A post from guest blogger and Fordham writer and researcher Emmy Partin.

It’s frustrating to be a charter-school supporter in the Buckeye State. Charter performance in Ohio is, overall, barely equal and too often inferior to that of the district schools with which they compete. According to the latest data from the state, some 64 percent of Ohio’s urban charter schools are rated “D” or “F” by the state, compared to about 50 percent of their district peers.

There are exceptions. In Fordham’s hometown of Dayton, 6 of the 10 highest achieving public schools are charters. There, charter school students not only outperform their district peers on traditional measures of student achievement (47 percent of district students attended a school rated “academic emergency” while 28 percent of charter students were in such a school), but also on the state’s new value-added growth measure (68 percent of Dayton charter students met or exceeded overall state growth expectations while only 37 percent of district students did). And there is more hope on the horizon. Ohio’s first KIPP school opened its doors this month, and a trio of high-performing charters in Cleveland recently announced a new cooperative relationship.

A law intended to close chronically underperforming charter schools kicks in next year, yet just two charters (out of more than 300 statewide) will fall victim to it.

With a union-friendly, anti-school-choice governor aiming to take over the state’s public education system and the state’s tax coffers shrinking, Ohio’s charter schools must prove their worth or risk being put out of business altogether. But if they aren’t able to do this, even the most ardent choice supporters among us should not become excuse-making apologists for them.

David Whitman writes about the coverage of his new book, Sweating the Small Stuff.

On Monday, August 18, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post wrote a complimentary column about my new book, Sweating the Small Stuff, which recounts the tale of six inner-city secondary schools that have succeeded in closing the achievement gap. When a first-rate reporter like Mathews calls your book “splendid,” “lively,” “readable,” and drops a few other bouquets suitable for framing and book jacket blurbs, it may seem churlish to quibble with his column. But his opposition to my subtitle—Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism—and more generally to my use of the term “paternalistic” to describe these gap-closing schools has since triggered a groupthink blogfest decrying my use of the “P-word.”

Unlike Mathews and columnist George Will, nearly all of the armchair commentariat criticizing the paternalism label has yet to actually read Sweating the Small Stuff, though they have read Mathews’ column and a Fordham Institute press release on the book. Several bloggers, including Joanne Jacobs and Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Blog, are keeping an open mind about the utility of the paternalism label. But without having read the book, a number of bloggers have already roundly misconstrued the origins and meaning of the term, the “new paternalism.” This mini-brouhaha in the edusphere threatens to overshadow the newsworthy record of these inner-city schools—diverting attention from the important implications that these break-the-mold schools bear for the future of inner-city education. (more...)

A post from guest blogger and Fordham intern Amy Ballard.

Stafford points out the recent Washington Post article on the apparent diversity crisis at TJ. She’s right: blaming the school for its demographics is ridiculous. However, as a former TJ student, I have a few more things to say about the never-ending diversity debate.

All it’s doing is hurting the students. I was a member of the 2001 entering class that saw a lamentable nosedive in minority student enrollment (cited in the article as the beginning of the current diversity discussion). Yes, the numbers of African American and Hispanic students were low, but my nine black and Hispanic classmates were forced to stand under a negative spotlight for their entire four years of high school. They stood out in the crowd, not for their accomplishments or ambitions like many TJ kids, but for their race. Asian American students were forced to justify being there in numbers disproportionate to the surrounding population and endure racial jabs like “Asian F” or “Asian fail” (both referring to a B+). White students became hypersensitive to their classmates’ and friends’ races, a consideration neither necessary nor helpful when being assigned a lab partner or gym buddy.

At one point, the discussion got into sex (the school was 60/40 boys/girls and it had people worrying). When, during my junior year, I told my counselor during college sessions that I was more interested in the liberal arts than in science and math, I was informed that it was entirely possible that I had gotten through the second round of admissions to TJ solely because I was a girl and “there was a big push on that your year.” There was even a brief uproar over the diversity of the teachers and administrators! The single-minded focus on race and sex (read: visible) diversity takes away from the rather rich diversity that does exist (my graduating class contained a concert-level pianist and violinist, several students who had completed undergraduate math requirements, a published short story author, and a student who deferred college admission to spend a year in NOLS) and is detrimental to the cultural education of the students at TJ. It’s hard to grasp concepts like fairness and equality when everyone is constantly telling you your school has neither.

As an alum, people often ask me about the diversity at TJ, rather than the rigor of the all-Honors classes or the merit of the tech labs and mentorships required of seniors. Instead, they ask me if I knew any black kids or if my classes consisted entirely of Asian students. All of that detracts from the ultimate goal of schools like TJ—the academic achievement and intellectual accomplishments of the best pupils. Each time TJ posts the country’s highest SAT scores or tops AP marks in both Physics and US Government, someone says, “Yeah, but where are the minority students?” Asking that question devalues the time and energy the students and teachers at TJ spend every year to produce not only top scores and future Ivy Leaguers but valuable experiences in the areas of research, writing, technology, science, and math. The admissions process is not a result of the students who participate in it or of the students who attend the high school or even of the teachers who teach there. The debate over the admissions policy needs to be kept out of the halls of the school itself. When I was a student there and people asked me about the diversity “problem” I would tell them that we weren’t black students or white students or Asian students or Hispanic students or nerds or geeks—we were TJ kids and there was no problem.

Photo by Flickr user via.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan.

Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Susan Zelman, announced to her staff today that she will be stepping down as state superintendent. She is leaving after several months of public, and sometimes nasty, tussling with Governor Strickland and his emerging agenda for Ohio’s K-12 education. Dr. Zelman will be missed, and now speculation turns to her possible successor. Scott Elliott of the Dayton Daily News has listed on his blog four possible candidates (including the Governor’s wife). He is seeking suggestions on other names to consider; if you have any insights here please share with Scott and his readers.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch. Visit her blog, Bridging Differences, at blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences.

Dear Mike,

It is absurd of Dean Millot to call you a “McCarthyite” for pointing out that Bill Ayers was a terrorist. He was a terrorist. He says so. He doesn’t deny it. His actions, which he proudly acknowledges, confirm it.

McCarthy was known for making false charges. Yours were not false. McCarthy was known for saying that someone was guilty if he associated with another person who was clearly guilty. But Ayers was not a terorrist by association with terrorist. He was a terrorist; he planted bombs. Maybe he killed people, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know, but one thing certain about bombs is that they have the power to kill people.

And it is not true that no one was killed by Weathermen bombs. First of all, I have never heard until Dean Millot wrote it that the Weathermen warned people before they bombed something. That is a new one on me. I lived through that era and can’t recall any reports of advance warnings. Second, three Weathermen—including Ayers’s girlfriend Diana Oughton—were killed when one of their own bombs exploded as they were building it in a luxurious townhouse in Greenwich Village. By the way, they were packing the bombs with nails, presumably to maim people, not buildings, and to create terror wherever they would be exploded. Also, a researcher was killed by a Weatherman bomb when he was working late in a university lab at the University of Wisconsin.

I don’t know much about bomb-making, but I can’t see any circumstance in which making bombs and planting them where people can be injured or killed is admirable in a democratic society.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan.

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann is embroiled in serious scandals and faces impeachment. His own political party (the Democrats) has disowned him, and he is under intense pressure from the Governor, the statehouse, and the media to resign immediately.

We take no joy in Dann’s troubles, but his leaving office would raise some interesting questions. In September, Dann held a press conference to announce lawsuits aimed at closing two Dayton charter schools (he subsequently added two more schools). Dann cited the state’s charitable trust laws and alleged that the schools had violated their “charitable” missions as 501(c)3 organizations because they were underperforming academically (see Gadfly’s take on the first lawsuits.) One of the schools originally targeted by Dann has subsequently closed, but the second has vowed to fight the lawsuit. Oral arguments for that case are set for May 15 in Dayton.

If successful, this novel theory of trust law would effectively turn the state attorney general into a charter-school prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Under Dann’s legal theory, his office would determine whether a school is successful or not, thereby usurping the regulatory authority of the General Assembly, the Ohio Department of Education, and individual charter school sponsors. If the AG gets this authority, observers wonder what would prevent him from determining that nonprofit colleges and universities aren’t up to snuff and should be closed? Or hospitals? Or any other nonprofit unloved by political supporters of the attorney general, whoever that might be? And why not then in other states, too?

Will the AG’s potential impeachment or resignation impact the Attorney General’s Office in this case? It’s far too early to tell, but one good thing that could come from this bad situation is a more thoughtful approach to dealing with troubled charters than having them killed off by a hard-charging AG.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch.

When No Child Left Behind was first passed, I supported it. It seemed to me a good idea to test kids in reading and math from grades 3 through 8; after all, if you don’t have basic skills, you are severely limited in your ability to learn anything else. I could not, at first sight, see why anyone would object to establishing baseline goals for basic skills.

As the full consequences of the law have unfolded, I have begun to have second thoughts. I must say that my views changed very considerably after a daylong session in November 2006 at a conference that Rick Hess and Checker Finn organized at AEI called “Is the NCLB Toolkit Working?” The dozen or so papers presented that day all gave the same answer: No. If I recall correctly, less than 5 percent of eligible children were taking advantage of choice options; less than 20 percent of eligibles were utilizing after-school tutoring. The after-school tutoring seemed to be a swamp of incompetent providers and badly-administered programs, as best I could tell. I must say that the day was mind-changing for me.

I put those findings together with the increasing evidence that states were inflating their test scores to prove that they were well on their way to 100 percent proficiency (a phenomenon a Fordham Institute report called “The Proficiency Illusion”), and I began to recognize that NCLB was having some very ill effects on American education.

Then came the release of 2007 NAEP scores for the states, and I saw that the test score gains in reading and mathematics that predated NCLB (from 2000-2002 or 2000-2003) were larger than the test score gains since the passage of NCLB. Much ado about very little academic progress.

These are the reasons that I have come to believe that NCLB needs radical overhaul, not just tweaking. It is not working, and it has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing, has promoted grade inflation by the states, has dumbed down education by its unremitting focus on basic skills and its narrowing of the curriculum. Hey, folks, there are just so many hours in the day and in the week, and if more and more of them are devoted to testing and prepping for tests, then there are fewer available for the study of history, literature, science, the arts, civics, geography, and foreign language.

I don’t want my grandchildren to go to schools whose reputations ride solely on basic skills and not on their capacity to offer a rich and coherent program in the liberal arts and sciences.

If we continue in this mode, we will manage to produce a generation of kids who can pass the tests but are uneducated. We will also destroy American public education at the same time.

Stop defending NCLB. It has proven to be ineffective, harmful for kids, devoid of what matters most in education, hostile to knowledge-acquisition, and downright bad for the future of education.