The Truth About Ohio School Report Cards
A few weeks ago the Ohio school report cards were released. Very few administrators, teachers, or parents were happy. Overall it looks like Ohio schools are doing much worse. Schools in high income areas with high residential property values are doing great while schools in urban areas with low property values are not.
The Ohio school report cards tell us the same thing every year. Except this year, many schools are doing much worse than usual. Is it possible that many Ohio schools are suddenly catastrophic failures? If you believe the report cards then yes. Some sort of day of reckoning- cataclysmic event has hit dozens of school districts.
Except the schools have not significantly changed. Most are doing the same things they did the year before. What happened in a year? How did so many schools make so many mistakes earning such terrible distinctions?
Here is the secret. The schools are not changing. The mechanisms and political mumbo jumbo contributing to the creation of the school report cards changed again last year. This new recipe for measuring schools has yielded an inaccurate result. Once again Ohio state politicians keep messing around with how they measure Ohio schools, and the result is another year of failure for many Ohio school districts. Now the politicians will blame the administrators, teachers, and indirectly the parents for kids not succeeding at an acceptable level.
This allows the state politicians to shift the blame away from themselves for properly funding Ohio schools and lay it at the feet of others. This is a classic political maneuver. For decades Ohio politicians have been messing with school funding, creating new draconian rules for teachers, and adopting common core like rules that take power away from locally elected school boards. It is time we face reality. Ohio’s schools are being engineered to fail.
Wait. Planned to fail? Well, not all schools are being set up, just Ohio public schools. Ohio’s powerful politicians want the privatization of education. They have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from charter school investors. They have given said investors billions of dollars of our tax money. They have also been forcibly dragged kicking and screaming into any scenario involving holding charter schools accountable. What do you think is happening? The school report cards get “tweaked” every year, and things just keep looking worse for public education. Do these cards accurately reflect what is going on in our schools? No. This is nothing more than an attempt to turn public opinion against our local schools.
Do you need more evidence? Do the research. Look at how Ohio legislators have made it harder to be a teacher in Ohio. Examine the new regulations and new rules. Don’t forget how decades ago the Ohio Supreme Court told legislators to fix the unfair funding of schools in our state. Did they fix it? Nope. We haven’t even talked about the new graduation standards that may prevent tens of thousands of kids from graduating high school next year.
Accountability is a good thing, but it is only good when you are using measurements that are accurate and consistent. Ohio politicians want you to be angry at your public schools. They want you to blame your school administrators and teachers. Remember, this is merely a distraction. Ohio politicians don’t want you to hold the real responsible parties accountable. Ohio politicians don’t want you to see they are the ones to blame for our failing schools.The Truth About Ohio School Report Cards – Blogging with Craig Brown: