CURMUDGUCATION: OH: State Ed Board Joins Takeover Law Opposition

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: State Ed Board Joins Takeover Law Opposition

OH: State Ed Board Joins Takeover Law Opposition

HB 70 is an Ohio law that strips a school district and its elected school board of all their power and hands it, via an academic distress board, to one person-- a super-powered CEO. The law was rammed through the legislature in less than 12 hours under the direction of then-Governor Kasich, and so far it has been used to take over Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland schools (three districts that are, coincidentally, neither very wealthy or very white).

I've been following the story in Lorain (site of my first teaching job), where things have gone poorly. The CEO job created by HB 70 is undoable-- the CEO must be expert in all aspects of running a school district, he must bring that expertise to bear in fixing the specific problems in a troubled school district, and he must do so against the backdrop of a district that has been disenfranchised in all ways.  It's hard to imagine the person who could handle that challenge, but it's also hard to imagine someone who could do a worse job of meeting that challenge than Lorain's state-imposed CEO, David Hardy, Jr., a TFA product with a striking lack of people skills who has tried to apply charter management methods to an entire district.

Taxpayers have been fighting back against HB 70 with everywhere from the courts to the legislature. This week they took their fight to the state board of education, and the state board (despite the resistance of the state superintendent) heard them loud and clear.

The state board unanimously passed a simple resolution:

The State Board of Education does not support House Bill 70 of the 131st General Assembly. 
This resolution came after hours of testimony from Lorain, East Cleveland and Youngstown. Testimony included:

From Henry Patterson, Lorain native and member of the first ADC: The economic and educational CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: State Ed Board Joins Takeover Law Opposition