Ohio: A New Kind of Battleground- Hanauer article in The Nation
Posted May 30, 2011 in Press Releases
The Nation
When my daughter started kindergarten, she was deemed secure enough to be placed next to the most rambunctious boy in the class. Her classmate, son of a formerly incarcerated man, quickly won us over with his humor, intelligence and infectious grin, if not always with his strict adherence to classroom expectations. But our well-resourced school system, which abuts a struggling neighborhood in Cleveland, also assigned gifted teachers and a much-beloved aide to that student. Five years later my daughter proudly tells me that her old kindergarten seatmate is a top math scholar in their fourth grade class.
Investments like that are what’s at stake in Ohio as the State Senate considers the brutal budget passed by the House, a bill that includes $2.1 billion in education cuts, a 9 percent reduction. These cuts, coupled with a bald attack on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, will further dampen an economy that has left Ohio riddled with foreclosed homes, displaced workers and troubled communities.
Official unemployment in Ohio stands at 8.9 percent, with more than 525,000 Ohioans searching for work. The state never recovered from the 2000