This post is about bad public policy and how, once bad policy has been passed by a state legislature, it is hard to ever get rid of it. Specifically the subject is Ohio House Bill 70, a failed law that has, over time, proven the failure of state takeovers of public-school districts as a strategy […]
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 […]
Jeff Bryant introduces a special, back-to-school issue of The Progressive with a commentary, The End of School Reform. Bryant’s piece narrates the quiet death of long running policies across the nation’s school districts, programs that were central to corporate, standardized test-based school accountability and the idea that punitive school turnaround plans would quickly raise overall […]
In Ohio, the state senate is refusing even to consider a new school funding plan, developed over a period of several years to replace the old school funding system that has become progressively unworkable over the past decade. Last Thursday, the Ohio House of Representatives passed the proposed new plan by a huge margin: 84-8. […]
This post has been updated. The Ohio Senate is up to its old tricks. Five years ago right at the end of a spring session of the Ohio Legislature, a group of state senators added a long amendment to House Bill 70, which was about expanding the number of full service, wraparound community learning centers—schools […]
Both chambers of the Ohio Legislature came into session on Wednesday to pass an omnibus “coronavirus” bill, which sets the date of the now delayed primary election, waives mandated standardized testing in schools that have been closed during the pandemic emergency, and allows seniors to graduate from high school as long as they were on […]
Ohio’s House Speaker Larry Householder is leading his chamber expeditiously to address the crisis over school vouchers which emerged last weekend, when negotiations between the Ohio Senate and the Ohio House entirely broke down over the state’s EdChoice voucher program. The Ohio House passed an emergency amendment to Senate Bill 89 on Wednesday afternoon to […]
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