Confused? Yes, DeWine is Too

Demanding How Schools Teach While Giving School Dollars to Unregulated Private Schools

I’d say I’m the one confused, but I don’t think it’s me.

I think it’s the Governor who’s confused.

Because the same person seems driven by two wholly different motives. Maybe this happens when you let too many different forces drive your agenda. Either way, when such confusion and dissonance involve something as important as how we educate our children, it’s a major problem.

Why the confusion?

On one hand…

This week, the Governor is on a big state-wide tour around Ohio to push his (and the legislature’s) decision that a technique called the “science of reading” is the only proven way to improve literacy in schools.

DeWine with election-denier Bill Johnson, new President of YSU and suddenly a literacy expert

Our literacy rate is a crisis, DeWine says, and the “Science of Reading” curriculum is the only way to solve it. Nothing else works. He’s so committed to this that he already allocated tens of millions to make it happen in the state budget. Schools will be required to teach with “science of reading” materials by this fall. He said in Columbus: “We're now following the science of reading, but we still have too many classrooms in the state of Ohio where that's not occurring…We have to get every classroom, every child — every child deserves that."

Every child! Remember that.

So this week’s tour involves him and the guy who he appointed to lead the new Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) hosting public sessions raising the alarm about the literacy crisis, and rehashing all these reasons why schools must adopt his chosen approach.

What is the Department of Education and Workforce, you ask? It’s the new agency the Governor created when he stripped most of the powers from the elected/appointed State School Board. It’s pretty clear that a major reason for the takeover was so he could do what he’s doing now with this tour—directly control this statewide push (and staffing/implementation) for “the science of reading” technique, and not have to gain the consensus of the state school board which, before his takeover, was appointed and elected by Ohio voters to make these curriculum decisions.

On the other hand…

At the same time DeWine is undertaking this tour from the very top, we see other GOP officials (including his Lieutenant Governor, Jon Husted) engaging in a continuous private/religious school tour to celebrate public money flowing out of public education coffers and into those private schools as private vouchers.

Husted smiling, taking credit for public dollars going into schools the state can’t regulate…

We now know these funds almost entirely subsidize private school students to continue going to the schools they were already attending (and could already afford). In some cases, public money is becoming the lion’s share of individual private school’s budgets. This universal voucher explosion advances the Ohio GOP’s stated ideology of applying the DeVos private market model to education.

Starting to see the problem?

Let me walk through it:

The explosion of private vouchers means that huge amounts (again, closing in on a billion dollars) of public money flows into the hands of private entities. And one of the biggest concerns about this flow of public funds is that those entities face far fewer rules, regulations and transparency as to how they spend those public dollars—including who they teach, what they teach, and how they teach.

And of course, if government starts telling religious schools what to teach and how to teach it, we are also venturing into major league Constitutional difficulty. Lawsuits will surely follow.

So the inevitable result of the private/Devos model that Ohio and other gerrymandered-red states are eagerly adopting is a separate set of publicly funded private schools with no regulation or oversight from government. But the Devos vision says that that’s OK, because parents’ decisions on how to spend their voucher dollars will work out the problem.

You know, it’s a market!

DeWine is Doing Both!

Now enters DeWine (and the statehouse), telling us that they have reached the conclusion that there is only one effective way to teach reading.

One side note: I don’t intend here to weigh in on the complex debate over the best ways to teach reading, which has been dubbed the “literacy wars.” But if you’ve watched Ohio education decisions in recent decades, you know to be on the lookout anytime an Ohio politician declares that they have found a “silver bullet” solution to education. We’ve lived that nightmare with ECOT (and online schools), White Hat (and for-profit unregulated charters), universal vouchers, and the like. These decisions have been driven far more by ideology and good old fashioned pay-to-play than a sincere look at what’s good for kids. And the same people (LG Jon Husted perhaps more than anyone) have been part of all of these failed policies, while inevitably raising big campaign dollars from those who profited from these reckless ventures. Similarly, if you trust the statehouse to get this right based on what’s good for education, you haven’t been paying attention. Together, these are the people and the policies who have led Ohio from 5th to the mid-20s in our national public education ranking.

Given their track record and serial habit of selling education policy decisions to the highest bidders, these are the last people we should trust to make these decisions.

Also, when you see the same national names who backed failed “silver bullet” solutions of the past—people like Jeb Bush (a big online ed backer, among other things)—along with deep-pocketed corporations and donors all now insisting that “Science of Reading” is the new must-do “silver bullet,” (as millions are invested to make it happen) we should be equally cautious.

But…put all those real flags aside for a moment.

Let’s assume DeWine has reached his personal conclusion sincerely. Let’s even go one step further: let’s assume for the sake of argument that he’s right—that the Science of Reading is the only way to solve our literacy crisis.

Well, that would mean that he’s discovered the key to ending a literacy crisis at the same time that the GOP’s universal voucher program is putting far more (climbing to $1 billion soon) of our public dollars into the hands of schools with little to no regulation and little to no transparency. So at the same time that he’s running around the state saying all schools (“every child,” remember?) must teach reading in a certain way or we won’t overcome our literacy crisis, he and his GOP buddies are busy diverting public school dollars to create a separate system of publicly funded private schools, over which neither DeWine nor any other public officials have any control over how that public money is spent, or what is taught and how.

But it gets even worse.

Based on the stories I’ve read, it’s also clear that countless private schools don’t today use DeWine’s now-preferred technique. Regardless, he’s sending hundreds of millions of our public dollars their way (often at a rate per voucher far greater than how much public schools receive from the state per student), to teach in a way that he is now insisting will not improve literacy.

And that separate private system is set up so that nothing can be done about that fact going forward. Once the money’s out the door, that’s it. Public officials have no say whatsoever, now or in the future, about how those schools teach reading or anything else. Those private schools can teach reading however they want—including with techniques that are proven to be disastrous failures. Yet money for those private schools is going to keep soaking up a larger and larger portion of public education dollars.

By his own terms, DeWine and the GOP’s universal voucher scheme will be subsidizing with ever growing dollars schools who he himself says are failing to teach students how to read amid a literacy crisis.

Of course, one solution is that DeWine can start telling private schools: “Hey, a new condition of these private vouchers is that you MUST start teaching literacy via our chosen “science of reading” approach.”

But of course, that would quickly lead to a predictable and ferocious backlash, which is why such conditioning of public funds will never happen.

(Who knows, maybe we’ll start seeing advertising like we do these days for pharmaceuticals — “ask your private school about ‘Science of Reading’ — it’s the best model by far!”).

The Contrasting Ideologies

This all brings us to the broader dissonance of what’s happening.

If you take the rhetoric of the DeVos/anti-public education right seriously, then DeWine’s opinion about the best way to teach reading actually shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. It’s irrelevant.

Because it’s not his choice. It’s the parents’ choice. Under the philosophy of the universal voucher scheme being implemented here and elsewhere, and approaches such as Education Savings Accounts, it’s the parents who choose what school (and what method of teaching reading) they want their kids to utilize.

Under that model, DeWine’s views don’t matter, and he shouldn’t be telling schools what they should be teaching. That’s just government “interference” in the marketplace!

Even more starkly, that government “interference” is coming from the highest level of state government—the furthest distance from the parent possible. Heck, DeWine is saying that it doesn’t matter what locally elected school boards think—all local schools must take the approach he prefers. And he even took over the functions of the state school board (including educators who were elected to serve on it) to keep another obstacle from getting in his way.

So local and state-level checks and balances and expertise in education be damned. One man, his appointee and the legislature want to impose their approach over everyone else in Ohio education. He’s the decider for “every child.”

On the flip side, universal vouchers are being pushed across Ohio with the philosophy that the market model best works from bottom-up decisions—by parents and, for the most part, no one else.

So which is it, Governor DeWine?

Do you want public money going to private schools where neither you nor anyone else has any say over what they teach or how they teach it? Where parents can choose whatever reading approach they want, regardless of your opinion?

Or do you think you get to dictate from on high what all schools in Ohio should do, without even input or shared decisionmaking with local or state-level elected officials and educators?

The irony is that at the same moment, DeWine and Ohio are embracing the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum: a voucher free-for-all where parents’ make the choice free from government, versus the direct imposition by the Governor of his curriculum preference, running roughshod over local and state education officials who are elected to make those decisions.

It couldn’t be more incoherent.

Unless…

Unfortunately, the best way to square this glaring inconsistency is the ugly one referenced above. That the same money and power which have driven failed education decisions in Ohio for too long are lurking here too.

On the one hand, powerful and monied interests are demanding that DeWine and GOP leaders provide universal, unrestricted vouchers to support a separate system of private schools. On the other hand, powerful and monied interests are demanding of GOP leaders that Ohio firmly embrace one specific type of reading curriculum.

And as they always do, the Governor and legislators can’t say no—to either push. So they dedicate time and public power advancing both agendas, and hope no one figures out just how inconsistent the two approaches are.

And this suggested explanation, my friends, is why in the middle of last century, Ohio voters created the separate Department of Education and separate state school board in the first place. They did so to put keep decisions like these out of the hands of state politicians who had a history then—and still have a history now—of prioritizing a whole lot of things that benefit them over formulating a plan for public education that is centered on what is actually best for Ohio kids.

One of many benefits of such a plan is that it would at least be internally consistent.