Ohio received a No Child Left Behind waiver yesterday, and the state is now expected to evaluate its schools with a more stringent assessment plan suggested by Gov. John Kasich.The state released district-by-district data showing how each school district would fall under the new system, which uses letter grades to evaluate schools. The simulation, which uses 2010-2011 data, shows most local schools would dropCincinnati Public Schools would drop from the second-best rating of “Effective” under the current system to a D-, with 23 schools flunking and Walnut Hills High School retaining its top mark with an A.Charter schools in particular are worried about surviving under the new grading system. Under Ohio law, if a charter school flunks two out of three consecutive years, the school has to close down.Some local charter schools are especially desperate to improve performance. Earlier this year, Dohn Community High School began a program that would literally pay students for showing up to class and working hard.The waiver from No Child Left Behind frees Ohio from a requirement to make 100 percent of students “proficient” in math and reading by 2014. Many parents, teachers and schools had criticized the No Child Left Behind requirement for being unrealistic.With freedom from No Child Left Behind, Ohio now has the responsibility of paving its own path toward school and student accountability. The new grading system was singled out as a big caveat by the Obama administration. Ohio is also expected to put extra funds in low-performing schools and create new accountability measures for teachers and principals.Ohio is expected to work out the full details of its plan by Sept. 15. If it doesn’t, the No Child Left Behind waiver will expire. The suggestions would then need to be approved by the legislature before January 2013 and go into effect August 2013.The Obama administration is using the waivers as an incentive for education reform in states. Ohio was one of eight states to get waivers yesterday. Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island also obtained waivers.

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has already had a rough week, having to give back more than $100,000 in campaign contributions in response to an FBI investigation. Today The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Politifact website looked into one of the five claims made in Mandel's new 30-second TV ad, and it seems to be pretty false. Mandel claims that his opponent, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, “cast the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care." Politifact notes that since the health care overhaul passed by the minimum 60 votes necessary, that every vote was technically “deciding.” But, on the other hand, Brown was an early supporter of the legislation, and it is widely known that Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the final “yes” vote to join. Plus, technically, Brown was the seventh person to vote because it was taken in alphabetical order. Ohio public schools have received a waiver for parts of No Child Left Behind that will remove a requirement to get all of their students proficient in math and reading by 2014. Nineteen states have received the waiver, meaning they'll have to create their own federally approved academic progress standards. Covington leaders are expecting staff reductions as part of balancing the 2012-13 budget to cover $1.5 million that was left out. The city is facing $1.6 million in cuts to public-safety services and about $700,000 across other departments. Mitt Romney officially won the Republican presidential nomination yesterday, but no one's talking about it because all the stories involve Donald Trump and the fact that his iPhone app misspelled “America.” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has two weeks to offer arguments against extradition to Sweden after a U.K. supreme court ruling. The makers of Blackberry are considering how to remake their products into something people will actually want again. Facebook's public offering drama has caused experts to ask questions such as, “should investors see the wretched performance of Facebook’s IPO as any sort of signal about the likely future direction of the overall stock market and the economy?” While the rest of us were living our lives, two asteroids zipped past the earth early this week. Don't worry — they were small.