I attended the Montgomery County Democratic Party’s annual rally / fund raiser last night at the Dayton Convention Center. Ted Strickland was the special speaker.

Strickland looked fit and trim. He gave a rousing speech that responded to  Ohio’s SB5 — landmark legislation that curtails the bargaining rights of public employees that Governor Kasich had signed earlier in the day.

I wish I would have taken my video camera. The videographer recording the event, I hope, eventually will post the speech — and if so, I will link to it.  I took notes as best as I could — and below are some of the key sentences and phrases from Strickland’s speech that I noted.

• SB5 is the most mean spirited, antifamily legislation ever passed.
• We are facing the greatest threat to middle class since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
• Conservative and libertarian think tanks have been plotting for years and are mounting a united effort in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan.
• If they can break organized labor, there will be no restraint on corporate control of everything.
• They think they are winning, but people have had their eyes opened.  The radical right has taken off its mask and now everyone can see the ugliness they have been hiding.
• Kasich’s plan attacks public education and will deprive public education of $3.1 billion  over the next two years.
• What they (the radical right) really want to do is to repeal the New Deal and in so doing decimate the middle class.
• If ever you have been willing to fight, determine to fight now.
• Our  values and principals are are risk.  Our country is at risk.  This is a political Armageddon and we must win.

I took a lot of pictures, but, didn’t know how to use the camera I borrowed — I’m looking for a new one — and so most of the pictures I took didn’t come out.  But here are a few:

County Treasurer Caroline Rice

Rhine McLin, recently the mayor of Dayton. I'm sorry that I didn't catch the name of the handsome couple standing with Rhine.

 

John Murphy, President of our South of Dayton Democratic Club, received a special award. Here he is with his daughter, Gen, who is also the administrator of the MCDP headquarters.

Dayton City Commissioner, Matt Joseph, with an award recipient.

Clayton Luckie represents Ohio's 39th House District.

Me and Ted -- We both graduated from Asbury College -- separated by a number of years. You wouldn't know by this picture, but this youthful looking former governor is eight years older.

County Auditor Karl Keith did a great job as "Master of Ceremonies." Here, shown congratulating President Murphy.

Jim Mims is a recently elected member of the State Board of Education. I had a good conversation with him. He has a lot to say. At some point in the near future I hope to do an extensive interview with him.

It was a great evening -- at $125 per person, it raised money to fund the headquarters and other expenses of the Montgomery County Democratic Party. The South of Dayton Democratic Club bought two tickets to raffle off -- And, wow, one of them came to me.

The video below shows a program organized by the Fordham Foundation and conducted at Cleveland State University on March 14.  The title of the program was “Doing More With Less In K-12 Education — A Timely Discussion For Ohio”

Doing More with Less in K-12 Education: Cleveland State University from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

After opening remarks by Chester Finn, President of the Fordham Foundation, the first speaker, Nate Levenson, a “strategic planning management consultant,” formerly Superintendent of Schools for Arlington Public Schools in Massachusetts, stated that the goal of public education is clear — we know what we are trying to accomplish — we simply need a good strategy establishing clear priorities of what most contributes to accomplishing that goal.

This basic structure of Levenson’s proposition seems valid, but his foundation — we know what we are trying to accomplish — to me seems weak, because in the current setting, the bottom line thinking that directs what districts are trying to accomplish emphasizes producing results on objective tests. In Ohio, school districts put all of their energy into getting high marks from the Ohio Department of Education — on tests of minimum competencies.  Without a better vision of aim / purpose of public education, the effort to “accomplish more” is certain to be misdirected.

Levenson says that the quality of teachers is what matters most, yet, in a time of budget cuts, districts are tempted to stop funding effective programs for teacher development and teacher mentoring.  He says that in a time of decreasing dollars, school systems must invest even more in generating and analyzing data.  He says, “Information is power, and during tough times we need more information, not less.” Levenson urges his listeners to study effective districts. He says some districts have figured out how to have high achievement, while at the same time making cuts in staff members and making other cuts as well. “We can learn from them,” he says.

The second speaker Steven F. Wilson is founder and president of Ascend Learning, a charter school management organization in New York City, and a former executive vice president for product development at Edison Schools.  Wilson says that today’s education reformers have a rare opportunity. He says, “Maybe once a century we have an opportunity to completely change what we do in schools. … we need to break what we do now and start over again.”

Wilson says, in education, we are spending huge amounts of money on teachers, but what we are buying — seniority and advanced degrees — has no relation to teaching efficacy.  He says we need to “get rid of the least effective teachers — with gusto. … We’ve been running an employment system, not an education system, for the last 40 years. We need to change what we do and put students first.”

The biggest current strategy for improving education — reducing class sizes — according to Wilson, has been proven wrong and much money can be saved by modestly increasing the number of students in each class.  The plan Wilson advocates is for schools to increase class size and dramatically change how teachers are compensated.  He says, as it is now, the teaching profession is riddled with incompetents who themselves were poor students, graduating at the bottom of the high schools and colleges they attended. To attract better candidates to teaching, Wilson says schools must pay higher salaries, sooner, based on merit.

Missing from Wilson’s point of view, it seems, is a vision of what professionalism should mean for teachers — and the structure of a system that would empower teachers with the status and responsibilities of professionals.  As I hear Wilson, he would see even the more qualified and more highly paid teachers he advocates, as remaining basically blue collar workers in a hierarchical organization in which they would have few professional prerogatives. To attract better candidates to teaching, it seems to me, there must be a restructuring of the system of education that gives teachers more responsibility, more freedom to meet that responsibility, and more opportunity for the expression of individual creativity.

See: Does Ohio’s Low Standard For School “Excellence” Hinder Authentic School Improvement?

The graphs below show the voting pattern in Kettering, Ohio for the 2010 election. Each graph shows the total universe of registered voters in Kettering and shows how sub-groups voted, or failed to vote.

The universe of all Kettering registered voters is divided according to six age groups (the rows in the chart) And each age group, in turn, is divided into six divisions (the columns in the chart). The six columns are: Republicans who voted, Democrats who voted, Independents who voted, Republicans who did not vote, Democrats who did not vote, and Independents who did not vote.

Here is a breakdown of those voting:

• 88% of Republicans voted — 9220 out of 10,488
• 75% of Democrats voted — 8549 out of 11,400
• 31% of Independents voted — 6096 out of 20020

In Kettering 57% of registered voters actually voted in the November, 2010 general election. What these graphs do not show is the number of eligible voters in Kettering who have never registered. Nationwide, it is estimated that 30% of eligible voters never register to vote.  In Kettering 57% of registered voters went to the polls, but I don’t have the data to calculate the turn-out rate of all eligible voters.  In Ohio, the overall turnout of eligible voters was estimated at 48%.  Here is a cloer look at two of the groups — one older, one younger

76% of Kettering registered voters age 60-69 voted:

• 93% of Kettering Republicans age 60-69 voted (1745 out of 1876 voting)
• 84% of Kettering Democrats age 60-69 voted (1796 out of 2149)
• 47% of Kettering Independent age 60-69 voted (790 out of 1674)

28% of Kettering’s registered voters age 18-30 voted:

• 65% of Republicans age 18-30 voted — 374 out of 579
• 46% of Democrats age 18-30 voted — 432 out of 943
• 21% of Independents age 18-30 voted — 1160 out of 5542

The graph shows a huge dip in registered voters from the age group 50-59 to the age group 60-69, then a big gain for the 70+ group. A better graph that showed more the age divisions — say, 20 instead of 6 — would show a more accurate representation, and smoother transitions from each age group. I’m planning on redoing thes graphs to improve them.

I am accumulating this data via a FileMaker program on my iMac, and I have all of the voting records of Montgomery County to work with. I used the iMac “Numbers” program to produce these charts and graphs.

I’m intend on making more analysis — particularly comparing the voting patterns in the 2008 election with the 2010 election. This graph below is the same data — again, the six columns together represent the total universe — 41,908 potential participants — of registered voters in Kettering.