EducateOhio - The competition for education talent

Terry Ryan / October 10, 2012

Over the past two years, the Buckeye State has been at the forefront in the competition for creating and expanding businesses and the jobs that go with growth. According to the Dayton Daily News JobsOhio – Governor Kasich’s public-private job-creation initiative -- has provided “assistance to 400 companies investing or expanding in the state, 31,300 new job commitments and $6.1 billion in capital investment.”

The energy, passion, and focus JobsOhio has applied to recruiting and developing businesses needs to be replicated in education through a similar program -- EducateOhio perhaps? The Buckeye State needs a strategy, and the supporting resources, to become a state where top education talent wants to invest time and energy and build high quality schools and education programs. Other states have already moved in this direction, and more are joining fast.

For example, last week I spent time with leaders from top reform states and cities as part of the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust) annual conference. The 75 or so CEE-Trust participants learned about the efforts of cities like New Orleans, Indianapolis, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee to recruit top education talent to their locales from across the country and to help available talent do more through things like charter school replication. The competition is friendly but fierce. Top school operators and educators are being poached by communities hungry for better schools.

Increasingly schools are seen as pivotal to economic development and states and cities are

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EducateOhio - The competition for education talent

Young, gifted, and neglected

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / October 10, 2012

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.

Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

Today’s systemic failure takes three forms.

First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.

Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes

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Young, gifted, and neglected

Fordham to authorize two new KIPP schools in 2013

Kathryn Mullen Upton / October 10, 2012

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s application process for new charter schools for next school year just wrapped up, and we are pleased to announce that two new schools – a KIPP elementary school and a KIPP middle school – have been approved by the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation for sponsorship.

These two schools underwent a comprehensive application process (outlined in figure 1, below), which, in partnership with our colleagues from the Ohio Authorizer Collaborative (OAC), began in January 2012.

Nine applicants began our 2013 application cycle (which opened in January 2012), and school designs varied widely. Of the nine, three promising applications were approved to move forward during the initial review phase. After review by a team of external consultants with relevant experience in school finance, academics and governance, two were moved on to the final phase of the application process and subsequently approved by the Fordham Foundation to open. Approvals were granted based on the strength and alignment of key components of the application, including the proposed education, finance, governance and operations plans, and, the interview.

Figure 1: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation New Charter School Application Process

Both new KIPP start-ups will be governed by KIPP: Central Ohio. This is the board for the current KIPP Journey Academy in Columbus (see figure 2 for its enrollment growth). Like Journey, both schools (yet to be named) will be located in Columbus. (Exact locations will be determined

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Fordham to authorize two new KIPP schools in 2013

KIPP Journey Academy teacher earns Teacher of the Year award

Aaron Churchill / October 10, 2012

The Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools (OAPCS) named Ms. Lynnly Wood its 2012 Teacher of the Year. Ms. Wood is a fifth-grade reading teacher at KIPP Journey Academy. OAPCS praised Ms. Wood’s ability to teach students who come to her classroom with varying levels of reading ability. For example, Ms. Wood has implemented a Guided Reading program for her students. This program provides every one of her three-hundred plus students differentiated reading instruction every day. The personalized instruction that Ms. Wood uses has produced impressive results: In 2011, Ms. Wood was the KIPP network’s top-performing fifth-grade reading instructor!

We at Fordham are very pleased and grateful to have outstanding teachers like Ms. Wood and the many other teachers who daily teach the ABCs of life to students who attend Fordham-sponsored charter schools.  For more about Ms. Wood’s accomplishments, please continue reading here.

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KIPP Journey Academy teacher earns Teacher of the Year award

The frontier of school district efficiency

Aaron Churchill / October 10, 2012

The baseball playoffs started this week in earnest, with the Cincinnati Reds carrying Buckeye State’s hopes for a pennant (next year for sure, Cleveland fans). This year’s playoffs includes teams with varying levels of economic resources—from the high-spending New York Yankees, to the low-spending, upstart Oakland A’s. Yet, all these teams have proven themselves to be successful over the long regular season.

Schools districts, like baseball teams, are similarly endowed with varying amounts of economic resources. And like baseball teams, some districts get a lot for their money—the Oakland A’s of school districts—while others get little for their money. “Efficiency” generally describes whether an organization gets a lot or a little out of the resources they put in.

To look at which schools are more efficient, we use Ohio public school districts’ expenditure per equivalent (EPE) and performance index score (PI). EPE is the district’s input (the money it expends) and PI is the output (what it gets for the money: namely, student achievement). The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has developed both of these measures.

• EPE is a weighted per-pupil expenditure that accounts for the higher cost of educating poor, English language learning, and special needs students. ODE reports official EPE data for traditional districts (there is not official, publically-accessible data for charter schools, so they are excluded from this analysis).  

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  The frontier of school district efficiency

Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools

October 10, 2012

We are now in the twentieth year of charter schools and during that time a lot has been learned about those that work and those that fail. Roland G. Fryer of The Hamilton Project discusses some of the lessons learned in his new report Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools.

Fryer analyzed videos, surveys, and lottery data from 35 charter schools in New York City to distinguish practices that generate student achievement. He found that the traditional components districts link to success—class size, per pupil expenditure, percent of teachers with advanced degrees—were not related to high reading and math scores.

So what are successful charters doing differently compared to lower performers? Consistently high-achieving charter schools had five practices in common: 1) increased professional development; 2) data-driven instruction; 3) high-dosage, personalized instruction that targets curricula to the level of each student; 4) increased time on task; and 5) a strong emphasis on high academic expectations.

These methods are working for charters, and may also find success in traditional schools. Preliminary outcomes from pilot programs that implemented these strategies in Denver and Houston public district schools show a sharp increase in student achievement. Fryer acknowledges that all five components may not fit with each district. However, he is fervently optimistic that students in some of the lowest performing schools can improve their academic performance over the next eight years using these strategies—but at a per-pupil cost of about two thousand dollars

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Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools

What Impact Will NCLB Waivers Have on the Consistency, Complexity, and Transparency of State Accountability Systems?

Jeff Murray / October 10, 2012

The Center on Education Policy at the George Washington University has released a study of the states whose No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver requests have been granted by the U.S. Department of Education. As of September 2012, waivers have been approved for 33 states and the District of Columbia. While those seeking waivers were generally looking to avoid the same NCLB requirements (most particularly the one that says 100 percent of students must score proficient in reading and math by 2014), the plans put forward to earn those waivers vary in a number of ways.

States for the most part are able to define for themselves what constitutes progress and achievement for the full student population as well as specific student subgroups based on race and income, among other characteristics. Under NCLB, there is considerably less room for customization of outcome measures while states granted waivers have a number of ways in which they can replace the “100 percent proficient” by 2014 requirement and other NCLB provisions. The conclusion is that there will be a lack of consistency in measuring educational achievement across the waiver states that will make comparison difficult as each state’s plan kicks in.

Ohio is not included in CEP’s review, but the specifics of its waiver are similarly illustrative of the variety of approaches states are taking. The hallmark of Ohio’s waiver application is the creation of a rigorous A-F grading system for schools, the definition

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What Impact Will NCLB Waivers Have on the Consistency, Complexity, and Transparency of State Accountability Systems?

From technology to truancy

October 10, 2012

• Students in some Ohio districts will not be turning their cell phones on vibrate anymore as schools experiment with new policies that allow the use of technology in “green zones” such as hallways and lunch rooms. Classroom use of electronics is at the teacher’s discretion, with some classes using laptops to take notes and camera phones to photograph science experiments.
• Good teachers never stop learning. Instructors at New Albany High School are taking graduate courses to develop blended learning curriculum for their students. The course quality will be assessed based on student performance during the second half of the school year.
• Parents of truant students attended motivational sessions as opposed to paying fines, as part of an effort between the Cleveland Municipal Court and the Juvenile Court. The program, Redirecting Our Curfew Kids (ROCK) was intended to inform parents of the dangers of truancy and missing curfew.
• Cincinnati Public Schools students have an exciting new after-school option. WordPlay, designed to meet urban community needs, provides an inspirational and fun place for kids to do projects, read, or get homework help.

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From technology to truancy