Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’
Ohio Gov. John Kasich said a number of interesting things Wednesday during an interview at an “education summit” where six candidates for the Republican presidential nomination spoke with education activist and former CNN host Campbell Brown.
The event, sponsored by Brown’s “The 74″ advocacy group and the conservative American Federation for Children, was centered on 45-minutes interviews that Brown did with Kasich, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
* There was the moment when Kasich looked in the audience and said that he believed that to make sure kids learn, “sometimes that means shaking it up a little bit.” Then he said to one specific woman: “See that cross you are wearing around your neck. The lord expects that. He expects us to get out of our comfort zone on the behalf of children. Because you see education is about unlocking this brain to discover and improve the world.”
* There was the moment when Kasich said without a hint of irony, “We’re not going to tolerate failed charter schools,” failing to mention that Ohio’s $1 billion charter sector is the most troubled in the country and that he and Republican lawmakers have failed to take serious action to hold these schools accountable.
Kasich did subtly suggest that it has been hard for Republican lawmakers to come around to putting some restrictions on awful charter schools, and he did recognize that some of the criticism of Ohio charters has been legitimate.
But he didn’t mention that a two-year effort to write legislation that would strengthen oversight of these schools passed in the state Senate in June, and was believed to have majority support in the state House — but, somehow, mysteriously, never made it to a final vote.
And as you might expect, there wasn’t a word — from Brown or Kasich — about the recent investigation that the Akron Beacon Journal did into Ohio charters, in which it found: “No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” The newspaper had reviewed 4,263 audits released last year by the state and concluded that charter schools in the state appear to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It says that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools.”
Yet Kasich did tell Brown, “We’re not going to tolerate failure.”
*There was the moment when he took on all of those teachers lounging Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’ - The Washington Post: