Rebel on Ohio State Board of Education Finds a Way to Make His Voice Heard | janresseger

Rebel on Ohio State Board of Education Finds a Way to Make His Voice Heard | janresseger:

Rebel on Ohio State Board of Education Finds a Way to Make His Voice Heard

Ohio is currently one of America’s 23 all-Republican states—Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican Governor.  It even has an elected state supreme court that is dominated by Republicans. Although all the seats on Ohio’s 19-member state board of education are formally designated as non-partisan, 8 seats are held by appointees of the governor, and only 7 seats are currently held by members who identify themselves as Democrats.  If you are a Democrat in such a situation, you need to be creative about getting your voice heard.    

A.J. Wagner keeps figuring out how to make people listen.  Wagner was, early in his career, an elementary school teacher, then later a Dayton attorney, and later still a Dayton Municipal Court judge, and the Montgomery County Auditor.  Finally, before retiring from the bench in 2010, Wagner was elected to serve as a judge in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.

Last summer when the Cleveland Plain Dealer exposed that the Ohio Department of Education had mysteriously omitted the ratings from Ohio’s notorious online charter schools and dropout recovery charters from a new state rating system for authorizers of charter schools,Wagner pressed the State Board of Education to insist on bringing in an outside investigator.  The state board tabled his request, though the press across the state and most notably thePlain Dealer continued to press for transparency. David Hansen, who ran the Department of Education’s charter school office, subsequently resigned.  Eventually Dick Ross, then Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, retired at the end of 2015.

Now, according to the Columbus, Ohio blog, Plunderbund, Wagner has taken to his Facebook page to publish a personal letter to Ann Whalen, a senior adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Education, to protest the letter she sent recently to all chief state school officers to remind