about Summit Academies

March 18, 2009

Frank Stoy of the Lucas County Educational Service Center Office of Community Schools took issue with a March 4 piece concerning troubles in the Summit Academies. 

I really wish you had done your homework before making the sweeping comments about Summit Academies in the most recent Ohio Gadfly. Summit Academies serve 99% special education students, mostly diagnosed with ADD, ADHD and Aspergers. As most experts will agree, the measures used on the Ohio Report card do not accurately measure these students' progress and performance.

The issues with Summit schools is much more complicated than the Beacon Journal article you used as the basis of your information stated and we as sponsor for most of the Summit schools are working very hard to address the issues.

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about Summit Academies

about the governor's education plan

March 18, 2009

Bill Wilken, a retired businessman and educational finance expert, responded to a February 18 Ohio Gadfly editorial (and newspaper op-ed) concerning Gov. Ted Strickland's education proposals.

What strikes me about the Strickland plan (like so many other state education policy initiatives) is its silence about school management.  Essentially, it preserves unchanged the historical congeries of many cooks in the kitchen, a system in which many are responsible for running the schools but in which no one is really responsible. Everyone can point fingers at everyone else.  The story is no different than the one about the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.  Just as in that fable, we never seem to tire of arguing about the source of our problems-teachers, principals, school boards, state bureaucrats, or various elected officials.

While I concur with your desire for improved standards, I seriously doubt that any revisions on this front will have much impact without parallel and substantial changes in our mechanisms for managing schools.  We need to move aggressively toward a management structure which vests unambiguous responsibility for education management and outcomes either at a single point at the state or building level.  Equally important, we need to make certain that those at the locus of responsibility have the training, experience, and disposition necessary to serve as managers.

The Strickland plan places primary responsibility for educational outcomes not on management, but on labor.  While teachers obviously are pivotal to educational outcomes, it defies

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about the governor's education plan

Do term limits dumb down the political dialogue in Ohio?

Mike Lafferty , Terry Ryan / March 18, 2009

Have term-limits hurt public policy in Ohio? When term limits were passed by Ohio voters in 1992 the idea was simple: they promised relief from mediocre, self-interested incumbents and partisan legislatures stuck in gridlock. Term limits were intended to create more competitive elections while also creating citizen legislatures. Or, as the CATO Institute argued in 1995, "to effectively end politics as a lifetime sinecure," (see here) thereby making public service a leave of absence from a productive, private sector career.

Ohio is one of 15 states with term limits. Ours kicked in for lawmakers and other state-level elected office holders in 2000 when 45 House seats and six Senate seats were term-limited. The 2008 election resulted in the biggest turnover since then. Of 99 House members, 32 are new members and 21 of those are new because of term limits. The Senate is far more senior with only four of the 33 members new to the chamber, and the new senators all had previous legislative experience.

A month into their first term, and before they even received their new business cards, these new House members were presented with a 3,000-plus page biennial budget bill from the governor that included a substantial redesign of the state's education system. The proposed changes included a significantly revamped school funding system, proposals for new academic standards and state assessments, myriad changes to the teacher licensure and retention system, and major revision of the state's charter

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Do term limits dumb down the political dialogue in Ohio?

We see the fluff, but where's the beef?

Mike Lafferty / March 18, 2009

There's very little real evidence in Gov. Ted Strickland's proposed "evidence-based" education proposals, according to a review by the Ohio Academy of Science.

The Academy, which is particularly interested in science, technology, and engineering education, including STEM, examined the bibliography on which Gov. Strickland's education proposals are based.

"After a brief review of that document...it appears that most references are to political action or opinion reports; only a few articles appear to be from primary, peer-reviewed, refereed journals that the Academy would consider fundamental to understanding how children learn and how we should organize learning environments and pedagogy," wrote OAS Chief Executive Officer Lynn Elfner in a letter to the House Finance and Appropriations Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee.

The governor's assertion that his plan is based on expert education research is being scrutinized. For example, University of Washington education finance expert Paul T. Hill found little merit in the governor's assurances (see here).

In his letter to the subcommittee, Elfner offered the Academy's help finding experts qualified to judge the plan.

"When we looked at the list, it lacked a lot of the references we expected. It wasn't as rigorous," Elfner told The Gadfly. "Given the priority of STEM, I would have expected to see more than the references I already knew about."

The "research-based, evidence-based" assurances given to back up the governor's proposals, Elfner said in an interview, lacked studies based on cognitive science, learning, and brain mapping. Too many of the papers

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We see the fluff, but where's the beef?

New report supports Fordham's recommendations for charter schools

Emmy L. Partin / March 18, 2009

According to a new report, charter schools don't produce substantially different academic results than their district peers. A longitudinal study conducted by RAND used student-level data to examine charter schools in Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, Denver, Milwaukee, and the states of Ohio, Texas and Florida (see here). It found that charter schools do not have an effect, good or bad, on the achievement of students in nearby district schools. The study also confirms that charter schools do not "skim the cream" when it comes to recruiting students-children enrolling in charter schools have similar academic achievement levels as those attending district schools, except in Ohio and Texas, where students entering charter schools are substantially behind the achievement levels of their district peers.

The report, Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition, offers two major concerns about the Buckeye State's charter schools. First, that the state's virtual schools lag far behind both district schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools in terms of student performance, and second, that the performance levels of charter schools in Ohio vary to a much greater degree than other sites.

The report's authors present two theories for why charter school performance varies so widely in Ohio: 1) The state has an unusually diverse group of authorizers (sponsors) and the quality of those authorizers varies greatly, and 2) Ohio's charter schools operate on significantly less funding than their district peers. The report suggests holding authorizers

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New report supports Fordham's recommendations for charter schools

Let's not forget about education's ugly little dilemma

Emmy L. Partin , Mike Lafferty , Terry Ryan / March 18, 2009

Perhaps the only thing related to K-12 education that Ohio's governor and lawmakers aren't talking about "fixing" is the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) (see here). That's odd, as few things are more out-dated, cost-laden and in need of reform than public pension systems.

None of STRS's problems have changed in the two years ago since we pointed them out in our report Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System (see here). The STRS system is still opaque, costly, encourages early retirement, hinders mobility, and backloads teacher compensation from early in a career to the very end. And according to the system's latest annual report (which covers July 2007 through June 2008) the financial health of the system is worsening (see here). As the economy has melted down STRS's unfunded liability has topped $18 billion (up $3.7 billion from the previous year). As this liability has increased, so has its amortization period, up from 26.1 years in 2007 to 41.2 years in 2008 (despite state law requiring an amortization period of no more than 30 years).

STRS says its troubles are due to "investment returns being less than expected, retirees living longer and payroll growth being less than expected." The Wall Street collapse has only made matters worse. Also, retirees are not going to start dying younger and teachers are not going to willingly retire later when the incentives favor them retiring in their mid-50s.

Many individuals

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Let's not forget about education's ugly little dilemma

Maybe the budget bill needs a few more brains working on it

Emmy L. Partin / March 18, 2009

The House Finance and Appropriations Primary and Secondary Education subcommittee will wrap up public hearings this week on Gov. Strickland's education reform plan, despite disagreement about whether a Finance subcommittee is the appropriate group to consider massive changes to state education policy.

The governor's budget proposal would not only change how Ohio funds its public schools but also make major changes to things like academic content standards, student assessments, teacher employment and licensure rules, and the governance of teacher preparation programs. Because of the complexity and extent of the education provisions in the budget bill, Rep. Gerald Stebelton (R-Lancaster), ranking minority member on the House Education committee, believes it is beyond the capacity of any one committee to fully explore its implications.

"The House Education committee, under the worthy leadership Rep. Brian Williams [D-Akron], a retired educator and superintendant of schools, has many members who have a great deal of experience with public education who are capable of exploring the myriad of education issues raised by this bill," Stebelton told The Gadfly in an e-mail. Stebelton believes the two committees could work simultaneously on the budget bill. "We could be working in parallel with the Finance committee, analyzing the bill, taking testimony, and reviewing proposed amendments and attempting to finalize it while the Finance committee addresses the financial issues of not only education but also the remainder of budget."

Rep. Steve Dyer (D-Green), chair of the Finance Primary and Secondary Education subcommittee disagrees. "The pieces

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Maybe the budget bill needs a few more brains working on it

How eight state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region identify and support low-performing schools and districts

March 18, 2009

The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance
March 2009

This report analyzes how state education agencies in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermon,t and the territory of Puerto Rico identify and support low-performing schools and districts under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

The report shows each agency had more schools newly identified as low-performing for 2007-2008 than schools losing that designation. The parameters set by the NCLB Act give state agencies flexibility in identifying schools and districts that need support as well as the kind of interventions to be taken. All eight states had intervention systems for schools or districts and they provided a variety of services centered on assessment, improvement plans, consultation, and professional development.

For Connecticut, state guidance and support for district-level systems is the key to sustained improvement in instruction and learning and for developing a clear accountability system. In Massachusetts, the districts are predominantly responsible for monitoring and support while the state provides resources and targeted assistance. New York has a system of customized supports requested by the districts and schools and administered from regional education centers. Finally, Rhode Island strives to create partnerships and reciprocal accountability between the state education agency and the local districts.

This study points to the need for continued learning in regards to building the capacity of schools and districts to improve student achievement, as well as the role state education agencies should take. It should serve

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How eight state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region identify and support low-performing schools and districts