Recognizing that “local” school districts are no longer local is the first step in a real fix for Ohio’s broken system.
Schools stopped being local when the state stepped in decades ago and decreed that authentic local schools should consolidate into district-wide systems. Since then the legislature and the governor have increasingly intruded in matters for which bureaucrats have no expertise. The ability to draw votes does not an educator make.
As the heavy hand of bureaucracy weighed ever-heavier, Ohio’s school system became one massive and inefficient conglomerate.
Thousands of expensive school employees will object, but Ohio must stop the inefficiency and massive expense of requiring each community to support “local” school districts that are no longer local. Schools of Ohio belong in a single, statewide system.
Imagine the cost-effectiveness if Ohio were to:
1 - Move to the state level all administrative functions that do not directly involve individual school buildings. The top local school administrators should be building principals.
2 - Move from the local level to the state level all purchasing of supplies and provision of services such as busing. Services and supplies would be provided by private companies, selected by lowest and best bids.
3 - Pay school employees throughout Ohio the same, with variance according to the cost of living in each community.
4 - Remove state interference from the art and science of teaching. Let teachers take over that responsibility again, but provide for ways to weed out incompetent teachers and financially reward the better ones according to a statewide measure. All schools would teach the same classroom subjects and offer the same extra-curriulars, as mandated by a commission of educational experts.
Such a system could be employed to relieve the unfair burden on property owners, eliminate the expense and frustration of levy balloting, reclaim from labor unions their stranglehold on public welfare, save vast sums on school administrative functions and purchase of services and supplies, improve classroom performance, and make educational opportunities and advantages equal for every student, every teacher, every community.
"As the heavy hand of bureaucracy weighed ever-heavier, Ohio’s school system became one massive and inefficient conglomerate."
ReplyDelete"Schools of Ohio belong in a single, statewide system."
am i seeing a contradiction here?
No.
ReplyDeletecongolerate -
1. anything composed of heterogeneous materials or elements.
2. a corporation consisting of a number of subsidiary companies or divisions in a variety of unrelated industries, usually as a result of merger or acquisition.
system -
1. an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole: a mountain system; a railroad system.
2. any assemblage or set of correlated members: a system of currency; a system of shorthand characters.
3. an ordered and comprehensive assemblage of facts, principles, doctrines, or the like in a particular field of knowledge or thought: a system of philosophy.
(But I did originally publish it with incorrect paragraph numbers. You should have picked up on that.)
hey, i'll start counting your number when you start paying me to edit your stuff ..... i still think you're asking for the devil to take over the schoolyard if you want the state to run every thing above the principal's office for every school in ohio ..... instead, the legislature should find the cojones to reverse engineer the creeping state power grab ..... just because the state has to pick up an increasing tab in lieu of insufficient property taxes doesn't mean that it has to keep assuming more power over local schools -- the legislature could adopt a method of allotting grants from state coffers to local school districts to be spent the way local school districts (and their elected local boards) see fit ..... probably never happen, tho ..... by the way, why all the griping over the passage of a school levy? what do you have against democracy?
ReplyDeleteYou seem to appear every two years or so from the bush country of the far northwest under the devil's spell just to piss me off. Is this the year? Where have you been for the many months and many essays describing exactly what is wrong with our schools and what was at stake in the Newark School levy vote? HUH?
ReplyDeleteAnd I'll pay you to edit my stuff when you get familiar with the English language (which still employs caps and no .....'s).