Photo courtesy of: The Patton College of EducationStephen Dyer
The Coalition of Rural and Appalachian Schools is pleased to announce the 2016-17 Hicks Executive in Residence, Mr. Stephen Dyer. He currently serves as the Education Policy Fellow at Innovation Ohio, a Columbus-based Progressive think tank, where he fights for the right of all Ohio’s children to receive a world-class education, regardless of where they live.
He has authored several reports for Innovation Ohio that have sought to ensure the fundamental right of every Ohio child to a world-class education. He is widely considered one of the state’s top education policy experts, and one of the few people in the country with the experience of actually implementing and leading the debate on every major aspect of education reform from teacher quality to student achievement to school choice to equitable financing.
He has been published in Education Week – the nation’s education policy newspaper of record, as well as The 74 and Real Clear Education. He recently spent a year as a fellow with the Education Policy Fellowship Program through the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C. and served as part of an American delegation to observe the Chinese education system in Shanghai and Beijing. Dyer also is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Akron.
Dyer has spent his career serving his community, first as an award-winning journalist with the Akron Beacon Journal, then as an award-winning State Representative representing Ohio’s Summit and Portage counties. As a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal for nine years, he reported on some of the most pressing issues of our time: government corruption, the fight against terrorism, the denial of legal rights, and crime against children.
Dyer won awards and recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press and the Cleveland Press Club. He collaborated on an innovative project called “Ohio: Look at the State We’re In” that analyzed where Ohio ranked on various quality of life issues. That collaboration earned Dyer and two other reporters nominations for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.
After winning his seat in 2006 to represent the 43rd House District, Dyer fought tirelessly to once and for all fix our state’s school funding system. He spent two years developing his own system, then when Gov. Ted Strickland introduced the Ohio Evidence Based Model in 2009, Dyer was the chairman of the subcommittee that transformed the new system into one that earned the Frank Newman Award from the Education Commission of the States – recognizing the country’s most “bold, innovative, non-partisan” education reform of 2009. It remains the only school funding plan produced since the 1930s that promised to lower Ohio’s property taxes to pay for schools.