NO CONFIDENCE VOTE

Last November, one of Cleveland's largest modern voter turnouts rejected a school tax increase 55% to 45%.

Yesterday, in a one-issue election designed to produce a micro-turnout, about 43,000 voters rejected a smaller school tax increase 65% to 35%.

It's hard to see how the voters' message could be clearer. It's even harder to see what could be gained by trying the same thing again in November.

Contrary to this morning's PD, it was not just "a core group" of angry Old Brooklyn and West Park voters who defeated the levy. Issue 3 passed in only eight of Cleveland's twenty-one wards. It was voted down by three East Side African-American wards (1, 2 and 10) as well as by strongly Hispanic Ward 14. In fact, if no one at all had voted in Old Brooklyn (Wards 15 and 16) or the "far west side" (Wards 19, 20, and 21) the levy would still have failed 51% to 49%.

This was a citywide defeat. It was a broad vote of no confidence in the people running the schools... in particular, Byrd-Bennett and the Mayor-appointed, anonymous school board. Whether it was "fair" or not is beside the point. These are public schools we're talking about, and they need the support of the public to survive. They don't have it.

It's time for "school leaders" and "school advocates" to stop looking for villains and start looking in the mirror. Could it be that their long struggle to insulate the School District from "politics" (i.e. from normal democratic governance and accountability to the voters) has been all too successful? Could it be that they've quietly communicated to voters a message that the levy campaign finally, stupidly said out loud: "We want your money but we don't want you!"? Could it be that the voters -- not just in Puritas Park but in Lee-Harvard and South Collinwood -- are not so interested in paying for a school system that they no longer own?

Is it time yet to reconsider whether this appointed school board thing was really such a good idea?

Well, we'll see. But one thing is pretty obvious... when you get a resounding vote of no confidence like yesterday's, somebody has to resign. At least that's what happens in democracies. Who's it gonna be?