Kudos to Dayton education innovator Ann Higdon

Terry Ryan / December 16, 2009

Dayton is famous for its innovators – the Wright Brothers; John H. Patterson, who founded the National Cash Register Company in the late 1800s; and Charles F. Kettering, who developed the first electric starter for cars, all come to mind. It’s not surprising, then, with such a history that one of the country’s great educational innovators today also comes from Dayton.

Ann Higdon, president and founder of Improved Solutions for Urban Systems (ISUS), was recently awarded “The Purpose Prize,” a prestigious national award for social innovators over the age of 60. Ann was honored for her work with ISUS, a charter high school whose mission is to help at-risk students between the ages of 16 and 22 earn high school diplomas, gain professional certifications, find jobs, and go to college. (Watch a short video of Ann speaking about her motivations and ISUS here.)

Ann Higdon at a Dayton area home that ISUS students helped construct (May 2009). Photo courtesy of Laura Elizabeth Pohl.

In 1992 Higdon founded ISUS as a way to tackle Dayton’s alarming drop-out rate – fully half the young people in Dayton were dropping out of school. Ann’s goal was to establish a constructions trade program that would provide the most troubled students with job certifications and employable skills. Her students struggled in traditional high schools – they were dropouts, had gotten in trouble with the law, had

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Kudos to Dayton education innovator Ann Higdon

Cleveland's NAEP math scores draw attention to district's urgent need for reform

Emmy L. Partin , Jamie Davies O'Leary / December 16, 2009

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) –also known as the “nation’s report card”—released district-level results last week for 18 urban districts including Cleveland. Districts participating in the voluntary Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) can compare their scores to their home state, the national average, and other urban districts.

Cleveland is among the ten established participants in TUDA (which started in 2003). Unfortunately, 2009 math results reveal that Cleveland, the district with the highest percentage of low-income families (almost 100 percent), is also the only one whose math scores in fourth and eighth grade have not budged, statistically speaking, since 2003 (see charts below). While students in cities like Boston, Atlanta, and Houston have made gains over the last six years, Cleveland’s scores remained stagnant.

Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress

In 2009, only eight percent of fourth graders and eight percent of eighth graders in Cleveland scored proficient or higher in math. This places Cleveland second to last in fourth grade (topping only Detroit) and fourth to last in eighth grade (ahead of Detroit, DC, and Milwaukee). (See a graph comparing the five lowest scoring cities here.) 

What does this mean in terms of real-life math skills? When asked to subtract a two-digit number from a three-digit number, less than half of Cleveland fourth graders could do so. When asked to interpret a basic algebraic expression (like 2w-3) just 29 percent of eighth graders were

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Cleveland's NAEP math scores draw attention to district's urgent need for reform

2009: Fordham's publications in review

December 16, 2009

The holiday season is a great time to catch up on these 2009 Fordham-Ohio publications you might have missed during the year:

• Ohio at the Crossroads: School funding - more of the same or changing the model? Noted professor and director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill, examined Governor Strickland’s proposed school funding reforms and presented several viable alternatives to the “evidence-based” model. (February 2009)
• Checked Out: Ohioans’ Views on Education 2009 With education at the center of the state’s biennial budget debate, Fordham partnered with The FDR Group and Catalyst Ohio to probe what Ohioans really think about issues like charter schools, school funding, and teacher quality. (May 2009)
• Losing Ohio’s Future: Why college graduates flee the Buckeye State and what might be done about it Through surveys of college students at Ohio’s top colleges and universities, this report by The FDR Group explored why Ohio’s best and brightest college grads want to leave the Buckeye State, what policymakers and others could do to keep them here, and what impact this “brain drain” has on the education sector. (June 2009)
• Full Analysis of Ohio’s FY2010-2011 Biennial Budget Bill After the dust settled from the budget battle, we examined the legislation’s impact on charter schools, academic standards and accountability/compliance, and teacher licensure and employment issues. (July 2009)
• 2008-2009 Ohio Report Card Analysis Partnering with the education research and information firm Public Impact, we conducted our seventh rapid-turnaround

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  2009: Fordham's publications in review

All-day K mandate brings to light flaws in evidence-based funding model

Jack M. Fletcher , Jamie Davies O'Leary / December 16, 2009

The first major component of Governor Strickland’s education reform plan, an all-day kindergarten mandate facing Ohio school districts in the 2010-11 school year, is making apparent why the “evidence-based” funding model cannot live up to the lofty expectations the governor and others have set for it.

Putting aside questions about the benefits of across-the-board all-day kindergarten, consider the fiscal realities. Implementing all-day, every day kindergarten is estimated to cost $205 million statewide. (For a breakdown of what it would cost Columbus and Dayton area districts, see here and here.)

Colleen Grady at State of Ohio Education blog parses out the $205 million cost estimate to see if that, as Sen. Gary Cates (R-West Chester) argues, is “probably a conservative figure.” Grady shows how the price for all-day kindergarten actually will end up being much higher due to egregious problems with how the education department calculated the figure (e.g., using a student-teacher ratio much higher than what is now mandated by law, failing to include the price of textbooks and other instructional supplies, and not including the cost of additional non-teaching staff needed to serve the additional students). As if an extra $205 million would not be burdensome enough on taxpayers, it comes at a time when the state is already scrambling to plug an $851 million hole in the budget before December 31 to prevent catastrophic cuts to education that could run as high as 15 percent

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All-day K mandate brings to light flaws in evidence-based funding model

Ohio on path toward spreading Race to the Top winnings far and wide

Emmy L. Partin / December 16, 2009

Like other states, half of Ohio’s $200 to $400 million in potential Race to the Top (RttT) winnings will be distributed to participating LEAs via the Title I formula. That $100 to $200 million pot may seem like a lot of money at first blush, but in reality it represents no more than about one percent of what the state will spend on education this biennium and roughly $55 to $110 per public school student. If not targeted toward spurring real reform, the risk is great that the money will do little more than provide a small, temporary boost to district bank accounts. Unfortunately, that may be exactly what will happen. 

Ohio LEAs have until January 8 to sign on to the state’s RttT application. At this point (and it must be noted that nothing is final and that the state still has a full month to work on its application), because of the political capital spent on his school reform plan in the last state budget, Ohio’s RttT approach revolves around Governor Strickland’s education vision and the changes he signed into law in July. While that bill did contain reform-minded provisions in areas like teacher tenure and preparation, its hallmark was mandating a statewide, prescriptive, one-size-fits-all, inputs-based method for funding education – one that is far removed from student or school-based performance.  This is far from the type of reforms we hear Secretary Duncan pushing.

If Ohio’s final

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Ohio on path toward spreading Race to the Top winnings far and wide

The Tab: How Connecticut Can Fix Its Dysfunctional Education Spending System to Reward Success, Incentivize Choice and Boost Student Achievement

Terry Ryan / December 16, 2009

Bryan C. Hassel and Daniela Doyle
Public Impact 

In The Tab, ConnCAN (a well-connected Connecticut education advocacy group) and Public Impact (a crackerjack education research organization) make the case for Connecticut’s move to a school funding system that:

• Allows money to follow children based on their needs to the schools they attend;
• Shines a bright light of information on the flow of funds; and
• Removes barriers to creating great schools.

The Tab builds on the school finance work of organizations like the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and the Fordham Foundation. It actually applies concepts like weighted student funding, empowered school leadership, and performance-based results into a working school reform model for Connecticut. The report goes deep – getting into the thorny issues of setting weights (for things like poverty, limited English proficiency, district size, etc.) and modeling out the costs of the new system over time.

The authors readily admit that their model would create winners and losers. They write, “the reforms have costs: financial, but more significantly political, since some districts and schools will lose money to make real change possible.” With these costs in mind, why do it? Because Connecticut simply can’t continue to afford the social costs of staggering achievement gaps that plague the state despite spending $13,000 per student (fifth highest in America).

Reformers and policy makers in Connecticut are coming to the realization that their state has to get

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The Tab: How Connecticut Can Fix Its Dysfunctional Education Spending System to Reward Success, Incentivize Choice and Boost Student Achievement

Defining a 21st century education

Emmy L. Partin / December 16, 2009

Craig D. Jerald
The Center for Public Education
July 2009 

Hoping to calmly and critically evaluate the grandiose promises of the 21st century skills movement, this paper systematically looks at three things: how changing world conditions have impacted skills requirements; which kinds of skills, based on this new world order, will be most important going forward; and what districts and schools should do about it. The world has become more automated and globalized, meaning jobs formerly done by humans in a specific location can now be admirably completed by computers half-way around the world. Further, argues Jerald, workplace success in the 21st Century relies on the layered interdependency of “foundational knowledge” (core academic content), “literacies” (ability to apply content), and “competencies” (ability to call on literacies), not on a simplistic skill set learned in the abstract.

Finally, what are the implications of these findings for school districts and schools? Though he spends a mere two pages on this important question, Jerald does hit some key points. There can be no "either or" thinking about the relationship between skills and content knowledge; 21st century skills (or applied literacies and broad competencies, as Jerald calls them) are best taught within traditional disciplines and there is good reason to be skeptical of stand-alone lessons related to these skills; America's expansive curriculum needs to be focused on

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Defining a 21st century education

The Promise of Proficiency: How College Proficiency Information Can Help High Schools Drive Student Success

Jamie Davies O'Leary / December 16, 2009

By J.B. Schramm & E. Kinney Zalesne
December 2009 

The Promise of Proficiency, a joint production by the Center for American Progress and College Summit, argues that we need to equip high schools with data regarding their graduates’ college enrollment and proficiency rates. To fill the “P-20” informational gap, and backmap students’ collegiate performance in a way that would improve America’s high schools, the report insists that the federal government should:

• Support the gathering of college proficiency data so that each high school can track their graduates’ success in “year 13”;
• Disseminate this data to the public; and
• Reward high schools for making improvements in their graduates’ college proficiency rates.

Promise’s case for building P-20 longitudinal systems is compelling, as is the call for installing a college-prep culture in America’s neediest high schools. However, it places the onus of responsibility on the shoulders of the federal government without adequately exploring whether states are suited to oversee data-building efforts. Certainly the federal government plays an important funding role (with 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act money, the U.S. Department of Education earmarked $250 million for this very purpose), but individual states are ultimately responsible for laws/regulations governing the use of data, and creating (or preventing) an environment conducive for collecting and applying data meaningfully.

Ohio already has incorporated nine of the 10 elements of the Data Quality Campaign (see Ohio’s DQC profile here), a national group that supports state policymakers in improving the

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The Promise of Proficiency: How College Proficiency Information Can Help High Schools Drive Student Success

A canard worth torpedoing

Terry Ryan / December 16, 2009

One of the great canards in public education is that no one should profit from the public schools. For example, cries of “corporate takeover of public schools” and “profits come before the needs of children” have been part of the anti-charter school rhetoric in Ohio and elsewhere since the first for-profit charters opened in the early 1990s....Read it here.

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A canard worth torpedoing

Changing "value added" terminology

Jamie Davies O'Leary / December 16, 2009

…I’m starting to see a pattern. Merit pay. Performance pay. Value-added. What is so bothersome to teachers (and unions) about these terms is not the words themselves but that they measure merit, performance, and value according to something they don’t like: student test scores. If the job you sign up for is to move students forward academically, how is it alienating/deceptive/inaccurate/whatever to measure your job performance based on how successfully you fulfill that fundamental role? Read the full post here.

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Changing "value added" terminology

Congratulations to Tom Lasley

December 16, 2009

Congratulations to our good friend Tom Lasley on his retirement from the University of Dayton’s School of Education and Allied Professions. Tom not only spent more than 30-years of distinguished service as an education professor but was also an unrelenting champion for students and schools in the Dayton area. He has consistently pushed for much-needed education reform in Ohio and has been by far the most reform-minded dean of educations in the Buckeye State for the past decade. We are happy that Tom will remain deeply involved in the education reform struggles through the Dayton-based EdVention. Read the Dayton Daily News post about Lasley here.  

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Congratulations to Tom Lasley