Governor blasted for "lies"

The Dayton Daily News has an article about a school superintendent blasting the Governor for apparent lies about public employees at a closed door meeting.

We've been in possession of this letter for some time, but given its obvious explosiveness we had decided not to publish it, however now that the DDN has written that story we think the entire letter in context deserves to be published.

September 9, 2011

Dear Staff,

I wanted to send this email to you for a week now. It has taken me the better part of this week to make sure I form my words correctly and present to you absolute facts. I am trying to do this below. I feel very passionate that it is my duty as the superintendent of a legitimate public school district to fill you in on an occurrence I had last Thursday.

I was invited to hear Governor Kasich speak at a private “invitation” only event. At first, I declined, but after more consideration, I accepted and attended the event. Ohio House Speaker Bill Batchelder spoke for about 5 minutes and then the Governor spoke for about 20. The majority of people in the room were affiliated with the Republican Party.

When Batchelder spoke, he told this group point blank that Ohio is in the financial shape it is in because public employees have been bilking the state out of money for years. I promised myself that I would not become outraged to the point where I had to leave, so I stayed.

The Governor spoke for about 5 of the 20 minutes on Senate Bill 5. I thought you might be interested in some of the things he said. He told the audience that public employees do not pay a dime into their pension fund and that they do not pay a dime for their healthcare insurance. As you know, this is a bold face lie. The public pension systems of Ohio have noted that 98% of public employees DO pay 10% of their salary to the retirement system. I hope you know that you do as well. Ten percent of your salary goes to STRS and the school district does pay an additional 14% for you. This is no different from an employee who has a pension from his or her company or a matched 401 (k). Nearly every professional employee of any company that is worth its salt has one or both of these benefits. Additionally, many public employees pay a percentage of their health care cost. You pay 20%.

The Governor said that “we are at war with these people.” He also said that he wishes they would just accept Senate Bill 5 because he is going to spend millions in tax payer money to defend it in the campaign. He said if it goes down, he and the legislature are going to “ram it through” in other legislation. He commented that his polls are showing that as many as 70% of Republicans are going to vote the bill down and he doesn’t understand why.

He also tried to tell the people that he tried to sit down with union leadership and they declined. I guess he forgot that the union leadership approached him before Senate Bill 5 passed and he had the doors of the State House LOCKED for the first time ever in history. He locked us out of our building and said he was not discussing anything. His actions made that clear.

Although many people in the room clapped when he said other things, no one clapped during this Senate Bill 5 piece. He entertained about 10 questions. No one asked anything about Senate Bill 5. They all asked about why he is selling the turnpike to a foreign nation and why he is “selling jails” to private companies which may be foreign nations when the major religions have deemed this immoral, unethical and unjust. They also asked about tax abatements, Obama Care and Medicare in Ohio. After every single question, he turned the tables around and made a comment that public employees have caused Ohio to be in financial ruin and that is why he was doing all of these things.

I could tell you more.

I understand that Ohio is in bad financial shape. I really do. I understand that we need reform. You cannot “ram through” reform and you cannot blame the state of the economy on the hard working people of Ohio. The absolute thing that bothered me the most about the whole ordeal was that he lied to the people in that room. He spread a bold face lie as propaganda in order to make his bill look valid. It made me sick.

This Governor is a bully and the legislature is his posse. We have to stand up to this bully AND to his posse. We need to make sure that our family members, our friends, our neighbors—anyone who will listen—know the truth and know that these lies are coming from Columbus. If you don’t stand up for yourself now, this will only be the beginning of a downward turn from which we will never recover.

Additional information:

As we speak, HB 136 is moving rapidly through the Ohio house. If passed into law, this bill allows ANY student in ANY public school to take their daily funding, which is now nearly $6,000 per student, and go to the private school of their choice if the family income is less than $95,000 per year. This money is deducted from the public school of residence. There is no regard for separation of church and state. I believe federal funds would follow the student as well. The private school is free to take or turn away any student they choose for any reason. They are free to kick them out whenever they wish. They do are not accountable in any way shape or form as you are as a public school. If this bill passes, MANY of you will loose your job. First of all, we will deal with two different consequences of this bill. #1. Most private schools cost more than $6,000. So who will benefit? Upper middle class students and or the cream of the crop that are given scholarships by the private schools. #2. If the private school costs less than $6,000 per year, the parent gets to bank the extra money. So that means if the parochial schools in our area choose to accept this, they could charge $4,000 per student and the parent would get a check for $2,000 for each kid. The lawmakers in Columbus keep trying to crush public education and we are hanging on by a thread. This and senate bill 5 will be the final nails in the coffin.

If there ever was a time to speak up and be active in government, it is now.

Hang in there,

Dr. Mike

These are obviously very troubling comments from the Governor if this letter is accurate.

Canvassing 101: Myths vs Realities

Now that the campaign to get the repeal of SB5 on the ballot is complete, the campaign to win the No on issue 2 is underway. This campaign will require more than just TV and radio ads. Just like the effort to collect signatures, the effort to persuade a majority of voters to vote No on Issue 2 will require lots of hard work by thousands of volunteers.

One of the tasks volunteers will be asked to do is canvass potential voters who might support our effort to repeal SB5 by voting No on Issue 2. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about political canvassing

Canvassing is the systematic initiation of direct contact with a target group of individuals commonly used during political campaigns. A campaign team (and during elections a candidate) will knock on doors of private residences within a particular geographic area, engaging in face-to-face personal interaction with voters. Canvassing may also be performed by telephone, where it is referred to as telephone canvassing. The main purpose of canvassing is to perform voter identification – to poll how individuals are planning to vote – rather than to argue with or persuade voters.[1] This preparation is an integral part of a 'get out the vote' operation, in which known supporters are contacted on polling day and reminded to cast their ballot.

Knocking on the doors of strangers and asking them about their political support may sound daunting if you've never done it before. All kinds of questions may run through your mind. What if they are busy? What if they are just rude? What if they are vehemently opposed to voting No on Issue 2?

Well the good news is that the reality of canvassing can be quite enjoyable. For example, remeber those 1.3 million people who signed the petition to repeal SB5? Those will be one of the prime targets for contacting via a canvass, and those people will most likely be very pleased to hear from, and talk to, you.

From our mailbag, here's some mythbusting points worth sharing

Myths about Canvassing

Myth 1: People will yell and argue.
You are only going to persuadable voters. The educated voter, one who votes in every election and always votes in Democrat or Republican primaries will NOT be on your list. You are calling and knocking on doors of the voters who are 35%-70% likely to vote and are independents or democrats.

Myth 2: What I say won’t matter. People already have their minds made up about this issue.
Actually, the majority of doors we knocked on were people who had never heard of SB 5! I know, it seems impossible, but there is a large contingent of people just waiting for us to educate them.

Myth 3: I won’t be able to persuade people.
There are four types of people I‘ve encountered on the neighborhood walks:
Person 1: already knows all about it; supports you; doesn’t even let you finish your script
Person 2: has heard about it, but really has no clue what it is about
Person 3: has never heard of SB 5
Person 4: supports SB 5 and will vote yes

Person 1 gives you hope and make you want to continue down the list. Person 4 (I’ve only encountered one, and he wasn’t on the list - his wife was.) Your job isn’t to persuade this person. It is a waste of your time. Smile, thank them for their time and move to the next address.
Person 2 and Person 3 are the most important. They are the majority of people you will encounter. The most persuasive thing I’ve said to these people… “I’m a teacher.” Seriously, I learned half way through my first shift, to skip talk about firefighters, police officers, and nurses. As soon as I mentioned my profession, people smiled and asked me my opinion. Some wanted to know how it would affect me, but the majority just wanted to know if they should vote yes or no.

Teachers and Educational Support Professionals have the power to make the biggest difference in this repeal. It's critical that as many people as possible become engaged in this part of the campaign. You can find local canvassing opportunities in your area by visiting the We Are Ohio events page here. Recruit a friend or colleague to go with you!

The weakest "linkage"

Many changes are starting to ripple down to the classroom level as Ohio moves forward with its efforts to implement corporate education reform. One of those changes is the creation and increasing use of teacher level value add reports. We provided some basic background on value add here if you need a refresher.

One of the most important steps in producing these complex reports for each teacher is to know which teacher taught which student, in which subject, and for how long. We need to know this for every student and every teacher. It's a process called "linkage". Without this linkage teachers could not be credited with the instruction they provided to each student.

By 2013, it will not be just RttT districts and Battelle for Kids’ projects that will require this linkage to occur, but all school districts must “implement a classroom-level value-added program (HB 153; Section 3319.112(A)(7)).

These teacher-level value-added reports will be used to determine teacher effectiveness and will be a significant factor in teacher evaluations. So it is clear that being able to accurately link student to teacher per subject is going to be critical if this system has any hope of working fairly.

If one imagines common scenarios such as students moving, teachers getting sick and having a sub, and one multiplies that by over 120,000 teachers in Ohio and almost 2 million students - the opportunity for linkage error is simply massive, only surpassed by the sheer magnitude of the administrative effort needed to keep this whole enterprise from unravelling.

Battelle for Kids has spent part of the summer providing some training and webinars on this issue.

In spring 2010, more than 125,000 rosters were verified by educators in South Carolina, Texas, Ohio and Oklahoma. Recent analyses of linkage results from schools across the country yield alarming results, including

Everytime a student moves, someone will have to go into a computer system and remove them from each teacher's roster, and then when that student enrolls in a new school, someone will have to go into a computer system and add them to each of their new teacher's rosters. Ditto for students changing classes, ditto for teachers needing to be replaced and on and on. Hundreds of thousands of changes throughout the school year will need to be performed, and all this on top of hoping the initial set up of millions of teacher/student linkages is error free each year to begin with!

Because Value add is longitudinal, i.e. results from previous years are used to make current year calculations, any errors from previous years will also be carried over, so it isn't like each year allows for a fresh start either. Indeed, as time rolls by, the errors may be compounding.

According to Battelle's own presentation this system hasn't worked to date in South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, nor Ohio - which is set to expand it to every school district.

How much confidence can anyone have in a system that will be used for high stakes decisions such as pay and employment, that relies on such gargantuan administrative tracking that has proven to be as utterly unreliable as this?

Link Before You Leap

The bait and switch of school "reform"

In recent weeks the debate over the future of public education in America has flared up again, this time with the publication of the new book "Class Warfare," by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer magazine. Brill's advocacy of "reform" has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University's Diane Ravitch and the Nation's Dana Goldstein.

But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext that has been quietly baked into the very terms of the national education discussion.

Like most education reporters today, Brill frames the issue in simplistic, binary terms. On one side are self-interested teachers unions who supposedly oppose fundamental changes to schools, not because they care about students, but because they fear for their own job security and wages, irrespective of kids. In this mythology, they are pitted against an alliance of extraordinarily wealthy corporate elites who, unlike the allegedly greedy unions, are said to act solely out of the goodness of their hearts. We are told that this "reform" alliance of everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the Walton family to leading hedge funders spends huge amounts of money pushing for radical changes to public schools because they suddenly decided that they care about destitute children, and now want to see all kids get a great education.

The dominant narrative, in other words, explains the fight for the future of education as a battle between the evil forces of myopic selfishness (teachers) and the altruistic benevolence of noblesse oblige (Wall Street). Such subjective framing has resulted in reporters, pundits and politicians typically casting the "reformers'" arguments as free of self-interest, and therefore more objective and credible than teachers' counterarguments.

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What teachers are telling the Governor: Day 5

Previous days comments can be found here:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Today's installment covers perhaps the most common theme encountered when reading through submissions made by educators regarding the idea of merit pay. Fairness. It's a theme that runs through so many of the comments we have spent time reading. The concern is deep and wide, and the lack of transparency and apparent partisanship being exhibted by those involved in the development process is causing deep anxiety within the education professions ranks

I am concerned about pay based on performance of students. In the field of Arts, Music, and Phys. Ed., we see all the children in assigned grade levels within a school and help children establish right brain and left brain thinking which can be different ways than their classroom teacher might require. It would be difficult to measure this type of performance. Also we see some teachers who have classes that are functioning at a lower level and sometimes, they do remarkable things with those students, other times those students might wind up on an IEP so they can receive the specialized attention that they need to move forward. This is not a reflection of the teacher, but rather demonstrates how some students don't advance at the "normal expected" rates of their peers. I don't see why teachers could then be penalized for that as well...which will happen in a "performance based pay". This is why I find it hard to conceive how this concept of "performance based pay" would be fair or even recognize a teachers success. Thank you for considering this fact.

Not and idea, but questions. How will the pay of teachers be determined by merit? What are the exact parameters? How will the pay of teachers not involved in standardized testing be determined? Will this not lead to the most experienced teachers being released from duty simply because of their expense?

I don't think that there is a fair way to do performance based pay for teachers. This will turn into a system of the administration picking out their friends for pay raises and leaving everyone else at the bottom of the pay scale. Their is no way to know how a teacher is effecting a student. I have had students that I thought that I did not reach, but later, after they graduate, they tell me that I was the reason they stayed in school and did well.

Teachers would absorb better this if you would just be fair: elected officials are public employees, yet you are not including yourselves in this merit pay plan. Senators and some representatives make more now than we'll make at any point in our careers (especially those of us who teach in rural Ohio), yet you place yourselves above your own mandates. We've already proven ourselves: we had to pass student teaching, get the degree, pass the Praxis / NTE, and we work harder every year to improve our district's report cards. My school has been excellent the last five years, excellent with distinction at least the last two years. You? Your only "test" is the election process. You didn't take a test to prove that you know anything about Ohio history, current events, or fiscal responsibility, characteristics that all elected officials should possess. You don't have to prove that you've connected with your constituents; that your constituents have better lives because of your work. We've proven our merit. With all due respect, when will you prove yours?

It is hard to understand how teachers will equitably be able to have their pay tied to student acheivement. How will teachers that do not teach a tested area be evaluated? How will the "human" factor of our product be accounted for? How will teachers in low income districts be fairly evaluated? I'm all for making sure that we have high quality teachers, but using student achievement or satisfaction cannot fairly evaluate a teacher's worth and will only drive good people away from the teaching profession. I also find it interesting that the state of Ohio after all of these years has still not figured out how to fund our education system and has yet to comply with the Supreme Court decisions about state funding. And yet we want teacher's pay to be related to a system of evaluations that are already flawed.

Right now the process isn't fair, isn't open, and lacks any collaboration and cooperation. That needs to change.

Are radical school funding changes ahead?

We will have to wait to see the actual details, but if this report from NPR StateImpact is any guide, the Governor's proposed school funding formula is going to look a lot more like a public school defunding effort.

A new school-funding model being developed by Governor John Kasich’s administration could allow local property tax dollars to follow students to charter schools or be used to fund vouchers for private-school tuition. Right now, only state tax money can do that.
[...]
other key changes under serious consideration:

• Changing how the state calculates the amount of money local school districts must raise. Currently, this calculation is based on property values. The new funding model could take into account student poverty levels, local income levels and other factors;
• Creating financial incentives for school districts to shift some instruction online; and
• Simplifying the way that school districts collect taxes to make it more understandable to taxpayers.

Other possible changes include providing increased funding to districts with high-performing schools and structuring funding to encourage regional collaboration in areas like transportation, Mattei Smith said. While a separate study of school district consolidation is underway, consolidation is not part of discussions on a new school funding model, Mattei Smith said.

The Board of Education has expressed a strong desire for significant public input, which is to be applauded, because these proposals, albeit with limited detail, appear quite radical.