In a Quinnipiac poll that came out last week, we learned that support for Ohio Gov. Strickland’s education policy had gone from 42-22 to 31-29(with 40 undecided) in just over a month.
That’s an 18 point swing.
Ouch.
And it’s going to get worse.
Late last week, three of Ohio’s biggest newspapers took Strickland to the woodshed on education. From the Columbus Dispatch:
Word that Gov. Ted Strickland’s “evidence-based” plan for Ohio’s schools might not fit with the new school buildings that taxpayers have paid $6.5 billion to construct is one more sign that the plan isn’t well-thought-out.
That’s not to say that the governor’s staff didn’t put a lot of effort into it. It prescribes in detail exactly what all schools need to have and to do to be successful.
But the staff employed the wrong kind of thinking: prescriptive instead of empowering, focused on inputs rather than results.
From the Akron Beacon Journal:
The challenge Ohio must meet (a challenge reiterated by President Barack Obama) is to create incentives for excellent education, in public as well as charter schools. It will be Ohio’s loss if Strickland’s charter school proposals result in slowly but effectively starving to death excellent schools along with the mediocre and the failures.
And finally, the mightly Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Strickland should think twice before ordering every child out of these little lifeboats, because some of them would certainly be forced back aboard sinking ships.
When it comes to understanding the importance of charter schools to many Ohio students, Strickland clearly has a lot to learn. He should ask the president for some tutoring.
And all this from a Governor who back in 2006 said if he didn’t solve the education crisis in Ohio, that he would consider himself a failure.
I can see the commercials already…
In fact, this is a good start:
“I’m very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”
