Change your mind, Super?

From John Curry, September 23, 2007
Subject: Change your mind, Super?

More from the Akron Beacon Journal investigative report ("Whose Choice") in 1999....check out how the then state Ohio School Superintendent (John Goff) "changed the rules."

"Who's making rules?

Brennan's range of influence stretched far beyond elected officials and reached into the inner workings of government, especially the voucher program, according to records.

After working hard for five years to carve out a voucher program, he wanted to be actively involved, records show, and he intended to keep the Department of Education out of the program.

Officially, the director of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program was Bert Holt, a retired Cleveland public schools administrator chosen by the Ohio Department of Education.

While Holt was supposed to report to the department, phone records and other communications obtained by the Beacon Journal show that she worked closely with Brennan and Needles, the governor's chief aide for education.

The other key state employee was Francis Rogers, a department researcher in Columbus who was responsible for designing the voucher application process and a lottery to select the winners.

Rogers wrote to his boss that something appeared to have gone wrong in Cleveland during the first lottery. He said it appeared that poor children whose names had been selected in the lottery may have been passed over for higher-income children.

He was surprised to hear about memos from Brennan to the governor's office suggesting how the lottery should be run and that he should be guaranteed access to children who were not in poverty.

In one correspondence, Brennan said his new nonprofit organization, Hope for Cleveland's Children, "should be given a printout of the scholarships (recipients) chosen so that we can assist people who will be calling in asking questions . . . "

It was an interesting request, Rogers said recently, considering Brennan was planning to open schools exclusively for voucher students. The names of lottery winners would make it easy for him to recruit customers.

Brennan also made it clear he did not want his schools to be stuck with nothing but poor children.

"The worst result I can imagine is that the new schools would be staffed completely with low-income students," he told Needles in writing. "The mixture of low-income and higher-income students is essential to the success of new schools."

Brennan got his way.

A few months into the first school year, then-Ohio school Superintendent John Goff changed the rules to allow families earning twice the rate of poverty – as much as $22,000 in a single-parent family with one child -- to be eligible."