Sec. 3314.062. No community school shall admit any student ... for the school year in which admission is sought, to a district building whose most recent rating issued under section 3302.03 of the Revised Code is better than the most recent rating issued to the community school under section 3314.012 of the Revised Code...
This lovely little piece of legislation, introduced by State Senator Joe Schiavoni (D-Canfield), says that if you want to enroll your child in a charter school that happens to be located in the school district where you live and the public school has a better state report card (nanny nanny boo boo!), your child is banned by law from enrolling in that charter school.
You see, the public school union bosses (and the Democrats, by extension) are so insecure about their product that they will go to great lengths to destroy their competition. They don't want you to have choices for your child because they're afraid you might not choose their government-run school. So they seek to pass ridiculous laws like this one (co-sponsored by Senators Tavares, Cafaro, and Sawyer) to put a stranglehold on parental choice.
Schiavoni says it's all about accountability:
"Of the 14 traditional public schools in Mahoning County, 11 are rated as 'excellent' despite yearly budget cuts. However, these 'excellent' public schools continue to lose funding to charter schools whose educational track record is inferior. Our educational systems should be held accountable for their failures, regardless of whether they are community or public. In these difficult economic times, there should be no reason for our state's highest performing schools to lose additional state funding to underperforming community schools."Does he think to ask himself why so many students are fleeing these 'excellent' schools in Mahoning county and flocking to 'inferior' charter schools? Besides the fact that an 'excellent' rating isn't really....excellent (see my previous blog post on that subject), and besides the fact that when they "lose funding to charter schools" they also have fewer students to teach and provide services for, I'd be interested to know if Mr. Schiavoni is in favor of wholesale banning of enrollment in failing public schools. Is this about providing the most effective education for the children or is it a schoolyard turf war? I suspect it's the later.
The truth is, this type of legislation tells us a lot about Senator Shiavoni and others who continually battle against the inevitable forces of school choice. They think they know what's best for your children and for mine. They think that parents are inherently too stupid to know the difference between a good and a bad school and so the state must be charged with making laws restricting the choices for parents because too many choices would just be confusing. Clearly Senator Shiavoni thinks that the parents in Mahoning County are ignorant of the facts for choosing the 'inferior' charter schools.
I imagine the thinking goes something like this: If parents had to choose between a dangerous, excellent-rated school, where the child was miserable, and a safe, continuous improvement-rated school, where the child was thriving, how could they ever decide such a thing without state oversight? Parents aren't qualified to make such decisions. It takes hoards of PhD-laden bureaucrats to crunch the numbers and determine which school should survive and which should be starved to death by mandate of the union bosses and their those who do their bidding in the Ohio Senate.
This is why it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family.
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