Education summit to gauge Kasich
Gov. John Kasich is taking part in an education summit this week in New Hampshire with several other Republican presidential candidates, and he should have plenty to say.
Former NBC and CNN journalist Campbell Brown said the idea behind Wednesday’s event is to go in-depth with the candidates — in individual question-and-answer sessions lasting 30-45 minutes — on an issue that virtually all voters agree is important but often is given short shrift.
“None of us want to hear talking points, and we’ve made that clear to the candidates,” said Brown, co-founder and editor-in-chief of debate sponsor The Seventy Four (named for the 74 million school-aged children in America), a nonprofit news site that covers education reform across the country.
“My expectation about the summit is that there will be some playing to the crowd. My goal is to get past that and get to talk in-depth about the issues,” she said.
Brown said she is aware of the controversy over the Ohio Education Department’s now-departed school-choice administrator, who quit after it was revealed he was scrubbing charter-school evaluations to make them look better.
She also knows that Kasich has dismissed calls for an independent investigation of the official, David Hansen, the husband of Kasich’s presidential campaign manager, Beth Hansen, and said it could be a campaign issue.
“If the governor believes in promoting charters, then you have a responsibility to address failures in the system,” Brown said. “Otherwise, it will hurt the entire effort.”
Also scheduled to appear are former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, California businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Bush and Kasich are virtually deadlocked in the latest New Hampshire GOP poll, behind businessman Donald Trump, who isn’t appearing.
Where Kasich stands on key education issues:
Charter schools
Kasich and a GOP-dominated legislature have greatly expanded school choice. More than
$1 billion in state money flows to charter schools, which enroll a record 120,000 students.
And the number of available school vouchers — state funding that allows students to attend private, mostly religiously backed schools — has leaped from 14,000 to 60,000, although as of Monday, fewer than 29,000 applications for EdChoice scholarships had been submitted.
Still, Greg Harris of StudentsFirst said, “In Ohio now, no child is forced to go to a failing school. That’s pretty substantial.”
Ohio’s laws regarding charter-school operations and oversight have been criticized both here and nationally for allowing bad schools to remain open while requiring too little transparency and accountability.
Kasich acknowledged the problem in late 2014, promising to put reforms in his budget bill.
“We strongly support options regardless of a family’s economic background, but they have to be quality options. He’s been very serious about that,” Harris said.
But GOP lawmakers stripped Kasich’s charter reforms out of the budget and instead worked on a separate bill. They didn’t finish it before the summer break, meaning another school year will go by without reforms.
“We are wasting so much money on failing charter schools right now,” said Keary McCarthy, president of the liberal Innovation Ohio.
McCarthy said Kasich has been saying the right things regarding charter-school reform, but he hasn’t pressed lawmakers to act. The former Democratic legislative staffer noted that when the administration wanted a controversial plan in June to allow a takeover of Youngstown schools, it passed both chambers in one day.
Many critics say the millions in campaign contributions from charter-Education summit to gauge Kasich | The Columbus Dispatch:
