially but it’s a load of obfuscation and crap. I once had an Internet encounter with a libertarian who was against public schools. His attitude was that why should his tax money go to someone else’s kids. He said that every parent is responsible for their own kid’s education, ergo, there should only be private schools or home schooling…no tax supported public schools!!! Libertarians don’t believe in the commons, they want to privatize everything and leave it all to the so-called free markets because they hate government and government programs. Libertarianism is great if you are a billionaire or a corporate executive but terrible for working class and poor Americans who live from pay check to pay check. Libertarians are adamantly against universal health care.
Thanks Jersey Joe. 😁
Sure, governmental programs are needed. 😁
Improving oneself doesn’t sound bad. 😐
I hope Jan’s effort produces some results. if so, the general format and principles would be good for other regions in Ohio.
It is hard to take a high road when the opposition is so mean spirited and well-funded. In Cincinnati a court case is planned to challenge racial isolation in housing created by the deep history of favoring wealthy developers for tax incentive financing. School funding shrinks with every TIF grant.
In the short run, I think Ohio’s Republican governor and Republican legislature will be enlisted to support Trump’s planned coup. Tactics in that effort are numerous–capturing as many Electoral College votes as possible, discrediting the voting process, and picking a Supreme Court justice that will be on his side if the election is contested.
Your choice of the word “coup” is exactly right.
Trump has made clear that he will not accept defeat; he will claim the election was rigged. He will say that absentee ballots and mail-in ballots are fraudulent. He will call down thunder, lightning and chaos and burn down our democracy rather than admit defeat. He is a fascist.
Is not the GOP mascot the elephant?
I say get an elephant into the White House, scoop it45 up w/his/her trunk, & get it45 the
heck OUT!!
&, before that, let the donkey give it45 one swift kick…