Ohio Core
Some educators are not happy about Daft's Ohio Core curriculum being railroaded through the legislature:
"We have been following the legislation closely because, again, the politicians do not have confidence in us educators," said Lora Garrett, principal of Cuyahoga Heights High School, one of the state's top-performing schools. "For some reason, they know our jobs better than we do -- or so they think."
Well, Lora, it's not unusual for one's employers to think they know their job better than you do, whether they do or not. But I don't see anything in this about "doing your job". It's about having minimum standards for entrance into Ohio universities. How you prepare your students for those standards is your call. And the legislature wouldn't ever worry about how the schools were doing their job if in fact they were doing their job.
I've got reservations about this. It looks like an unfunded mandate on public schools, and Youngstown State doesn't deserve to be on the B-list. I don't even think there should be a B-list; putting Central on it is "the soft racism of low expectations". And ultimately it's all rearranging the Titanic's deck chairs.
But to say that state government has a Constitutional obligation to provide free public education (the crux of that separation-of-powers muddle re education funding that we had several years back), and then say that it's not their job to decide what form the education will take...that's just ridiculous.
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