An Unfair Editorial

The Plain Dealer had a terribly slanted and unfair editorial titled "Cleveland school-reform bill needs teachers' input". From the title it sounded as though some were finally calling for collaboration, before a rush to legislation. Alas, that was not the case, as the editorial demonstrated, first with a straw man argument

When the usually reserved Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says he would trade his office for "quality education for our children," all of the other adults involved in the high-stakes discussion on school reform ought to determine what they would give up as well.

So far, judging from the Cleveland Teachers Union's tepid response to the mayor's Cleveland-only school reform package, the answer appears to be little or nothing.

One should hardly be confused by the empty rhetoric of a politician and then compare it to actual sacrifices working people ought to make on the basis on that rhetoric. So straight away we knew this editorial was headed south.

The mayor says that despite hours of meetings with union representatives, he has received no written reply to his wide-ranging draft legislation on school reform.

The draft legislation was only made available less than 24 hours ago as of the writing of this editorial! People have barely had chance to even read and digest it, let alone craft some policy response document in considered terms.

If the Mayor and the Plain Dealer truly wanted teacher input, why didn't they seek it during the crafting of the actual legislation, then they could have rolled it out with a lot more support and a lot less controversy. To now blame teachers, yet again, for his own failing to collaborate with critical stakeholders is very unfair.

Rick Santorum Needs A History Lesson

In a campaign stop in Ohio, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum called the viability of the public education system into question

“Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?” he said. “Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”

“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly — much less that the state government should be running schools — is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.

Mr. Santorum isn't just wrong, he is absurdly wrong. The Ohio constitution enshrines the provision of public education by the state. It's a defining core value, not some new fangled government edict dreamed up by supporters of bureaucratic big government 50 years ago. This was written into our constitution before US industrialization began and factories were built, it was written in our constitution in 1851.

Mr. Santorum seems to want to take us back to before 1851.

Update

B Herringten on twitter digs into the even further distant past and notes that funding of public education in Ohio began with the Land Ordinance of 1785 before Ohio was even a state

The ordinance was also significant for establishing a mechanism for funding public education. Section 16 in each township was reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Many schools today are still located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for public education