Regionalism
needs to be repealed, not expanded.
Republican lawmakers in Illinois last month pitched a
bold plan for the state to seize control of the Chicago public schools,
becoming one of a growing number of states that are moving to sideline local
officials — even dissolve locally elected school boards — and take over
struggling urban schools.
Governors in Michigan, Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin,
Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere — mostly Republican leaders who otherwise champion
local control in their fights with the federal government — say they are
intervening in cases of chronic academic or financial failure. They say they
have a moral obligation to act when it is clear that local efforts haven’t led
to improvement.
“I want to protect the schoolchildren and their parents;
that’s my first duty,” Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) said about his plan,
which would wrest control of the nation’s third-largest school district from
elected city leaders and was immediately opposed “100 percent” by Chicago Mayor
Rahm Emanuel (D).
After Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential
hopeful, seized the struggling schools in Youngstown last July, he described it
as an 11th-hour attempt to save young lives. “If you’re a school district
that’s failed year after year after year, someone’s going to come riding to the
rescue of kids,” Kasich said, describing the Youngstown school system, which
has regularly received F’s on state report cards and where just 1.1 percent of
the Class of 2013 was deemed ready for college.
Eleven states have passed or debated legislation to
create state-run school districts in the past year, according to the Education
Commission of the States, which tracks state education policy.
“There certainly is an effort afoot in the country to
dismantle local government and reduce or eliminate the role of local school
boards,” said Thomas Gentzel, executive director of the National School Boards
Association.
State takeovers were once a rarity, but they have become
increasingly popular as the number of states controlled by Republicans doubled
between 2010 and 2014.
“There’s been a sea change of Republicans taking control
of a great many states, and this model is quite appealing to them,” said
Kenneth K. Wong, chair of the education department at Brown University.
In the most recent versions, states are creating
“recovery districts” in which they take control of large numbers of schools
scattered across several districts.
Although the particulars vary, an appointed manager
wields broad powers to redesign schools or close them entirely. The state manager
can hire and fire, set curriculum,
reconfigure the school day, sell property and, in some
cases, break existing labor contracts. Increasingly, state managers are turning
over traditional public schools to charter school operators, which are funded
by tax dollars but are privately managed.
The idea is that the state can bring aggressive change in
a way that local politicians, with their community ties and loyalties, cannot.
The best-known example is the Recovery School District in
Louisiana, created by state lawmakers in 2003 to convert struggling traditional
schools in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport into charter schools. The
district now consists of about 70 charter schools.
But the move to replace locally elected school officials
with outsiders has yielded questionable results. Takeovers in Newark, Detroit
and Memphis have not improved test scores — in fact, some schools have gone
backward.
“These ideas kind of travel like wildfire,” said Kent
McQuire, president and chief executive of the Southern Education Foundation,
which recently analyzed state takeovers in three states. “But you can’t really
find evidence that there’s been positive, sustainable changes in learning in
those places.”
And the takeovers have sparked angry protests, legal
challenges and bitter complaints of racism. All state takeovers to date have
occurred in school districts that are impoverished and majority African
American and Latino.
“These proposals are not really about school reform or
improvement,” said Philip Lanoue, the 2015 national Superintendent of the Year.
He runs a school district in Georgia, where Gov. Nathan Deal (R) wants to
change the state constitution to enable state takeovers. “These takeovers are
entangled with money and power and control.”
In Georgia, Deal wants to create an Opportunity School
District made up of as many as 100 low-performing schools from across his
state.
But voters first have to amend the state constitution,
which currently stipulates that education must be controlled by “that level of
government closest and most responsive to the taxpayers and parents of the
children being educated.” If the referendum passes in November, Atlanta would be
most affected, with 27 eligible struggling schools.
The mere threat of a takeover has prompted the Atlanta
public schools to act. The system hired a top Deal education aide — who had
designed the governor’s plan for takeovers — to advise the city on how to avoid
one. Atlanta Superintendent Meria Carstarphen announced last month that she was
inviting charter school operators, local nonprofit agencies and other organizations
to submit proposals for ways to boost the performance of those 27 struggling
schools.
One elementary school in Clarke County, Lanoue’s
district, would be a candidate for takeover. He said lasting improvement
doesn’t come from a top-down makeover.
“If you really wanted true reform, wouldn’t you work
directly with school boards and the school system?” he said. One of the most contentious takeovers has been the
seizure of the Youngstown City Schools in Ohio, which the Kasich administration
orchestrated behind closed doors.
Youngstown has been struggling since the collapse of the
steel industry in the 1970s. Nearly all the district’s 5,100 students are
low-income, and 1 in 5 have special needs. Classrooms churn with instability:
Nearly 20 percent of Youngstown students either came into the district or left
in the middle of the 2013-2014 school year while more than 1 in 4 were
chronically absent.
In the summer of 2014, Tom Humphries, president of the
Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce and a Kasich supporter, said the
governor told him to devise a plan to fix the schools.
“This is about these kids,” said Humphries, adding that
the region has had difficulty attracting new employers because of an
undereducated workforce. “They only get one opportunity, and this is about
their lives. We can’t keep doing the same things. They’re not working.”
He launched 10 months of secret meetings between top
Kasich administration officials and a handful of community leaders, including
the Youngstown schools superintendent and the president of Youngstown State
University.
Participants’ notes released by the state show the
members pledging secrecy out of concern for anticipated public resistance.
After nearly a year of discussions, the Kasich administration unveiled plans
for a turbocharged state takeover that includes the dissolution of the locally
elected school board and appointment of a chief executive officer with broad
powers over local schools. A special commission controlled by Kasich appointees
is expected to name a chief executive next month.
The administration and its allies in the state
legislature rushed the legislation, getting it approved by a committee and
narrowly passed by both houses of the legislature less than 24 hours after it
was made public, drawing protests from Democratic lawmakers who said it
violated procedure.
“This was a blueprint to dismantle the city schools,”
said state Sen. Joe Schiavoni, a Democrat who represents Youngstown and is
Senate minority leader.
Members of the elected Youngstown school board said they
were blindsided. “None of our community was involved in this, period,”
said Brenda Kimble, president of the Youngstown City Schools board of
education, which is suing to stop the takeover. “No board members, no parents,
no elected officials, no teaching staff. Nobody knew about this.”
The Rev. Kenneth Simon, a Baptist pastor involved with
Youngstown schools, said the changes concentrate power in a new chief executive
who is not accountable to the community, something that could be especially
damaging to African Americans.
“They’re taking away the right of our own school board
that we elected to govern,” he said. “The school board has no power,” he said.
“The community has no say. I don’t know how African Americans could sit and let
them roll the clock back like this.”
The law applies not just to Youngstown but to any Ohio
school district that receives an F grade from the state three years in a row.
“This isn’t just something happening in this small city
in Ohio,” said Schiavoni, the Democratic lawmaker. “This is going to happen in
other school districts in Ohio, and it’s happening all over the country. It’s a
systematic approach to privatize public education.”
Talking to reporters four months ago, Kasich was baffled that
some in the community oppose the takeover of a failing school district.
“What do they want to do? They want kids to continue to
fail?” Kasich said. “People ought to be outraged when kids are trapped in
failing schools. It’s a disgrace.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/gop-led-states-increasingly-taking-control-from-local-school-boards
/2016/02/01/c01a8e4e-bad3-11e5-b682 4bb4dd403c7d _ story.html?hpid=hp_hp-cards_no name%3Ahomepage%2Fcard
Comments
I oppose
further state intrusion into K-12 public education in Georgia and recommend a
“NO” vote on the GA Constitutional Amendment in November 2016.
US K-12
public schools need to be independent from federal government funding and
control. It is unconstitutional,
dangerous and detrimental.
Georgia
K-12 public schools need to be independent from state government funding and
control.
I oppose
unelected governance. I want to repeal
Regionalism in Georgia to eliminate governance by appointed boards. This includes the repeal of GA HB 1216 passed
in 2010 and GA HB 277 passed in 2012.
I oppose
Common Core, social engineering, admittance of non-English-speaking students
and Muslim propaganda in public schools.
I support
public school reform by making students responsible for their own education and
giving parents and teachers the primary responsibility for assisting these
students. Teachers, parents and
Principals should decide on curriculum, content and materials. I support the
elimination of middle school and the restoration of the K-8 neighborhood
grammar school.
I urge
County School Systems to stop selling Bonds to fund construction and to plan
maintenance and additions to expand the use of school buildings to 100 years.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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