What Ohio Gov. John Kasich is doing to public education in his state
With two-term Ohio Gov. John Kasich joining the crowd of candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, it’s a good time to look at the public education mess that has developed in his state under his leadership.
Kasich has pushed key tenets of corporate school reform:
*expanding charter schools — even though the state’s charter sector is the most troubled in the country
*increasing the number of school vouchers that use public money to pay for tuition at private schools, the vast majority of them religious — even though state officials say that fewer than one-third of those available were used by families this past school year
*performance pay for teachers — even though such schemes have been shown over many years not to be useful in education
*evaluating educators by student standardized test scores in math and reading — even though assessment experts have warned that using test scores in this way is not reliable or valid.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Education Department in Kasich’s administration is in turmoil. David Hansen, his administration’s chief for school choice and charter schools resigned over this past weekend after admitting that he had unilaterally withheld failing scores of charter schools in state evaluations of the schools’ sponsor organizations so they wouldn’t look so bad. (Hansen’s wife, incidentally, is Kasich’s chief of staff, who is taking a leave from that post to work on his campaign.) There are growing calls now for the resignation of the Kasich-backed state superintendent of education, Richard Ross.
Under his watch, funding for traditional public schools — which enroll 90 percent of Ohio’s students — declined by some half a billion dollars, while funding for charter schools has increased at least 27 percent, with charters now receiving more public funds from the state per student than traditional public schools, according to the advocacy group Innovation Ohio. This despite the fact that many charters are rated lower than traditional public schools. Meanwhile, local governments have been forced to pass levies to raise What Ohio Gov. John Kasich is doing to public education in his state - The Washington Post:
