Friday, April 3, 2009

Meeting Notice

April 6, 2009, 6:45-8:15pm
Jim Rice Meeting Room

Joint Safety Services Building
5181 Northwest Parkway


At the last meeting (March 2), we acknowledged that much of the "steam" from 2008 has vanished, and our efforts should be consolidated to focusing on the 2009 Board Election.

With a majority of the board seats available (three out of five), it is a great opportunity to support a slate of candidates that understand the issues at hand and are willing to address them, as well as embrace the importance of community education and awareness that savehilliardschools.org has established. To this end, we are going to dedicate the next few meetings on the important tasks of Platform Development, Candidate Identification, and Campaign Strategy. We can use your help in these areas to identify ways and people that will resonate the message and bring success in November.

Our next meeting is this Monday, April 6, 6:45-8:15pm at the Joint Safety Services Building (5181 Northwest Parkway). We will be in the Jim Rice Meeting Room, and you should enter the doors in the left-front of the building.

During this meeting, we will develop the basis for the Platform, discuss Candidates and brainstorm ideas for names of the "committee to elect". Paul has indicated he will run again, and one other candidate has shown interest. I have volunteered to be the Treasurer and assist with leading the committee. If you are interested in helping out or have strong ideas to help the platform, please attend. In addition to Platform strategists, we can use help with the Marketing and Public Relations aspects of a campaign.

Past meeting summaries can be viewed via the GrassRootsGoup topic on the left.

Note: This meeting is not an official meeting of the Hilliard City School District, nor is it being coordinated with school officials, although members of the Administration, Board and Staff are more than welcome to participate.

No need to RSVP. Contact Mark Morscher if you have further questions.

4 comments:

  1. http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/docs/ohioscontractforthefuture.pdf

    Paul, have you seen this??

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  2. Musicman: Thanks for the link. I took a cursory look and the document, but won't have time to study it for a few days. What are your thoughts on it?

    PL

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  3. Honestly, I agree with most of it. It appears they have isolated the root of the problems, and proposed at least some sort of feasible solution to them. As always though, the problem in this state isn't the development of ideas, it is the implementation of them.

    Can you honestly imagine any teachers union agreeing to merit pay/easier firing of teachers?

    Unfortunately, I can't.

    The question for me is, how to unilaterally rid the state of teachers unions?

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  4. The unions will never give away their power. You'll see that the reason why Strickland hid the data for his Plan is because the teachers unions had significant input. Only when the unions are taken out of the equation will we see a real improvement in student achievement.

    Caroline Hoxby is an economist who specializes in the econometrics of education. She wrote a compelling piece some time ago about how unionization resulted in less intelligent teachers over the decades. Simple enough deduction: removing market forces from the teaching profession resulted in more intelligent and more capable people choosing the private sector for higher financial reward. But Hoxby supports the thesis with metrics. It's highly technical, but still interesting nonetheless.

    She's at Stanford now, but she was at Harvard Business School for years and the bulk of her work can be found there.

    Here's her page at Stanford: http://www.hoover.org/bios/hoxby.html

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