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A House divided puts the conservatives in charge The Plain Dealer Sunday, August 3, 1997 The Ohio Senate leadership did its best last week to ram through sweeping changes in state educational policy. The House leadership tried hard, too. And sure enough, it looks as if there will be sweeping changes, but not the ones most people were expecting. In last week's battle over the future of public schools in Ohio, the victory belonged to a tough core of conservative House Republicans, an intransigent Democratic minority and a lot of moms and dads who are nursing sore phone-dialing fingers this weekend. Now, it's important that the conservatives don't betray their constituency by overtaxing their talent for political hardball. The net effect of the week's work is that two education-reform bills, are hitting the Gov. George V. Voinovich's desk. One, Senate Bill 55, would require high school students to complete 21 credits to graduate, would replace the ninth-grade proficiency tests with a 10th grade version and would require that fourth-graders pass the reading section of their proficiency test before promotion to fifth grade. The other, House Bill 412, would require that school districts keep balanced budgets and set aside a percentage of their budgets for textbook materials and maintenance and establish "rainy-day" funds to cover fiscal emergencies. The House bill would also have done much more to expand state power over local school districts, if not for the Democrats' unity and the conservatives' backbone. By sticking to their guns and refusing to vote for the Republican-sponsored bills, no matter how many concessions the Republicans' made to them, the Democrats put life-and-and death power over the bills in the hands of a dozen or so House conservatives. As Wednesday's GOP caucus stretched past midnight into Thursday, it became clear that the conservatives were in a position to dictate a bill that met their requirements. And their requirements entailed a complete makeover. Out when a provision that would have established an Office of Educational Accountability and Productivity within the state Office of Management and Budget. The conservatives viewed with astute suspicion this effort to concentrate great power over local school districts in the hands of appointed members of a new executive bureaucracy far out of voters' reach. Out went a measure that would have given the Ohio Department of Education authority to take over local school districts it considered academically subpar. The legislation was amended so the department can assess districts' performance and demand that failing districts develop improvement plans. But local officials, not state bureaucrats, will be responsible for drawing up and implementing those plans. That's as it should be. Out went a requirement that Ohio schools administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test conservatives have criticized as much too focused on gauging students' attitudes rather than their academic ability. Out went a provision that would have forced urban districts to cut
student-teacher ratios to 15:1, a horrendously expensive proposition of dubious
educational value. The conservatives kept the reforms they wanted. For instanced, Rep. Michael Fox, A Hamilton Republican, walked away with charter school legislation he had sought without success for the better part of a decade. Most of this happened because the Democrats - the people the moderate Republican leadership usually looks to when votes are hard to come by - forced the leadership into the arms of the GOP conservatives. The Democrats made the conservatives strong. And Ohioans who burned up the Statehouse phone lines made them even stronger. A phone blitz organized by a loose coalition of e-mail linked conservative groups pushed a number of legislators off the fence on to the winning side. Staff members of the 16 House Republicans targeted by the phone campaign estimate that in the days leading up to the vote, their offices received more that 1,700 calls demanding changes in Senate Bill 55. Legislators "started receiving all those phone calls, and their didn't understand what all the hubbub was about," said Rep. Mike Wise, a Chargrin Falls Republican and a leader in the conservative camp. "Then, we were able to get a memo into the members' hands, saying, "These are the offensive provisions." "All of a sudden, the phone calls matched up with the reality and instead of having seven or eight "no" votes, we had 20." As of the time this column goes to press (Friday evening), the conservatives were holding firm against the leadership's effort to put a tax increase on November's ballot to pay for the Supreme Court-ordered school funding increase. And they were risking the educational grains they had just made by driving the moderates back to the Democrats in search of a deal. The smart play is not to jeopardize their new-found power, but to lock the Democrats out of the process by oh-so-reluctantly giving the leadership the votes to put the Supreme Court's tax hike on the ballot. Then it's up to Ohioans to do the intelligent thing - and blow it to pieces at the polls. Ohio's families won an important victory last week because the conservatives played their hand just right. This is no time to overplay it. O'Brien is the Plain Dealer's deputy editorial director. |
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Diana M. Fessler
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