Three constitutional provisions confer on all Ohio youth the right to a thorough and efficient system of traditional public education. These edicts require the state to make available high quality educational opportunities to all the children of all the people via the SYSTEM. Citizens can opt out of the SYSTEM but the state has no constitutional obligation to pay the education expenses of those who opt out. By constitutional mandate, the state’s first obligation is to perfect the SYSTEM. If it is perceived that the SYSTEM has problems, it is the obligation of the state to fix the SYSTEM.
Beginning with the 1983 “Nation at Risk” report, powerful voices at the federal level began condemning the SYSTEM with particular rancor being directed toward school unions. Eventually influential persons with a variety of motivations and intentions piled on the campaign to beat down public education. The motivation of some was the prospect of accruing huge profits from the public largess. But regardless of the motivation of these powerful voices, the first order of business for the public school antagonists was to destroy public confidence in public education and thus take the public out of public education.
Distracters began by intensifying the “failing” school rhetoric and the deification of education “choice”. Hence, the charter school and voucher movement went forward.
The people with the huge profit motive hijacked the charter school movement. Charter schools were supposed to be non-profit, experimental, innovative entities which would instruct traditional public schools on how to improve. Instead, many of these “experiments” have merely become a lucrative money-making scheme for high profile campaign contributors.
Part II to follow…
