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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 29
Monday, June 29, 2009
Editorial: Why those sex scandals seem to skip Ohio
The nation is enjoying some sex scandals. Every place you turn, another politician is in trouble for doing something he ultimately describes as letting down his family, his staff, his supporters and his state.
The late-night talk show hosts rejoice. The news media get to lighten up for a while. The latest embarrassments have been to Republican politicians, but the long-term trend is decidedly bipartisan.
The phenomenon of the sexually misbehaving politician occurs in the far west and the northeast, the southeast and the Mississippi Delta.
One entity is skipped: Ohio.
When Ohio has a scandal, it’s about lobbyists and booze and money and other such pedestrian stuff. Nobody ever has sex. When they shouldn’t, anyway. Or gets caught, anyway.
Why? Are we not a fairly typical place?
Not in politics. In that, we’re a little on the weird side.
Specifically, for the last several decades, Ohio politics has been dominated by people whom you can’t even imagine having an affair, at least if you know them.
John Glenn? Who met his beloved Annie in school, protected her through her shy youth and obviously delighted in her later in life?
Ted Strickland, the minister and psychologist and politician, and one of the most earnest men in the history of men?
George Voinovich? Out of the question.
Mike DeWine? Bob Taft? No and no.
These guys exude choir boy. Not that they’re preachy about it. They’re not.
Their commitment to family and to “traditional values,” including a pretty strong fix on the difference between right and wrong (that weakens in campaigns), doesn’t get expressed in fire-and-brimstone sermons from political mounts. It gets expressed in private lives led privately, despite public careers. It gets expressed without being expressed.
You couldn’t write a novel about politics that featured these guys. Nobody would believe it. That’s how far they are from the stereotype that is nurtured by the governor of New York who took the train to his trysts, the governor of South Carolina who went to Argentina to do it, the senator from Nevada whose special friend was on his payroll, the senator from Louisiana who paid, and the former president who did not have sex with that woman.
Sometimes people are shocked by the details, but seldom by the fact of scandal itself. Political enemies express a sort of shock, of course, but they are not to be taken seriously. They feel that if they can somehow tie the adultery to the use of taxpayers’ money or official duty, they can make a huge deal of the whole thing.
However, if sex scandal were to hit one of these Ohio guys, there’d be real shock, not Casablanca shock (to use an old-movie reference).
The above mentioned novel would have another problem, besides incredibility: It’d be boring. Sure, there’s a “storybook” quality to some of these romances, but there’s nothing novel about them.
Now, of course, not every single Ohio politician you can name fits into the choir-boy category. But so many do that the odds of the state having one of these juicy scandals in, say, any five-year period are bleak. There was Dick Celeste many, many years ago. Then there was Marc Dann, who was still a largely unknown quantity when he self-destructed in so many ways. For all anybody knows, that might be it for a while.
In which case, Ohioans will have to bear with politics that’s about deficit spending and school funding, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and all that. It seems unnatural.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Dayton shows it can rescue dropouts
For all the challenges facing Dayton schools and their students — and they are many — there is one good news story: Far more kids are graduating than did so just a few years ago.
Dayton is now at an 83.5 percent graduation rate, up 30 points from a disastrously low 53.5 percent six years ago. The district still has work to do, but its impressive gain is testament to the value of hard work and focus.
The way Dayton made this gain also has implications for education policymakers and could be a road map for other struggling urban districts.
The turnaround started by digging into data. One of the early moves of former Superintendent Percy Mack and the school board under Gail Littlejohn and her team was to hire a director of accountability and beef up the department that tracks statistics — test scores, attendance, graduation figures.
As the district delved into graduation rates, administrators found a significant number of kids were being counted as dropouts even though they actually had transferred to other schools. There was a disconnect that prevented matching the fact that records had been requested by another school (the best sign a student has transferred) with the data on dropouts.
This might seem like a ridiculously basic step for the district to miss, and, to an extent, it is. But remember that Dayton students are extremely transient. It’s quite common for a student to move several times in a school year, sometimes to a school outside the district and then back.
Also, there is no formal procedure by which districts notify each other that a student has transferred. Districts have to have the sense to track records requests. This is silly. Ohio is developing a system that assigns each student in the state a unique ID that would ease tracking of transfers, but it’s still several years away from implementation.
At the same time that it was figuring out who transferred and who didn’t, Dayton also began improving its reporting and tracking of daily attendance, which previously had been a mess. This helped schools more quickly identify kids who were absent a lot. Attendance was 90.8 percent last year — still below the 93 percent the state expects, but several points higher than in prior years.
Beyond cleaning up data, Mr. Mack instituted new disciplinary rules. They weren’t perfect, and discipline remains a problem in some schools even today. But the changes were an improvement over previously lax policies.
The district also has gotten aggressive during the past six years about addressing students who are flunking classes. Students who fail courses in high school now are quickly offered an opportunity to make up the work through a computer-based course that they can complete at their own pace before and after school. That keeps kids from falling behind and on track toward graduating.
One big 2002 study, by Johns Hopkins University of dropouts in Philadelphia, which tracked kids for six years beginning in sixth grade, studied a host of data about kids who did not graduate and found four factors that correlated to at least a 75 percent likelihood that a student would drop out: a final grade of F in math; a final grade of F in English; attendance below 80 percent in a year; or a final “unsatisfactory” behavior mark in any class.
It’s impressive how closely aligned Dayton’s improvement efforts were with research that was just emerging at the time. Its interventions hit all four of those areas.
The issues Dayton has tried to address — sloppy data and a lack of attention to kids who are failing classes, misbehaving or skipping school — are common to many urban districts.
If Dayton can keep refining its efforts to hang on to students, keep its momentum and eventually see 90 or 95 percent of kids graduate, it could become a model for others to study and replicate.
It’s making great strides.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetGuest column: Where city employees live really does matter
Paul Woodie, a former assistant city manager in Dayton, is a lifelong Dayton resident.
Much of the debate about requiring city employees to live in Dayton has centered on urban myths.
Myth No. 1: Everyone has a constitutional right to live where he or she wants.
Residency was the rule from 1805 to the 1950s and from 1971 to 2009. Have city employees been denied their constitutional rights for 200 years, or has the meaning of civil service changed?
Why can’t state employees live in Covington or Richmond? Why is Jon Husted required to live in Kettering?
In the end, we all live where our chosen work requires us.
Myth: If Dayton had better schools and neighborhoods, its employees would choose to live in the city.
By 1971, after a 20-year residency hiatus, a majority of city employees did not live in the city. Were Dayton neighborhoods that bad in the 1950s and ’60s?
Myth: A majority of city employees will continue to live in the city.
In just 10 years, a majority of employees will live outside the city even if every current employee stays put. City residents constitute 20 percent of the region’s work force. All things being equal, 80 percent of those taking and passing the civil service exam will not be residents. With a 7 percent annual turnover in personnel, it is merely a matter of math and time.
Myth: It is an insult to assume that nonresident employees would not be professional in the performance of their job.
The concern is not about nonfeasance, but about world views. Why do we care who is appointed to the Supreme Court so long as the nominees are qualified judges of good will? Because something more than skill and good will may color their decisions, like empathy and life choices.
Is it likely that a planner who chooses to live on a farm outside Eaton will have the same intuitive skills to address urban life in Five Oaks as a planner living in McPhersontown? Would a parks supervisor who lives in Mason be as willing to attend neighborhood night meetings as an employee who lives in Belmont, or will this become another union grievance?
Of course, there will be employees who will rise above it all, but that will not be the general rule. If a waitress is rude, I simply go to another restaurant, but city employees have important control over the quality of life of my neighborhood.
Myth: The mayor and the city commission run the city, so it shouldn’t matter where city employees live.
This is the biggest myth and the one that strikes at the heart of the problem. For the first time in history, the CEO of the city will not have to live in the city. Does it matter? Think NCR’s Bill Nuti.
Contrary to popular belief, the CEO is not the mayor. The mayor hires and fires no one, does not control the budget, and cannot negotiate financial incentives for either NCR or Joe the Plumber.
The mayor’s role is to form a consensus among the five commissioners and represent the city to state and federal officials. This role has merit and requires considerable political skill, but the position doesn’t have the power many think it does.
Under Dayton’s current form of government, policymaking and the quality of city services are decided by bureaucrats. Under this new law, neither the police chief, who decides how I am protected from crime, nor the city attorney, who decides if a law dealing with drug houses is worth defending, are required to even live in Montgomery County.
The city manager form of government worked well when Dayton was primarily a utility service provider, and there were few social and economic issues to navigate. It worked well when employees grew up and lived in the city and had credibility in a crisis. In the near future, those who have never lived, and will never live, in the city and who may be uncomfortable in most neighborhoods will decide our fate.
In the early ’70s, before residency, several tax issues failed, forcing dramatic city service cuts. Opinion surveys indicated citizens believed employees were unresponsive and unconcerned. Restoration of the residency rule, performance budgeting and the creation of priority boards were the pillars of reform that led to tax levies passing. Now all the pillars are cracked. We need to build new ones.
Dayton is the last major city in Ohio with a city manager form of government. Cincinnati and Toledo have abandoned it for a strong mayor. It is time for us to take a hard look at the efficacy of our form of government.
Some have suggested metro government as the answer. But the pathway to regionalism begins in the suburbs, not Dayton. Unfortunately, the cocktail conversation always ends when the vodka runs out.
In the meantime, if we can’t have a government of the people, at least let us have a government by and for the people.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Guest Columns, Local History
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