The Scoop on Kasich’s Education Policy Proposals
Posted March 16, 2012 in Press Releases
Yesterday, Governor Kasich said everywhere he looks in Ohio he finds something else to fix, so it’s no surprise that his mid-biennial budget review read like a laundry list of proposed policy changes on energy companies, banks, taxes, etc.
Many of the items on that list also touched on Ohio’s schools.
Educators like to say third grade is the age at which students stop learning to read and start reading to learn. That mantra might have inspired Governor Kasich’s third grade reading guarantee.
The program would monitor students’ reading abilities, and require an intervention if they aren’t reading at grade level.
In fact, Kasich says if students get to third grade and fail the state exam, they won’t be moved on to the fourth grade.
Kasich says, “that is doing the children a disservice, that is doing the parents a disservice.”
About 12 years ago, Ohio tried to launch a similar program for fourth graders that never made it into classrooms.
Piet Van Lier, an education policy researcher with the left-leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio, says at the time the Ohio Supreme Court found that program to be an “unfunded mandate.”
Van Lier says “not much came from [that program] so how is this going to be different?”
Other ideas from the governor include changing the way schools are evaluated to a letter grade system instead of the 26-point metric used now.
Kasich says the idea there is that he wants “parents to understand exactly how their schools are doing and at the same time we intend to raise the standards.”
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also a part of Ohio’s Race to the Top waiver application.
Schools that serve dropouts would also get a new system of assessments, and all early childhood programs would have to be graded too.
The mid-term budget also proposes expanding blended