COLUMBUS, Ohio (CGE) - Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Students First founder and former Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools Michelle Rhee are going to the movies together, in Cleveland, where they will watch a screening of "Waiting for Superman' with representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Ohio Chamber of Commerce, and the Greater Cleveland Partnership; and education stakeholders.
BYO popcorn, Junior Mints
Whether popcorn, Junior Mints or big value beverages will be available in the lobby wasn't mentioned in the communique Wednesday from Gov. Kasich's communication team to reporter, but this live event, to be hosted by Cleveland State University at its student center, will be one among others being held in various cities across the state.
Kasich communicators said portions of the event will be webcast live, including opening remarks and a panel discussion led by Gov. Kasich and Michelle Rhee. Moreover, questions for Gov. Kasich and Michelle Rhee will be submitted by the live audience and by viewers across Ohio.
The announcement that participants will need invitations in order to attend these events triggered an immediate response from the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
Ohio Dems see lesson in movie screening
The movie Kasich and Rhee, who appears in "Waiting for Superman," will show was described by ODP as anti-public schools. Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a statement, "Ohioans aren’t waiting for Superman. They’re waiting for a governor who stands up for middle class families and protects our tax dollars. It’s a shame that Governor Kasich has trivialized the Ohio Department of Development so much that he has turned it into a subsidiary of the Ohio Republican Party."
ODP alleged that Kasich administrators attempted to hide details of the event from the public, asking reporters not to publicize it. Instructions to reporters from Kasich press secretary Rob Nichols said credentialed members of the media are welcome to attend the entire event, but filming during the movie is not permitted. Nichols advised members of the media wishing to come only for the panel discussion and media availability to arrive around 7:45 p.m. The movie screening starts at 6:15, but the panel discussion & Q/A with audience - to be webcast - won't start until 8 p.m.
Redfern not only questioned the amount of public money spent to hold the event, but said ODP will be issuing a public records request as to the amount of administration staff time and taxpayer dollars that went into this invitation-only affair.
“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to promote the agenda of charter school fat cats at an invitation-only event sponsored by the corporate backers of John Kasich’s anti-middle class policies. To say the least," Redfern said.
The governor's media office noted that webcasting will be held around the state in Canton, Cincinnati, Dayton, Marietta, Toledo and Youngstown and said all regional events will follow the same timeline as the live event in Cleveland.
Rhee, Kasich team up again
Michelle Rhee, the controversial education leader who has become a national lightning rod in the battle between public and private schools, was in Cleveland earlier this year, when she was a featured speaker at the Cleveland Club, a local group that invites newsmakers to share their views on important issues of the day.
This is not the first time Rhee and Kasich are hosting a screening of "Waiting for Superman." The duo, each having developed a well deserved reputation for taking on public education and the unions that represent many in that workforce, had a similar date night in Columbus not long ago.
Gov. Kasich spoke glowingly of the movie in his first State of the State address, using it to batter teacher's unions in general and the Ohio Education Association in particular, a union that lined up against him during last year's election for governor.
In his first three months on the job, Gov. Kasich sent teachers reeling, when he pushed for a bill that effectively nullified the collective bargaining rights of over 350,000 public employees, many of them teachers, who will see tenure and seniority tossed out, replaced with merit pay performance standards to be developed by the Ohio Dept. of Education, a department that while not one Kasich directly controls, has effectively taken over through other means.
When Gov. Kasich kicked the hornets nest of collective bargaining he unleashed a statewide movement to overrule a the Republican-led legislature's passage of SB 5, the bill Kasich championed that scrubbed 28 years of relatively peaceful negotiations between public employers and their workforces. The message from reports on the progress of the referendum of SB 5 indicate Ohio voters will turn it down this fall. This base-energizing effort could easily be carried into next year, when President Obama runs for a second term and Democrats hope to reclaim the U.S. House of Representatives and other state offices.
Kasich continues to push to abandon long-standing sympathetic policies to collective bargaining like prevailing wage, which.
Charter school insiders talks out of school
As the battle between public and private schools continues, made even more hot by the $1.3 billion in state funding Kasich is withholding from public schools and the increase in funding to for-profit charter schools, especially so-called "e-schools," the argument will only intensify over whether such schools are worth the investment, given reports that they don't perform any better that public schools, and in some cases perform worse.
Critics of charter schools, which wear the white hats in "Waiting for Superman," point to charter school titan David Brennan, a wealthy Akron industrialist and self-proclaimed "education activist" who gives big to Republican candidates, as he did to Kasich last year, as the poster boy of diverting millions in state funding to his chain of for-profit charter schools.
In an critical article of Brennan's chain of charter schools, a former employee wrote, "Like McDonald's, White Hat [the name of Brennan's charter school company] serves as many kids as possible as cheaply as possible."
Amy Rankin, a former employee of White Hat who took her boss and company to the woodshed in a 2007 article that ran in Scene Magazine in Cleveland called "Education at its Worst," decried what she described as a "cubicle farm" that offered an ineffective online education for "unmotivated, lower-income students."
Charter schools "abysmal, unccountable"
Adding more fuel to the fire of the political blaze pitting public against private schools was a recent report by a progressive think-tank group that found that most charter schools have abysmal academic records, virtually no accountability and perform poorly on state evaluations and have low graduation rates.
The group, Innovation Ohio, found that of the two dozen online charter schools — most of which are set up by districts for their own students - five had graduation rates of 54 percent or less.
"I think it's fair to say that Ohio's e-schools are a disaster," Innovation Ohio spokesman Dale Butland told media at a news conference. "Why doesn't Ohio simply shut these schools down?"
According to IO, nearly 30,000 students attend the seven statewide e-schools included in their study.
The Cleveland Plain reported that Butland said Gov. Kasich and other influential Republicans are beholden to David Brennan and William Lager, a pair of e-school operators who have combined to contribute at least $4 million in political donations since 2001.
Most of the contributions went to Republican candidates and campaign accounts, Innovation Ohio alleged.
"When you add it all together, it becomes a textbook example of pay to play," Butland said, PD reporter Joe Guillen wrote.
Nichols, Kasich's press secretary, dismissed the IO report as partisan work of employees of former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.
"If Strickland's former staffers are so full of good ideas, why did they hand to us a budget with an $8 billion budget hole in a state that lost 400,000 jobs during his administration?" Nichols said, Guillen reported.
For Rhee, taking on public school administrators and teachers - during and after her tenure as Chancellor of D.C schools - has catapulted her to national prominence.
Rhee has come under fire for performance claims she made while Chancellor that critics have called into question. USA Today reported that D.C. student test-score gains during her tenure, which she promotes, were probably tainted by widespread cheating. The newspaper’s analysis found suspicious patterns of erasures on standardized tests at half of the city’s schools.
Privatizing schools
Last week at a meeting of the American Federation for Children, which attracted Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a friend and kindred sprit of Gov. Kasich, Rhee found herself at an event that hundreds of protesters turned out for.
At the heart of the battle between public and private education is the long-term goal by many pushing vouchers that all schooling, one day, will be an activity supplied by private sources like for-profit management companies, religious organizations and home schools. And voucher plans, as seen in Florida, Milwaukee and Cleveland, offer hope that backers, with the help of helpful Republican officer holders, will achieve this goal.
Joseph Blast of The Heartland Institute says its a matter of time until a public education is a thing of the past. “The complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being," Blast said in one published report. "Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now, and would put us on the path to further privatization.”
In his State of the State address, Kasich said "Waiting for Superman," a critically acclaimed documentary about five families trying to get their kids into charter schools,
OEA president on charter schools, WFS
Sue Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, wrote an editorial in one Ohio newspaper that argued charter schools offer a false promise. "We in Ohio know better. While a few charter schools serving a handful of students succeed, the vast majority of charters perform about as well as, or even worse than, comparable regular public schools," she said, adding, "As our public schools struggle to make ends meet, Ohio’s charter-school law funnels millions of dollars into the bank accounts of private operators."
Taylor, not surprisingly, said the film casts public-school teachers as villains and that Gov. Kasich and Rhee like to demonize teachers. "In doing so, they ignore that in thousands of successful public schools, great teachers are making a difference every day in the lives of kids. But you wouldn't’t know that by this deceptive, one-sided film, which purposely left out any portrayal of a high-performing public school."
Kasich on "Waiting for Superman" in SOS
"I went out and bought the movie “Waiting for Superman.” I’m going to show this movie here in the state of Ohio," Gov. Kasich said in his first State of the State address. "You watch this movie, it will get you angry, it will get you frustrated, it will make you cry, and it will get you to begin to stand up for our kids when you have an opportunity.
"You see, I — I’ve been in Harlem with Geoff Canada and seen the struggle that goes on. When you see you don’t have enough choice and mothers — just like that lady in Akron, she wasn’t complaining about the education, but she wasn’t sure her kids were going to be safe. She had no choice to go anywhere else, because the choice probably ran out or she was unaware of it. And then they put a ball and they do like a lottery and they pick the ball out and I won and you lost. And I won and you lost to our kids? Shame on us. It’s unacceptable.
"You deny a kid an education, a secure education, you’re killing their future. Nothing should stand in our way of making Ohio an ability to lead in this country and be able to compete in the world. And we better commit ourselves to this and get this fixed."
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