We’re about to see the State Board of Education perform its clearest statutory function. Within the next few weeks, as provided in Ohio Revised Code 3301.08, “the state board of education shall appoint the superintendent of public instruction, who shall serve at the pleasure of the board.”
The Board’s search firm, Ray and Associates, has identified five recommended candidates. The Board will meet on Thursday, April 28, and each member will have the opportunity to recommend another candidate from the list of applicants. The Board will vote on each of its members’ nominees; the top five (if there are that many) will be added to the five from the search firm, and those (up to ten total) will be brought to Columbus for interviews on May 9-11. (The process is outlined here.)
If I’m elected to the State Board of Education, the chances are that I’ll participate in a similar process someday. It would be unwise to prejudge candidates, but it’s not unwise to identify priorities, and to some degree, I did that in January.
Several candidates would come to us from nonpublic schools, and I would look at them with caution. The Superintendent needs to support the institution he or she leads, and although ODE influences nonpublic education–sometimes in very important ways–its work is predominantly about public schools. So I’ll be looking carefully at the materials provided, and over the next few weeks I’ll provide some impressions.
Extra credit: want to dig deeper? Check the following references.
- list of all applicants
- recommended candidates, other qualified candidates, and unqualified candidates
- applications – first packet
- applications – second packet (recommended candidates are all here)
- Penny Schwinn, pages 86-101
- Robert Sommers, pages 137-55
- Shonda Hardman, pages 203-229
- Thomas Lasley, pages 273-309
- Tina Thomas-Manning, pages 373-90
This post originally appeared on the website of my 2016 campaign for State Board of Education, http://bill4board.us.
Wow – what a list of potential candidates. Looking at some of them, I was amazed at the number who were not even remotely qualified. And quite frankly, the top 5 do not exactly excite me, either. Between the non-public educational backgrounds, an ivory tower PhD with no apparent “real” teaching experience, and a superintendent with quite a bit of anti-union baggage, there’s not a whole lot of hope for Ohio’s kids. I am hoping that the current board can sift through the rest of the stack and come up with someone we can all be proud of.