Kasich's ties to Rhee might have something to do with his former boss, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is a huge supporter of Michelle Rhee and all that she represents. The Washington Post has a quote from Murdoch that sounds vaguely similar to what Kasich has said:
....In a speech at the annual awards banquet for the Media Institute, Murdoch addressed a crowd of communication regulators, lobbyists and executives. He said more people like Rhee need to stay in place to overhaul an educational system that overspends to protect ineffective teachers through their unions and the politicians who support them. He said no business could ever operate like the monopolies that school districts have become, without performance goals or consequences when those goals weren't met.....
.....Last July, Rhee fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals under a new evaluation system that for the first time holds some educators accountable for students' standardized test scores. She has not indicated if she will stay on as chancellor after the expected election of Democratic mayoral nominee Vincent Gray......
(Note: Rhee resigned from her Washington, DC post just a week after this article was published.)
USA Today has the details of the Washington, D.C. Erasergate scandal under Michelle Rhee's watch----
.....A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
....In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.....
More info on the Rhee/Murdoch/Kasich ties:
* Michelle Rhee also had some influence in the wording that was inserted in SB 5 concerning teachers (see Huffington Post 5/24/11). Her lobbyist, Robert Klaffky helped work on the language for SB 5.
* The Nation explained how Murdoch wanted to take more control of public schools:
.....But what’s been less well understood is the impact the scandal might have on Murdoch’s attempt to make a profit off the American public sector, most notably through seeking to provide technology services, such as data-tracking systems and video lessons, to public school districts.....
.....scrutiny on Murdoch’s school agenda is growing. Aware of the media titan’s relationship with former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, education reporter Alexander Russo tried to find out if Murdoch had donated to StudentsFirst, Rhee’s PAC. The group’s goal is to act as a political counterweight to teachers’ unions.
“After two days of emails and phone calls—they must have been freaking out behind the scenes trying to figure out what to do—a Rhee spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the Murdoch money,” Russo wrote....
* Robert Klaffky, lobbyist, and advisor/friend of Kasich's, has been busy lobbying various Ohio government agencies on behalf of StudentsFirst.
Online filing of lobbying activity (http://www2.jlec-olig.state.oh.us/olac/Reports/ExecutiveInitialsSearch.aspx):
Ohio Department of Education:
| Klaffky | Robert F | United for Children Advocacy dba StudentsFirst | 3/29/2011 |
Here is some additional info on Agents for United for Children Advocacy dba StudentsFirst from JLEC-OLIG:
| Click on the agent's name to find all employers of that agent or return to search form. If a check appears in the L(egislative) or E(xecutive) box, it indicates the individual is registered as a lobbying agent for this branch of the government. Additional information is found in the Lobbying Handbook. Only current engagements are shown. Terminated engagements are not included in the search results. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Michelle Rhee and Bridget Davis are listed as out of state agents (see OutofstateAgents). With Rhee's appearances with Kasich, why aren't these listed as contacts with lobbyists?
* Finally, this posting by ProgressOhio shows the supporters of the Michelle Rhee agenda:
This week in the war on workers
Fresh off a cheating scandal and an appearance at a DeVos-funded event with Scott Walker and Tom Corbett, former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee was John Kasich's special guest for a screening of charter school propaganda piece Waiting for Superman.Hat Tip: Daily Kos
Note the governors she's making appearances with: Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, Ohio's John Kasich. And to round out her partnerships with the worst of the worst, she's working with Florida's Rick Scott, Nevada's Brian Sandoval, and...well, consult your list of worst governors. They're probably big Rhee supporters.
This isn't incidental. It's about privatizing public education, reducing transparency and accountability in education, and driving down working conditions for teachers and support staff. That has an enormous impact right now on our middle class and an exponentially bigger one in the future as the kids trying to learn under this system grow up.
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Ohioans have to ask themselves how much influence Rupert Murdoch, Michelle Rhee, Robert Klaffky, and other right wing conservatives have had on SB 5, and changes to the structure, foundation, and funding of education in Ohio. Murdoch, Rhee, Klaffky, and Kasich are not experts in education and we should not listen to their proposals which seek to destroy public education. You would not go to a plumber to fix a brain tumor, and we should not take advice from right wingers who seek to make money off of educating our children.