Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Free the Cleveland schools from weight of bureaucracy
By Kevin O’Brien  
March 3, 2012 

So, it’s not just theoretical. 

There really does come a time when an organization gets so thoroughly mired in rules and bureaucracy that it can no longer do the things it was established to do. 

There really does come a point at which the mission shifts so profoundly that the original purpose of the organization is lost entirely. 

The Cleveland schools have been at that point for quite some time. 

What was once just a school district -- a bureaucracy established to educate children -- was ordered decades ago by a federal judge to take on the additional assignment of forcing white people and black people to live together in harmony. 

From the standpoint of social engineering, desegregation was a failure. From the standpoint of education, it was a disaster. 

Thousands of people fled not just the school system, but the city, too. A district whose enrollment topped 150,000 in the late 1960s started a long slide into chronic academic and fiscal chaos. A city that had until then held Ohio’s strongest concentration of wealth, population and industry became what is now described as a “doughnut hole.” 

The intentions were good. The results weren’t. 

As the school system adapted to a remaining population that was heavily black and heavily poor, a more subtle but pernicious change took place. 

Expectations were lowered. 

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t talked about. It wasn’t something that anyone really intended. But it happened, and because it happened, the mission changed again: A system created specifically to educate children became a system maintained primarily to pay adults. 

In 1997, the Ohio General Assembly changed state law to put the mayor -- Michael R. White, at the time -- in charge of the city’s public schools. Not enough changed. 

That same year, Ohio legislators opened the door to charter schools. Not enough changed. 

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it was constitutionally permissible for Cleveland parents to use tax-supported vouchers at private schools. Not enough changed. 

Families were freed to make other choices, and many did so, producing a further drop in public school enrollment. But the district itself was -- and remains -- firmly trapped in a web of work, payment and seniority rules partly of its own making and fully favorable to the Cleveland Teachers Union. 

Mayor Frank Jackson and schools CEO Eric Gordon, to their great credit, want to take a machete to the web. 

They have put before the General Assembly a request to free the Cleveland schools from an ill-conceived state mandate that seniority be the primary determining factor in work assignments and layoff decisions. 

They want to make performance a stronger factor in deciding who gets paid what. Imagine that. 

They want to tear up the district’s contracts with its unions and start fresh, rather than having to negotiate every deleted comma. 

They want to join charter schools, not beat them -- sharing levy proceeds with them, counting charter enrollment in the city in the public district’s student census and establishing a local board to monitor charter school quality, encourage the good ones and shut down the bad ones. 

That last one, I think, goes too far. The state has been terribly slow to react to charters that pretty clearly are rip-offs, but allowing a public school district essentially to absorb charters and take over quality control defeats the purposes of competition. 

As to the rest, though, the Ohio General Assembly needs to do as it did with vouchers and mayoral control: Grant Cleveland an exception and let it experiment. 

The Democrats, willing prisoners of teachers union money that they are, aren’t going to jump on board -- even though Mayor Jackson is one of them. 

The Republicans have no excuse not to, though. The party that passed Senate Bill 5 on solid arguments and solid principles needs to step back up to the plate and offer Cleveland to the state as a clear demonstration of the benefits of taking control of a government entity away from a union. 

Legislators need not expect that freeing the Cleveland schools from rules that favor union interests above all others will “save” the district. But they must recognize that until they are freed from those rules, this city’s schools will remain beyond salvaging. 

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