Michele's Rhee's reputation was already a little shaky amongst educators, as she pushed a partisan and deceptive corporate education reform agenda, but now that reputation must be in tatters on the news that she and her nascent organization "StudentsFirst" employed lobbyists in Ohio to architect major parts of SB5 and the SB5 provisions in the budget bill.

Between January and April of 2011, StudentsFirst employed Robert Klaffky, the president of firm Van Meter, Ashbrook & Associates and a close adviser to Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) to help push various aspects of education policy.

If the name Robert Klaffky sounds familiar, it's because he was featured in an Disptach article only this weekend, frontpage headlined "Kasich friends in high demand - 3 who have long been advisers to governor become top lobbyists".

Almost every Thursday during the 2010 campaign, Kasich's closest advisers, including Klaffky and Preisse, met at Thibaut's house to strategize. After Kasich's victory, candidates for his cabinet trooped to Thibaut's house to be vetted.

The details of Klaffky's lobbying are laid out in a HuffingtonPost report

In particular, the group, established by Rhee after she left the D.C. school system following then-Mayor Adrian Fenty's defeat, had Klaffky work on SB5, the infamous anti-collective bargaining bill passed into law but already facing the likelihood of referendum.
[...]

How much work StudentsFirst actually did on SB5 is not entirely clear. While Klaffky said he was tasked with putting language into the controversial bill, Hobson insisted that the group's primary focus was on the budget, HB153. The reason SB5 was put on the lobbying disclosure, she said, was because Klaffky simply discussed the matter with StudentFirst officials.

That explanation, however, appeared to contradict local reports, which had Rhee personally asking Kasich to include performance pay for teachers in SB5. It also did little to win over critics of Rhee, who argued that the former chancellor's willingness to work with the likes of the Ohio governor gave him the type of cover needed to make sweeping changes to the collective bargaining law. Adding amendments to the bill, the logic goes, inherently supports the bill.

"It now turns out that Michelle Rhee hired a close friend of the governor to lobby in favor of SB5," said Piet van Lier, head of Policy Matters Ohio who has worked on education in Ohio and opposes SB5. "This bill would require merit pay and test-based evaluations for teachers, neither of which has solid research support as a way to improve schools."

There should be no educator in the country now in any doubt about Rhee's corporate, partisan "reform" agenda and her disdain for public school teachers.

Currently Ohio has almost 100,000 students attending 339 charter schools, costing tax payers about $720 million a year. The Governors new budget seeks to significantly privatize public education further.

With so much at stake, there's currently a lot of lobbying going on, and lot of that lobbying is around this issue

In Ohio, a charter school must have a contract with one of 77 approved sponsors (also known as authorizers) who are responsible for overseeing academics and finances. Many are school districts or county educational service centers that sponsor only one or two charter schools, but a few are nonprofit organizations that sponsor dozens.

As introduced, Kasich's budget pins more responsibility on sponsors by forbidding them from adding schools if any of their current schools are in academic watch or academic emergency, the state's two lowest rankings.

Seems reasonable that we would want authorizers to only be sponsoring quality school programs. But there's a hitch, and it's a big one

That disqualifies just about everyone who's a sponsor now because almost all have at least one low-performing school, said Terry Ryan, who heads the Ohio offices of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Its sister foundation sponsors seven charter schools in Ohio, one of which is in academic emergency.

One would think these organizations would want to spend some time fixing their current failing schools, but no, that's not what is being lobbied for in Columbus

Ryan would like to see that changed to allow, say, 20 percent of a sponsor's schools to be low-ranked. But he's quick to add, "We do not want to return to the days when 50, 60, 70 schools were being opened by people who did not have a solid track record. We're still seeing the repercussions from that."

20 percent! That's an awful lot of students being left behind. What does the Governor's education Czar think?

Sommers is amenable to a change.

Well of course he is. This massive expansion of charter schools has nothing to do with improving education quality. It's about the bottom line.