Saturday, March 24, 2007

Education Forum Coming to Akron


The League of Women Voters of Akron will present "Shame, Shame Who's to Blame", a forum on education funding on April 14, Saturday, 9:30AM - noon. The event will take place at the Akron-Summit County Public Library main branch meeting room. The event is free and open to the public.

On the panel will be:

  • Tom Sawyer, State Senator, former Mayor of the City of Akron, former Congressman and recently elected former member of the State Board of Education.
  • Brian Williams, former Akron Public Schools Superintendent and current State Representative
  • Charles Parsons from White Hat Management
  • Ed Holland Superintendent, Cuyahoga Falls Public Schools
Topics for discussion will include funding, vouchers, accountability, teacher training.

Charles Parsons was hired by White Hat recently to bring up the performance of the Life Skills warehouses schools. As it happens, he was my principal when I was in high school, and went on to become the district superintendent, so he is an educator. Of course he was educating a mix of white rural and suburban kids, so hard to know how he prepared himself for Life Skills.

Cuyhoga Falls has sponsored at least one charter school -- Schnee Learning Centers, which is basically a publicly sponsored version of Life Skills. I've written about that before.

LWV Akron has a website, but doesn't have any information about the event on it.

6 comments:

Jill said...

Thanks for the heads up Pho.

Cee Jay said...

Pho,
Great information about White Hat and Brennan. There are so many problems in our schools, many of them are a result of government's failure to deal with social and econmic problems. Manditory testing and punishing schools where students are in greatest need by withholding funding or forcing them to compete with charter and voucher schools only exacerbates the problems. The truth is, the push to privitize education is an attack on teachers' organizations and unions.
Quality of education is not what they are after.

Village Green said...

Sad to see that Charlie Parsons has gone over to the darkside. Didn't he make enough money as an administrator?

Scott Piepho said...

VG:

It's "Chuck" if I remember correctly.

Anonymous said...

The truth is, the push to privitize education is an attack on teachers' organizations and unions.

But did the NEA keep its commitment to "new unionism?" Are teachers living up to the "duties of citizenship" or will they support the flawed GIRFOF without educating themselves with a high school equivalent lesson on its pros and cons?

Jill Cabe said...

Thanks for the PR. THe LWV ignores all my pleas to update the web site (and my offers to do for them).