Small item says much about Strickland
Sunday, March 29th, 2009 By David HansenThe news that Governor Strickland’s education finance proposal is being modeled not by the analytical research resources of the Ohio Department of Education but by a private firm of Driscoll and Fleeter is worth noting on several levels.
First, the Akron Beacon Journal among others scores the move for its obvious obfuscation of the workings of government. Observers can’t see how ’the sausage is being made’ as they could have when the ODE was doing such work. We’ve long pointed out that one of the characteristics of a government worthy of a free people is that its inner workings are thoroughly transparent to citizens. When the Governor hides from public scrutiny the development of the policy he has staked his incumbency on, he is, in effect, insulting the freedom of Ohioans.
Second, the Governor has turned to a firm which has enjoyed a cozy relationship with a key vested interest in the school funding debate. As the AP notes Driscoll and Fleeter are “….on the payroll of a private tax institute run by the Ohio School Boards Association…”. That’s a pretty generous assessment as any examination of the public record would reveal that the OSBA, their so-called private tax institute (”Education Tax Policy Institute”) and Driscoll and Fleeter are a thoroughly integrated entity. Just take a look at the ETPI’s tax filing submitted in August of last year (available through Guidestar service, free registration required) and you’ll see it was initially ’signed’ by Rich Levin, a former partner in Driscoll and Fleeter and now the state’s tax commissioner — some 18 months after Levin had left private practice for his current position.
Much research has documented that school finance in Ohio is a largely a political exercise distributing tax dollars among and according to the interests of adults who work in the system and the bureaucracies they control, all according to their relative political power. The interests of children and their parents, relatively powerless in the universe of school politics, come in a distant second in this exercise. (See for example, this report by our Matt Carr.)
By outsourcing the design of his proposed system to the OSBA, the Governor continues to put the interests of education bureaucrats over that of children and parents.
Finally, we just have to ask why the Governor allows himself the freedom to choose a for-profit provider in the vital task of designing a new school finance system when he won’t permit the same choice to Ohio children and their parents seeking to get the best possible education? Clearly Strickland’s objections to for-profit schools are not based on consistently applied principles. And our research shows that they aren’t based on fact, either. The reality is the Governor just continues to serve up special interest politics when it comes to school finance reform.
Tags: Driscoll, Governor Strickland, Levin, school funding
April 6th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
[...] recent, repeated attempts to hide its workings from the people raise important concerns about the Governor’s [...]