State budgets outline what sort of public investment is possible within the revenue constraints of any state government. They also outline the spending priorities of the majority. Sometimes, despite laws that prohibit logrolling, they also contain a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with fiscal matters. Ohio’s new biennial budget reflects a priority […]
This morning, July 1, marks the beginning of a new fiscal year for Ohio. Yesterday was the deadline for passage of a new budget to pay for the functions of state government for the next biennium—fiscal years 2020 and 2021. But instead over the weekend, members of the Legislature passed a 17 day budget extension […]
The members of the Ohio Legislature must pass House Bill 154, thereby repealing Ohio House Bill 70, which provides for the state to seize governance from locally elected school boards in the state’s lowest scoring school districts. HB 70 was passed in 2015. House Bill 154, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Representatives Joe Miller (D-Amherst) […]
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 […]
The operation of wealth and power has never been more evident in Ohio school politics than it is this month. HUNTING VALLEY In an op-ed this week, the retired editorial page director of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brent Larkin describes an attempted state budget amendment that would have let residents of wealthy Hunting Valley […]
Officials from the Ohio Department of Education have begun replacing the locally elected school board in Youngstown with a mayoral appointed school board. This week we learned about one more extension of autocratic state power backloaded in 2015 into the HB 70’s school district takeover of Youngstown. Because at the end of four years of […]
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 […]
This blog will take a one-week, mid-summer break. Look for a new post on Monday, August 5. We are in the midst of a wave of state school takeovers. On Tuesday evening In Providence, Rhode Island, the state Council of Elementary and Secondary Education granted the authority for Rhode Island’s recently appointed State Education Commissioner, […]
The Ohio Senate passed a state budget bill this afternoon which does not include the Senate Education Committee’s proposed amendment for state school district takeovers—a plan designed to replace House Bill 70. The Senate removed the language to repeal HB 70 which the House had included in its state budget bill. The Plain Dealer reports […]
Updated June 13, 2019 You will remember that on May 1, 2019, the Ohio House passed HB 154 to repeal Ohio state school takeovers, which have been catastrophic failures in Lorain and Youngstown under HB 70—the law that set up the state seizure of so-called failing school districts. HB70 was fast tracked through the Legislature […]
