SB5 could turn Gov. Kasich into a lame duck

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A short while ago we published an analysis piece to determine which of the Senators who voted for SB5 would be up for reelection in 2012. A number of readers asked us to perform the same analysis for those House members who voted for SB5, so here it is.

The Ohio House of Representatives is made up of 99 districts. Currently the Republicans control 59 and the Democrats 40. The House is quite different from the Senate. Representatives are elected every 2 years, not every 4 and every district will be contested in 2012. Representatives become term limited after 4 terms. So with that basic understanding, let’s look at the SB5 roll call.

We can eliminate all of the Democrats from consideration as not a single one of them voted for SB5.

While SB5 was passed on a party line vote, some Republicans did cross the isle to vote no too. They were Randy Gardner (R), Ross W. McGregor (R), John Carey (R), Terry Johnson (R), and Casey Kozlowski (R). That reduces the potential total to 54 Republicans who voted for SB5.

Five of these Representatives will be term limited, they are Louis W. Blessing, Jr. (R), Courtney Combs (R), William P. Coley, II (R), Joseph W. Uecker (R) and Danny R. Bubp (R). So we’re down to 49.

One other Republican who is unlikely to be on the ballot next year is Rep Mecklenborg (R). He was recently arrested for a DUI in Indiana enjoying the company of a young woman purported to be an employee of a nearby adult entertainment establishment. It’s quite possible he won’t serve out his term, as calls for his resignation continue to grow.

That then, gives us 48 potential Republican Representatives who will be on the ballot in 2012 who voted for SB5. They are, sorted by their 2010 votes for percentage:

District Member Percentage vote for Percentage vote against
91 Bill Hayes (R) 47.06 52.94
41 Lynn Slaby (R) 49.9 50.1
21 Mike Duffey (R) 50.48 49.52
96 Al Landis (R) 51.04 48.96
42 Kristina Roegner (R) 51.69 48.31
18 Mike Dovilla (R) 52.41 47.59
1 Craig Newbold (R) 52.58 47.42
19 Anne Gonzales (R) 52.68 47.32
63 Ron Young (R) 53.14 46.86
93 Andy Thompson (R) 53.81 46.19
17 Marlene Anielski (R) 54.75 45.25
43 Todd McKenney (R) 54.99 45.01
81 Rex Damschroder (R) 55.31 44.69
85 Bob Peterson (R) 55.32 44.68
46 Barbara R. Sears (R) 56.34 43.66
86 Cliff Rosenberger (R) 59.46 40.54
16 Nan A. Baker (R) 60.19 39.81
50 Christina Hagan (R) 60.52 39.48
58 Terry Boose (R) 62.29 37.71
36 Michael Henne (R) 63.27 36.73
23 Cheryl L. Grossman (R) 63.41 36.59
34 Peter Stautberg (R) 64.81 35.19
38 Terry Blair (R) 67.49 32.51
98 Richard Hollington (R) 68.44 31.56
97 David Hall (R) 68.8 31.2
74 Bruce W. Goodwin (R) 69.01 30.99
51 Kirk Schuring (R) 69.2 30.8
71 Jay Hottinger (R) 69.31 30.69
84 Bob D. Hackett (R) 69.7 30.3
37 Jim Butler (R) 69.71 30.29
70 Jarrod B. Martin (R) 69.93 30.07
53 Timothy Derickson (R) 70.19 29.81
69 William G. Batchelder (R) 70.34 29.66
2 Andrew Brenner (R) 70.35 29.65
67 Peter Beck (R) 70.74 29.26
76 Robert Sprague (R) 70.78 29.22
75 Lynn R. Wachtmann (R) 72.05 27.95
90 Margaret Ann Ruhl (R) 72.26 27.74
4 Matt Huffman (R) 72.32 27.68
35 Ron Maag (R) 73.02 26.98
78 John Adams (R) 74.27 25.73
79 Richard N. Adams (R) 77.09 22.91
3 Ron Amstutz (R) 100 0
5 Gerald L. Stebelton (R) 100 0
77 Jim Buchy (R) 100 0
82 Jeffrey A. McClain (R) 100 0
83 David E. Burke (R) 100 0
94 Troy Balderson (R) 100 0

14 SB5 supporters could not survive a 5% swing from their margin of victory in 2010 (2 didn’t even reach the 50% threshold due to a third party taking significant support). With only a 10-seat margin to maintain control, it is quite possible that control of the Ohio House will swing away from the Republicans and back to the Democrats.

Such a swing, could put a halt to the Governors radical agenda and turn the remaining 2 years of his first term into a lame duck effort.

Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired

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Stealing the headline from this NYT article, to bring to your attention a report on the IMPACT rubric for teacher evaluation in Washington DC. Ohio's new evaluation system passed in the state budget draws some of its heritage from this, so we thought it would be valuable to consider it for a moment.

Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.

Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.

The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.

Ohio's new system involves each teacher receiving two 30 minute in-class observations also. Education Sector, a non-profit think tank recently produced a paper on IMPACT and took at look at some of the ways this new system has affected Washinton DC teachers. We urge you to read the paper in full, below, but we've also pulled out some of the interesting pieces to entice you.

The observations take 30 minutes—usually no more and never any less—and all but one of the administrator visits are unannounced. Based on these observations, teachers are assigned a crucial ranking, from 1 to 4. Combined with other factors, they produce an overall IMPACT score of from 100 to 400, which translates into“highly effective,” “effective,” “minimally effective,” or “ineffective.” A rating of ineffective means the teacher is immediately subject to dismissal; a rating of minimally effective gives him one year to improve or be fired; effective gets him a standard contract raise; and highly effective qualifies him for a bonus and an invitation to a fancy award ceremony at the Kennedy Center.

It is a measure of how weak and meaningless observations used to be that these pop visits can fill teachers, especially the less experienced ones, with the anxiety of a 10th-grader assigned an impromptu essay on this week’s history unit for a letter grade. The stress can show up in two ways—the teacher chokes under the pressure, thereby earning a poor score, or she changes her lesson in a way that can stifle creativity and does not always serve students. Describing these observations, IMPACT detractors use words like “humiliating,” “infantilizing,” “paternalistic,” and “punitive.” “It’s like somebody is always looking over your shoulder,” said a high school teacher who, like most, did not wish to be named publicly for fear of hurting her career.

[…]

“Out of 22 students, I have five non-readers, eight with IEPs [individual educational plans, which are required by federal law for students with disabilities], and no co-teacher,” says the middle school teacher. “The observers don’t know that going in, and there is no way of equalizing those variables.”

[…]

Bill Rope is not young, or particularly bubbly, but he is a respected teacher who sees this unusual relationship from the confident perspective of an older man who went into education after a 30-year career in the foreign service. Rope, who now teaches third grade at Hearst Elementary School in an affluent neighborhood of Northwest D.C., was rated “highly effective” last year and awarded a bonus that he refused to accept in a show of union solidarity.

But a more recent evaluation served to undermine whatever validation the first one may have offered. In the later one, a different master educator gave him an overall score of 2.78—toward the low end of “effective.”

[…]

So how did it all shake out? At the end of IMPACT’s first year, 15 percent of teachers were rated highly effective, 67 percent were judged effective, 16 percent were deemed minimally effective, and 2 percent were rated ineffective and fired.

[…]

Theoretically, a teacher’s value-added score should show a high correlation with his rating from classroom observations. In other words, a teacher who got high marks on performance should also see his students making big gains. And yet DCPS has found the correlation between these two measures to be only modest, with master educators’ evaluations onlyslightly more aligned with test scores than those of principals.

Impact Report Release

High stakes testing leads to cheating

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It has been well documented that Washington DC schools, while being led by Michele Rhee engaged in widespread cheating of tests in order to artificially boost performances. Now a second large school district that employed high stakes testing to drive high stakes decisions has been found to have engaged in widespread cheating. This time in Atlanta Public Schools

State investigators have uncovered a decade of systemic cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools and conclude that Superintendent Beverly Hall knew or should have known about it, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

In a report that Gov. Nathan Deal planned to release today, the investigators name nearly 180 educators, including more than three dozen principals, as participants in cheating on state curriculum tests, officials said over the weekend. The investigators obtained scores of confessions.

Cheating was uncovered in 44 of 56 schools investigated involving 38 principals and 178 teachers - 82 of whom confessed to misconduct. The 2 page report, below, states:

Cheating was caused by a number of factors but primarily by the pressure to meet targets in the data-driven environment

Summary of APS cheating scandal

That same pressure will now exist in every school in Ohio as teachers pay and careers will be measured in large part by their students test results - tests that have proven to be unreliable for such uses.

New Guidelines on Teacher Evaluation and Accountability Approved at 2011 RA

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The NEA just announced new guidelines on teacher evaluations.

On Monday, the 8,000 delegates to the 2011 National Education Association Representative Assembly voted to adopt the NEA’s policy statement that revamps teacher evaluation and accountability. The development, implementation, and enforcement of high-quality teacher evaluation and accountability are top priorities for NEA and its affiliates.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel believes the new statement signals a commitment to a new, more prestigious profession of teaching and reflects the first broad endorsement by NEA of the need for evaluation and accountability reform.

“As more states and districts seek to improve teacher evaluation, the risk is that reform is done to teachers rather than with them,” said Van Roekel. “This policy statement was written by and for teachers while heeding others’ expertise as well. It outlines a system to help teachers improve instruction and meet students’ needs. It offers sweeping changes to build a true profession of teaching that is focused on high expectations.”

The policy statement is based on a recommendation of a workgroup of NEA leaders convened in the spring by Van Roekel and led by Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle. It outlines guidelines for an evaluation and accountability system that focus on enhancing the practice of teachers, instead of identifying teachers for dismissal.

The statement reflects the importance of maintaining high standards, not lowering them and calls for robust evaluations based on multiple indicators. The statement supports state or local affiliates to use standardized tests for evaluating teachers if the standardized tests are of proven high quality and provide meaningful measures of student learning and growth.

Here's the policy document.

NEA Statement on Teacher Evaluation and Accountability

SB5 repeal, the difficult second act

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Like most compelling stories, the repeal of SB5 will be told in 3 acts.

The first act introduced us to the characters, and the main story element putting those characters at risk, and in confrontation with each other. The antagonists in our story are the Ohio GOP in the form of the legislators and Governor who passed SB5. Pitted against them are our protagonists, the working people of Ohio who will need to fight to preserve their rights to earn a decent living in safe working conditions.

Our protagonists responded to this assault, with over 10,000 volunteers going into their communities and collecting 1,298,301 signatures to place SB5 on the ballot for repeal, setting up the rising tension of act II.

Ordinarily, the second act could be expected to begin with a fight over whether this effort had collected enough signatures to qualify, but having collected over a million more than needed, no one expects this to present a problem.

The next issue to be resolved then will be the formulation of the ballot language. The Ohio Ballot Board will have to decide if the question is posed to voters as "shall the law take effect?” or "shall the law be repealed?" Conventional wisdom suggests it’s easier to get voters to vote “No”, rather than “Yes”, and precedent indicates that’s how the Board will decide the matter. Either option is likely to have little effect on the result.

The story will progress to the repeal campaign protagonists needing to identify and persuade voters, and the antagonists trying all manner of dirty tricks to stop them. So before we look at what that means, let’s take a look at how many voters will likely be needed to vote against SB5 in order for the campaign to prevail. Below is a table of voter turnout going back 15 years. In bold are the off-cycle years, as 2011 is (i.e. none gubernatorial or presidential elections.).

Year Total Votes Turnout Major Issue
2010 3,956,045 49.22% Gubenatorial
2009 3,292,374 44.64% Veterans, livestock, casino
2008 5,773,777 69.97% Presidential
2007 2,436,070 31.34% Local issues only
2006 4,185,597 53.25% Gubenatorial, min wage, casino, smoking ban
2005 3,093,968 40.26% State Bond issue, Reform Ohio Now
2004 5,722,443 71.77% Presidential, Gay Maririage Amendment
2003 2,614,354 36.62% State Bond Issue
2002 3,356,285 47.18% Gubenatorial
2001 2,574,915 36.00% Local issues only
2000 4,795,989 63.60% Presidential
1999 2,467,736 34.53% Local issues only
1998 3,534,782 49.81% Gubenatorial
1997 3,163,091 45.55% Bail, Workers Comp
1996 4,638,108 67.83% Presidential, Riverboat Casino

As you can see these off cycle years have lower turnout with variations that are greatly affected by whether and to some extent, what, state ballot initiatives are present. Ranging from almost 3.3 million in 2009, down to 2.4 million in 2007. It would be wise to think that 2011 will see turnout in the high end, if not the highest. With the GOP and Tea Party failing to get their healthcare countermeasure initiative on the ballot, the turnout battle will be solely fought on the grounds of SB5 repeal.

It would be safe to assume a high turnout – perhaps north of 3.3 million votes, which means the repeal campaign would need 1.7 million votes. The 1.3 million signatures is a great start, and will form the initial base with which to identify potential repeal supporters.

But not all those 1.3 million will be supporters, so in excess of 400,000 more voters will need to be identified – most likely a million more. These voter contacts will require massive volunteer efforts to call (phone bank) and contact in–person (canvass).

These signatories, plus union members and their households, Democrats and Independents (who according to polls favor repeal in the majority) will all be contacted at some point, either by telephone or in person, and most likely both, to determine if they can be relied upon to vote for repeal.

This is why continuing to enter signature data is critical. It is also a huge structural advantage that repealers have over the SB5 supporters – they have no such list from which to draw upon.

As potential voters are contacted they will be graded, typically on a scale of 1-5, on whether they support repeal or not. Those falling in the middle of that range will require persuasion, and that is where the nastiest of the fall campaign will be waged, for the hearts and minds of the undecided voter.

Both sides will be polling to determine what the best lines of attack and defense are. What messages work and what don’t. These polls, unless leaked, will never be made public – but everyone will feel their effects.

Typically one begins to see visible signs of political campaigns after Labor Day. TV, print and mail advertising will begin to bombard voters. The nastiest pieces will be sent via the mail, but in today’s political climate the TV ads won’t be much better.

Repeal supports should expect to see some very ugly TV ads as early as September as the SB5 supporters try and move the polls in their favor. This will be akin to probing the enemies’ lines looking for weaknesses.

In order to provide some inoculation to these inevitable attacks, the SB5 repeal campaign will also try to persuade voters of its case too. First with visibility events, and urging supporters to talk to friends, family, and coworkers, followed by extensive paid media efforts on TV, in print, and mail too.

By the time we reach this point, Act II will be coming to a close and we’ll be entering act III, final act – GOTV, or Get Out The Vote. We’ll discuss that in a later article.