The new normal in public education: doing more with less

Terry Ryan / September 29, 2010

“When we get back to a more normal economic cycle in Ohio, this is very doable.” This was Governor Strickland’s response to a question about how he plans to add billions of new state money over the next decade to pay for the state’s evidence-based school funding model.  

Based on education spending over the last two decades, the governor’s comment is reasonable. Chart 1 below shows inflation-adjusted per-pupil revenue for K-12 public education in Ohio, which has risen by 60 percent since 1991. There is no doubt that public education in Ohio – as across the rest of the country – has held a privileged position when it comes to spending. In fact, when controlled for inflation, school spending has been increasing substantially for a century. Why should anyone expect the future to be any different?

Chart 1: Inflation-adjusted Per-pupil Revenue for K-12 Public Education in Ohio, 1991 to 2010

Source: Ohio Department of Education, Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator; 2010 figure represents estimate

In Stretching the School Dollar, a new book published by Harvard Education Press and co-edited by Fordham’s Eric Osberg, there is a chapter ominously titled “A Warning for all Who Would Listen – America’s Public Schools Face a Forthcoming Fiscal Tsunami.” The chapter’s authors, Vanderbilt’s James Guthrie and Arthur Peng, outline the forces that have contributed to public education’s unique status and why it’s been so protected: 

 …its

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The new normal in public education: doing more with less

Top-performing urban middle schools

Terry Ryan / September 29, 2010

Each year Fordham analyzes  performance data of schools and districts in Ohio’s Big 8 cities, and provides a ranking of each city’s schools by Performance Index (PI) score, a weighted average of proficiency results among all tested students in that school. A school’s PI score gives an overall indication of how well its students are doing on the state’s tests, across all tested grades and subjects.  The PI score scale runs from 0 to 120 – the higher the score, the better achieving the school. A previous Ohio Education Gadfly analysis lifted up 16 high-performing district and charter schools (serving any grades), and today we bring you a list of the top-performing public middle schools in Ohio’s urban areas.

This ranking of the top 20 is all the more impressive considering that middle school-aged students are traditionally among the hardest to serve well (see this week’s review on “Stuck in the Middle”). Last year following the state’s report card release, the Columbus Dispatch ran an article about the district facing up to “ugly truths,” namely that none of its middle schools met federal targets in reading and math that year, that two in five (38 percent) didn’t teach a full year’s worth of material to students, and that nearly three in every four were rated D or F.

Other cities struggle as well (to varying degrees) to improve the achievement of middle school students. But there are several scattered

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Top-performing urban middle schools

High-performing, high-poverty schools

Emmy L. Partin / September 29, 2010

Our recent study, Needles in a Haystack: Lessons from high-performing, high-need urban schools, lifted up the successes of, and tried to extrapolate lessons from, urban schools that serve large numbers of poor kids well.  But poverty exists beyond city borders. Ohio’s highest unemployment rates exist in rural communities, and Appalachian southeastern Ohio in particular has long struggled with chronic poverty.  Still, just as we find in the big cities, schools in rural areas and small towns are also succeeding at delivering large numbers of poor students to high levels of achievement.

Using data from the Ohio Department of Education, we examined the 2009-10 academic performance of the 542 public schools where 75 percent or more of the students were eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch last year. This analysis includes rural, urban, and suburban schools, and district and charter schools alike.

Chart 1 shows the distribution of students in these schools by building rating.  Far too many -- nearly half -- of these students attend a school rated D or F by the state.  But it’s promising that fully 20 percent are in an A or B school.

Chart 1: Students in high-poverty schools by building rating, 2009-10

Source: Ohio’s interactive Local Report Card

In terms of raw achievement, several of these schools are doing very well.  A school’s “Performance Index score” gives an overall indication of how well its students are doing on the state’s tests,

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High-performing, high-poverty schools

Data from three education surveys converge around the importance of effective teaching

Jamie Davies O'Leary / September 29, 2010

If you’re clamoring to know what Americans think about myriad K-12 education issues, then you’ve just struck gold. Three recent surveys provide a plethora of opinion data on issues ranging from charter schools and teachers unions, to taxpayer-funded increases in education spending and hot-button issues like teacher evaluations.

That the surveys have varying methodologies and unique questionnaires makes it all the more significant that common themes emerged – especially those that point to shifting attitudes about teacher-related reforms (i.e., evaluations, compensation, and tenure).

The first, conducted by Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG)—and based on information from a random and nationally representative sample of 2,776 respondents— casts the results in a political light. Researchers found that when it comes to education policy, “divisions between ordinary Democrats and Republicans… are quite minor.” Most interesting findings include that: the public doesn’t want to increase local taxes to foot the education bill (only 29 percent favored it); 62 percent “completely” or “somewhat” support retaining NCLB’s testing requirements (against just 12  percent who don’t); a majority of respondents didn’t have an opinion as to whether Race to the Top was a federal “intrusion”; 45 percent believe ineffective teachers should be fired rather than counseled; and 49 percent favored basing teachers’ salaries on students’ academic growth (compared to 26 who opposed).

The second, the well-known annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, was derived from telephone interviews with 1,008 adults recruited randomly. The

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Data from three education surveys converge around the importance of effective teaching

Bias, faulty research cloud valid message in charter school report

Emmy L. Partin , Terry Ryan / September 29, 2010

Last week, Policy Matters Ohio released a report on charter school accountability.  The primary finding was that when charter schools are operated by management organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, too often the management organizations are running the show, not the independent boards that are legally the schools’ owners. 

We at Fordham will be the first to admit that Ohio charter school law allows for blurred lines of responsibility among operators, authorizers, and school boards.  In fact, Fordham testified to the Ohio House and State Board of Education last spring in support of efforts to clarify the roles and responsibilities of sponsors (aka authorizers), governing boards, and operators. 

Some of Policy Matters’ findings are, without question, worth taking seriously. For example, if some charter schools’ governing board structures are out of compliance with state law, as the report alleges, that’s a problem that absolutely needs to be addressed post haste. 

However, other items in the report raise an eyebrow about the validity of some conclusions.

First, the methodology is messy. The report compares Ohio law regarding multiple facets of the charter school program to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers' principles for authorizers. Not Ohio charter laws to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ model charter law. Not Ohio laws specifically regulating authorizing to the NACSA principles for authorizers. The report is essentially a comparison of management company contracts to NACSA's principles for authorizers – apples to oranges to

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Bias, faulty research cloud valid message in charter school report

Is teacher performance data ready for primetime in Ohio?

Mike Lafferty / September 29, 2010

The Los Angeles Times brought the concept of value-added education data front and center before the public when it conducted an analysis of teachers’ value-added scores in that city, and then published the findings – complete with teachers’ names attached – on its website.

The Los Angeles story is the most prominent example of a national movement to link student data to individual teacher performance. Federal Race to the Top dollars will fund more than a dozen states’ – including Ohio’s – efforts to incorporate value-added data into teacher evaluations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, are investing millions in teacher effectiveness initiatives.  In Ohio, public value-added results are available by district, school, grade level, and subject – teachers and administrators have access to more robust student-level data. And districts participating in the federally funded Teacher Incentive Fund program will use value-added data along with other measures to award performance bonuses to teachers.

Three state education experts interviewed by The Gadfly believe it is time to use value-added here not only for informing teachers about their students’ progress but also to evaluate the teachers themselves -- to help them improve, but, if necessary, dismiss ineffective ones.

“Clearly other districts use value-added as part of evaluation of performance, but the difference between [what happened in] Los Angeles and [what takes place in a district like] Winston Salem, N.C., is that they use value-added to assess but the data are not

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Is teacher performance data ready for primetime in Ohio?

Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 29, 2010

Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller, Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching, (McKinsey and Co., September 2010).

This thoughtful McKinsey report examines the advantages and feasibility of boosting the quality of the American teacher workforce by attracting more of it from the top third of the college class. Today, the authors estimate, we draw 23 percent of new teachers from this upper-tier—and in high-poverty schools, just 14 percent. After the requisite extolling of the benefits of having smarter and better educated teachers (especially for needy kids) and reminding us that high-achieving countries do far better than the U.S. at making the teaching occupation appealing to high-ability people, the authors break into the meat of their report. Here, they offer a number of strategies for upping the reputation of U.S. teachers. Some are costly (e.g., boosting salaries overall); others are less expensive in dollar terms but challenging in other ways. (For example, they suggest making high-need schools safer and better led, giving performance bonuses to top-achieving instructors, and focusing on “turnaround” and/or STEM schools.) Cautiously, the paper points to possible offsetting savings, such as targeting a larger share of the school dollar on instruction; they estimate that we could redirect $50 billion by simply lowering our high “non-educator expenditures”(e.g. admin, transport, and ancillary services) to the OECD average. They are even so bold as to suggest larger classes and more extensive use of instructional

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Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching

Reinventing Alternative Education: An Assessment of Current State Policy and How to Improve It

September 29, 2010

Cheryl Almeida, Cecilia Le, Adria Steinberg, Roy Cervantes
Jobs for the Future
September 2010 

This report from Jobs for the Future analyzed all 50 states’ and the District of Columbia’s policies that guide their overall approach to and operation of alternative education programs. The authors, through a review of state policies and legislation, examined the extent to which each state’s alternative education policies incorporated seven elements that comprise what JFS deems a model alternative education program. States should:

1. Broaden eligibility to reach beyond the traditional “at risk’ student.
2. Clarify state and district rules and responsibilities to establish quality standards for the operation and management of such programs.
3. Establish a separate accountability system that holds alternative programs to common state standards and takes into account circumstances unique to alternative education.
4. Increase support for innovation by allowing alternative educations models to replicate throughout the state.
5. Ensure high-quality among staff by creating incentives for such professionals to work in alternative programs and requiring ongoing professional development.
6. Establish outside community partnerships to provide a range of academic and support services to alternative students.
7. Create a funding formula that provides alternative education programs with a greater amount of funding than received by traditional programs through state and district per-pupil payout.

What the report found was not surprising: overall states have a lot of work left to do when it comes to educating students through alternative programs.  The District of Columbia and 40 states have implemented at least one of the policy elements but

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Reinventing Alternative Education: An Assessment of Current State Policy and How to Improve It

Stuck in the Middle: Impacts of Grade Configuration in Public Schools

Nick Joch / September 29, 2010

Jonah E. Rockoff & Benjamin B. Lockwood
Columbia Business School
Fall 2010

Middle schools aren’t working. At least, that’s the conclusion made by Jonah E. Rockoff and Benjamin B. Lockwood in their new study “Stuck in the Middle,” featured in the latest edition of Education Next. The pair tracked data from approximately 200,000 of New York City’s middle schoolers on their journey from grade three through grade eight during the 1998-99 through 2007-08 school years. They found that both mathematics and English language arts test scores of students who had attended K-5 or K-6 schools, then went on to attend a middle school, dropped significantly in both English and math in the students’ first year of middle school compared to their peers who attended K-8 schools. Their scores continued to drop at least through grade eight, the highest grade level the study covered, although at the significantly lower rate per year.

The researchers suggest two reasons for this disparity. First, cohort sizes (the number of students in a given grade level at a particular school; note – this is not related to class sizes) in middle schools were more than double those in K-8 schools, and the researchers hypothesize that large cohort sizes may therefore be detrimental to student achievement. Further, surveys of parents and students at the schools examined in the study indicate that both the students at K-8 schools and their parents were more satisfied than their middle

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Stuck in the Middle: Impacts of Grade Configuration in Public Schools

Did you get a raise for not dying this summer?

Emmy L. Partin / September 29, 2010

That question, and others, is posed on 25 billboards throughout greater Cincinnati.

The Michigan-based Education Action Group bought the billboard space in southwest Ohio as part of a public awareness campaign to highlight what it sees as wasteful spending by Ohio school districts.?? Earlier this year, EAG issued a report, Ohio Teacher Contracts: The Black Hole of School Spending, that lifted up areas of district spending related to personnel costs that EAG believes should be eliminated or scaled back???from excessive sick days to automatic step increases in salary.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that nearly one-third of the area's school districts are seeking local tax increases on the November 2 ballot.?? EAG's vice president Kyle Olson told the Enquirer:

We're not getting in the middle of tax levies or anything, but if the district is coming to you as a taxpayer asking for more money, or whatever the case may be, we're saying why don't you look at the way the districts are currently spending their money to make a decision about whether they need more. The public has to demand change. If the public doesn't demand change why should anything change.

You can see mock-ups of the four billboards here.

- Emmy Partin

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Did you get a raise for not dying this summer?

85,000 students eligible for Ohio's EdChoice Scholarship

September 29, 2010

This summer it became evident that Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship (a statewide voucher program for students in low-performing schools) would reach its cap and students would be waitlisted. Currently the EdChoice voucher program has a 14,000 student cap, which has never been reached until this year. Read the full post here. 

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85,000 students eligible for Ohio's EdChoice Scholarship

If there were a button, we'd "like" Facebook CEO's investment in Newark schools

Nick Joch / September 29, 2010

• Social networking and school reform. An unlikely pair? Not any more, given Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $100 million to struggling public schools in Newark, New Jersey. Check out the New York Times’ coverage of the announcement here.
• Speaking of hundreds of millions of dollars, among other organizations directing new attention and funding to education worldwide is the World Bank, which recently unveiled a five-year, $750 million initiative to help make universal primary education a reality. In the eyes of many, however, this number falls far short of the need.
• President Obama, John Legend, Brian Williams, Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr., and others took the stage at New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza this week for Education Nation, a forum on how to best address the complex educational challenges America faces in the 21^st century. Check out the website, where there are enough videos to keep you busy for hours.
• Educational innovations are undoubtedly all the rage these days, but even in the current climate, Quest Learning’s new strategy stands out. Video games, not blackboards and books, are the educational tools of the future, says Katie Salen, the video game developer-turned school administrator who created Quest. Adolescents, rejoice.
• Grade skipping has fallen out of favor with many school districts in recent years, but according to Jay Mathews in his recent Washington Post column, it’s time the idea came back into fashion. Gifted students,

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  If there were a button, we'd "like" Facebook CEO's investment in Newark schools

Stretching the School Dollar: Insights for the Buckeye State

September 29, 2010

 Spending on K-12 education has increased continuously over the last several decades, while achievement remains flat. What can districts and schools do, especially now that Ohio faces a $6-8 billion budget cliff in the next biennium? District superintendents, treasurers, lawmakers, policymakers, and education reformers gathered September 27 in Columbus to find answers at Fordham’s Stretching the School Dollar event (read about the book, published by Harvard Education Press, here). To discuss smart cost savings, we invited economist Marguerite Roza, Steven Wilson of the NYC-based charter management organization Ascend Learning, and Fordham’s own Eric Osberg and Terry Ryan. The overwhelming consensus? The time is ripe for dramatic reforms, a complete overhaul of how we view teacher compensation/benefits as well as class-size reduction policies, a rethinking of online learning and productivity in education, and more. You can view the panelists' Power Point presentation here. And be sure to check out the full video of our event, “Stretching the School Dollar: Insights for the Buckeye State,” online here.

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Stretching the School Dollar: Insights for the Buckeye State

New Fordham report: Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010

September 29, 2010

Today Fordham released results from a national survey of education school professors in the US. Cracks in the Ivory Tower finds that more than eighty percent of the nation’s ed professors think it’s “absolutely essential” that teachers be lifelong learners, and are more likely to view the role of an educator as “facilitator of learning” (84 percent) rather than “conveyor of knowledge” (11 percent). While not entirely surprising that most education professors espouse these philosophies, it stands in stark (and somewhat worrisome) contrast with their views on other education concepts. For example, only 24 percent say it’s “absolutely essential” that teachers understand how to work with state standards, tests, and accountability systems. In terms of hot-button issues, some results are encouraging: 83 percent of professors of education show support for financial incentives for teachers working in challenging schools, 66 percent think that current teacher prep programs “need many changes” and 63 percent think programs like Teach For America are overall a good idea. Read more of the findings here.

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New Fordham report: Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010