BuckeyeBlog

We read with disappointment the progress of teacher (and nurse, and janitor, and lunchroom employee) union contract negotiations in Hilliard, Ohio which concluded earlier this month. 

The Hilliard union employed the usual tactics of industrial era labor conflict including ’work-to-rule’ and filing harrassing unfair-labor-practices charges, all of which only reinforce how obsolete and obstructionist teacher unions are in the 21st Century. (more…)

As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, “Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight .”

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors – all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

Parents, kids and the principle of freedom won a victory in the Ohio Senate today, although by a narrow margin. The vote on SB 57, the Special Needs Scholarship was 17 to 15 in favor. All Democrats voted against the bill, along with Republican Senators Stivers, Schuring and Grendell. Now SB 57 moves to the Ohio House.

Kudos to Senate Education Chair Joy Padgett, Senate President Bill Harris and SB 57’s sponsor, Sen. Kevin Coughlin for their leadership in shepherding the measure to passage.

(more…)

Up for a vote today in the Ohio Senate Education Committee is a bill giving families of children with disabilities new options for their education. The provisions of Senate Bill 57, also known as a special needs voucher, were passed by the General Assembly last year as part of the budget bill but were vetoed by Governor Strickland.

The Governor gave two reasons for his veto: first, school choice programs lack accountability; and, second, school choice programs harm public schools and the children who remain in them. (more…)

Okay, now I’m afraid.

While Marc Dann was copping a feel, er, plea, the real news was a few blocks north at the Arena Grand movie theater, where about 400 people in pretty expensive suits were discussing Managing a Changing Climate: Challenges and Opportunities for the Buckeye State.

The entire political, industrial, legal and accounting world is planning on moving forward with laws that could readily rewrite the world, including plans for a Carbon Market Efficiency Board.

If we’re lucky, the board would act like the Federal Reserve and would do relatively few things; basically, establish a gross amount of carbon pollution, if pollution it be, and thereby enable trading in the right to emit the stuff. Of course, the sense of that depends upon whether it is sensible to consider carbon a pollutant. Apparently the real tragedy of the commons is that everything is capturable now.

But we won’t be so lucky as to have such a board merely establishing property rights. Instead we’re going to get politicians playing Lilliput, tying us down until we can’t emit.

And meanwhile, they’ll be jetting around the world collecting awards for it.

In justifying his veto last year of a voucher program intended to help disabled children achieve better in their educations, Governor Strickland offered up two of the teacher unions’ tried and true critiques of school choice. One was the fallacy that regulatory accountability is both effective and the only tool for conforming public expenditures to public goals. We’ll explode this notion elsewhere on BuckeyeInstitute.org in a couple of days or so.

Strickland then offered the familiar assertion that school choice hurts the children who remain in public schools, through draining resources in a way that would harm “…the vast majority of students, including disabled students, who attend public schools.”

Unfortunately, the facts don’t back the Governor up on this assertion.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have looked at the Florida McKay Scholarship, the program model for Ohio’s special needs voucher, and found that:

Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.

Disabled public school students’ largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.

The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program.

Strickland has threaten to veto SB 57, Sen. Coughlin’s and Rep. Peterson’s latest version of a statewide special needs scholarship.

If he follows through on his threat, we’re wondering exactly how the Governor will explain to the parents of disabled children across Ohio, both those who would have taken advantage of the voucher and those who wouldn’t have, why he chose to ignore the facts about a special needs voucher and favored the prerogatives of teacher unionists and other adults over the needs of their children.

For a fuller briefing on the special needs voucher, visit BuckeyeVoices.org where a podcast with report author Winters has just been posted.

The Newark Advocate has a story about an “awareness raising” event at a few universities in Ohio centered around this misleading notion: “According to Business and Professional Women/USA, in 2006 the average median annual earnings of women were only 77 percent of men’s salaries. The 23 cents in the purse illustrates the disparity between genders.”

Dr. Thomas Sowell does a good job of demolishing this nonsense in a short video:

Here Dr. Sowell discusses these issues in print and makes an excellent point:

People without the slightest knowledge of economics or the slightest experience running a business will boldly assert that women are paid only 75 percent — or some other percent — of what men make for doing exactly the same work.

Think about it. If an employer could hire four women for the price of hiring three men, why would he ever hire men at all?

Even if the employer was the world’s biggest sexist, he could still not survive in business if his competitors were getting one-third more output from their employees for the same money.

Ohio’s popular Ed Choice school voucher program continues to grow. Today is the sign-up deadline for the coming school year and it’s clear that Ohio parents want educational choice.

The program has enjoyed sustained growth since it was implemented three years ago. In fact, this year’s applications have already surpassed last year’s by 12 percent according to the Ohio Department of Education. Parents seeking information on the program should contact School Choice Ohio at (614) 223-1555.

Read more about the program in today’s Cincinnati Enquirer.

It is not very often that I run across a New York Times editorial that I agree with, but today is an exception. Apparently, a small provision was inserted into the state’s pending education budget bill which “bars school administrators from considering student test scores when determining whether a teacher deserves to get tenure.” The folks on the editorial board are against the measure, and blame the state’s teacher union for trying to thwart better school management.

“To judge whether a teacher elevates the class or sets students spiraling backward, administrators should look at the biggest possible picture. That includes the teacher’s education and experience, of course. But what about the students’ work, including their performance on standardized tests? Shouldn’t that also be considered before giving a teacher a virtually permanent job in New York State? The ban is so nonsensical that lawmakers clearly decided that the only way to get it passed was to keep it hidden deep in the budget documents.”
(more…)

Yesterday, Buckeye Institute Education Policy Analyst Beth Lear testified before the Senate Education Committee to refute specific findings of a labor union-backed report critical of Ohio’s successful Autism Scholarship program.

Senate Bill 57, currently under deliberation in the Senate, will expand the special needs choice program.