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Ohio Regulations

Ohio’s Minimum Standards for Elementary Schools, at issue in the Whisner case, demanded, among over one hundred dictates:

"drinking water with slanted stream" (a cooler dispensing water straight down into a paper cup was apparently illegal);

a building "free of stains" (presumably including temporary shoe-marks on linoleum floors);

physical facilities in which "odors are non-existent" (even in science labs and rooms where students baked cookies?);

a faculty composed entirely of state-certified teachers (though there was no evidence that they were better than non-certified teachers, and though the nation’s most renowned private schools generally preferred to be without them);

enough yarn-balls so every child in the largest class could have one;

a minimum enrollment of fifteen pupils in the first grade (even if a school with lower enrollment was producing superior results);

student records not open to parental scrutiny (perhaps because state bureaucrats didn’t like parents);

elementary schools "comparable" to secondary schools (though state officials were unable to explain in court what that meant); and

"a remedial reading laboratory appropriately equipped" (even if no students in a school needed reading remediation).

An Ohio official testified that some of the standards were mandatory and others temporarily advisory, but that distinction, apparently existing only in his mind, was not discussed in the book of standards or any other public document he produced.

To make matters more shocking, the Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction at the time, who defended the "standards" vociferously and lamented the court opinion in favor of prosecuted private school patrons, was Martin Essex, one of the nation’s most highly regarded chief state school officers. I opposed the then-ongoing movement to strengthen state departments of education despite their dismal record, but my protest to Roald F. Campbell of the University of Chicago, one of the movement’s prominent leaders, produced no explanation at all, and the movement went ahead forcefully.

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Copyright © 2004 Donald Erickson

Published with the assistance of IEW Systems