John Kasich’s Biggest Joke: Ohio Charter Schools
John Kasich is a master of making jokes at other people’s expense. His reputation of delivering snide, snarky comments, after nearly 40 years as a performance politician, is legend.
One joke making news Monday is the expectation that Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley will endorse Gov. Kasich for president. This is funny only if backward Alabama, where Republicans dominate state politics even more than in Ohio, is deemed a state whose policies should be bellwethers for the nation. The pending endorsement is framed as an example of Gov. Kasich’s strength stretching “beyond his home state and New Hampshire, and beyond moderate Republicans.”
One joke that isn’t funny and that Gov. Kasich won’t laugh at is Ohio’s education record on for-profit charter schools, which now enroll a record 120,000 students and siphon off billions from better performing public schools.
Various sources have ridiculed the Buckeye State under Gov. Kasich for its ideologically driven partisan plan to dole out billions to for-profit charter schools in spite of state report cards showing just how bad they perform when compared to their public school cousins. Ohio public schools and unionized teachers have long been top targets for Kasich and his for-profit education sponsors and backers, who count on sizable campaign donations to keep the ax of responsibility from falling on them and their business-model schools.
Kasich: “That’s Kind Of The End Of It”
Separate from the generally poor performance of Ohio charter schools, which remains a big thorn in Gov. Kasich’s side as he runs for president, is the potentially criminal conduct of the husband of Gov. Kasich’s chief of staff, Beth Hansen, who now serves as the governor’s presidential campaign manager. David Hansen could find himself in legal cross-hairs for falsifying charter school data to make the industry and its sponsors look less terrible on paper, even when reality shows billions in tax payer dollars taken away from public schools has been squandered by Ohio’s charters, which critics argue should be regulated to the same degree public schools have been forced by the Kasich Administration to dance to the tune orchestrated by he and like-minded hard-right state lawmakers.
One report about the scrubbing said Hansen didn’t include online schools or dropout recovery schools because he thought it was fair to for-profit charter school sponsors.
Hansen did similar data scrubbing before Gov. Kasich hired him as school choice director at more than $100,000 per year in salary. When news broke on Hansen’s allegedly illegal activity, he resigned. Kasich has called a request by seven members of the state school board to investigate Hansen’s conduct at the Ohio Department of Education “political” as he tries to make the troubling issue go away.
Ohio’s twice-elected and now term-limited governor got testy when reporters dared ask about the Hansen affair. Kasich is on record talking about Hansenand why he wants any investigation to stop.
“I mean, the guy is gone. He’s gone. We don’t tolerate any sort of not open and John Kasich’s Biggest Joke: Ohio Charter Schools:
