A new concept of what it means to be educated will drive Dayton's economic revival

Terry Ryan / October 24, 2012

Dayton has a long tradition of innovation (think airplanes, pull-tabs, electric starters, cash registers, and even teacher unions). Yet, as the innovations of one era slip into obsolescence in the next, it should come as no surprise that the Gem City has struggled economically in recent decades. The hope for Dayton’s revival comes from innovation. And this time the innovation is in education—how  we prepare people for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

By 2018, it is estimated that almost two-thirds of jobs in America will require at least a sub-baccalaureate credential. A sub-baccalaureate credential is a post-secondary credential that includes awards like certificates, associate degrees, state-issued education credentials, corporate certificates and badges among others. Dayton, according to a fantastic piece in the Lumina Foundation’s fall edition of Focus Magazine, is quickly becoming a national leader in preparing “sub-baccalaureate graduates.”

Dayton’s economic struggles peaked in 2009 and the scale of the pain was captured by The New York Times, which  reported that the area faced a vortex of “economic and social change.” The Timescontinued, reporting that  “the area’s job total has fallen 12 percent since 2000, while about half of its factory jobs – 38,000 out of 79,000 – have disappeared this decade. Not only have large G.M. and Delphi plants closed, but NCR, long the city’s corporate jewel, recently announced that it would move its headquarters to the Atlanta area.”

The jobs of Dayton's past: » Continued

A new concept of what it means to be educated will drive Dayton's economic revival

Ohio schools teeter on the edge of proficiency cliff

Aaron Churchill / October 24, 2012

When the next President of the United States and the 113^th Congress are sworn into office next year, they’ll be faced with an impending “fiscal cliff” – the perilous combination of cuts in government spending and tax increases that are set to take effect soon. Business people, government officials, and economists all worry that the cliff will slow the U.S. economy to an even greater crawl—meaning fewer jobs, greater market volatility, and negative economic growth.

In the education world, another cliff is on the horizon as the transition to the Common Core looms. In Ohio, let’s call it the 2014-15 PARCC “proficiency cliff.” Everyone – from local educators and parents to state policymakers – should be paying attention and working to ensure student academic progress in Ohio doesn’t slam to a halt like the nation's economy might. Consider the chart below.

Chart 1: Ohio Academic Achievement (OAA) proficiency rates versus projected PARCC proficiency rates, fourth-grade math, for select Montgomery County traditional districts and charter schools (ch).

Source: 2011-12 OAA proficiency rates and PARCC proficiency rates (based on 2011-12 OAA advanced and accelerated rates) are from June 2012 ODE data set. [1]

What does the chart show? A steep drop in student achievement when the PARCC exams (tests in math and English language arts aligned to the Common Core standards) arrive in 2014-15. The elements of the chart are as

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Ohio schools teeter on the edge of proficiency cliff

First Cleveland, now Columbus: Step one in Mayor Coleman’s focus on improving the city’s schools

Emmy L. Partin / October 24, 2012

The day after Superintendent Gene Harris announced her 2013 retirement from the Columbus City Schools (CCS) last month, Mayor Michael Coleman declared he’d play a greater role in improving the city’s schools. The district has been plagued in recent months by a data-tampering scandal and its unrelenting news coverage, and academic achievement has been stagnant for several years now. Coleman and City Council President Andrew Ginther have launched what is effectively the start of the post-Gene Harris era with a briefing about the district from Eric Fingerhut, corporate Vice President of Battelle's Education and STEM Learning business and the Mayor’s newly appointed education advisor; Mark Real, founder of KidsOhio.org; and John Stanford, deputy superintendent of CCS. The briefing is one of four intended to bring city leaders up to speed on the state of the city’s schools and related issues.

So what did they learn? There were at least three major takeaways.

The city’s footprint is significantly larger than the district’s. The distinction between kids who live in the City of Columbus and those who live within the boundaries of Columbus City Schools (CCS) is important – and something most residents and observers would find surprising. Columbus’s population has doubled since 1950 and the region continues to grow. But much of the growth has happened in parts of the city not served by CCS. Real reported that 131,000 K-12 students live in the city; however, just 49,000 attend CCS. About 13,000 attend a charter

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First Cleveland, now Columbus: Step one in Mayor Coleman’s focus on improving the city’s schools

2011-12 school performance analyses for Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton

Aaron Churchill / October 24, 2012

On October 17, the State Board of Education authorized the Ohio Department of Education to release additional data components of a local school districts’ Report Card, in spreadsheet format. Until the Auditor of State completes his investigation of districts and buildings that are suspected of tampering student attendance records, the data remain “preliminary.” ODE therefore has not yet published an official Report Card for any district in its usual PDF format.

Despite the continuing cloud of suspicion over a few schools’ academic data, we believe that the preliminary data is sufficiently reliable to analyze district and charter school performance in Cleveland and Columbus (Ohio’s largest cities) and Dayton (Fordham’s hometown).

Check out our reports, which answer the following questions (among others):

• How do charter schools, as a group, perform compared to traditional public schools?
• Has the performance of charter and district schools improved over time?
• How many students attend high-performing schools versus failing schools?
• How far will the pass rate on standardized tests fall when Ohio moves to the Common Core?
• How did your local school building perform in 2011-12?

The reports can be accessed through the hyperlinks on each city name: Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton.

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2011-12 school performance analyses for Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton

Ohio education leaders hear special ed improvement recommendations

Aaron Churchill , Emmy L. Partin / October 24, 2012

Last week, Fordham and the ESC of Central Ohio welcomed Nate Levenson to the Buckeye State for a series of conversations with district and Educational Service Center superintendents, state policymakers, and education organizations that represent both traditional districts and charter schools. Levenson spoke about his ideas for making special education more efficient and of greater quality, which are laid out in his recent report Applying Systems Thinking to Improve Special Education in Ohio.

Throughout his time in Ohio, Levenson emphasized the following points:

1. The compliance-driven culture of special education needs to change. Compliance is ingrained deeply into the culture of special education. Because compliance is so worrisome for special education directors, it leads to perverse incentives; for example, the incentive to “over-identify” students as special needs and the incentive for special education training and professional development to focus on compliance rather than pedagogy and actual student learning.

2. Schools could become more efficient and provide higher-quality services by subcontracting special education services. Ohio’s Educational Service Centers, social service agencies, and non-profit and for-profit companies could provide a “dream team” of special education specialists that districts could bid for. Districts would therefore reduce the in-house cost of providing special education services by contracting these services to other partners.

3. Identifying kids as special needs doesn’t necessarily translate to better outcomes. When students are unnecessarily identified as special needs, it lowers expectations and may lead to educational

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Ohio education leaders hear special ed improvement recommendations

Increasing Young Children’s Contact with Print during Shared Reading: Longitudinal Effects on Literacy Achievement

October 24, 2012

With the Kasich Administration’s push for improved literacy skills among Ohio’s elementary students, many educators and analysts are keeping a keen eye on the development and assessment of reading programs. One national program, Project Sit Together and Read (STAR), is examined in the new research study by Shayne Piasta, Increasing Young Children’s Contact with Print during Shared Reading: Longitudinal Effects on Literacy Achievement. Piasta’s research measures the program’s effects on student literacy in pre-k to second grade. (See the U.S. Department of Education's review of the study.)

Project STAR is designed to develop students’ reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. Teachers read aloud to students, but also use techniques to encourage kids to pay attention to the print on book pages. For example, a teacher may ask students about words or use a finger to follow along as words are read.

To measure the impact of these print focused techniques, researchers compared three groups in 85 preschool classrooms, composed mostly of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. One group received “high-dose” instruction, where Project STAR techniques were used in 120 reading sessions; the second “low-dose” group had just sixty reading sessions; the last group received regular instruction techniques. All groups received their instruction from the same books over

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Increasing Young Children’s Contact with Print during Shared Reading: Longitudinal Effects on Literacy Achievement

Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap?

Jeff Murray / October 24, 2012

In this policy brief from The Future of Children organization, authors Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel Sawhill, and Catherine Snow start from the premise that the United States has a two-part “literacy problem”: (1) the current reading skills of U.S. children are “inadequate for the heightened literacy demands of the twenty-first-century economy,” and (2) the widening literacy gap between students from high- and low-income families virtually ensures a permanent impediment to economic mobility for those students left behind.

In Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap?, the authors suggest that adoption of the Common Core Standards is an important first step. In fact, they argue “If American children were to master the Common Core, they would fare better in international comparisons, the American economy would receive a boost, and the literacy achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged children might narrow somewhat…giving them a better opportunity to compete.” But standards by themselves, the authors argue, have very little effect on achievement and must be backed up by assessments, comprehensive reporting, curriculum fully aligned with the Common Core, and most importantly high-quality teaching to support all of the above.

The authors are not alone in predicting a precipitous drop in literacy achievement and an even-wider gap in achievement between the haves and the have-nots in the first round of testing on Common Core standards. Discussion at a recent Common Core event in Cincinnati reinforced that educational professionals

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Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap?

Principal Concerns: Leadership Data and Strategies for States

Aaron Churchill / October 24, 2012

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) just published a short yet important paper on how states can improve the talent among their ranks of principals. The paper focuses primarily on how states can strategically and thoughtfully engineer a pipeline of talented principals. According to the authors, states can activate three levers to build this pipeline: (1) collect administrative staff data to project the need for principals—and, geographically, where the need will be; (2) join principal preparation programs to their graduates’ results, in order identify the most effective prep programs; and (3) connect school building performance results to principals and encourage districts to reward effective principals and help struggling ones.

The 21st century principalship will be a leadership position that requires a host of skills. Principals will have to manage people, whether parents, teachers, or kids. They’ll have to manage processes, which will range from teacher evaluations to budgeting. They’ll have to understand data, including value-added growth models, which are based on complex statistical models. And they’ll have to do all this within the context of being educational experts and instructional leaders. They also have to help motivate their staffs and their students. It won’t be an easy job—though, it probably never has been—and as CRPE concludes, it’ll take strategic thinking about which levers states should activate to build a pipeline of principals, who are just the right people, who can do the right work, in the right places.

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Principal Concerns: Leadership Data and Strategies for States

Charters on the move!

October 24, 2012

• Cleveland’s Central neighborhood has welcomed its first charter school. Stepstone Academy is operated by social-service agency Guidestone and uses innovative practices to help improve education and family life for its students.
• More e-schools may be on the way. Recent changes to state law allow for the opening of five new e-schools for next school year. If more than five proposals are received by the May 15 deadline, the Ohio Department of Education will select schools by lottery.
• School and business leaders in Cincinnati are frustrated with Ohio’s “legislative and financial roadblocks” around charter schools. The district has worked to expand its portfolio to include high-performing charters and emulate similar efforts in other cities nationally, but leaders are finding that Ohio’s laws and charter climate are a major roadblock to bringing in new school models.
• Six St. Louis charter schools have closed in light of their “financially stressed” designation. Imagine Schools Inc., serving over 3,000 students in the city, closed its schools under state law after spending more on administrative expenses compared to instructional costs. The state and the city’s business community picked up the $250,000 tab to open three schools designated for displaced students.

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Charters on the move!