presidents

The Terhar debacle roundup

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Fallout from State Board of Education President's offensive and ignorant Facebook post, comparing President Obama to Hilter spread far and wide yesterday.

The latest development has a tepid statement from the Governor's spokesperson saying "the governor has no comment about Terhar’s posting and no plan to remove her as board president". A true profile in courage and leadership.

The Ohio Department of education had its head resign over a serious ethics violation, and the current acting superintendent and his deputy are reportedly applying for district level jobs. Education leadership in Ohio is in disarray. Now the governor expects education professionals to take the State Board of Education President seriously after this disgraceful incident? Certainly her fellow board members don't think so

“I don’t think she can be perceived as being objective,” said Jeffrey Mims, a board member from Dayton. “Whether she wrote the statement or not, the fact that she harbored those statements on her Facebook page, I think you just can’t be associated with that.”

Ann Jacobs, a board member from Lima, said the board is supposed to be nonpartisan but Terhar’s posting is the latest sign of how partisan it’s gotten in recent years.

Here's a sampling of some of the coverage

Her continued presence on the board brings disgrace to the State Board of Education, Ohio's education system and all the professionals who strive everyday to bring excellence to educating Ohio's young people.

Politics and Education Don't Mix

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Governors and presidents are no better suited to run schools than they are to run construction sites, and it's time our education system reflected that fact.

A central flaw of corporate paradigms, as is often noted in popular culture, is the mind-numbing and dehumanizing effect of bureaucracy. Sometimes we are horrified and sometimes we laugh, but arguments for or against the free market may be misguided if we fail to address bureaucracy's corrosive role in the business model.

Current claims about private, public, or charter schools in the education reform movement, which has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century, may also be masking a much more important call to confront and even dismantle the bureaucracy that currently cripples universal public education in the U.S. "Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula," argued legal reformer Philip K. Howard earlier in this series, "but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts....This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy."

Bureaucracy, however, remains an abstraction and serves as little more than a convenient and popular target for ridicule -- unless we unpack what actions within bureaucracy are the sources for many of the persistent failures we associate erroneously with public education as an institution. Bureaucracy fails, in part, because it honors leadership as a primary quality over expertise, commits to ideological solutions without identifying and clarifying problems first, and repeats the same reforms over and over while expecting different results: our standards/testing model is more than a century old.

Public education is by necessity an extension of our political system, resulting in schools being reduced to vehicles for implementing political mandates. For example, during the past thirty years, education has become federalized through dynamics both indirect ("A Nation at Risk" spurring state-based accountability systems) and direct (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top).

As government policy and practice, bureaucracy is unavoidable, of course. But the central flaw in the need for structure and hierarchy is that politics prefers leadership characteristics above expertise. No politician can possibly have the expertise and experience needed in all the many areas a leader must address (notably in roles such as governor and president). But during the "accountability era" in education of the past three decades, the direct role of governors and presidents as related to education has increased dramatically--often with education as a central plank in their campaigns.

One distinct flaw in that development has been a trickle-down effect reaching from presidents and governors to state superintendents of education and school board chairs and members: people who have no or very little experience or expertise as educators or scholars attain leadership positions responsible for forming and implementing education policy.

The faces and voices currently leading the education reform movement in the U.S. are appointees and self-proclaimed reformers who, while often well-meaning, lack significant expertise or experience in education: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, billionaire Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee (whose entrance to education includes the alternative route of Teach for America and only a few years in the classroom), and Sal Khan, for example.

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