Category: Politics

The Beatings Will Cease When Your Morale Improves

The newly-elected Ohio General Assembly has submitted its plan for educators in the new Ohio of Governor John Kasich and the Tea Party. Without (and even, perhaps, with) strenuous intervention, Ohio’s public schools will be poorer in nearly every conceivable way.

We thought we might be in trouble when the STRS Board swallowed hard and produced the plan which became House Bill 69, which will cut teacher pensions. We knew we had an enemy when a Fairfield representative submitted House Bill 21, which would incorporate student test scores in teacher licensure, make exceptions for Teach for America alumni, and permit unlimited licensing of e-schools, which replace teachers with computers.

Pernicious legislation grows in Columbus like kudzu, but we’ve been able to beat back legislative assaults before. This time we face an attack which would change the very rules of the game: last week, Senator Shannon Jones (R-Springboro) submitted Senate Bill 5, which would neuter unions and thus drastically limit our ability to do anything about other legislative horrors.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, Governor Kasich, while steadfastly refusing to have any communications with public employee unions, has indicated that Senator Jones’s bill doesn’t go far enough, and that he may incorporate anti-union language in the 2011-13 budget which the law requires him to submit by March 15.
In forty years of watching Ohio defy its constitution’s call for a “thorough and efficient system of common schools,” I have never seen this concentrated a campaign against public schools and the people who work there. If you care about public education in Ohio, you need to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that your voice is heard.
Look for more in this space.

Lessons of 2010

Governor Ted Strickland’s election-night email to supporters says that last night, he “thanked the Congressman [Kasich] and his supporters for a hard-fought race that allowed all Ohioans the opportunity to consider the kind of future they want for themselves and for their families.”
If this campaign was in fact an “opportunity to consider the kind of future” we want, it probably didn’t provide that opportunity in the way Governor Strickland meant. It may have given us an opportunity to consider the kind of campaigns we want, but that’s not the same thing.
Governor-elect Kasich articulated a vision for the Ohio he wants to see. In many ways, it’s the wrong vision: he says he intends to balance the budget, but he was never required to identify just how. It is clear to me as a retired public educator that in some way or another my colleagues and I will pay part of the bill: he said as much in the campaign, and he refused even to meet with education union leaders.
But as wrong as his vision is, he wasn’t shy about articulating it. Governor Strickland, a good man with a lack of imagination, never articulated a vision for his second term as Ohio governor, instead relying for the most part on attack ads that made the point that Kasich was a Wall Street insider. Unfortunately, many taxpayers probably figure that being a Wall Street insider is nice work if you can get it. (The problem with class warfare as a campaign strategy is that many people are Democrats but aspire to be Republicans.)
More damaging, by using limited campaign resources to beat a dead horse, Strickland lost opportunities to use those resources to expound his own vision–which, granted, presumes that he had one.
George W. Bush showed us how far you can go by being wrong and strong; consider the power of slogans like “No Child Left Behind” and “Mission Accomplished.” Ted was right, but he was weak, and voters don’t reward that.

Ambition Trumps Truth in Mandel Ad

The Columbus Dispatch certainly isn’t a Democratic mouthpiece, and it’s taken plenty of shots at public schools and educators over the years; but the newspaper recently analyzed some Josh Mandel campaign ads that seem to show the Ohio Treasurer candidate to be a liar.

This is pretty sensitive to me since it seems Mandel has been able to get a free pass; evidently a lot of people assume that a Marine wouldn’t say anything dishonorable, but that overlooks the effect of ambition. I’m told by friends who screened him years ago when he sought the OEA endorsement for Ohio House that he said then that he was opposed to school vouchers. That was before he was elected, after which he promptly began doing the bidding of his party managers and supported vouchers and Ohio’s runaway charter schools. So educators have reason to question Mandel’s veracity, especially when there are votes to be won.
The Dispatch article documents a series of lies contained in a recent Mandel campaign ad. In addition to misrepresenting a bidding process which The Plain Dealer says saved Ohio taxpayers $7.3 million, the campaign ad introduces islamophobia by stretching a connection between Boyce and a friend’s mosque.
I’ve met Kevin Boyce and found him to be bright and personable. Perhaps more important, he actually knows what the Ohio Treasurer’s office is for and can articulate a clear vision for that office.