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Kasich pushing plan as model in education overhaul

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By Laura A. Bischoff, Staff Writer 10:20 PM Wednesday, February 8, 2012

COLUMBUS — Gov. John Kasich loves Cleveland’s ambitious plan to overhaul the city’s failing public schools by resetting collective bargaining agreements, championing high-performing charter schools, expanding preschool to all 4-year-olds, and increasing the hours students spend in classes.

“I’m counting on Cleveland to deliver the goods,” Kasich said in his 83-minute State of the State speech delivered at a public school in Steubenville on Tuesday. “We can change urban education in Ohio and change the urban education in America. And that is worth fighting for and risking for.”

It begs the question: Is this something Kasich would like to see spread to other urban districts such as Middletown or Hamilton?

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is a mess.

According to Cleveland’s plan, the district is in academic watch, has a 63 percent high school graduation rate, only 43 percent of fifth graders tested proficient in reading, 30 percent of fifth graders tested proficient in math, and enrollment dropped by 3,000 students in the last decade.

The district is controlled by a board appointed by the mayor.

The plan calls for state law changes to give the district more autonomy, eliminate seniority as the sole factor for employee layoffs or assignments, require differentiated pay to attract talented teachers and principals, mandate that Cleveland schools and unions begin future contract negotiations without carryover items from previous agreements, and provide targeted funding for year-round schools, high-performing charter schools and other initiatives.

Kasich press secretary Rob Nichols on Wednesday declined to discuss details of any upcoming education reform efforts and said Kasich’s policy team is digging into Cleveland’s plan. And the governor was short on details about what the Cleveland plan might mean for other urban school districts.

School officials from Middletown and Hamilton, while they had read accounts of Kasich’s speech, said it was too early to tell what impact it may have in Butler County.

Debi Gann, president of the Hamilton Classroom Teachers Association Union, said she read about the State of the State in the Hamilton JournalNews, but she didn’t know enough to comment about the governor’s plan.

“I’m not sure what he’s talking about,” she said Wednesday afternoon.

She said the plan never was “brought to my attention,” and she wondered how long Kasich had considered the plan.

On Tuesday, the governor was critical of graduation rates in urban districts. He said 65 percent of students in Ohio’s urban districts graduate high school.

Graduation rates at Middletown were 82 percent — the highest in 10 years — but still the lowest in Butler County, according to 2009-2010 statistics from the Ohio Department of Education.

In Hamilton, the graduation rate was 92 percent during the same time, according to the ODE. The Hamilton graduation rate has skyrocketed from 67 percent during the 1998-99 school year.

Rasmussen said students who come from impoverished homes are two grade levels behind students from suburban students. That means, urban districts, “must be twice as good to catch up,” he said.

He was proud that Middletown ranked 12th in the state last year based on the “growth rate” of its students, measuring them from the first to the last day of school.

While Rasmussen said graduation rates are one way to rank a district’s academic success, he doesn’t want the system to forget about the “bench marks along the way, measures along the way.”

Gann said urban districts face additional inherent challenges because of the students’ lower social economic status. She said for some students, the only meals they receive are breakfast and lunch at school, and since many of them come from single-parent families, they don’t receive the educational support afforded other students.

Comparing students’ performances from urban districts and suburban districts is “like apples and oranges,” she said.

The governor told his audience on Tuesday that state leaders need to analyze successful models, such as high-performing charter schools in Cleveland and Wells Academy in Steubenville where elementary school students scored the highest in the state on achievement tests.

“We need to study them, find out what works, be data driven and do it,” he said.

State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, called Cleveland’s “very bold and innovative” but she said now is not the right time to push for these changes statewide.

“Certainly, Senate Bill 5 poses a real challenge to this because many of provisions of this were also in Senate Bill 5,” said Lehner, who voted in favor of Senate Bill 5, the GOP-backed collective bargaining legislation that voters soundly rejected in a November referendum. She added that the parts included were those provisions that polled well with Ohio voters even though the entire bill was tossed out.

“The challenge here is to get people to understand this isn’t just a re-run of Senate Bill 5. This takes the best of Senate Bill 5. It doesn’t any of the other public employees. It doesn’t touch a lot of the other things they didn’t like about Senate Bill 5. And hopefully, the conversation can be restarted,” Lehner said.

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