OCSS Admin Uncategorized

Sam Dorf’s Collaboration with Activists for City Policies Included Proposed Ordinances That Would Stifle Free Speech

Oakwood City Council candidate Sam Dorf has a history of collaborating with outside, controversial activist groups for guidance on Oakwood City policies.

As noted in a recent letter to the Oakwood Register (posted here), in 2019 Mr. Dorf effectively accused Oakwood police of racial profiling based on a deeply flawed study by ABLE, an activist organization, including in the October and December 2019 City Council meetings. Mr. Dorf even stated that the study’s claims were consistent with his own observations of Oakwood police. Even after the study was thoroughly discredited by the City in both meetings for lacking numerous critical facts to justify the accusations, Mr. Dorf doubled down on the study in the December City Council meeting, claiming it was nonetheless important to follow the study’s recommendations to address the “perception of Oakwood”. This can all be seen in the minutes from those meetings here and here.

The traffic stop statistics of the ABLE study were also the basis for Mr. Dorf’s writing to City Council members to urge the police department to end the practice of stopping drivers based on random license plate checks, even though the City noted it is a nationwide best police practice to catch drivers with suspended or revoked licenses or who are under arrest warrants (accounting for nearly 25% of criminal suspects under arrest warrants apprehended by Oakwood police) (see here). Mr. Dorf’s stated reason was to reduce the racial disproportionality of racial minority drivers stopped by police as reported in that study, with no mention of the impact on public safety from ending that practice (see here). Records obtained from Oakwood police show a significant drop in traffic enforcement since then and resident complaints of increased speeding and reckless driving, as noted in that letter to the editor on that issue.

Mr. Dorf’s call for a policy of suspending without pay and publicly identifying, and thus effectively doxing, Oakwood police officers who discharge their weapon against unarmed suspects (regardless of the circumstances), also noted in that letter, came from the Dayton unit of the NAACP (see here). Again, that would put officers at risk and deter them from making difficult but possibly necessary decisions in extraordinary circumstances.

In July 2020, Mr. Dorf wrote City Council members to encourage them to participate in Bridging the Gap, an activist march demonstration whose message included that Oakwood and other Dayton suburbs and their police are unwelcoming and prejudicial to racial minorities (see here). He also wrote City Council members and Chief Hill to encourage them to participate in a book study of How To Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X Kendi, and of Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey. Mr. Kendi’s book specifically rejects a colorblind, racially neutral standard of treatment and explicitly calls for racial discrimination (i.e., actual racism) across society to engineer equal racial outcomes. It commends Karl Marx, it denounces capitalism as inherently racist and born out of racism (racism’s “conjoined twin”), and advocates implementing unspecified “anti-capitalist policies” throughout society. What does any of that have to do with the operations of City Council? What sorts of radical policies does Mr. Dorf want the City Council to implement based on these beliefs?

More recently, in September 2024, Mr. Dorf wrote to City Council members to encourage the City to adopt model ordinances drafted by the Anti-Defamation League, through his collaboration with Dr. Kelly Fishman, a staffer at the ADL’s office in Cleveland. Dr. Fishman also wrote a recent letter to the Oakwood Register editor endorsing Mr. Dorf for City Council. These model ordinances would stifle and penalize a wide range of free speech, including speech having nothing to do with the ADL’s stated purpose of combatting demographic hatred. For example, under one the ordinances (Model Ordinance #4), someone who overlooks a “No Solicitations” sign on someone’s property or who is unfamiliar with the ordinance could be fined, or even criminally prosecuted, simply for leaving a flyer or pamphlet on the property to advertise their business or promote a candidate for office, or for ringing the doorbell to fundraise for their church or their child’s little league team.

It’s also easy to see how the enforcement of this ordinance could be susceptible to politicization and abuse. For example, someone who leaves a pamphlet or knocks on a door to promote a Republican candidate for office or fundraise for their church is fined, while someone who does so for a Democratic candidate or other reason is not, or vice-versa. In light of this and Mr. Dorf’s political orientation, what other sorts of overbearing regulations he would seek to impose on Oakwood if elected to City Council?

The City Council is not a platform for the sort of divisive political and social activism that has been the focus of Mr. Dorf’s extracurricular activity since moving to Oakwood. It is a non-political governing body entrusted with the stewardship of our community facilities, services, ordinances and fostering its economic development.

Oakwood needs City Council members who will focus on these nonpartisan tasks rather than activist causes and policies that could harm and divide the community.

OCSS Admin Uncategorized

Killing Vouchers Won’t Improve Failing Schools

Recently, Rose Lounsbury, one of Oakwood’s most vocal opponents of EdChoice and other Ohio private school voucher programs, admitted to me that she would never want her own kids in a troubled school district like Dayton Public Schools (DPS), given the intolerable conditions there that I cited in my April 2nd letter to the Oakwood Register editor from a former DPS high school teacher (i.e., routinely disruptive classrooms making teaching extremely difficult, students resisting doing any schoolwork, and violence even towards that teacher). Despite the fact that EdChoice has allowed students to escape failing schools like DPS for private schools for nearly 20 years, she defended her support for dismantling those programs by claiming it would stop them from “defunding” failing districts like DPS so the needs of its students can be better served. Of all the specious arguments propounded by voucher opponents, this one is the least credible: that eliminating vouchers will somehow improve failing school districts by increasing their funding, when many such districts have already engaged in high spending levels with dismal results. Let’s walk though some numbers to see why.

First, with all the voucher opponents’ hysteria over the nearly $1 billion spent on Ohio’s vouchers last year, for context, that equaled less than 3% of the $30 billion in funding Ohio’s public schools received in 2024. The EdChoice program, the focus of the voucher controversy, accounted for $677.6 million, or only 5.2% of the $13 billion the Ohio government spent on all K-12 schools, and it equaled only 7.97% of the State’s $8.5 billion spent on traditional K-12 public school districts. So, would eliminating EdChoice and increasing the State’s public school funding by 7.97%, plus some additional funding from increased public enrollment by former EdChoice students, have significantly improved student outcomes in those failing districts?

Start with our own school district. In 2024, Oakwood City Schools spent $16,846 per student1, and among 8th graders, 90.4% were proficient in math and 83.6% were proficient in English language arts, and the district’s four-year high school graduation rate was 98.3%. Very respectable metrics. Meanwhile, the DPS district spent about 38% more, for a staggering $23,209 per student1, which was among the top 10% spending levels per student among all Ohio districts in 2024 (hardly a “defunded” district, is it?). Nevertheless, among that district’s 8th graders, only 8.9% were proficient in math and only 11.5% were proficient in English language arts, and the four-year high school graduation rate was only 72.3%. Why didn’t this far greater spending translate into better student outcomes, versus these far worse metrics, compared to our own district? Do we simply need to spend even more to overcome the troubled circumstances surrounding these districts? How much more?

If EdChoice had been eliminated and the money spent on it in 2024 was instead allocated to a 7.97% increase in State public school funding, that would only yield an additional $796 in per-student spending for the DPS district since 43% of the district’s funding came from the State (i.e., $23,209 times 43% times 7.97%). If that district’s metrics were so dismal with $23,209 per student of spending, do we really think another $796 per student, plus a small increase in State funding from enrollment of returning former EdChoice students,  would have been the transformative catalyst that would have significantly improved those outcomes? How about $7,000 more, for $30,209 per student? Think again. Last year, the East Cleveland City School district spent over twice as much ($14,240) more, for a whopping $37,449 per student1, the second highest per-student spending level among all Ohio districts. Rather than generating better student outcomes, by most metrics they were even worse than DPS. Among 8th graders, only 3.5% were proficient in math and only 11.5% were proficient in English language arts.

If spending more money translates into better student outcomes, how do we explain these results for these two troubled school districts? Another school district’s story helps answer this question. The Baltimore City Schools district made local and national headlines in 2017 and again in 2023, when in each year there were 13 high schools without a single student proficient in math. In 2017, the district also had five high schools and one middle school without a single student proficient in either math or reading, and among 8th graders, only 11% were proficient in math and only 13% were proficient in reading. Any educator reading this should be appalled at those statistics. If you think this was due to a lack of spending, think again. In 2017 the district had among the top 10 highest levels of spending per student among all districts in the United States, and yet it had about the same dismal 8th grade proficiency levels as the DPS district last year. In 2023 it spent $22,424 per student, which adjusted for 2024 dollars was almost exactly the same as DPS last year, and it had $1.7 billion in funding. In an interview, the Baltimore City Schools district’s CEO, who holds a Ph.D. in education from Harvard, advised that the root cause of this problem – despite such profligate spending – was chronic absenteeism. That refers to a student being absent at least 10% of the days of the school year. In fact, a study by the National Center for Educational Statistics found a strong correlation between chronic absenteeism and poor standardized test performance. In the Baltimore City Schools district, 30% of students were chronically absent in 2017, followed by 54% by 2023.

With that in mind, let’s return to these three Ohio districts discussed above. When comparing last year’s data for the Oakwood, DPS, and East Cleveland school districts in that order, we see dramatically increasing levels of spending and yet dramatically declining math and English proficiency. Here’s what else we see: dramatically increasing rates of chronic absenteeism, from 8% in Oakwood, to 45.1% in Dayton to 63% in East Cleveland. It’s not hard to understand this relationship between chronic absenteeism and poor standardized testing or academic performance; chronically absent students have significantly less exposure to classroom teaching and schoolwork that helps develop the knowledge and skills measured on standardized tests. But it also reveals a more fundamental cause: a lack of overall engagement or motivation in one’s education by the students, and most troubling, by their parents or guardians. Those are obviously the people in the best position to ensure students make it to school each day, and to undertake disciplinary and other corrective measures when students are found to be chronically absent. As further evidence of this, the former DPS high school teacher also shared with me that on parent-teacher conference nights, virtually no parents or guardians would show up to meet with teachers, leaving them to resort to doing lesson planning or other tasks to pass the time while they sat there. Think about that; with such serious problems among students in that district, from low math and English proficiency, to neglected schoolwork (per the teacher), chronic absenteeism, behavioral problems and likely very poor grades, there should be a line out the door of concerned parents and guardians eager to discuss these many problems regarding their kids. Instead, it was the opposite.

These are not problems we can remedy with even more spending, clearly it’s not a money problem; as shown above, some of the highest levels of spending in the State of Ohio and even the entire United States have proven that. During a May 14th anti-voucher presentation by Oakwood Advocates for Public Education, the group attempted to counter this by asserting that State-subsidized pre-K programs (funded by eliminating vouchers, presumably) would solve the problem. However, studies have instead shown that among economically disadvantaged kids, the beneficial effects of such programs on student performance and behavior are short-lived and fade out after a few years, and studies are mixed as to purported long-term beneficial impacts (see, e.g., here, here and here). Again, spending even more money in these failing districts won’t solve these problems. Feel free to offer other arguments for doing away with vouchers, but that is the least credible of them all.

Here’s how we can move the needle and make a difference: keep in place a voucher program for students in those failing districts, so that the students and parents who are motivated enough to do so can get out of those troubled schools and take advantage of a much better educational environment that can be life changing for those kids and their families. In fact, a study published last month, and cited in the Wall Street Journal, found that students who enrolled in Ohio’s EdChoice program during 2008-2014 (when EdChoice was primarily for students in failing schools) were significantly more likely to attend and graduate from college than their classmates who remained in public schools. Note the study also narrowed the comparison to students from the same public schools, with similar racial, socioeconomic and other demographics, and with similar pre-enrollment standardized test scores. Note also that, in the actual study report downloadable from this article, the researchers refute the common claim of Ohio’s voucher opponents: that private schools supposedly provide inferior education based on the fact that students who left public schools for private schools showed slight declines in performance on state standardized tests. The researchers point out that unlike various private schools, Ohio public schools’ academic curricula are designed to align with those state tests, and those public schools have a powerful incentive to tailor their curricula and lesson plans for state tests since unlike private schools, they are publicly graded and ranked based on their students’ performance on those state tests.

-Trevor F. Hoffmann

1 For all per pupil spending and funding levels of Ohio districts, and the State’s share of funding, go to this Ohio Board of Education website, then click the link titled “click here to access the report” to download the spreadsheet, then refer to the second tab of the spreadsheet for this data. For each school district, per pupil spending is shown in column AU, the state’s share of the district’s revenue is in column AW, and per pupil revenue is under column BD.

OCSS Admin Local Interest, Uncategorized

The Real Meaning of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Programs

This is a summary of the New Discourses Bullets Podcast on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by James Lindsay. 

The term equity is used frequently by many organizations in politics, business, government, and our schools.  The term sounds like equality in the American tradition, where equality has been traditionally defined as equal opportunity for all Americans and put forth in the vision of the American Dream.  Equity is a distortion of this American tradition, a repackaged form of socialism that is based upon the theory that any form of unequal outcomes is a result of systemic injustice.  This becomes the basis to argue for power to change the system by reallocating resources and forcing equal outcomes.  This principle can be applied to any area in which you can identify unequal outcomes.  In traditional Marxist socialism, this would be applied to perceived inequities in the distribution of money across social classes.  In modern America, this is more typically applied to racial, gender, or educational “capital,” where any difference in outcomes based upon these categories is attributed to systemic injustice and requires action to force changes.   

Diversity is another term that has been appropriated by the political left and given a new meaning that does not refer to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.  Diversity now refers to representation of racial, gender, or other woke identities.  This is fundamentally a political movement that sees the world through power dynamics. This perspective rejects the color-blind approach to diversity that has been pursued by American culture since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  The woke diversity movement limits the way we see the world – their lens is one that classifies everyone by their race, gender, or class status. Diversity experts claim to be the ones who get to determine what is truly diverse, and when placed in a position of authority they enforce the party line view.  This can be easily observed in the objections to diversity programs that seem to only push specific groups as diverse, especially in schools.

Inclusion is the next term to be hijacked by the woke left.  Inclusion has been redefined to mean that anyone who does not support the DEI paradigm will be “called out” and excluded from the group. It is a rhetorical technique that enables censorship of the power dynamics based upon the identity groups. Who wants to be accused of not being inclusive?  The accusation alone is often enough to undermine your moral authority and results in self-censorship, even when one just is pointing out the lack of authentic inclusion in DEI programming.  Some programs will also reference the idea of belonging, which is inclusion plus positive affirmation.  This affirmation, whether applied to racial or gender categories, often defies logic and is therefore destructive of the hard sciences such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, and engineering.  The transgender movement can easily be seen as an extreme example, as men appropriating the female body for themselves shout down anyone who questions this in the public domain as not sufficiently inclusive.

The goal of this DEI movement is ultimately one of control, undermining the freedoms that we enjoy in an open society like America.  The Marxist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s all moved into the education field, as they knew that they could push their strategies into the schools and push their agenda, and when social equity has been injected long enough into our children society will behave in the way the woke want it to behave. It’s no longer time to sit back and let this happen in our schools.  We must step up, protect our kids, and preserve the excellent education they deserve.  If you want to join the discussion about these topics, stop by our Facebook group or send us a note at admin@oakwoodstrongschools.com.

OCSS Admin Local Interest, Uncategorized

Pronouns and Freedom of Speech

What is the pronoun policy in Oakwood Schools?  Parents, teachers, and students in the community want to know!  In previous years, including the 2021-2022 school year, many teachers surveyed children in our schools for their preferred pronouns (see photo above) and even asked whether children’s parents knew of the child’s preference.  It is not clear what their intentions were in collecting this data, and there was significant debate in the community as to whether this was appropriate to be asking our kids.  Many parents have reported to the Oakwood Community for Strong Schools that inquiries to the administration resulted in more questions than clear answers.  This year seemed different, with pronoun surveys largely absent and reports that each school in the district was handling things independently.

All of this begs the question, what is the appropriate policy to protect children’s mental health while also respecting the role of parents as the primary caregivers for their children?  In mid-September, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin released model policies that put parents at the forefront of schools’ policies regarding transgender students (https://www.foxnews.com/media/virginia-gov-youngkin-introduces-model-policy-virginia-transgender-students).  One of the most important features in Gov Youngkin’s recommendations is that parents are indeed respected in these sensitive situations.  It may serve the Oakwood Board of Education and the Administration to consider a similar approach. 

There are many considerations for the BOE and the administration to consider.   As discussed in our post regarding the SEL program (https://oakwoodstrongschools.com/2022/09/27/oakwood-sel-program-unanswered-questions/), surveying children on mental health issues without explicit consent from parents and also without appropriate personal data protection protocols puts the school district at risk of violating personal privacy and health care regulations such as HIPAA (https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/hipaa.html).  There is a growing consensus that the explosion in gender identity and transgender claims may be the result of social contagion that can be exacerbated by unsolicited surveys introducing ideas into young minds.  Dr. Lisa Littman has published work on this area of research into Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (https://littmanresearch.com/), and we have posted previously on the work of Abigail Schrier to investigate this phenomenon.  Children with mental health issues should be treated with love in a private setting and with trained professionals, and not exposed publicly or labeled in ways that pressure them inappropriately.  Parents should be at the forefront of these issues as the primary caregivers, and this should be clearly acknowledged by the school system.

Another consideration is the impact that school policies may have on freedom of speech.  Students and teachers should not feel compelled to use “preferred pronouns.” To be forced to use pronouns is a violation of the 1st Amendment and puts the schools at risk for lawsuits.  The whole concept of “preferred pronouns” is an ideological belief that gender is a social construct separate from sex.  Compelling anyone to declare their pronouns or to utilize self-designated pronouns violates the tenants of the 1st Amendment.  An example of an inappropriate policy is found at a 4-H group in Santa Clara, CA.  The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism sent a letter explaining the First and Fourteenth Amendment concerns with the policy, as can be found at this link: https://fairforall.substack.com/p/fair-news-7-28-2022.  In a case right here in Ohio, a professor at Shawnee State University was recently awarded $400,000 as a settlement following a situation in which he was disciplined for declining to use a student’s preferred pronouns (https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/04/21/shawnee-state-professor-settles-case-wont-be-required-to-use-preferred-pronouns/).

The strong protection of the freedom of speech for our teachers and students in Oakwood City Schools will build a culture with true freedom of expression, foster discussion and debate, and develop resilience as our children encounter a variety of ideas.  We don’t need a community of activists who claim any dissent is “transphobia” and require compelled speech and preferential treatment in the form of “safe spaces.”  We will surely come back to this topic in the months ahead with additional insight from across our country as well as within the Oakwood community.

If you have something to share with our team, please send a note to admin@oakwoodstrongschools.com.