Ohio Senate Education Committee Blames Educators While Underfunding Schools in the State’s Poorest Communities
Members of the Ohio Senate Education Committee, who have been holding hearings on a new state school district takeover plan, continue to scapegoat the teachers and educational leaders in the school districts which serve concentrations of our state’s poorest children.
Despite a large body of research correlating standardized test scores with aggregate family and neighborhood income, Bill Phillis reports that twice last week at a hearing convened by the Senate Education Committee, one senator repeatedly asked: “How much time should we give those who drove the bus into the ditch to get it out?” The Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell quotes Senator Bill Coley, who mused: “I think its maybe the wrong people are running the show and we need to try something different.”
I guess these guys adhere to the old idea that if we were merely to exchange the staffs of the richest and the poorest school districts in the state, the challenges for students in poor communities would magically disappear. Instead, research shows that economic segregation—where wealthy families are moving farther and farther into the exurbs—has been rapidly accelerating. Our senators must imagine that that public school educators can, on their own, swiftly erase the alarming and growing economic gap between children growing up in pockets of extreme privilege and children segregated in our most impoverished city neighborhoods or living in remote rural areas.
There is a lot of evidence, however, that Ohio’s state senators are mistaken when they blame schools and public school educators. The state takeovers are based on a set of overly complex and opaque calculations that yield the school district grades on a state report card. This year’s state report card ratings were released just last week. It is not surprising, given what is well known about the correlation of standardized test scores with family and community CONTINUE READING: Ohio Senate Education Committee Blames Educators While Underfunding Schools in the State’s Poorest Communities | janresseger
