Just how potent are teacher unions?

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. , Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 5, 2012

Hostess Brands is set to liquidate its 82-year-old company because it was unable to meet the salary demands of its unionized employees. Roughly 18,500 workers will lose their jobs because 5,500 members of various bakers’ unions can’t appreciate that a tightening economy, stiffening competition, and an increasingly health-conscious America mean fewer Twinkies for all.

Hostess is doing what other private-sector organizations (such as the auto, airline, and steel industries) have done in response to fiscally unsustainable contracts with — or contract demands from — their unions: either throw in the towel and quit altogether, or use drastic measures such as bankruptcy proceedings to reboot the terms (and costs) of employment.

Private-sector firms can do things like that. But what happens when one’s core business is educating 55 million young Americans via the public schools? They have unions, too, unions that typically make demands that are as damaging to educational quality and affordability as those of their private-sector counterparts. But public-sector endeavors can’t just shut down — or declare bankruptcy.

Public-sector endeavors can’t just shut down — or declare bankruptcy

Education today employs more unionized staff than any other industry, public or private. Between them, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have some 4.6 million members, a combination of active teachers and other public-school employees, college faculty and staff, retirees, and students. (Meanwhile, membership rates in private-sector unions continue to fall, from 37 percent in 1952 to 6 percent

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Just how potent are teacher unions?

Changing One Million Lives

Terry Ryan / December 5, 2012

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), a top-notch group of entities that are serious about sponsoring quality charter schools, issued a call this week for authorizers and state laws to be more proactive in closing failing schools and opening great new ones. They call it the One Million Lives campaign.

At the kickoff, NACSA President Greg Richmond said, “In some places, accountability unfortunately has been part of the charter model in name only. If charters are going to succeed in helping improve public education, accountability must go from being rhetoric to reality.” He then called for a policy agenda aimed at achieving both smarter growth and stronger accountability in these ways:

• Establishing strong statewide authorizers that promote both high-quality growth and accountability,
• Writing into law standards for authorizers that are based on NACSA’s excellent Principles & Standards for Quality Charter School Authorizing,
• Placing performance expectations for charter renewal into state law,
• Empowering authorizers to close schools that fail to meet the expectations set in their charter contracts,
• Holding authorizers accountable for the performance of their schools and their authorizing practices, and
• Creating automatic school closure laws that make it impossible for education failure to persist forever.

Ohio, where Fordham is an authorizer (of eleven charters today, more tomorrow), is an excellent case in point. The Buckeye State has had more than its fair share of charter-school failures, and there is ample room for improvement in the state’s charter laws and school performance. When NACSA and

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Changing One Million Lives

School leader profile: Dr. Glenda Brown

Ellen Belcher / December 5, 2012

Introduction

In both our role as researchers and as a charter school authorizer we have come to appreciate over and over again the critical importance of school leaders in making schools great. In our “Needles in a Haystack: Lessons from Ohio’s high-performing, high-need urban schools” report from 2010 we identified school leaders as one of the keys to these schools’ success. More recently, Public Agenda studied nine high-performing, high-need, schools in Ohio and they reported at the successful schools “principals lead with a strong and clear vision . . . and never lose sight” of their goals. What’s more, “these principals earn trust and respect by engaging and supporting their staff in building the structures, practices and confidence necessary to fulfill this vision.”

School leaders drive success for their buildings, and in the schools we authorize (currently 11 buildings serving about 2,700 students) the school leaders are pivotal in leading school success and improvement efforts. There is no harder job than running a successful school building for high-poverty students. Yet, there are school leaders across the state and the nation who do it day-in and day-out, and too few get recognized for their great work. We are fortunate that some of these leaders work in schools that Fordham sponsors and it is our privilege to tell a little bit of their stories and the impact they are having on students in Ohio.

We enlisted Ellen Belcher, veteran journalist and former Dayton

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School leader profile: Dr. Glenda Brown

Fordham supports HB 555

Aaron Churchill , Terry Ryan / December 5, 2012

The Ohio Senate Education Committee this week heard testimony and debated the merits of House Bill 555 (HB 555), legislation that would overhaul Ohio's school accountability system, if passed. The legislation has passed through the Ohio House of Representatives and is currently under review by the Senate. Revamping Ohio’s accountability system is required under Ohio's ESEA Flexibility request.

Most significantly, HB 555 proposes a change in how the Buckeye State rates schools' academic performance. Under current policy, Ohio's public school buildings and districts (charter and traditional) are given a rating from "Academic Emergency" to "Excellent with Distinction." HB 555 would do away with these designations and move to an A to F rating system. The new grading system would take effect beginning in the 2014-15 school year. In addition to this change, HB 555 would also revise the components and weights of a school's Report Card, enact an accountability framework for dropout recovery charter schools, and establish a rating system for charter school sponsors.

Fordham's vice president Terry Ryan testified in favor of HB 555, arguing that the legislation represents a step forward in Ohio's accountability system. You can read Terry's Senate testimony here, along with an analysis of how the implementation of the PARCC exams (tests aligned to the Common Core) may affect the state's and districts’ proficiency rates in 2014-15.

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Fordham supports HB 555

Fordham mobility report makes news

Aaron Churchill / December 5, 2012

The recent student mobility report by Community Research Partners and the Fordham Institute has made headlines across the Buckeye State and nationally. Press coverage on student mobility has come from the state’s largest newspapers in Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown, and from a few of the state’s midsize news outlets in cities such as Lima and Zanesville.  Both Education Week and the Huffington Post also reported on the study.

We’d encourage you to dig into these news articles, as well as the full report.

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Fordham mobility report makes news

Getting Down to Dollars and Cents: What Do School Districts Spend to Deliver Student-Centered Learning?

Aaron Churchill / December 5, 2012

In this report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), researchers examined 12 high schools around the country that educate students according to student-centered learning (SCL) principles. (CRPE included two Ohio high schools: Cleveland’s MC² STEM Academy and Federal Hocking High School.) CRPE identifies and defines, in detail, five principles of SCL: (1) personalized instruction, (2) authentic instruction, (3) mastery-based assessment, (4) learning that reaches beyond the school walls, and (5) learning models that change the school schedule.

The researchers pose two practical questions about high schools that deploy SCL principles. First, does SCL generate higher costs than traditional approaches to schooling? And second, do schools that use SCL allocate their resources (time and money) differently than traditional schools?

With respect to the first question, the researchers found that, no, SCL high schools don’t necessarily spend more or less than traditional high schools. With respect to the second question, the researchers found that, yes, SCL high schools allocate resources differently than traditional high schools. SCL schools, for example, spend more on classroom instruction and less on administration. In fact, CRPE researchers found that one school employed just one part-time administrator and hired four unpaid interns to perform administrative duties, which freed it to spend more on classroom instruction.

CRPE concludes by recommending “hard budget constraints for schools and then giving schools the resource flexibility they need.” School leaders in SCL schools agreed that flexibility in allocating time and money is a

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Getting Down to Dollars and Cents: What Do School Districts Spend to Deliver Student-Centered Learning?

Strength in Numbers: State Spending in K-12 Assessment Systems

Jeff Murray / December 5, 2012

With the imminent arrival of the Common Core and its associated assessment requirements in 45 states and the District of Columbia by 2014-15, much concern has been generated about the cost to states of all of this innovation. The prevailing concern is that states will be forced to spend excessively to change and upgrade their existing standards and associated assessments.

The new report by Matthew Chingos, Strength in Numbers: State Spending on K-12 Assessment Systems, published by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings notes that it is actually difficult to determine whether states participating in the two consortia of Common Core assessments (PARCC and Smarter Balance) will face higher or lower costs for new assessment systems primarily because the costs of their existing systems are difficult to calculate. Using contract information between states and testing vendors, Chingos attempts to merge disparate data into overall and per-pupil costs for those states and to make as close a comparison between states as possible.

Ohio’s current per-pupil cost for all assessment activities was calculated at $40, placing it 11th out of 45 jurisdictions for which data were available, and well above the national average of $27 per student. The key factor identified that affects per-pupil cost most consistently was student population size: “The most conservative estimates,” Chingos remarks, “indicate that moving from a state with about 100,000 students…to one with about 1,000,000 students is associated with a decrease in per-pupil assessment

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Strength in Numbers: State Spending in K-12 Assessment Systems

Buckeye students set for success

December 5, 2012

• Three Ohio education initiatives are competing in the national $400 million Race to the Top competition. Reynoldsburg, Cleveland Metropolitan Schools, and the Ohio Appalachia Collaborative are among 61 finalists who stand to win five to forty million dollars in rewards.

• "We are basically telling every child who enters kindergarten in Cuyahoga County that we believe you can go to college." These are the words of executive Ed FitzGerald, according to a recent Plain-Dealer article, who has launched a savings account program for Cuyahoga County students.

• Ohio placed eighth in the nation under a more rigorous graduation rate mandated by the U.S. Department of Education. The new method provides a more uniform comparison for states, and shows that many have room for improvement.

• College-bound students should take some time to browse the internet. According to the Dayton Daily News, the Ohio Board of Regents has designed a website to help students plan for college in efforts to support higher graduation rates.

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Buckeye students set for success