Funding the future of K-12 education in Ohio

Terry Ryan / January 25, 2012

Part I: Funding crisis scales back Ohio highway projects, is education next?

Last week, Ohio’s newspapers warned, “Money crunch pushes Downtown roadwork way back,” “Local highway projects face delays,” and “Last phase of I-75/I-475 project stalls.” The financial problems facing the state have forced a major scaling back of transportation infrastructure projects that have been in planning for years. According to the Columbus Dispatch the Ohio Department of Transportation “proposes pushing back 34 projects that had been planned to start by 2017 to dates as far off as 2036.”

Jerry Wray, director of the Ohio Department of Transportation, captured the problem when he told the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Unfortunately, this is Ohio’s new reality. For too long, previous administrations have added more and more to the list of projects knowing that there were more projects than funds available. Their poor planning has put us in the position of making the tough decisions and delivering the bad news to many communities throughout the state that there is simply not enough money to fund their projects.

The woes facing Ohio’s highway improvement efforts raise questions about whether education in the Buckeye State faces similar problems. Have the state and local school districts promised more than they can deliver? Has education really adjusted itself to the “new normal,” or have we been buying time and hoping for new money to bail out schools, money that isn’t likely to show up?

Despite the fiscal woes, Ohio is in the midst of enacting laudable education reforms. The state is totally revamping its academic standards as part of

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Funding the future of K-12 education in Ohio

In-school credit union branches helping youngsters learn to manage money

Emmy L. Partin / January 25, 2012

An innovative partnership to teach money-management skills to students launched this month between a southern Ohio school district and a local credit union.

The Atomic Credit Union is establishing student-operated credit unions in the three Jackson City School District elementary schools. . The credit union offers free savings accounts for children that feature no fees or minimum balance requirements. The credit union will provide the first $2 deposit for each student who opens an account and students may then deposit as little as one cent at a time, to ensure that all students can participate, regardless of their family finances. One day a week will be designated as “credit union day” in the schools when students can make transactions, and fifth-grade students will learn real-world job skills working in the school credit union.

Atomic Credit Union President and CEO Tom Griffiths told the local Telegram newspaper, "For our children to be growing up and experiencing the worst economic times our country has seen since the Great Depression, I cannot think of a better ‘educational vehicle’ than that of a student-run financial institution."

Around the state, student-run credit unions are helping students learn to manage their money. Some high school branches offer virtually all of the services of traditional credit union branches. The FirstDay Financial Federal Credit Union branch at Miami Valley Career Technology Center in Dayton is open two full days per week. Student members can open accounts, make deposits, cash checks, and apply for ATM and debit cards, as well as a special “young adult” credit card. Additionally, they

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In-school credit union branches helping youngsters learn to manage money

Adoption was the easy part: Gauging Common Core implementation progress across the country

January 25, 2012

When the Common Core academic content standards were first introduced, most observers thought at best ten or 12 state would adopt them, and few thought it possible they’d be adopted by all but a handful of states. However, as a Fordham’s Now What? Imperatives and Options for “Common Core” Implementation and Governance pointed out back in 2010, the introduction and adoption of the standards was just the beginning: “Standards describe the destination that schools and students are supposed to reach, but by themselves they have little power to effect change. Much else needs to happen to successfully journey toward that destination.” It is that journey and progress toward the final destination that Education First documents in its new report, Preparing for Change.

As the Common Core efforts move into implementation, this report takes an important look at where states are in the process of ensuring a successful and seamless transition to the new academic standards. States were asked to answer questions about implementation as a part of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center’s annual state policy survey last summer. The survey questions were specifically designed to track the following areas of implementation: professional development, curriculum guides, and teacher evaluations. The survey reported data from all 50 states, although only 46 states and DC have formally adopted the standards.

How is Ohio doing when it comes to preparing for the full implementation of the Common Core standards by 2014?

According to this analysis, Ohio is on track to ensure that the Common Core is faithfully and properly implemented. The Buckeye State

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Adoption was the easy part: Gauging Common Core implementation progress across the country

Ohio’s “unique” approach to charter-district collaboration

Terry Ryan / January 25, 2012

Ohio is unique in its ability to turn the best of charter school theory and practice on its head. The most recent example comes from an Ohio school district that set up a charter school to offload test scores of low-performing students while making money for the district. According to the Columbus Dispatch the London City School District “will collect 80 percent of the $1.9 million in state dollars the charter will draw this year as payment for its services. It expects $700,000 of that to be profit.” The treasurer for both the charter school and the district told the paper that “district officials plan to continue the ‘revenue sharing’ method” despite the fact the school received an academic rating of F on its 2010-11 report card.

Last week the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) released its annual look at the state of charter schooling in the United States – Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2011. The theme of this year’s report is charter-district collaboration. For most of the 20-year history of charters in America, relations between school districts and charter upstarts were frosty at best and downright hostile at times. Or, as CRPE’s Robin Lake writes, “Districts were known to call the local fire marshal to make sure new charter schools could not get their fire permits approved in time to open or to delay the release of state funds so that charter schools couldn’t pay salaries.” Yet, it wasn’t a one-sided fight. As Lake observes, “Charter school

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Ohio’s “unique” approach to charter-district collaboration

Ohio’s ed system ranked 10th nationally, still merits just a C+

January 25, 2012

Ohio has gotten a lot of feedback on its education system in the past few weeks. On January 10, the U.S. Department of Education released a progress report detailing the Buckeye State’s accomplishments and challenges with Race to the Top funds. (Here is Fordham’s take on the report.) On January 12, Education Week released the national report card Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge –Education in a Competitive World.

Each year, Education Week chooses a theme that serves as the underlying narrative for the report, this year’s being “American Education from a Global Perspective.” The report “takes a critical look at the nation’s place among the world’s public education systems, with an eye toward providing policymakers with perspective on the extent to which high-profile international assessments can provide valid comparisons and lessons.”

States are graded on six criteria:
1.       Chance for Success: Looks at the broader educational environment: from family income and parent English proficiency to adult educational attainment, and takes into account the lingering effects of the ongoing recession. Ohio’s Score: C+ (78.4); Nation’s Score: C+ (77.6)

2.       K-12 Achievement: Examines school achievement: 4^th and 8^th grade scores on math and English tests, the influence of the poverty gap on test scores, and high school graduation rates. Ohio’s Score: C- (71.2); Nation’s Score: C- (69.7)

3.       School Finance: Looks at school funding equity across the state: the correlation between school funding and property-based wealth, per-pupil expenditure, and the percent of total taxable resources dedicated to K-12 education. Ohio’s Score: C (76.0); Nation’s Score: C (75.5)

4.       Standards, Assessments, & Accountability: Reviews a state’s course- and grade-specific standards (including the

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Ohio’s ed system ranked 10th nationally, still merits just a C+

The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / January 25, 2012

Into the contentious debate over teacher effectiveness and value-added metrics (VAM) comes this important, timely, and supersized analysis, conducted by a trio of respected economists with the NBER, showing that the impact of good teachers follows their students into adulthood. The analysts pull data from 18 million test scores from roughly 2.5 million children over two decades (1988 to 2009). They note changes in teaching staff and find that, when high-value-added teachers (top 5 percent) joined a school, end-of-year test scores rose immediately in the grade taught by those teachers. In addition, a one standard deviation (SD) increase in a teacher's value-added score raises student achievement by 0.1 SD on average across math and ELA (which equates to roughly one to two months of learning in a year).

The researchers also meticulously track subsets of students into young adulthood (using income-tax records, W-2 forms, university-tuition payments, social-security forms, etc.) and find that the pupils assigned to teachers with higher value added across all grades are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. Further, they find with another cohort that, by age twenty-eight, a 1 SD improvement in teacher value added in a single grade raises annual earnings by an average of about 1 percent (which could add roughly $4,600 over a lifetime in additional earnings). And replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher in any of the studied grades (four through eight) would increase the combined lifetime income of that teacher's class

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The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

The State of Charter Schools: What We Know – and What We Do Not – About Performance and Accountability

January 25, 2012

Since the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1991, over 6,700 charter schools have set up shop in 40 states and DC. Unfortunately, not all of these schools have been successful and a number of them have since closed, in fact charter schools have experienced a 15 percent closure rate since their inception.

A recent report by the Center for Education Reform takes a look at why charter schools close and shows that the number one reason (over 40 percent) for charter closure is fiscal mismanagement and financial problems driven by low enrollment numbers. Other issues such as ethical violations make up 24 percent of charter closures. Furthermore, academic failure makes up 19 percent of all closures. While academic performance is extremely important, schools tend to close for money problems rather than academic ones. Ohio is no stranger to the challenges of ensuring charter schools deliver results while ensuring they function well as businesses. This report is a useful read for Ohioans interested in better charters.

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The State of Charter Schools: What We Know – and What We Do Not – About Performance and Accountability

Raising Job Quality and Skills for American Workers: Creating More-Effective Education and Workforce Development Systems in the States

January 25, 2012

The U.S. economy has shed more than eight million jobs since 2008, and has created only two million new jobs in that same period of time, resulting in not only a high number of unemployed people, but also a high number of job vacancies. A recent report by The Hamilton Project attributes this contradictory statistic to the nation’s schools doing a poor job of graduating students who are career-ready. With a lack of qualified applicants, employers are settling for the cheapest employees rather than the most qualified employees, or worse, leaving jobs vacant all together. Or, as in the case of Apple and other great companies, moving the jobs to China where the labor force is ready, willing, and able to do the work.

In order to provide students with skills necessary to obtain decent jobs that pay a middle class wage, the author argues that students need career counseling in high school that does not simply herd students toward bachelor’s degrees, but directs them to career certificates or associate’s degrees, as well. College dropout rates could be lessened if students were directed toward “key economic sectors” – career fields with a high number of job vacancies that can provide high compensation for highly qualified applicants.

As a solution, the report proposes the federal government set up a grant program in which states would apply for money through a process like the Race to the Top competition. Selected states would identify already established programs that partner with employers to train underemployed groups, and help improve the efficiency of these programs.

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Raising Job Quality and Skills for American Workers: Creating More-Effective Education and Workforce Development Systems in the States

Becoming tech-savvy

January 25, 2012

Google has attempted to bring online educational videos safely into the classroom by creating a Youtube site that is dedicated to all levels of education, from help in K-12 classes to full university courses to lifelong learning videos.

Teachers will be getting some help re-aligning their existing lesson plans with the Common Core. A new software called Studysync will help convert existing lesson plans or assist teachers in creating their own tests and assignments. It also keeps a portfolio for each student to show progress throughout the year.

The U.S. Department of Education released a report “Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy” as a call to action for more civic learning. It encourages “action civics” (using technology and social media for learning and practice) over your “grandmother’s civics” (rote memorization of dates). (Emmy discussed how Ohio is already implementing goal #7 of the report with HB 211, which addresses history in the K-12 classroom.)

Looks like Apple is trying its luck in the textbook business. Apple recently announced the release of iBooks2, an interactive textbook software. They hope to circumvent state regulation on textbooks by releasing the software for free for iPads.

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Becoming tech-savvy

OAPCS debuts 2012 Ohio Charter Law Guidebook

January 25, 2012

The Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools has released a nifty guide intended to serve as a tool for the many non-attorneys who must navigate the state’s community school laws. The guide puts complex legal language into a simpler format and provides helpful links directly into the Ohio Revised Code and other resources. OAPCS intends to keep the guidebook up-to-date as laws are changed. You can check out the guidebook here.

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OAPCS debuts 2012 Ohio Charter Law Guidebook

Three Columbus events mark first-ever Digital Learning Day (February 1)

January 25, 2012

Next Wednesday, February 1, is the first-ever Digital Learning Day. This national effort is designed to celebrate educational practices that make learning more personalized and engaging for students and to explore educational policies to support innovative models of teaching and learning. There are three events in Columbus designed to build Buckeye momentum for a wave of innovation that changes policies, shifts attitudes, and supports wide-scale adoption of promising instructional practices.

Getting Smart Book Talk with Tom VanderArk (The Ohio State University, Thompson Library, Campus Reading Room, 2 PM)

Engage in dialogue with Digital Learning Now! luminary Tom Vander Ark about his recently-released book Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World. Executive Director of Innosight Institute Michael B. Horn lauds: "Provocative and bold, Tom Vander Ark's Getting Smart challenges long-held assumptions about education, points to why innovation will be so critical to enabling the education system of the future, and paints a vision of what learning could look like throughout society—and how we so desperately need it.” The book talk will conclude with reflection from President Debe Terhar of the State Board of Education of Ohio.

Education Committee Testimony on Digital Learning (Ohio Statehouse, Room 17, 5 PM)

The Education Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives of the 129th General Assembly will begin its February 1^st hearing with testimony on digital learning from Tom Vander Ark and a cadre of digital learning stakeholders. This opportunity to engage with the committee is especially important as the recommendations of the Ohio Digital Learning Task Force will be released on March 1.

Ohio Digital Learning Day Reception (Ohio Statehouse,

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Three Columbus events mark first-ever Digital Learning Day (February 1)

EVENT: Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive (February 15)

January 25, 2012

On February 15, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ohio Grantmakers Forum, and Achieve are hosting “Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive,” an important conversation about Ohio’s adoption and implementation of the Common Core Academic Standards.

Speakers include:

-          Melissa Cardena, director of academic quality and assurances for the Ohio Board of Regents;

-          Mike Cohen, president of Achieve;

-          Steve Dackin, superintendent of Reynoldsburg City Schools;

-          Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute;

-          Eric Gordon, CEO of Cleveland Metropolitan Schools;

-          Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction;

-          Debe Terhar, president of the State Board of Education; and

-          Deb Tully, director of professionals issues for the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

The event will be held Wednesday, February 15, from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm at the Hyatt Regency, Delaware Ball Room, 350 N. High Street, Columbus.  (Note, this is a different location than previously announced; however, the Hyatt Regency is connected to the Greater Columbus Convention Center and should be convenient to anyone who has already made hotel or other travel accommodations.) Register online today!

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EVENT: Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive (February 15)

Event: The Future of Math Education in Ohio (February 21)

January 25, 2012

High-quality math education has never been more important for our students. Join an expert discussion about the future of math instruction and learning in the Buckeye State.

Keith Devlin, Stanford University professor, Carl Sagan Prize Winner, and NPR’s “math guy”, will offer a keynote presentation followed by a robust panel discussion featuring State Superintendent Stan Heffner; David Ferrero, chief STEM advisor for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Brian Boyd, founding principal of the Dayton Regional STEM school; and Aimee Kennedy, principal of Metro High School. 

When: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 ∙ 11:30 to 2:30 (lunch will be provided)
Where: ESC of Central Ohio ∙ 2080 Citygate Drive, Columbus, Ohio 43219
RSVP: To Elaine Organ: Elaine.organ@escco.org by Wednesday, February 15. Space is limited, and the event will be webcast live.

The event is presented free of charge by the ESC of Central Ohio, Nord Family Foundation, Ohio Grantmakers Forum, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

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Event: The Future of Math Education in Ohio (February 21)