Current school data scandal is an opportunity to improve Ohio’s education accountability system

Terry Ryan / August 8, 2012

Rigorous academic standards and high-stakes accountability for schools and educators alike are important for school improvement efforts. The states where students have made the most significant academic gains over the last decade (for example, Massachusetts and Florida) have had high academic standards, assessments aligned to those standards – complete with high cut scores, and transparent systems for sharing school and student results through district and school “report cards.” The fact is standardized testing has proven to be the best, most objective tool for measuring both student and teacher success.

This is important to remember as Ohio deals with a widening scandal around allegations of “data fudging” and “manipulation of attendance records” to improve test scores and school report cards. Some Buckeye State educators and lawmakers have suggested that the underlying problem here is accountability, or that the state’s report card has taken on “way too much importance.” Accountability, however, is not the problem. The Columbus Dispatch editorial board got it exactly right when writing:

It’s true that the report card is short of perfect; it is an attempt to tell an extremely complex story – how effective a school district is, allowing for all of its advantages and disadvantages – in a few numbers and phrases. But even so, it is a valuable tool to ensure that educators strive for improvement. To back off now would be harmful.

In the short term, the state must investigate these allegations; and if

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Current school data scandal is an opportunity to improve Ohio’s education accountability system

Attempting to solve financial disaster by outsourcing schools – is Ohio next?

August 8, 2012

America’s states, cities, and schools are hurting big time financially. This is not news but the fact that the bad news keeps coming especially hurts. For example, just released unemployment numbers show an increase to 8.3 percent as American households lost 195,000 jobs. The underemployment rate – which includes those who are underemployed or who are working part time rose to 15 percent. This economic pain has struck education hard, leaving public school budgets strapped for cash and making business-as-usual more and more difficult. Districts around the country are now starting to take some drastic, and sometimes controversial, actions.

Highland Parks Public Schools, a small district in Michigan that is one the state’s lowest-performers, is on the verge of financial collapse. It made news last week when officials there announced plans to outsource its schools to a private for-profit charter school operator. The district handed over operations to The Leona Group which runs 54 schools in five states; 22 of its schools are in Michigan. The Leona Group will now oversee decisions around the hiring of staff, school curriculum and instruction, as well as school facility and maintenance issues.

What led up to such drastic action and are more districts right behind Highland Parks Public Schools? A perfect storm of low enrollment, poor fiscal management, and some of the worst academic results in the state prompted Highland Parks Public Schools to take bold action. Since 2006 district enrollment has

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Attempting to solve financial disaster by outsourcing schools – is Ohio next?

Why teachers are under the microscope

Aaron Churchill / August 8, 2012

Teacher talent is squarely at the frontier of education reform. Last week, The New Teacher Project issued a report that scrutinized teacher retention practices, finding that many top-shelf teachers—especially those in poorer schools where the need for effective teachers is the greatest—leave to teach in better schools, or leave the profession altogether.

In 2010, McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, published a blistering report of America’s teaching profession. McKinsey found that, in comparison to countries with high-flying education systems, America has a woeful teacher workforce: too many American teachers come from the bottom of their graduating college class, while too few top-performing college students consider teaching—much less enter the profession.

With these teacher quality issues in mind, I wanted to see how future grad-school education students fared on their GREs, the grad-school admissions exam. Educational Testing Service (ETS) administers the GRE, and in its summary statistics report, ETS breaks down test results by the test-taker's intended major—with education as a possible selection.

How did America’s future educators fare? Consider figure 1 which compares the average GRE score by intended grad-school major across two exam sections: quantitative (math) and verbal. On the left, education majors rank dead last in average quantitative score, even behind mathematically-challenged English and philosophy majors (they’re part of the humanities category). On the right side of figure 1, we observe that education majors rank in a tie for third-to-last in verbal score, falling well behind their

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Why teachers are under the microscope

Louisiana’s voucher accountability plan demonstrates it is possible to have school choice AND quality control

Adam Emerson / August 8, 2012

Louisiana recently submitted a proposal to that state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that calls for school choice and quality control in the state’s voucher program-- two words that have not been paired together enough here in Ohio. Specifically, the plan calls for a practical accountability system for the state’s voucher program. Louisiana’s K-12 scholarship program awards students who meet a residency and income requirement and who attend a low-performing school a scholarship to attend a private school of their choice. Currently approximately 5,000 students are using a public voucher in Louisiana.

The accountability plan, which would be the first of its kind in the nation, would introduce an accountability system based on a “sliding scale” (i.e. those schools enrolling more voucher students would be held to a higher level of accountability-- an idea Fordham proposed three years ago). Under the new system schools enrolling an average of greater than ten students per grade or forty or more students enrolled in tested grades will have their test scores reported. Schools will then be given points based on their performance, similar to the ones given to the public schools. Schools who receive low scores in the second year or any year after that will not be permitted to enroll any additional scholarship students for the next year.

While states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin have demonstrated greater transparency around student achievement data for voucher students, Louisiana’s proposed plan would

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Louisiana’s voucher accountability plan demonstrates it is possible to have school choice AND quality control

Fordham Foundation sponsoring three new schools this year

August 8, 2012

The Fordham Foundation is excited to announce that as of July 1 we have three new schools in our sponsorship portfolio. DECA PREP, Columbus Collegiate Academy – West, and Village Preparatory School::Woodland Hills Campus are all now part of Fordham’s sponsorship efforts. These three schools join eight others that we already sponsor, bringing the total to eleven schools throughout the state of Ohio. All three of these schools stem from other high-performing schools, and we have full confidence that they will provide a great education to youngsters in Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland.

Here is a quick look at each of the new schools.

DECA PREP - Dayton, Ohio
DECA PREP will open this fall as a new K-6 school in Dayton designed to immerse first-generation college-goers into a rigorous and structured elementary academic setting to ensure that they will be successful in high school and college. DECA PREP will incorporate components of the academic model of its sister school, the highly successful Dayton Early College Academy (DECA), which serves grades 7-12 in Dayton and has produced tremendous results over the years. In 2010-11 DECA received an Excellent with Distinction designation from the Ohio Department of Education (the highest possible rating) and it continually outperforms Dayton Public Schools. For example, the graph below demonstrates DECA’s performance compared to Dayton Public Schools in tent- grade math proficiency in 2010-11.

Source: Ohio Department of Education

DECA

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Fordham Foundation sponsoring three new schools this year

Blended learning: innovating the teaching process

Aaron Churchill / August 8, 2012

Innovation: It’s an education reform cliché. But what is innovation, really?

Ask most people about innovation and they’ll probably talk about products—airplanes, laptops, smartphones. But innovation also refers to process. That’s what blended learning is for education. It turns the process of teaching upside down.

Late last month, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in partnership with Knowledge Works and Reynoldsburg City Schools, welcomed Anthony Kim, founder and CEO of Education Elements, to Ohio to speak with local educators and district leaders. Founded in 2010, Education Elements is a California-based company that advises schools on how to adopt and implement blended learning models. Education Elements has assisted charters (KIPP Los Angeles), traditional public school districts (Houston Independent School District), and parochial schools (Mission Dolores Academy in San Francisco).

Kim began the conversation with an audience that included superintendents, teachers, lawmakers, and state board members by describing his blended learning model. According to Kim, blended learning has three goals:

• To differentiate teaching by breaking the classroom into smaller groups
• To increase the collection and use of student achievement data to improve teaching
• To create more efficient schools

How does blended learning achieve these goals?

First, blended learning can address some of the challenges of teaching students who read, write, and do math at different levels. Blended learning deploys a classroom rotation model: students are first broken into groups and then these groups rotate through different work stations throughout the school day.

Kim presented a three-station model, in which station

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Blended learning: innovating the teaching process

Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession

David Zheng / August 8, 2012

Over the past decade teachers have seen numerous reform efforts aimed at changing the status quo on teacher evaluations, pay, and tenure among other things. More often than not teachers are not directly involved in these reform efforts, leaving a key voice out of the process. A recent report by Education Sector looks at how teachers feel about these teacher-related reforms, and about unions and their involvement in reform efforts. A nationally representative survey of a randomly selected group of 1,101 K-12 public school teachers was conducted by the FDR Group to obtain the data. The questions for the survey were developed and refined through four diverse focus groups.

Significant findings in the report include that teachers support reforms such as:

• teacher evaluations, as long as the evaluation methods are perceived as fair
• pay reforms for factors teachers have more control over (e.g., working in tough neighborhoods and specializing in hard-to-fill subjects as opposed to student test scores)
• restructuring tenure laws that make firing ineffective teachers too difficult

For traditional union activities such as protecting their jobs and negotiating salaries and benefits, teachers viewed union involvement to be significant and favorable. In addition, teachers want unions to be involved in other activities which they generally do not participate in such as providing support for instruction and career development, and helping to reform teacher evaluation and dismissal.

Although the study surveys teachers at a national level, many of the findings are likely applicable to Ohio. Last

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Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession

No Child Left Behind Waiver: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications

August 8, 2012

Better late than never. Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owens of the Center for American Progress have now looked at the twenty-seven second-round waiver applications that states submitted to Secretary Duncan (as Ayers had done with the first round waivers in December 2011), seeking recurrent themes across three of the Department’s four priority areas: standards and assessments, accountability systems, and teaching and leadership. (“Duplication and burden” was not included as few states addressed it in their waiver applications.) Most importantly, they found that “the waiver process itself did not stimulate new innovations aside from accountability.” What’s more, even within this sphere, nine states opted to follow one of the Department’s prescribed options for accountability, and many others set similar goals, slightly tweaked—bringing into question the level of “innovation” that is actually occurring. (This is probably due to the feds’ tight leash on waivers at least as much to lack of imagination in the states.) CAP then uses its own policy priorities to rate the states’ applications and offer recommendations. Among them: The Department of Education should ask for more detail on aspects of state plans and should establish a clearinghouse to document and share tools, strategies, and lessons of implementation. There’s much helpful background here—and much detail about individual states’ waivers. But read with a discerning eye, remembering that CAP, during this election year, is not about to ding the Obama administration.

Jeremy Ayers and Isabel

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No Child Left Behind Waiver: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications

Tightening the belts of K-12 education spending

Emmy L. Partin / August 8, 2012

Two years ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan famously warned of the impact that the Great Recession would have on K-12 schools: “For the next several years, preschool, K–12, and postsecondary educators are likely to face the challenge of doing more with less.” At the same time he was bullish about the opportunities presented to schools by this “new normal”:

My message is that this challenge can, and should, be embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements. I believe enormous opportunities for improving the productivity of our education system lie ahead if we are smart, innovative, and courageous in rethinking the status quo.

Thanks to federal stimulus dollars, most Ohio school districts have not yet fully adjusted their practices to the new normal – though some are doing admirable work in this area, nor have they sought major increases in productivity. But sooner rather than later they will have to. Governor Kasich is crafting a school-funding plan, to be unveiled early next year – and the legislature is doing its own work on the topic. But no one believes more money will be poured into public education in the next state budget, as the governor is committed to not raising taxes or “growing government” and as Medicaid and other state obligations are eating up more and more of the state’s budget. Further, downturned property values mean less local revenue for schools.

So, as districts grapple with how to spend less without diminishing quality,

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Tightening the belts of K-12 education spending

Supporting the cause you believe in

August 8, 2012

• A single woman will affect lots of people for years to come. Sandra Crane, a 75-year-old volunteer Sunday school teacher from Michigan, is using her life savings (about $150,000) to build a school in Uganda. Crane confidently says that she doesn’t regret her decision, even after having to work two part-time jobs to support herself.
• After seeing the viral video of a 68-year-old bus driver being bullied by middle school boys, one viewer decided he’d seen enough. Max Sidorov, a Canadian-born graduate student, has collaborated with the bus driver and a director to launch the “7 Million Acts of Love” campaign to put an end to bullying. In a true act of humility, funds will help fund free counseling to victims and bullying awareness efforts.
• Parents have taken school development into their own hands in the Ottawa Hills School District near Toledo. The Ottawa Hills Schools Parent Association raised $30,000 throughout the school year to support several projects including a projector, playground equipment, cameras for high school journalism courses, and an automatic external defibrillator for the high school auditorium.
• Several Ohio school districts are sharing one superintendent, a practice The Plain-Dealer says is becoming more common. Jon Richie is taking on his third school district in Wayne country, saving the districts an estimated combined $350,000. Though it may not work everywhere, Gov. Kasich would like these types of arrangements to “bring more money into the classroom and less into

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  Supporting the cause you believe in

KIPPster of the year award and scholarship go to KIPP Journey student

August 8, 2012

Congratulations to Steve Antwi-Boasiako of Columbus who just last week was awarded The Doris Fisher KIPPster of the Year award along with a $10,000 college scholarship. The award and scholarship are given annually to six eighth graders from KIPP schools around the country. Recipients are selected based on their personal and academic success and impact on their communities.

Steve was a founding student of KIPP Journey Academy in Columbus, starting his KIPP career in 2008 after moving to the US from Ghana a year prior. When Steve joined KIPP he was significantly behind academically, however four years later Steve had made tremendous advancements in the classroom. His achievement levels went from limited to accelerated in reading and from proficient to advanced in math in just two years. This fall he will begin his high school career at St. Charles Preparatory High School where he received a full scholarship.

Congratulations to Steve and the entire KIPP Journey community on this exciting award.

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KIPPster of the year award and scholarship go to KIPP Journey student