Dogged Advocates for Justice Protest Ohio State School Takeovers of Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland

After January, John Kasich will no longer be governor of Ohio. House Bill 70, the law that paved the way for the Youngstown—and now Lorain and East Cleveland—school takeovers is the biggest stain on his legacy.  In gerrymandered Ohio, with huge legislative Republican majorities after the November 2018 election—62 Republicans and 37 Democrats in the Ohio House and 24 Republicans and 9 Democrats in the Ohio Senate—it remains unlikely that HB 70 will be overturned.

House Bill 70 prescribes that any Ohio school district which has received “F” grades for three years running on the state’s school district report card be managed by an appointed Academic Distress Commission instead of the locally elected school board. The state takeover law was sprung on an unsuspecting public at an afternoon hearing of the Senate Education Committee in late June of 2015, when Senate Education Committee chair Peggy Lehner introduced a 66-page amendment to a House bill which had already been moving forward with widespread popular support to expand wraparound full-service Community Learning Centers.  Senate Bill 70 was rushed through committee and passed by the full legislature within 24 hours. The amendment—which had been cooked up by Governor Kasich, then-state superintendent (and now discredited) Richard Ross, and Ross’s assistant, David Hansen, the husband of Governor Kasich’s chief of staff—fully changed the content of what had been House Bill 70 to enable the state to nullify the power of elected local school boards and insert state overseer Academic Distress Commissions, which appoint a CEO to run the district on behalf of the state.

Three years have passed.  Lorain joined Youngstown under state takeover, and now East Cleveland has been added.  In May of this year, northeast Ohio Democrats Kent Smith (whose district includes East Cleveland) and Teresa Fedor (Toledo) introduced HB 626 to overturn Ohio’s state takeover law.  The Elyria Chronicle-Telegram‘s Carissa Woytach explains: “The bill would suspend the creation of new academic distress commissions, keeping other failing school districts out of state takeover starting next school year… Despite bipartisan support, Smith said, the bill has yet to get a hearing from this General Assembly.”

The Ohio Supreme Court agreed in late October of 2018 to hear a case against HB 70 resulting from a lawsuit filed originally by the elected Youngstown Board of Education: “The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal regarding House Bill 70 submitted by Youngstown School’s Board of Education and others, which could set a precedent for districts under state mandate.  The original lawsuit, filed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in August 2015, challenged that House Bill 70 was unconstitutional  While the 10th District Court of Appeals ruled in June against the school board, the Ohio Supreme Court accepted the appeal….”  Amicus briefs in support of the Youngstown lawsuit were filed with the appellate court from across the Ohio public education community and all of the elected school boards taken over so far: the Lorain Board of Education, the East Cleveland Board of Education, the Ohio School Boards Association, the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, and the Ohio Association of School Business Officials.

The implementation of state takeover has been insensitive and insulting. Ohio’s Plunderbund reported in March, 2018 that Krish Mohip, the state overseer CEO in Youngstown, feels he cannot safely move his family to the community where he is in charge of the public schools. He has also been openly interviewing for other jobs including school districts as far away as Boulder, Colorado and Fargo, North Dakota. And a succession of members of Youngstown’s Academic Distress Commission have quit.

Plunderbund adds that Lorain’s CEO, David Hardy tried to donate the amount of what would be the property taxes on a Lorain house to the school district, when he announced that he does not intend to bring his family to live in Lorain. The Elyria Chronicle Telegram reported that Lorain’s CEO has been interviewing and hiring administrators without the required Ohio administrator certification. Hardy has also been courting Teach for America.  In mid-November, the president of Lorain’s elected board of education, Tony Dimacchia formally invited the Ohio Department of Education to investigate problems under the state’s takeover Academic Distress Commission and its appointed CEO.  He charged: “The CEO has created a culture of violence, legal violations, intimidation, and most importantly they have done nothing to improve our schools.”  The Lorain Morning Journal’s Richard Payerchin describes Dimacchia’s concerns: “Dimacchia claimed student and teacher morale is at an all-time low, while violence (at the high school) is at an all-time high.”

Youngstown and Lorain both earned “F” grades once again this year on Ohio’s school district report card.

At a November 28, 2018, Statehouse rally, Senator Joe Schiavoni, Reps. Michele Lepore-Hagan, Teresa Fedor, and Kent Smith joined citizens from the three school districts seized by the state—Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland.  They advocated for hearing and voting on HB 626, introduced in March to stop the takeovers. If no action is taken, the bill will die at the end of the Legislature’s 2017-2018 legislative session.

At last week’s Statehouse rally, Youngstown Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan described all the ways HB 70 abrogates democracy: “The legislation took away the voice of the locally elected school board members and gave an autocratic, unaccountable, appointed CEO total control over every facet of the system. The CEO can hire who he wants. Fire who he wants. Pay people whatever he wants. Hire consultants and pay them as much as he wants. Buy whatever he wants and pay as much as he wants for it. Tear up collective bargaining agreements. Ignore teachers. Ignore students. Ignore parents. And he also has the power to begin closing schools if performance does not improve within five years. Nearly four years in, here’s what the Youngstown Plan has produced: Ethical lapses. No-bid contracts. Huge salaries for the team of administrators the CEO hired. Concern and anxiety among students, parents, and teachers. And the resignation of most of the members of the Distress Commission who were charged with overseeing the CEO. Here’s what it hasn’t produced: better education for our kids.”

As Representative Kent Smith shared at the recent Statehouse rally, East Cleveland is Ohio’s poorest community and the fourth poorest community in the United States. The school districts in Youngstown and Lorain also serve concentrations of poor children.  In its policy for poor school districts, Ohio has chosen to punish instead of investing to support the children and their teachers.

In an important 2017 book, The Testing Charade, Harvard University’s Daniel Koretz, pointedly explains why school rating systems based on aggregate standardized test scores—like the one Ohio uses to determine state takeovers—are unjust: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores—and, particularly important in this system, more kids who aren’t ‘proficient’—than others. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms… Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.”  (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)