COLUMBUS — Gov. Mike DeWine on Thursday visited his new Ohio Department of Education and Workforce that usurped most of the duties previously carried out by the State Board of Education even as the law behind it remains under a cloud of legal uncertainty.
The Republican met with a working group that is preparing those who will train K-12 teachers at the regional level on the “science of reading,” representing a shift in how the state pursues literacy education. The research-backed method emphasizes phonics, or the sounding out of letters and words, which in many cases conflicts with how current teachers learned to teach reading.
That shift has also been challenged in court.
“I don’t worry about the lawsuits,” Mr. DeWine said. “That’s what we have lawyers for. My job, [education director] Steve Dackin’s job, frankly, is to support our local schools. ... What you saw today was an effort to ensure that the teachers all have had the training that is aligned with the science of reading.”
Though the order that temporarily blocked the move was lifted months ago, the transition of powers to the revamped department is still under a constitutional challenge filed by the Toledo Public Schools board of education, among other plaintiffs.
That case is pending in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.
Another lawsuit was filed in the same court by Reading Recovery of North America in an attempt to block the state’s shift away from a program popular with schools that employs “three-cueing,” encouraging students to reason out a word or sentence based on visual clues.
“There is nothing more terrifying than for a teacher to sit across from a parent and not be able to explain why their child can’t read,” said Carrie Wood, of the Mid-Ohio Educational Service Center in Mansfield, who participated in the workshop as a regional coaching coordinator.
Some of those at the table, as well as Mr. DeWine, said there had been early push-back from teachers.
“They would tell us this is not how they were taught,” the governor said. “And then we had other ones who said, ‘Well, I didn’t get much at all in how you teach kids to read.’ It was all over the place.”
About a third of Ohio students are not reading at the third or fourth-grade level.
“We simply have to improve that,” Mr. DeWine said, noting that the state doesn’t know yet how many school districts are already using the science of reading and what level of experience teachers may have.
The lawsuit challenging the shift notes that classrooms have long been divided on how to teach children to read.
“Despite this general divide, the Ohio Board of Education and local school boards, the bodies constitutionally and statutorily vested with making education policy decisions, have left it to educators to discern the best teaching methods to employ,” its motion for a preliminary injunction reads.
It claims the shift represents an unconstitutional education policy mandate on schools.
In addition to the reading shift, the current two-year budget stripped the 19-member state board of most of its authority, including the naming of the person charged with leading K-12 education policy for the state. The board still picks the superintendent of education, but that person has been demoted to an advisory role under the newly revamped education department’s director, named by Mr. DeWine.
The governor picked Mr. Dackin as the new department’s director, and he was by the governor’s side on Thursday.
Mr. Dackin, a former state board member and superintendent of a suburban Columbus school district, had previously been selected to serve as superintendent by the state board only to resign days later under an ethical cloud.
While on the board he had led the search for the next superintendent, only to resign from the board and accept the position himself.
The transition of powers between the state board and new state department keeps the board out of decisions affecting curriculum, academic standards, and other education policy, essentially leaving it with the authority to license and discipline teachers.
First Published January 11, 2024, 8:27 p.m.
