In a bold move that has the potential for booting teachers unions from schools, stripping local voters of their authority over their school districts and turning operations over to for-profit companies, the Ohio legislature introduced and passed legislation in a matter of hours with no opportunity for the public to deliver opposition testimony.
The bill began innocuously in the House as an effort to help communities turn schools into comprehensive learning centers for the neighborhood. The bill passed from the House to the Senate a month ago with an overwhelming 92-6 vote.
Almost everyone liked it — until Wednesday.
The Ohio Federation of Teachers, one of the state’s unions representing teachers, was prepared to testify in favor of the bill as it headed for a committee vote.
But Melissa Cropper, president of the union, got wind of the amendment that could disenfranchise unions and voters and turn operations over to private interests.
When it came time for her to speak, she attempted to oppose the new provision, but was told that the amendment had not yet been offered, so she could not address it.
She sat down. The amendment was introduced and four men in line behind her who had traveled from Youngstown stepped up to give favorable testimony.
They were Youngstown State University president Jim Tressel; Youngstown Diocese Bishop George Murry — whose organization of parochial schools would become eligible to receive state payment for children attending his schools; local chamber of commerce President Thomas Humphries; and Connie Hathorn, a former Akron school administrator who — as superintendent of Youngstown City Schools — has failed to turn around the struggling school system and will quit to take a job in Arkansas at the end of the month.
The bill quickly passed out of committee, went to the Senate floor where it passed with no support from Democrats and some opposition from Republicans — 18-14 — moved late at night to the House for concurrence, and again passed with opposition from both sides and a vote of 55-40, far different from its initial support.
Within 12 hours of introduction, it went to Gov. John Kasich for his consideration.
His office was supportive.
“Children in chronically failing schools don’t deserve to be abandoned, they need our help, badly,” said Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols. “These long overdue reforms to Ohio’s support system for failing schools will bring hope to these kids, parents and educators. And the governor applauds the local and state leaders who had the courage to stand up and help lead these needed changes.”
Youngstown first target
The discussion centered on Youngstown, which has been guided by an academic distress commission since 2010. The change has the potential to accelerate school choice, sending more children and public dollars to charter and private schools.
Lorain, the other Ohio school district in academic distress, must perform poorly another two years before it falls under the new provision, Ohio Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said.
Because the bill passed so quickly and state reports cards won’t include all the required information until next year, it is not clear how many other districts could be affected.
Last-minute maneuver
Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Kettering Republican and chair of the Senate Education Committee, was the one who attached the plan to the otherwise popular House Bill 70 Wednesday morning.
Teachers are decrying the bill’s privatization of the public education system.
Democrats voiced disapproval on the Senate floor, saying the change does little to address the root cause of social, economic and educational issues in the struggling Mahoning Valley town.
Youngstown has the highest poverty rate among Ohio’s 10 major cities and it is eighth in the nation for poverty among more than 550 ranked cities.
“It appears that it’s blaming the teachers, that it’s blaming the administrators in Youngstown, when we all know that the challenges in Ohio’s urban cores go beyond what a teacher or administrator can do,” said Sen. Cecil Thomas, D-Cincinnati.
“Haste makes waste and mistakes,” said Sen. Charletta Tavares of Columbus. She said this was a last-minute insertion in a bill designed to expand a Cincinnati-area program where community, health, private and public agencies offer wraparound services in schools to address the adverse impact of poverty.
“We are changing the state policy on education that applies to every school district in the state, not just Youngstown,” Sen. Michael Skindell of Lakewood said of the potential for the program to spread. “It seems to incentivize students to go from a failing public school to a failing charter school.”
He added: “Gosh, I wish we would be moving as fast on the failing charter schools in this state.”
The Ohio Department of Education, in conjunction with the governor’s office, has been working on this plan for months.
“I know that ODE has participated in discussions and in the drafting of the legislation,” said spokesman John Charlton, who noted the program is “somewhat unprecedented.”
Academic Distress Commissions have been in place since 2007, Charlton explained, but have not made significant progress in Youngstown.
“Bottom line,” Charlton said, “is that it is not fair to the students and parents who trust their schools to provide for their educations, the local educators and community leaders who have played by the system’s rules, or the communities whose futures depend on educated, skilled citizens. It’s time for a change. Kids in academically struggling schools can’t wait any longer; we need to make immediate improvements to the support system.”
Schools that receive three consecutive ‘Fs’ on state report cards will be taken over by the revamped academic distress commission, which consists of three members appointed by the state superintendent, another by the local mayor and a teacher selected by the local school board president.
The commission then hires a CEO, who doesn’t have to be an educator but must have “high-level management experience.” The CEO is paid up to $150,000 directly by the Ohio Department of Education.
The academic distress commission also can hire an “independent entity” — possibly a for-profit company — to oversee and promote local charter schools. The state’s private school voucher program also opens up to any student who would otherwise attend the academically distressed school district, regardless of how well the nearest school building in that system performs.
Schools can get out of academic distress if they earn a C grade on the report card and no more Fs in the next two years. Though overall grades aren’t out yet, 59 percent of all grades given last year to Ohio’s eight largest and poorest urban school districts were Fs.
When tested, students who live and attend public school in Youngstown rank low. One in seven students, however, attend school in neighboring suburbs through open enrollment, a process that skews the district’s performance.
Studies by the Mahoning County Educational Service Center and the Beacon Journal show that students who left Akron or Youngstown tended to be higher performing students. Students who lack personal transportation to attend a neighboring district generally are those who score lower and depress the district’s overall grade.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @DougLivingstonABJ.
By David Swanson
Remarks at the Lincoln Memorial, October 20, 2010
http://democrats.com/we-the-plutocracy
It's an honor for me to help welcome Robin Monahan and Laird Monahan to this city, not because I can take any pride in this place, but because we can all take pride in what they've done and encourage others to do it. Walking across the country, talking to people directly and through local media outlets and through the internet, and walking here to the seat of our misrepresentative government, is a model for us all.
Phoning in our concerns and expressing them in voting booths, or taking part in Rorschach Test rallies where the demands are so vague that no champions of corruption are in the least bit threatened -- those are all good things, but not sufficient. Walking and talking, educating and organizing are needed too, and everybody can do a little bit of it even if they can't walk the full length of the country.
But what if they did? What if we helped each other do it? World War I veterans tried walking here and refusing to leave. The military attacked its own veterans, but the result included free college educations following the next global fit of militaristic insanity. In many nations around the world people have walked to the capitals and refused to leave when the corruption had not yet reached our current level. Unjust governments and laws have been overturned without violence, but never without resistance.
It's an honor also for me to be supporting MoveToAmend and the Backbone Campaign. We have to build a massive movement from the ground up, and we have to enjoy doing it -- lessons these organizations can teach.
Truckloads of money are being dumped into the upcoming elections, and people seem to be especially concerned that we don't know this time around where it's coming from. The hell we don't. It's coming from the same pluto-pentagon-corporatocracy it came from in lesser amounts last time, and being able to identify specific culprits last time didn't do us a damn bit of good. People are also horrified because some of the groups funneling and laundering the money take in foreign money as well as American. I hate to break it to my fellow Americans, I know what fun xenophobia can be, but the problem isn't the nationality of the money, the problem is quite simply the money which -- there can be very little doubt -- tends to come from people and businesses that have money to spare. This marginalizes and even cancels out the interests of those who do not have any money to spare. That's most people in this country and even more people outside of it.
There are people in this country who want jobs and who have noticed that, rather than hiring new employees, corporations are funding truly stupid and debasing political advertisements that make us all meaner and more ignorant. And we, the owners of the airwaves, don't see a dime of the money spent, which all goes to other corporations to whom we have generously given our airwaves. In an international study released last weak that ranked our nation near the bottom among wealthy nations in terms of enforcing the rule of law, we did score fairly well in the subcategory of not allowing the bribery of elected officials. Why? Because we don't call it bribery. We call it human rights. We call it the human right of corporate humans to freedom of speech for financial speech.
And the human right to bribery produces the same thing that produces it, in a vicious cycle: ever increasing wealth for the very wealthiest, and ever increasing unemployment, debt, foreclosures, and poverty for others. Sure, our government still offers minimal assistance to those out of work. But it does not put them to work in education, infrastructure, or green energy, as a majority of us want. Our so-called representatives oppose the will of the majority on every issue. We want Social Security left alone, though we wouldn't mind seeing those with large incomes pay in at the same rate as those with small. They want to start dismantling the program. We want the wars and the military defunded. They want to fight wars without end, using the excuse of exporting by force our type of government, despite 86 percent of Americans believing our government is broken. If the democracy we pretend to be spreading is broken, is there really a humanitarian side to our wars or are they sadistic through and through?
Most of us could never run for office if we wanted to, unless we knelt before the moneyed interests. Most of us, when we look at the choices in the polling booth, have to vote the evil of two lessers. And of course we should do so, but we also need to follow the Monahan example. Not only is their healthcare plan -- walking -- far more effective than any considered in this town, but they have pointed us in the direction of what is most needed: education and organizing around fundamental principles of the rule of law, which is rapidly being supplanted by the law of rulers.
We can't vote most congress members out no matter how unpopular their actions. We can't compel them to subpoena or impeach when called for, or to refrain when not called for. We can't enforce or even know what laws have been created through Office of Legal Counsel memos or presidential decrees. We can't know who has been pardoned for what when the president provides immunity or the Congress provides bailouts. We've lost habeas corpus and due process. We've handed the legislature over to the filibuster rule. Should we be surprised when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declares that,
"ordinary people stubbornly hold on to some old-fashioned beliefs and one of these is the idea that the Constitution means something, statutes mean something, and the role of the judge is to interpret and apply the law as written."
We ordinary people will apparently have to amend the Constitution to say that it means what it says, to say that only people are people, to say that only speech is speech, and even to say that "habeas corpus shall not be suspended" means "habeas corpus shall not be suspended." This could be endless. Because of that task and because of what we're up against in Washington, we may have to do this purely through the states and a new convention.
But whether we amend the Constitution in one way or the other, or rewrite it from scratch, or just bring some honesty to how it is read as currently written, in any case we will need an activist movement across the country to force this change.
Television comedians, good ones but still comedians, are planning to hold a rally here soon to restore sanity, by which they seem to mean quiet down anybody with a raised voice or an insistence on significant and urgent change. The Monahan brothers' website has a post invoking their predecessor, Paul Revere. Imagine if he'd done his job quietly. I want to restore sanity by restoring some fundamental ideas, the ideas the Monahan brothers have crossed the country for. We all need to climb up on rooftops and shout: Corporations are not people! Money is not speech! Plutocracy is not a government of, by, and for the people!
--
David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union"
http://davidswanson.org
http://warisacrime.org
http://facebook.com/pages/David-Swanson/297768373319
http://twitter.com/davidcnswanson
http://youtube.com/afterdowningstreet
. . . .The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close. . . .
