Ohio's K-12 system slips from 5th to 11th, but that's beside the point

Emmy L. Partin , Jamie Davies O'Leary / January 11, 2011

Yesterday, Education Week unveiled its 15^th annual “Quality Counts” rating of state school systems, with Ohio earning a B- and ranking 11^th nationally. This year’s theme is education and the economy – a “detailed portrait of how states and districts are navigating the postrecession environment while seeking to maintain the momentum of standards-based school reform.”

While the theme is right, this characterization is somewhat misleading considering that school budgets continued to be propped up this school year with a large injection of federal ARRA funds and then a dose of Ed Jobs money to stave off teacher layoffs. Education Week’s attempt to frame the analysis as “postrecession” may be right chronologically, but in K-12 education at least, the worst is yet to come. 

A year ago, state education leaders were touting Ohio’s fifth-place ranking, the Buckeye State’s best since Education Week began ranking states in 2006, as validation of the education reforms made in House Bill 1.  Ohio’s successful Race to the Top proposal centers on moving Ohio from “fifth to first.” (Never mind that Quality Counts represents just one of dozens of ways to evaluate states’ K-12 education systems, and a better goal might center on actual improvements to student achievement rather than achieving a ranking relative to peer states.)

We were critical of claims a year ago that Quality Counts was the be all and end all of analyses. This year, we’re even more critical given

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Ohio's K-12 system slips from 5th to 11th, but that's beside the point

New teacher contract in the Queen City

Jamie Davies O'Leary / January 11, 2011

After a year of “tedious” negotiations, strong recommendations from The New Teacher Project, and a considerable amount of hype (mostly from board members or union officials, so consider the source) that the contract was “historic” and “the most progressive home-grown reform” in the country, a new teacher contract for Cincinnati Public Schools has been ratified.

The draft agreement between Cincinnati Public Schools and the 2,300-member Cincinnati Federation of Teachers makes some positive steps in the right direction, yet falls short in several areas – specifically those related to personnel policies. To be fair, the blame for this shouldn’t fall squarely on the Queen City; Ohio law prevents Cincinnati – and any other district seeking reforms – from going the distance on groundbreaking policy ideas.  

As far as this contract, goes, here’s a breakdown of positive elements and areas that fall short, as well as components for which success will depend on implementation.

The good

Performance-based awards are available at the school, team, and individual level and are based partially on student achievement and growth, as well as available to teachers taking on increased workloads (e.g., teacher evaluators).

An additional two days have been added to the school year. Among schools designated as high need, there may be opportunities to further increase the school year, lengthen school days, etc.

As Superintendent Mary

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New teacher contract in the Queen City

Ignoring our own advice

Terry Ryan / January 11, 2011

A recent report from our colleagues at the Fordham Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Are Bad Schools Immortal?, shows the folly of school turnaround efforts – only 1.4 percent of district schools and less than 1 percent of charters that have undergone turnaround efforts have done so successfully. And if the statistics aren’t bleak enough, expert opinion is even gloomier.

Ronald Brady concluded in 2003 that “Success is not the norm…the intervention experience is marked more by valiant effort than notable success.” More recently, Andy Smarick, former Fordham staffer and now senior official in New Jersey’s education department, spent a year studying and reporting on the failure of school turnaround efforts and concluded glumly, “The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our worst schools.”

Despite all this, in Ohio Fordham (which authorizes charter schools in the Buckeye State) is working closely with board members of a Dayton elementary charter school to try to turn that school around. The school has failed to make any academic gains for the last three years. Moreover, it could well face automatic closure under state law at the end of the 2010-11 school year if it is again rated F and fails to make growth in reading and math according to the state’s value-added metrics.  

Why not just shutter this school? (It’s not because Fordham doesn’t have the spine to do it – we’ve closed schools

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Ignoring our own advice

Slow and Uneven Progress in Narrowing Gaps

January 11, 2011

This report by the Center on Education Policy looks at student progress in the years since the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. 

Specifically, it examines whether states are increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps that exist between students of different races, ethnicities, incomes, and genders.   In order to determine this CEP gathered data on state tests from 2002 to 2009 for grades four, eight, and high-school tested grades, along with NAEP data from 2005-2009.

The analysis points to several trends.

Achievement gaps are large and persistent. Gaps between white and African American students remain, with African American students scoring 20 to 30 points lower than their white peers in 2009.  Furthermore, Asian students also performed highly on state achievement tests, ousting white students in most states.

For most student groups, gaps on state tests have narrowed since 2002.  Gaps on state tests narrowed more often for African American and Latino students than it did for low-income and male students.  Another fact worth noting is that achievement gaps narrowed in a majority of states between African American and white students, and between Latino and white students. 

While progress in narrowing the gap is encouraging, continuing at the current rate of progress would take many years to close the gap. Although gaps between subgroups have been narrowing across the country they are doing so at different rates.  Latino/white student gaps have narrowed more rapidly than any

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Slow and Uneven Progress in Narrowing Gaps

Resetting Race to the Top: Why the Future of Competition Depends on Improving the Scoring Process

January 11, 2011

In this policy brief, TNTP lauds Race to the Top for spurring more statewide reform last year in education “than in the previous two decades,” attributing its success to the clear priorities and guidance for applicant states, and the transparency established by making applications available for public review.

However, TNTP criticizes the ambiguity and subjectivity involved in the review process, and identifies several areas that must be improved should RttT be reauthorized for a third round:

1. Lack of differentiation in some areas of scoring, such as in the “Great Teachers and Leaders” section, where 86 percent of second-round applicants received high points and no state received low points. 
2. General rating inflation, especially from Round 1 to 2.
3. Deviation from the scoring guidance.
4. Excessive influence of outlier ratings on final scores, most notably for state like Louisiana, which many commentators believed deserved an award.
5. Inconsistent scoring from state to state. For example, Illinois enacted five pieces of education reform legislation and secured participation from districts representing 81 percent of students in the state.  Ohio secured significantly less participation from districts representing only 62 percent of students in the state, and had not enacted legislation to the degree of Illinois.  In this section Ohio outscored Illinois by six points. 

TNTP suggests that these issues allowed for possibly less-deserving states to win at the expense of states truly committed to reform. 

States were also not rewarded for their depth of commitment to education reform.  States such

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Resetting Race to the Top: Why the Future of Competition Depends on Improving the Scoring Process

The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers

Nick Joch / January 11, 2011

The education community has long emphasized that “one size does not fit all” for students, but what about for teachers? In a new white paper, The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers, researchers from CRPE propose customizing teachers’ benefit plans as a cost-stabilizing measure for districts. Currently, most districts offer teachers a single benefit plan with two options: opt-in or opt-out.  “Cafeteria-style” benefit plans, however, would give each teacher a set amount of money to spend on a wide variety of benefits, allowing the teacher, for example, to purchase a dental but not an optical plan. The teacher would keep any unspent money as a cash bonus.

The paper proposes three funding models for such plans:

• Model 1: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a baseline dollar amount which increases by a given percentage each year. The baseline dollar amount is negotiated in advance and may not be re-negotiated from year to year, but the yearly percentage increase may be re-negotiated.
• Model 2: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a percentage of the teacher’s salary. Salaries may be negotiated from year to year, but the percentage reserved for benefits may not.
• Model 3: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a fixed dollar amount, which may be negotiated from year to year.

Although these models are not likely to save districts money, they may introduce a new level of stability to districts’ yearly budgets. The first model, for example, would

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The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers

On track to be a math powerhouse by??? 2070?

Nick Joch / January 11, 2011

• Doctors, lawyers, and … teachers? If Democrats for Education Reform gets its way, this list of occupations will no longer prompt the question of which one doesn’t belong. Professionalizing teaching is the focus of the group’s latest white paper, Ticket to Teach, which proposes raising teacher salaries (to a minimum of $65,000) and recruiting the nation’s top students to teacher training programs, among other ideas. Check out the paper for yourself here.
• Is a choice between a bad school and a worse school really a choice? Not according to the American Enterprise Institute’s latest policy analysis, Choice without Options: Why School Choice Is Less Than It Seems in Washington, D.C. Many DC parents have to choose between a failing local school and an almost-failing school a couple zip codes away, the report’s authors say. Find out why here.
• The Sunshine State is brighter than ever after the gains educational achievement of its elementary school students, as reported by former Governor Jeb Bush in the Wall Street Journal.  According to Florida State reading tests almost half of Florida’s fourth graders were illiterate in 1998; today, 72 percent of fourth graders can read.  What led to this dramatic improvement? Click here to find out.
• Students in the United States are falling behind globally in math, reading, and science according to the newest PISA scores, as Fordham’s Checker Finn lamented several weeks ago. Our own Janie Scull looked at Ohio’s performance on

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  On track to be a math powerhouse by??? 2070?