Two members of the Ohio State Board of Education, including the board president, resigned from the board this week at the request of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine after they voted against rescinding a July 2020 “anti-racism” resolution that has since become controversial.
The two members who voted against the rescission, Board of Education President Laura Kohler and board member Eric Poklar, both submitted their resignation letters in a bid to avoid a forcible removal by the Ohio senate.
DeWine had appointed Kohler and Poklar to the board. Board of Education appointments require state senate confirmation, but appointees begin serving before the confirmation is finalized.
Kohler and Poklar had not yet been confirmed, and Kohler told the Colombia Dispatch that there were enough votes to block her confirmation and that she resigned at the behest of DeWine’s chief of staff, who wished to avoid an embarrassing defeat in the Republican-controlled chamber.
The rescinded 2020 resolution stated that there are “profound disparities between Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students and their white peers exist in all parts of the Ohio education system” and that a “culturally responsive curriculum can motivate students of color to a higher level of academic achievement and in many cases increase the graduation rate of previously disengaged students.”
It directed the Ohio Department of Education to “reexamine the Academic Content Standards and Model Curriculums to make recommendations to the State Board of Education as necessary to eliminate bias and ensure that racism and the struggle for equality are accurately addressed.”
The resolution had also authorized the Board of Education to require all state employees working for the Ohio Department of Education to undergo implicit bias training, “so that they can perform their duties to the citizens of Ohio without unconscious racial bias.”
Implicit bias training was also to be made available to board of education members “to identify our own implicit biases so that we can perform our duties to the citizens of Ohio without racial bias.”
Those statements drew criticism from Republicans in the state senate as promoting racial division.
The new resolution orders the department of education to suspend any policies in line with the old resolution, strikes the implicit bias training requirement, condemns critical race theory as having “no place in K-12 education” while noting that numerous factors, including race, contribute to student achievement discrepancies.
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A request for comment from DeWine’s office was not returned.
