Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon must shoulder the blame for district’s poor academic

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Mayor Justin Bibb has a laudable agenda, which appeals to my progressive politics. At the center of it is Bibb’s intent to fix public education.

As he puts it: “We must help a generation of students get back on track.”

I agree, but how will Bibb achieve this agenda item if he keeps CEO Eric Gordon, the administrator who has wobbled the schools toward the precipice, in charge?

Gordon has led the Cleveland Metropolitan School District since June 2011. Through most of it, public schools have struggled to educate anybody. Their state ratings have hovered at average or below for so long it’s hard to recall when the district exceeded state standards.

Such mediocrity falls on Gordon, a seemingly apolitical bureaucrat.

I call him the latter because he serves at the mayor’s pleasure. Now, some might describe this as a loose relationship. Nominally, the mayor runs the schools. Former Mayor Frank Jackson, however, left that chore to Gordon, who hasn’t produced the results Black and Hispanic parents demand for their children.

Not to keep this a secret, but I once worked for the district. I held a job in its PR department, so I saw day after day how incompetent or cavalier or indifferent the Gordon administration was toward educating youth of color.

Time and again, Gordon and his underlings squandered tax dollars, such as when they spent $35,000 to bring Wes Moore, a Black author no student ever heard of, to East Tech to speak one Saturday morning. Parents and students received invitations, which the district sweetened with a raffle of third-rate tablets, handouts of Moore’s bestseller and free box lunches.

Yet I didn’t count 50 parents in the cavernous auditorium.

In a broad sense, $35,000 isn’t a big slice of the district’s budget, but you don’t spend that money as freehandedly as people in the downtown office tended to do. In the case of Moore, I heard he was invited back — Gordon apparently liked his message — at a discount.

I didn’t attend Moore’s second visit; I wasn’t ordered to go that time.

Let’s not discuss the Wes Moore fiasco farther. It might be petty of me to even bring it up. For the issue here is the academic performance of our Black and Hispanic youth, and in the game of life — education is surely the foundation for that — they aren’t being prepared for success.

As school districts go, Cleveland lags in terms of technology, and the quality of writing instruction its students receive borders on laughable. The district abandoned a focus on teaching grammar a while ago, and “No Child Left Behind” ensured no child was learning.

Ask college recruiters what they think of graduates of our district, and you’ll be dissatisfied with what you hear. True, colleges claim they want to attract more Blacks to campus; most consider diversity a hallmark of a liberal education.

Not many of them, however, are flocking to Cleveland schools to recruit their graduates.

Somebody must take the blame here; somebody must be held accountable for the year upon year of poor grades on the state’s academic ratings.

If Jackson is absent blame, then Gordon is not. For Bibb to keep him as the man in charge of educating our youth would go down as an open frame on His Honor’s scoresheet.

Justice B. Hill grew up on the city’s East Side. He practiced journalism for more than 25 years before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.