The event brought together leaders from the business and education community to discuss the future of Dayton and the potential impact the Common Core can have on the city. The event featured Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction; Mike Cohen, president of Achieve; Ellen Belcher, author of our recent report on Common Core implementation; and David Ponitz, president emeritus of Sinclair Community College and chairman of the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

 Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction and Mike Cohen, president of Achieve

Superintendent Heffner explained that the Common Core standards will help Ohio move from the minimum toward a path that allows kids to be college and career ready. He acknowledged that the transition will be rough and that it will scare some people but in the end people will rise to the occasion, and kids will be asked to do more and better. Mike Cohen, one of the national leaders who has led the development of the Common Core, spoke of the national significance of these new academic standards. Cohen shared that the standards will set the expectations we want our students to learn and should drive and improve instruction. He also explained that while test scores will likely drop as the standards come on-line it would be wrong to retreat and weaken the standards or the assessment that go with them. Ellen Belcher closed out the event by highlighting some of the major findings from Future Shock: Early Common Core Lessons from Ohio (see above).

The need for higher academic standards is needed more now than ever. Dayton ranks 72^nd in educational attainment among the top 100 largest metro areas in the US and only 14.4 percent of Dayton residents hold a bachelor’s degree. Nationally the city’s educational achievement in mathematics is lagging and by the twelfth grade we are at the bottom of the barrel compared to other countries.

The Common Core standards have the potential to help put Dayton, Ohio and the country on a path toward higher achievement. The Common Core is a necessary step forward and while the road to success might not be easy and surely won’t come without challenges it is essential for the future of children that we get it right.

Under Ohio’s open enrollment policy, public school districts can voluntarily admit students from other districts, at no cost to the student. Districts throughout the state have generally adopted open enrollment; nearly eighty percent of Ohio’s 664 public schools districts participate in open enrollment according to the Ohio Department of Education. However, few open enrollment districts are located near Ohio’s metropolitan areas, a fact shown in the chart below.

Figure: Number of districts adopting open enrollment by Ohio metro area, 2011-12

Source: Ohio Department of Education. Note: District count is based on the county in which the major city is located.

A district of nearly 6,000 students, Reynoldsburg City Schools serves the middle-class, eastern suburbs of Columbus. The district maintains an “excellent” rating from the state (its second-highest rating), and around eighty to ninety percent of its students reach proficiency in math and reading every year. Open enrollment risks these sterling academic marks. Due to Reynoldsburg’s proximity to Columbus City Schools, the district may absorb lower-caliber students from disadvantaged parts of the city who are seeking a better schooling option.

What has induced Reynoldsburg to change its policy? Principles of school choice? Compassion for kids stuck in Columbus’ low-performing east-side schools? Neither. Rather, economic reality has compelled the change. With a projected deficit of $3.5 million for next school year, Reynoldsburg residents were given two options: either raise property taxes, or adopt open enrollment, a policy that would bring $5,700 per open-enrollment student. When faced with the choice of higher taxes or open enrollment, Reynoldsburg’s board, with resident support, approved open enrollment. In an interview with a local paper, one Reynoldsburg resident, who had been initial skeptical of open enrollment, voiced her support after a public meeting with school officials, “Without adding any cost to our community, an open enrollment policy would bring in additional revenue and families eager for quality education.”

In a piece in last week’s “Choice Words” blog, my colleague Adam Emerson, narrates the unfortunate story of how a high-performing Louisiana district has refused to enroll voucher students from outside their district. (See also Rick Hess’ reply and Emerson’s rejoinder.) In a courageous—though economically self-interested—move, Reynoldsburg provides evidence that not every suburban district is busily pitching iron fences around its schools. In certain situations, open enrollment can generate win-wins—for outside families wanting a better school and for families inside the district wanting tax relief. And if Reynoldsburg can successfully manage its open enrollment program, we may soon find other suburban schools following suit, expanding school choice for students and parents living in Ohio’s metro areas.

Adopted by the Buckeye State in 2010 and to be implemented starting in 2014-15, CCSS establishes a framework for what K-12 students across the country are expected to learn. For many students, CCSS will raise their standard of learning, and our interviewees universally champion these higher standards. The transition to the more demanding standards also concerns educators, who worry about anything from training teachers to online assessments to purchasing textbooks. Kimbre Lange, an Oakwood City Schools teacher, sums up educators’ optimism for the Core but peppered with caution: “We all get the big picture, but the devil is in the details.”

Buy-In for the Core

Greater Depth in Core Standards

“The horror of having too much to teach is less (under the Common Core).” Steve Dackin, Reynoldsburg City Schools

“Teachers have confidence in the Core. They believe that less is more.” Eric Gordon, Cleveland Metropolitan School District

“I’m very inspired. Finally we’re being allowed to do what we knew was right.” Katie Hofmann, Cincinnati Public Schools

Opportunities for Collaboration

“Opening up the world of education to small districts…It’s critical to be able to talk to colleagues outside of your neighborhood.” Tony Dunn, Belpre City School District

“Our network has increased. Now we can tap into other states.” Dee Martindale, Reynoldsburg City Schools

High Standards for All Students

“This is not your Mom and Dad’s high school. We’re raising the bar for all kids.” Steve Dackin, Reynoldsburg City Schools

“We need to standardize things so children are not crippled by their zip code.” Tony Dunn, Belpre City School District

Concerns about Core Implementation

Teaching Models and Materials

“The Ohio Department of Education should give good models to show what quality work looks like.” Dee Martindale, Reynoldsburg City Schools

“Our materials are not designed for the depth of the Common Core.” Eric Gordon, Cleveland Metropolitan City School District

“I don’t think the vendors understand it yet, even though they say they do.” Sheila Radke, Cincinnati Public Schools

Instructional Style Changes

“The instruction should look different.” Laura Mitchell, Cincinnati Public Schools

“If you go into a classroom and kids are working quietly, you better question what’s going on.” Katie Hofmann, Cincinnati Public Schools

“They [administrators] better hear some noise.” Sheila Radtke, Cincinnati Public Schools              

2014-15 Report Card Results

 “Parents won’t understand how severe it [the change] is until that report card is on the evening news.” Paul Scott, Ohio Connections Academy

Ohio State Superintendent Stan Heffner opened the event by laying out the problematic mix of technology, education, and kids: “Kids spend their nights in high-tech bedrooms and spend their days in low-tech classrooms.” 

“Kids spend their nights in high-tech bedrooms and spend their days in low-tech classrooms."

The remainder of the conversation focused on how to harness kids’ aptitude in technology for effective educational practices.

Fordham – and our event partners, KnowledgeWorks and the Nord Family Foundation –assembled an elite group of digital learning experts and Ohio practitioners to explore best practices and policies. The event’s first panel consisted of four national experts (U.S. Department of Education’s Karen Cator, Public Impact’s Bryan Hassel, iNACOL’s Susan Patrick, and Getting Smart’s Tom Vander Ark), each of whom emphasized the promise and inevitability of digital learning in the classroom.

A few of their recommendations included:

• Colleges of education should equip future teachers to leverage technology in their classrooms.
• Schools should exploit technology to create a multi-faceted student assessment system rather than rely on a single-test assessment.
• Schools should leverage technology to enable excellent teachers to reach more students through video-fed lessons.

The second panel included two Ohio lawmakers (State Senator Peggy Lehner and State Representative Timothy Derickson) and two Ohio education practitioners (Reynoldsburg Superintendent Steve Dackin, who has made his district a leader in blended learning innovation in Ohio, and Susan Stagner of Connections Academy, one of Ohio’s several full-time, online schools). These panelists described the benefits and obstacles to a quality, digitally-infused learning environment. Some of their observations about the benefits of digital learning included:

• Schools have successfully used blended learning environments in flexible credit hour programs.
• Schools have used digital learning environments to provide options to parents within a district. One Ohio district, for example, uses traditional learning environments in two of its high schools, while another high school—a STEM magnet school—uses blended learning approaches.
• Schools have used technology-based solutions to sustain high-quality education during periods of budget cuts.

Terry Ryan with Ohio Educator and Legislator Panel

They also provided cautions about digital learning, which included:

• Students often express their interest in having teachers in their lives, even when given the option of digital versus traditional classrooms.
• Political circumstances often constrain school officials from taking risks in technological investments.
• Lawmakers have difficulty defining “blended learning” in legislation because the digital-learning ecosystem changes quickly and is so vast.

Harvard professor Chris Dede writes, “The 21st century is quite different than the 20th in the capabilities people need for work, citizenship, and self-actualization.” Yesterday’s event reminded us of that fact. Indeed, technology holds the promise of creating powerful learning environments that expand students’ skill sets.

Several schools around the country have already achieved results using tech-based learning—Rocketship and Carpe Diem were two commonly referenced examples by panelists. For the Buckeye State, which has only recently dipped its toes into these murky waters (aside from full-time e-schools, which have operated here for more than a decade), successful integration of technology into the classroom will require significant investment—in teachers who can utilize technology, in hardware and software infrastructure, and in a policy framework that grants schools flexibility to apply digital learning to meet their students’ unique learning needs.

After the testimony of spokespeople from various activist groups and community-based organizations, Chairwoman Peggy Lehner finally allowed Cleveland’s children to speak. Arguing in favor of Mayor Jackson’s plan to reform their schools, these students offered compelling appeals for policy changes that would ensure high-quality teachers and enable high-quality schooling options.

David Boone Jr., a graduating senior from MC2 STEM High School, a science and math magnet school, described the impact that teachers have had on his education:

“I couldn’t form a complete sentence upon entering high school. But upon graduation, I will be the first student from my school to attend Harvard, because I had teachers who cared.”

Boone then spoke about his wish for change that would provide more Cleveland students with similar opportunities for success:

“My belief is that the current approach of doing nothing [emphasis his, in written testimony] is not helping. The Mayor has a new reform plan, and I urge you to give him a chance. Allow the state to focus more on students and provide us with higher-quality opportunities. We deserve it.”

Moreover, in a pointed remark, Boone stated that teacher hiring policies should be concerned first about students:

“Let’s make some progress and end old fashioned ways of hiring and compensating teachers. . . .It’s time we find a new approach that focuses on our students.”

Senator Nina Turner stated in her response to these students’ testimony:

“We have learned a lot from the mouth of babes.”

As Senator Turner advises, we can all learn from the testimonies of students like David Boone and others (including several students from the Citizens Leadership Academy, a Cleveland charter school covered in Fordham’s report “Needles in a Haystack”.) These students would most clearly understand the pressing urgency of Mayor Jackson’s plan—it’s their futures and their peers’ futures that depend on it. And lawmakers would be remiss if they didn’t listen to their voices as they consider passage of this important piece of educational reform.

Earlier this week U.S. News & World Report released the fourth edition of its Best High Schools rankings, highlighting some of the highest performing schools in the country. This year, the two best high schools from both Dayton and Columbus made the cut.  (And all four are profiled in our upcoming Needles in a Haystack Report.)

Receiving a Silver medal:

• Columbus Alternative High School (reading proficiency: 89 percent, math proficiency: 88 percent),
• Centennial High School (reading proficiency: 92 percent, math proficiency: 88 percent),
• Stivers Schools of the Arts High School (reading proficiency: 90 percent, math proficiency: 86 percent)

Receiving a Bronze medal:

• Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) (reading proficiency: 94 percent, math proficiency: 100 percent)

To come up with the list of the best high schools in the country, U.S. News & World Report analyzed 21,776 public high schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia.  Schools were evaluated by how well they serve all of their students using state proficiency tests as the benchmarks, as well as the degree to which the school prepared students for college- level work. Based on their performance for those measurements 4,877 of the highest performing schools were awarded a gold, silver, or bronze medal.

In cities where quality, high-performing high schools are desperately needed, these four schools are doing a tremendous job educating their student population and continue to outperform not only other city schools, but suburban schools as well.

Congratulations to Columbus Alternative, Centennial, Stivers, and DECA on your awards.  This is a truly a testament of all the hard work and dedication of the teachers, staff, and students over the years. For more information on these high schools and a detailed look at what makes them successful, stay tuned for our upcoming report on high performing urban high schools due out this fall.

In addition to the great things happening in Dayton and Columbus a third city in Ohio is also being recognized for success in education.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer published an article about The Cleveland Foundation’s College Now Scholars, a program designed to help the best Cleveland Schools students identify, apply, and find financial aid for college.  Of the 52 participants this year, a couple of students came from high schools profiled in our upcoming Needles report.  Daryl Mapson of Cleveland Schools of the Arts received a full scholarship to the dance program of Skidmore College in New York, and Hassan Khaled of John Hay Early College High School will be studying computer engineering at Oberlin College.  (Here are a few of these high schools’ statistics.)

When so much is changing in education, it’s refreshing to see that schools are being recognized for their hard work and success. 

It is clear why the OEA and the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) would want to recruit charter teachers to their ranks. Unions define success in large part by the number of members they have and how much they collect in membership dues. Members and money equal influence at the statehouse, and in recent years the OEA has been losing both to charter schools.  As far back at 2006, the OEA shared with its members a paper entitled “The Current State of Ohio’s Charter School Program.” In it they declared that “the charter school program in Ohio is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to ‘dismantle’ public education.” It noted that “charter schools have reduced union-represented bargaining unit positions…The total number of traditional public school personnel, excluding administrators, lost to charter schools is calculated to be (in 2004) 4,782.”

But, would unionized charter schools be good for students?

Successful charters work because they are flexible and constantly seek improvements to how they do things. They deploy funds, teachers, time, materials, and technology in different ways to impact student achievement. High-performing charter schools almost always display strong cultures, astute and driven leaders, dedicated teachers, coherent curricula, shared responsibility, and a sense of common purpose. Successful schools know their students and address their needs. In fact, one of the strongest arguments for charter schools is that they are expected to be different. Collective bargaining agreements put constraints on all these factors that lead to success and impede not only innovation but seek conformity across schools.

It is ironic that just as the Cleveland Metropolitan School District is seeking serious reforms to, and flexibilities in, its current collective bargaining agreement that the OEA wants to put charter schools under similar sorts of constraints. This is a mistake if we want more high-performing schools, especially for our neediest students. As we reported in our 2010 report Needles in A Haystack: Lessons from Ohio’s high-performing, high-need urban schools,  Needles “schools all have distinctive programs, missions and operational structures, put into place by school leaders and their teams to meet the unique needs of their students. Yet most districts adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. The result is that some of the most challenged schools in Ohio operate under teacher contract restrictions and district rules and regulations that make wholesale improvement extremely difficult.”

School improvement in Ohio is not going to be achieved by making charters more like district schools. It can be achieved, however, by giving district schools more charter like autonomies and flexibilities. Of course, increased autonomy should be tightly linked to heightened accountability as it relates to student performance goals. Districts could benefit from charter like freedoms by loosening the regulatory vise on schools as they demonstrate greater performance, granting freedoms in the areas that matter most to schools – determining the school calendar and schedule, adjusting curriculum and programs to meet student needs, acquiring more control over the school’s budget and making all personnel decisions.

Unionized charter schools may make good sense for the unions themselves, but they would be a set-back for school improvement efforts in the Buckeye State.

As the House considers SB 316, lawmakers need to balance the demand for high standards for recovery charters with the unique student composition and testing challenges associated with these schools. Further, lawmakers should understand the benefit of drop-out recovery schools to the graduation rates of traditional public high schools.

First, by definition, drop-out recovery charters primarily serve dropouts or students at risk of dropping out. This fact alone requires a different perspective of what “student achievement” means—and the approaches required for student success. Because dropout recovery charters enroll mostly high-poverty and highly underperforming students, an apple-to-apples comparison of dropout recovery charter performance to traditional high school standards of success seems unreasonable.

Second, legislators should consider how dropout recovery charters actually benefit public school districts. They do this is in a couple ways: first, by enrolling students who would have otherwise dropped out of education completely, recovery charters improve public school district’s graduation rates. Consider, for example, Dayton Public School’s graduation rates during the 2000s in the chart below:

Source: Ohio Department of Education (official) and author's calculation (estimated)

The red line shows Dayton Publics’ official graduation rate rising from 51 percent to 84 percent during the past decade; simultaneously, Dayton’s recovery charter enrollment grew by 600 percent. To estimate the impact that recovery charter growth has had on Dayton’s graduation rate, we assume that 75 percent of recovery charter students would have otherwise left the Dayton Public Schools without graduating. The blue line shows this estimated rate without recovery charters. The adjusted rate reduces Dayton Public’s graduation rate by up to 20 percentage points. (For more details about how the adjustment was made, see the report here.)

Perhaps even as important as recovery schools’ salutary effect on public school graduation rates, dropout recovery charters may directly benefit the students who attend public schools. How so? Underperforming students may have behavioral problems and may frequently disrupt student learning. If a public school district sees many of its most struggling and disruptive students migrate to dropout recovery schools, the student learning environment within its own walls should improve.

Third, assessing recovery charters’ performance should account for the fluid nature of their student attendance. The Performance Index (PI), an official performance metric and a widely quoted measure of school performance, shows how student attendance affects this indicator. Consider the 2010-11 PIs of two recovery charters:

Source: Ohio Department of Education, District Report Cards

We observe the very strong downward effect that untested students has on a school’s PI. (We suspect untested students were absent at during the exam period.) Cleveland Academy, which had a four percent untested rate, had a PI of 66. Meanwhile, Dayton Life Skills, with 46 percent of its students untested, reported a PI of 36. Thus, Cleveland’s higher PI may simply reflect higher attendance rates during examination time, not actual student performance.

We support the accountability provision in SB 316 to identify recovery charters that don’t serve their students’ needs. But we also ask legislators to consider recovery charters’ unique student composition, their benefits to public districts, and their testing challenges. This will take some smart thinking about how to assess recovery charters’ performance and whom to compare them with. And it will require careful consideration regarding sanctions for non-performing schools, and particularly, the consequences that closure would have on public schools.

We hope smart thinking will prevail. Colorado lawmakers have already implemented an “alternative accountability” system for its drop-out recovery charter schools, and we would encourage Ohio’s lawmakers to do the same. We highly recommend that lawmakers check out the testimony before the Ohio Senate on how to do this provided by the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

It is in the hope of stemming the loss of families and children that the mayor has proposed his bold school reform plan that seeks to turn the city’s educational fortunes around. There are many worthy parts to his plan (see here for details), and one of the boldest sections calls for changes to how charter schools operate and are treated in Cleveland. First, high-performing charters would be welcomed as equals and even be offered a share of local tax-levy revenue. This arrangement would be the first of its kind in America and is truly path breaking. Second, the plan calls for a Transformation Alliance that would have the authority to veto proposed start-up charter schools that don’t meet yet-to-be-determined criteria for quality.  

While many in the state’s charter community support the overall direction of the mayor’s plan no one, including Fordham, likes the provision giving the Transformation Alliance (and its yet unidentified members) veto authority over the start-up of new schools. We’ve learned as a charter school authorizer since 2005 (Fordham currently authorizes eight schools that serve about 2,300 students) that making determinations about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to open new schools is one of the hardest and most important decisions that an authorizer makes. It is not something politically appointed bodies usually do very well even if it is done with the best of intentions.

The work of an authorizer is hard because it literally demands trying to peer into the future and make bets about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to open new schools. These decisions are based on the people involved (leadership and governance), their academic plans (curricular and programmatic), their resources and budget assumptions, their experience (have they opened successful schools previously or been involved in a successful school?) and market demand. When Fordham takes applications for charter school sponsorship from prospective school operators we will only issue contracts to those applicants that we believe have “a high likelihood of success” in opening new schools.

As a result, we have dozens of prospective school operators contact us each year, a dozen or so actually go through the detailed Fordham charter application process, and this year we agreed to sponsor just three new schools.  We hold such a high-bar for prospective operators for two primary reasons. First, we have learned from experience that opening and running a successful charter school is one of the hardest things to do in American education. Many think they can do it well, but few really can. Second, it is far harder to close a struggling school (and disrupt the education of students and the lives of teachers) than it is to say no to a prospective operator that you think simply isn’t up to the task of opening and sustaining a successful charter school.

Yet, while we have doubts about the proposed Transformation Alliance and the scope of its authority, we fully understand, appreciate, and share Mayor Jackson’s frustration with the current system of charter school quality control in his city, and indeed across the state. We believe the charter community has a responsibility to offer the mayor and the city of Cleveland a workable solution to a real problem.

Today there are currently nine different organizations that can birth new charter schools in Cleveland. In no other American city outside of Ohio do prospective charter school operators have so many choices of authorizers to pick from and negotiate with. Not surprisingly, these authorizers have dramatically varied levels of commitment, resources, capacity, and motivation for giving birth to new schools along Ohio’s north coast. Not all hold high standards.

For example, in 2005 Fordham rejected a charter school application for the Weems School in Cleveland. They quickly and with little fuss found another authorizer, the Education Resource Consultants of Ohio. Fast forward to 2011 - state auditor Dave Yost summed the situation up at the now defunct Weems charter school as “a heck of a mess.” An avoidable mess. Others like it have played out in Cleveland and elsewhere and each time these charter blow ups have come at the expense of children and their education.

Mayor Jackson is absolutely right to demand better from the state’s charter community. A reasonable proposal would be for the mayor and the Transformation Alliance to have authority over determining – based on standards from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and state achievement data – those authorizers that would be allowed to sponsor new schools in Cleveland and those that wouldn’t.

Fordham – which expects to authorize one school in Cleveland in 2012-13 – would willingly be the first to go through a vetting process led by the Transformation Alliance. We would see this as an opportunity to partner with the mayor and the Cleveland school district in working to create more and better school options for children and families who badly need them. Maybe together we can help Cleveland reverse its decline, while giving children and families better school choices.  

We agree, Mr. Secretary. Here in Ohio, we’ve spent lavishly on special education services. SPED expenditures have skyrocketed during the past decade increasing over $1 billion dollars, a 50 percent jump. In contrast, non-special-education spending increased only 17 percent during the same period.  Today, special education eats nearly 20 percent of the entire K-12 education spending pie, up five percentage points from a decade ago.

Is Ohio’s special education spending spree warranted? If special education students are achieving, then yes. Consider, therefore, the test performance data for fourth- and sixth-grade students with specific learning disabilities (the largest subgroup of special ed students):

Figure 1: Improving test scores for primary school, learning-disabled students (2001-02 to 2010-11)

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Clearly, on the up and up.

But consider now the tenth-grade performance of students with learning disabilities:

Figure 2: Declining test scores for secondary school, learning-disabled students (2001-02 to 2010-11)

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Not so great.

The rise in Ohio’s special education spending seems to have improved primary school SPED performance. Yet the declining high school data pose a sticky distributional question about special education spending: Are we overspending in primary grades, while ignoring high school students’ needs? If that’s the case, we’re effectively losing primary school gains, while also burning through the special education budget—an increasingly large piece of the overall education pie.

As Secretary Duncan suggests, the truth about special education should be told.  And in Ohio, the truth seems to be this: primary school special ed students receive more of the support they need; high school students receive less.

• Educators see the “big picture,” the “global” problems that the Common Core aims to address, i.e. U.S. students’ lackluster performance among their international competitors and the large number of high-school  graduates who are not prepared for college or a career.
• A common language around the Common Core is being widely used. To a person, the educators spoke of ‘rigor and relevance,” “formative assessments,” “short cycle assessments,” “formative instructional practices,” “professional learning communities,” “curriculum-based assessments,” “curriculum alignment,” “curriculum maps,” “project-based learning,” “portfolio-based assessments,” “higher level thinking,” “performance-based testing” and “critical thinking skills.”
• Teachers want and appreciate tools they can “see.” What does “rigor and relevance” look like? (Good curriculum models are “very calming…in a sea of turbulence” shared one Cincinnati educator.)
• Everyone understands that data is king. Interviewees believe data is the secret to identifying and eliminating achievement gaps at the district level, the classroom level, and the student level.
• Emotions are high and run the gamut. Teachers are excited that they are being asked to ‘go deep’ and that standards are being raises. At the same time, there is fear about whether the new summative assessments will get it right, whether the tests really will be good measures of what students have learned.
• Collaboration has become standard operating procedure among schools, among districts, and with other entities such as the Council of Great City Schools, Battelle for Kids, the Gates Foundation, the General Electric Foundation, the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Ohio Appalachian Collaborative, the American Federation of Teachers and local educational service centers. No one feels like they’re working in a vacuum – or thinks that would be smart.

The educators in Ohio interviewed by Belcher, the people on the frontlines of our schools who work daily with our kids, see the move towards the Common Core as a positive. But, they worry seriously about the implementation challenges, and they fear that somehow our political leadership class will screw all of this up and turn a good into something bad. Or, as one Cleveland educator remarked, “the Common Core is the right work we should be doing as a country.” “But let’s not make this the metric system of our time…and all of sudden stop.” This is thoughtful guidance from someone actually doing the work.

Common sense, increasingly scarce in the public debate around the Common Core among talking heads and the chattering class, still prevails in the heartland. I take some solace in this fact and I hope others do as well.

• The school doesn’t offer a grade lever higher than three and has been declared to be in state of academic emergency for three of the four most recent years;
• The schools offers any of grade levels four to eight but does not offer a grade level higher than nine and has been in a state of academic emergency for two of the three most recent years and in at least two of the threeost recent years, the school showed less than one standard year of academic growth in either reading or math;
• The school offers any of grade levels ten to twelve and has been in a state of academic emergency for three of the four most recent school years.

Under these stipulations, 20 schools have been subject to automatic closure.  If the current version of SB 316 were to take effect, those schools could soon get a lot of company.

Kasich’s proposal changes the charter-closure law in two ways: 1) by instituting a new and more rigorous A-F rating system for schools and 2) by removing the exemption for dropout recovery schools from closure. What would be the impact of these changes?

Last August three schools were subject to automatic closure based on academic performance.  Had Kasich’s proposal been in place then, 28 schools would have made the list (eight more than have ever been subject to the provision).  

* denotes dropout recovery schools
Source: The Ohio Department of Education

As you can see in the chart above, the increase is largely due to the inclusion of dropout recovery schools. It’s also worth noting that while we expected to see more schools fall on the list under the governor’s proposal, it turns out that the A-F system might have saved one school (Lighthouse Community & Professional Development charter school) from automatic closure.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the Governor’s proposals in the weeks and months to come.

The report explains that developmental courses, while well intentioned, are financially burdensome for both students and schools, with the added dimension of terrible passing and retention rates. (At community colleges, 75 percent of first-year students require developmental courses, yet 50 percent of first-year community college students don’t return for a second year.) In Ohio, of over 110,000 first-time students, 42 percent took a remedial course in their first year in 2010. Ohio spends $130 million a year on developmental education, and nationally, two-year institutions spend $1.4 billion a year.

The report argues that technology is a potential solution to make the transition from high school to college more efficient, via two accelerated instruction models. First is the bridge/boot camp model: concentrated, adaptive, and self-paced programs that underprepared students take in the summer or over a break to prepare them for credit-bearing courses. Second is the supplemental model: a developmental math or English co-requisite course is taken alongside a credit-bearing course to act as a personal tutor to help students to remediate in the areas where they need it.

The Ohio Board of Regents teamed up with McGraw-Hill to create “Bridging to College Success”, a pilot targeting the knowledge gaps of individuals to help them enter college on-pace with their peers. Initially, the pilot was just in math and only at six institutions (community colleges, four-year universities, and one high school), but they intend to expand it to include English and reach over 20 schools within the next year. Both organizations hope that these adaptive assessments could be expanded to K-12 education to allow students to constantly track progress against the Common Core State Standards and deliver intervention long before a college campus.

Alumni, friends, students, and staff came together to purchase the building and fix it up to serve 300 students in fifth through twelfth grades. In 2008, a Kindergarten through fourth grade elementary feeder school was added to provide a seamless K-12 experience for the community’s children.

As we learned more about Sciotoville, its schools, its families and children, its history, and its challenges over the past year, we felt compelled to share the story of the Tartans (the schools’ nickname). So Fordham’s talented “new media” manager, Joe Portnoy, and Kathryn Mullen Upton, Fordham’s director of sponsorship, spent several days there in the fall, interviewing students, parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, community leaders, and alums—literally the entire school community—to understand this story.

The resulting video documentary, “The Tartans: The story of the Sciotoville community schools,” has just been released. It documents life inside the schools and out. Joe and Kathryn interviewed alumni (of the pre-existing district school) going back as far as the 1940s. Some of Sciotoville’s current teachers had been students who returned after college. Joe filmed local business owners and community leaders who support both schools with time and money even though their kids have long since grown up. As one person says in the film, “The schools are the heart of the community and without them we’d not have a community.”

Despite tight budgets and multiple challenges, the two Sciotoville charters have steadily maintained a Continuous Improvement (a “C”) rating by the Ohio Department of Education. Their elected governing boards (an arrangement which is virtually unheard of for Ohio charters) have committed to improving student achievement.

State law in Ohio uses the term “community schools” for what others call charters. In Sciotoville, that turns out to make sense, for these schools are owned and operated by local citizens and parents. Their story is compelling and says much about how important schools and children are to sustaining a community even in the toughest of times. We invite you to view it.

• Increase the number of high-performing district and charter schools and close and replace failing schools
• Focus district’s central office on key support and governance roles and transfer authority and resources to school
• Create the Cleveland Transformation Alliance to ensure accountability for all public schools in the city
• Invest and phase in high-leverage system reforms across all schools from preschool to college and career

Though the Cleveland Metropolitan School District is in dire need of the reforms proposed in the Plan, these two high-performing high schools, John Hay Early College High Schools and Cleveland School of the Arts High School, demonstrate that not everything in Cleveland is broken. The charts below compare John Hay’s and Cleveland School of the Arts’ tenth-grade students’ performance on the math section of last year’s Ohio Graduation Test to their peers in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The OGT certainly isn’t known for its rigor and we don’t want to overstate a school’s excellence based on its performance on that test. But these results do make clear that John Hay Early College and Cleveland School of the Arts are delivering their students to far higher levels of achievement than the district as a whole. We’re pleased by their successes and look forward to sharing more about these two schools, and four others, in our report. Watch for its release toward the end of this school year.

Fewer state tax dollars for Ohio’s local governments and schools have public administrators talking, in the light of day no less, about mergers and shared services – topics long taboo in the Buckeye State’s public sector. Most public officials fear the former and suspect that the latter is just a catchy phrase that stands for comingling their funds for the benefit of others.

Elected officials can be forgiven for their reluctance to discuss mergers and service consolidations. They didn’t create this maze of public service delivery; and until stagnant population growth, aging Babyboomers, and weakening soft economy caught up with Ohio, the status quo seemed sustainable. Citizens also have misgivings about consolidation and sharing. They view merging their local governments as a potential loss of identity and fear their sense of community will be sacrificed in the process. In Ohio, all politics really are local, and local control has been a sacred cow.

The reality is that public institutions have long succeeded in gaining taxpayers’ approval to dig deeper in their wallets because citizens fear that doing otherwise will result in bad schools, crumbling infrastructure, community decay, and lower property values. Times have changed. The economy tanked in 2008 and is only slowly recovering, state government is cutting back on local funding, property values have fallen, and it is increasingly difficult to pass school levies and other local tax increases even in the high-wealth suburbs. Local officials – and citizens – are left contemplating significant service reductions, higher local taxes and fees, and/or, collaborative efficiencies with neighboring jurisdictions.

It is hard to argue that from a governing perspective that Ohio is not overbuilt. Nearly 4,000 separate political entities create a lot of mouths to feed – from officials and employees to bricks, mortar, computer systems, and more. Clearly, no one in the 21^st century would design this scattered public service delivery system from scratch, but the political nature of the organizations involved makes finding solutions hard, and implementing them even harder.

Ohio’s over-capacity in governmental agencies is fundamentally structural, and local governments and schools have an important opportunity to cooperate on matters like regional health benefit pools, shared talent pools, information technology consolidation, and procurement innovations to protect vital services and programs. Progress begins with leadership that recognizes public funding limitations, embraces best practices and technology and is committed to change. Unwinding an overbuild public sector that has much embedded political support will be tedious work but necessary as we battle to regain public confidence.

In what may come as a surprise to many, K-12 public education systems in Ohio are ahead of the pack in many ways. There are two high-performing shared services models up and running that provide critical support for member districts: Educational Service Centers (ESCs) and Information Technology Centers (ITCs). These organizations represent viable platforms and valuable resources in constructing more efficient and regional approaches to common challenges that schools and local governments face. Currently these fee-for-service entities provide valuable curriculum support services, network connectivity, and other assistance to local school districts.

Developing partnerships between schools and local government agencies that pay tangible dividends to taxpayers should be among the highest priorities for both local and state political leaders and policy makers. In the greater Columbus area, for example, the Central Ohio Regional Shared Services Steering Committee, lead by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and the ESC of Central Ohio, provides an important forum for local governments to optimize resources, improve services, leverage economies of scale, and reduce costs through collaborative government agreements and shared services.

Public managers and elected officials from over 40 communities, school systems, nonprofits, and higher education gather regularly to evaluate how to increase their buying power and develop regional service delivery solutions while protecting vital services and curriculum.

Notable shared services initiatives by these entities include:

• Economic development and shared fleet maintenance (City of Columbus and contiguous local governments),
• IT consolidation planning (Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and the ESC of Central Ohio),
• IT consolidation planning (Union County, City of Marysville, and Marysville City Schools), and
• Health benefits cooperative (managed by the County Commissioners Association of Ohio for 23 Ohio counties).

Rebuilding trust with stakeholders and voters by maximizing tax dollars already approved, and in the system, is critical short term work. Turning talk into projects that pay with dividends of efficiency and trust among communities facing similar challenges will strengthen this state’s ability to weather the current fiscal storm and bolster public trust in the stewardship of tax dollars.

Hugh Quill is founder and CEO of Public Performance Partners. He is a former director of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and former Montgomery County Treasurer.

We’ve been working to improve the education landscape in our hometown of Dayton for nearly twelve years. The work is never easy and often frustrating. We were disappointed two years ago not to be able to feature a Dayton elementary school in our report. Thus we are pleased to be featuring two outstanding high schools there in this edition: Dayton Early College Academy (a charter school) and Stivers Schools for the Arts (a district-operated magnet school).

The charts below compare DECA’s and Stivers’ tenth-grade students’ performance on the math section of last year’s Ohio Graduation Test to their peers in the Dayton Public School district. The OGT certainly isn’t known for its rigor and we don’t want to overstate a school’s excellence based on its performance on that test. But these results do make clear that DECA and Stivers are delivering their students to far higher levels of achievement than the district as a whole. We’re pleased by their successes and look forward to sharing more about these two schools, and four others, in our report. Watch for its release toward the end of this school year.

Source: Ohio Department of Education PowerUsers Report, accessed March 21, 2012.

Controversial components of the mayor’s plan include basing pay, layoffs, and rehiring decisions on performance and specialization instead of traditional factors like seniority and credentials; replacing the current 304-page collective bargaining agreement, when it expires in 2013, and using a “fresh start” to renegotiate a new and far more streamlined contract; and providing high-performing charter schools with local levy dollars to support their day-to-day operations.

The Jackson Plan’s labor flexibility and levy support for high-performing charter schools are ideas that have long been anathema to statehouse Democrats and their union supporters. Not surprisingly, more than a few legislative Democrats and union officials have pointed out in recent weeks that some of the proposed changes in the mayor’s plan to the Cleveland teacher union collective bargaining agreement mirror those that were in the contentious and voter rejected Senate Bill 5. Democrats in both the House and Senate vehemently opposed Senate Bill 5 from its introduction to its demise (as did Mayor Jackson) in November. Further, organized labor, led by the teachers’ unions, raised over $20 million to help “kill the bill.”

Mayor Jackson has said repeatedly that his plan is not about politics, it is about the children of Cleveland and what they need and deserve.

Now, statehouse Democrats and organized labor are being asked by Mayor Jackson to sign off on changes to law that they worked so hard to kill just months ago. Why has the mayor put his Democratic colleagues in such an uncomfortable position? Because he believes, and evidence from successful school reform efforts in other big cities backs him up, that these changes would give Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon the flexibility he and his team need to keep and build the strongest teaching force possible.

Mayor Jackson has said repeatedly that his plan is not about politics, it is about the children of Cleveland and what they need and deserve. The fact that his plan has policy proposals that mirror what was in Senate Bill 5 doesn’t matter to him if these policies can benefit students and families. This position is hard for Democrats and the teachers’ union to stomach, but to their credit both seem to be working with the mayor and his leadership team to find a way to do it.

No one denies that Cleveland’s students are suffering and strong medicine is needed to try and turn things around in a city that has floundered from failed reform to failed reform for decades. Student performance in Cleveland is abysmal. The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results (on the NAEP – National Assessment of Educational Progress), for example, are considered the Gold Standard for looking at student achievement in mathematics and reading across 21 of the nation’s large urban districts. Cleveland’s students are bottom dwellers on these exams (as they are on state exams). Recent TUDA results showed that 68 percent of Cleveland’s fourth graders scored at below basic level in reading compared to 45 percent of students in the other large cities and 34 percent nationally. The numbers are even worse in mathematics.

The Jackson Plan offers the possibility of success because it is multifaceted, systemic, and forces change across the city’s educational landscape. Poor-performing schools face radical restructuring or closure while quality schools will receive more resources to expand what they do. The central office will be asked to streamline its operations and operate more efficiently while teachers will be rewarded, supported and held accountable for performance. Taxpayers will be asked to support a new levy request, and if all goes according to plan children in the city will receive stronger and better learning opportunities.

There looks to be an emerging bipartisan political consensus in Cleveland and Columbus that doing nothing is not an option, and that some form of Mayor Jackson’s plan is the best hope for moving forward. Democrats and Republicans at the statehouse are coming together to show support for the Jackson Plan, and if legislative language acceptable to both the mayor and the Cleveland Teachers Union can be presented to the legislature it has a real shot at becoming law. Time is of the essence here as legislation would have to be passed in time for the school district to file a levy request in August. For this to happen, a bill has to be presented to the General Assembly by the end of this week and passed by mid-Spring.

In a remarkable bipartisan show of support for the mayor’s plan a conversation was held this past Friday in Cleveland among northern Ohio lawmakers, Mayor Jackson, and the Cleveland Teachers Union. The discussions were convened by Senator Nina Turner (D-Cleveland) and Senator Peggy Lehner (R- Kettering, and chair of the Senate Education Committee). Joining the Senators in convening the meeting were Republican House Finance and Appropriations Chairman Ron Amstutz and Democratic State Representative Sandra Williams (head of the Legislative Black Caucus).

Such bipartisan leadership in search of solutions to thorny issues in Ohio has been sorely lagging in recent years. The fact that this is happening in an election year is all the more remarkable. Of course this could all fall apart, but all sides seem serious about finding a deal. Maybe, just maybe, real school reform in Ohio can move forward in a bipartisan way. That would be a good thing for not only Cleveland but Ohio.

The Harrison (CO) School District’s compensation plan, profiled in a recent Fordham report, represents another of yet a few compensation plans that totally redesign the actual teacher salary schedule. In this way, it joins Denver and Washington, D.C. in designing and implementing complete overhauls in how teachers are paid. These three districts are different from the dozens and dozens of other teacher compensation changes, most supported by the federal TIF program, which simply left the old schedule in place and added bonuses on top of them for teachers who worked in high poverty schools, in subjects where there are shortages (e.g., math and science) or for improving student achievement. Though such bonuses programs are needed and represent augmentations to how teachers are paid, the real breakthroughs will come when the overall salary schedule is redesigned, as Harrison has done.

The Harrison plan reflects the kind of new teacher salary schedule I have been recommending for nearly two decades – one that drops the current years of experience that trigger the bulk of salary increases and replaces them with metrics that reflect a teacher’s instructional expertise and impact on student learning (see my new book, Improving Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight, Corwin, 2012). Cincinnati was the first district to try such a new schedule, but the program collapsed as glitches in the new evaluation system emerged. It proposed to pay teachers largely on the basis of a performance-based evaluation score; though the compensation element was dropped, the evaluation system is still operating in the district, with teachers with higher scores producing more student learning gains.

The new Harrison plan provides salary bands, with each salary band linked to an effectiveness metric, so the higher the effectiveness score, the higher the salary. In this way the new schedule provides the highest salaries to teachers who are the most effective in producing student learning.

The effectiveness scores, like those being developed in many states and districts across the country, are derived from measures of both a teacher’s instructional practice and multiple measures of impact on student performance. Such multiple measures will generally lead to relatively stable and defendable effectiveness scores, which can be used in a salary schedule; I’d also tie tenure to an effectiveness level.

I have four major cautions and suggestions for the Harrison plan:

First, the system provides seven different effectiveness levels and thus seven salary bands. Psychometrically, it is difficult to have more than five such levels and the district will need to convince teachers that a one-point score difference should translate into placement into a higher or lower effectiveness level, and thus large salary difference. I have recommended that states and districts use a five-point scale.

Second, I would put a few experience steps inside each salary band so that teachers can earn a modest salary increase while working to enhance their effectiveness to the next higher level. But the top step in any salary band should be significantly below the first step in the next higher salary band so the prime signal is that higher salaries are earned by becoming more effective.

Third, I would add some salary for earning higher degrees but only degrees in the area of licensure. Though research shows that miscellaneous education units and degrees do not make a teacher more effective, research also shows that course work and degrees directly related to the area of licensure – e.g., a math or science degree for math and science teachers respectively – do improve teacher effectiveness. So totally throwing out rewards for degrees is tossing out an incentive that if controlled can help improve teacher effectiveness.

Finally, I would add incentives to the base salary schedule for: teaching in high need/high poverty schools, teaching in an area experiencing teacher shortages like math and science, and bonus programs based directly and solely on boosting student learning.

A redesigned salary schedule that provides the largest pay increases on the basis of demonstrated increases in an individual teacher’s effectiveness should be the form of the basic salary schedule of the future. If it were augmented with the above three incentive programs, a district would have a salary schedule that sent the right signals – get better at teaching, work in high poverty schools, get a license in subjects of high need like math and science, and produce increased student learning – and would finally align how teachers (as well as administrators) are paid with the core goals and needs of the education system.

Guest Blogger Allan Odden is director, Strategic Management of Human Capital, and professor emeritus, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

New York and Tennessee lead the nation in their overall increase in graduate rates, which have jumped 13 and 18 percentage points respectively from 2002 to 2009. (Ohio’s rate increased 2.1 points in that time.) Nationally, the number of dropout factories has declined by 457 since 2002 (to 1,550 such schools today). Texas leads the nation in moving schools off the list, with 122 fewer dropout factories in 2009 than 2002.  Another seven states moved more than twenty schools off the list.

But back to Ohio… what schools are the Buckeye State’s dropout factories? The report doesn’t list them, but using publicly available graduation rate data we can get an idea of what buildings they are and where they are located.

In 2009-10, 805 Ohio public high schools received a graduation rate calculation from the state. (Ohio, like many states, provided two graduation rates for that year: a state-calculated rate and a federally required “adjusted cohort graduation rate” (ACGR), the latter offering a more accurate number of how many students complete high school. For the purposes of this analysis, we are using the ACGR, the rate favored by the report’s authors.)

Of those 800-plus schools, 117 failed to graduate more than 60 percent of the class of 2010 on time. You can click here to see a full table of these schools, and here are a few interesting facts about them:

• Sixty-two of the schools are rated by the state as one might expect (Academic Watch or Academic Emergency, the state’s lowest two ratings; another 11 are not rated at all), BUT
• Nine received one of the state’s highest two ratings. In fact, four schools achieved an Excellent rating despite their dismal graduation rates.
• Not unexpectedly, all five of the high schools located in the state’s juvenile correctional facilities made the list.
• The majority of the schools (73 of them) are charter schools, including many of the state’s drop-out recovery schools, which are explicitly focused on getting at-risk students to graduation, and the state’s largest online schools.
• The district schools on the list are centered in Ohio’s major urban areas and a few mid-sized cities whose students often face similar challenges as their peers in the urban centers. Cincinnati City Schools and Cleveland Metropolitan Schools lead the pack with seven and eight schools on the list respectively. (The report features a special look at Cleveland and the urgency to revitalize that school district and city.)

The report is chock full of more data, case studies of successful dropout prevention efforts, benchmarks for assessing progress toward improving graduation rates, and policy recommendations. It’s well worth a read and we’ll have more coverage of it and Ohio’s efforts to increase the graduation rate in next week’s Ohio Education Gadfly.

We see it up close and personal in Ohio in our work with local school districts and as a charter school authorizer. There isn’t a week that goes by that we aren’t asked for names or contacts of potential school leaders, curriculum directors, or even teachers who are an expert in a foreign language, special education, or other high-demand subject. Great charter school models, especially those with an interest in trying to turn around long-suffering district schools, are also highly sought after and wooed.

MindTrust in Indianapolis is arguably the Gold Standard for groups in the country that are expert, strategic, and successful at recruiting talent to launch schools, work in schools, or serve needy students and families in different ways. But others are also doing great work, including New Schools for New Orleans, Charter School Partners in Minneapolis, 4.0 Schools in Louisiana, and Lead Public Schoolsin Tennessee.

Ohio’s efforts pale in comparison and scale to other states.

Ohio has made some gains in recent years in the competition for talent and the recruitment of successful charter school models to the state—for example: Teach For America (placing corps members in Ohio for the first time in 2012), KIPP, SEED Academy (planning to open a school in Cincinnati), and Building Excellent Schools. There are also some homegrown charter models that draw top human capital and are able to replicate great schools. But, Ohio’s efforts pale in comparison and scale to other states.

For example, Fordham has been authorizing charter schools in Ohio since 2005, and we’ve struggled mightily to recruit great schools (only one KIPP and one BES school and both opened in 2008). This year we are excited because our portfolio will include three new schools in 2012—Columbus Collegiate Academy West, DECA Prep in Dayton, and Village Preparatory School in Cleveland—all of which are offspring of some of the state’s highest performing charter school models. (We also hope to authorize two new KIPP schools in 2013). Yet, this success doesn’t come close to meeting the need here or in comparison to what other states are doing.

One further, major setback to Ohio’s efforts is that the state did not win any of the $54 million in competitive charter school grants issued by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. Where Ohio got zero dollars, Minnesota received $28 million over five years for new schools, New Jersey received $14.5 million over three years, and Massachusetts received $12 million. These three states all have stronger charter school laws, and they are all committed to helping great new charter schools open and thrive.

Ohio is in a competition for excellence in education, and despite some wins along the way we risk falling further behind some of our smarter and more nimble competitors. Other states are doing a better job of attracting both education talent and great school models and this will surely pay dividends for them in the form of student achievement.

Among the governor’s K-12 education proposals are:

• a strengthened third-grade reading guarantee—while Ohio has had a version of this guarantee on the books for years, it has been decried as an “unfunded mandate” by local districts and largely gone unenforced;
• performance standards for drop-out recovery charter schools—these schools have been excepted from Ohio’s charter school academic death penalty and other accountability measures since their inception more than a decade ago;
• a more straightforward, A-F school-rating system—the new system would be easier to understand and more accurately reflect schools’ true performance;
• adjustments to teacher evaluation and testing requirements—while the evaluation requirements put in place through the budget bill last summer are well-intentioned, they need tweaking to be more meaningful and workable at the local level; and
• passage of Mayor Frank Jackson's reform plan for Cleveland's schools—the city’s schools are suffering mightily, both academically and financially; Mayor Jackson’s plan—which carries the support of the district superintendent and business community—would put the district on the path toward academic improvement and fiscal stability.

Governor Kasich still has yet to tackle a few areas of education policy that need attention here (school funding first and foremost), but there is much to like in the plan he unveiled yesterday and it is heartening to see him display leadership in K-12 education policy and continue to advance important reforms.

Stay tuned to the Ohio Gadfly Daily and the Fordham Institute for continued analysis of the budget.

The correct answer, according to a brand-new paper from the Fordham Institute, is very likely the Harrison (CO) School District. Harrison is a high-poverty district of about 10,000 students near Colorado Springs. It has confronted the triple challenge of determining what elements are most valuable in a teacher’s overall performance (including but not limited to student growth on standardized tests), applying that determination to the district’s own teachers (all of them!), and then reshaping the teacher-salary system (with the teacher union’s assent!) to reward strong performance. Excellent teachers earn substantially more—and do so earlier in their careers—than their less effective peers.

Under the Harrison Plan, salaries for all teachers depend not on paper credentials or years spent in the classroom, but on what actually happens in their classrooms. “Step increases” based on longevity were eliminated, as were cost of living raises. And professional development is tailored by evaluations to help teacher improve. Harrison’s evaluation process is divided into two parts, with “performance” and “achievement” each representing 50 percent of the overall score.

Performance is gauged via multiple observations of the teacher-in-action over the course of the school year. Some of these are conducted by the principal, other parts by a committee of external district evaluators from other schools within Harrison. According to the report’s author, Harrison Superintendent Mike Miles, “All of the [observation] criteria are central to being an effective teacher. Who would disagree that preparation, use of data to inform instruction, quality instruction, and classroom environment are essential to being an effective teacher?”

Achievement is measured using student test results. The tests used depend on the grade level and academic subject. For example, state achievement test results, results on the district’s quarterly exams, and scores on the district’s semester exams may each account for up to 25 percent (of the half that relates to achievement). The Harrison Plan is crafted to avoid putting too much emphasis on any single test. This means that state test results, for example, represent one-eighth of a teacher’s overall evaluation. Student growth is what is mainly measured—and all test results used are norm-referenced or value-added. Finally, one-eighth of a teacher’s achievement score is tied to her school’s overall state rating, and one-eighth to a personal goal she sets in concert with her supervisor.  

So, how does this work for subjects like art? The measurement for an elementary art teacher include her students’ performance on the spring art project, results of the semester exams, and two art assessment sets, which include performance tasks. Art teachers face the same level or rigor in their evaluations as do the English and Math teachers. When all is said and done, all Harrison teachers receive one of five ratings: Novice, Progressing, Proficient, Exemplary and Master. Compensation rises with teach rating gain and such gains, in turn, hinge on stronger performance and student achievement results,. The district hopes to have more than 80 percent of its staff at the Proficient level or higher in the next few years. High-performing Harrison teachers make more money faster than teachers in other Colorado districts. Down the road in Colorado Springs, for example, a new teacher takes approximately 12 years to reach $48,000, while in Harrison a high-performing teacher can get there after just three years.

Note, though, that Harrison teachers receive little other money—there are no bonuses, stipends or extra-duty pay, nor any increases tied to simple longevity or degrees earned. Pay is based on performance; as are HR actions like professional development, probationary status and dismissal decisions. How much does this cost? The Harrison Plan was designed and implemented during a time when the district’s $107 million budget was reduced by $12.5 million. The Daniels Fund in Colorado provided an $800,000 grant over two years to develop the plan, but the plan is designed to be self-sustaining – no need to seek new dollars – even as many of the district’s high-performing teachers will see a spike in salaries.  According to Miles, “a pay-for-performance system cannot be sustainable if the plan is designed simply to provide teachers with more money.” The fact is, teacher pay is based on performance and in any given year some teachers will see a significant bump (up to $10,000), while others will not. The system is designed to reward teachers that perform handsomely, but not every year.

Miles, a former U.S. State Department diplomat and Army Ranger and current Broad Fellow, has led the Harrison district since 2006. Just two years into the implementation of the district’s pay-for-performance plan, he acknowledges that he can’t prove that the plan alone is driving Harrison’s successes. But there have been some. For example, the district’s most recent average ACT scores were up two full points over the previous year; one elementary school’s third grade scored 100 percent proficient on Colorado’s state reading test.

Miles is adamant, however, that raising student achievement can’t happen without excellent teachers—and that the district’s best teachers deserve the recognition and financial rewards that the plan outlines. It demonstrates that creating better teacher-evaluation systems is not as daunting as many might think. In fact, Miles hopes that Harrison’s tale can “inspire others by our success and spare them the mistakes we made. While school districts vary widely and state laws differ, our philosophy is transferable and our approach is replicable.”
The chronicling of the Harrison Plan is an important contribution to the efforts underway in districts and states across the country to create high-quality teacher evaluation systems and rigorous teacher performance plans of their own. As Miles concludes,

“At a time when districts are being prodded, incentivized, or forced to adopt pay-for-performance plans, we hope this ‘how-to’ guide will be a useful template that allows districts to seize the opportunity to recognize and reward teachers who are succeeding in the classroom.”

StudentsFirst had the pleasure of working with teachers and a principal from Harrison, Colorado late last year. We assisted the New Jersey State Superintendent in organizing roundtables across the state on the proposed teacher evaluation system under development. The Harrison folks were passionate about their work and their success in elevating the teaching profession there. It was incredibly powerful to listen to these veteran educators talk about how they felt that their evaluation system treated them as professionals and how they relied on it as a tool to help them and their colleagues improve. The principal described the increased, targeted development she could provide to staff and how the system enabled her to build a team solely focused on raising their students’ achievement.

What strikes me most about the Harrison model and why I think it’s so significant is that it dispels so many of the myths we hear about why a reform like this can’t be done or why change like they’ve seen in Harrison can’t be implemented and replicated elsewhere. These are students like we see everywhere else—high poverty and from families who themselves went through an underperforming school system. In short, these students come to school with all the challenges we’re familiar with, and their teachers are expected to deliver results. This is also a regular public school system—these aren’t charter schools or special schools that have been given extra funding or programs or powers. For too many years, the district fell far short of meeting expectations, ranking near the bottom of the state in student achievement. In 2005, only 54 percent of Harrison students were proficient in reading.

Harrison set out not just to do something different, but rather to abolish the status quo.

Yet even with those challenges, in 2007, led by the bold vision of Superintendent Mike Miles, Harrison principals, teachers, central office staff, and board of education members went to work on creating something better. Harrison set out not just to do something different, but rather to abolish the status quo and completely refocus the district and its educators on what mattered most—raising student achievement.

We know that what matters most in school when it comes to raising student achievement and changing their life outcomes is having an effective teacher in every classroom. Multiple studies confirm this, and wisely we’re seeing states and districts across the country follow the research and adopt policies to establish meaningful evaluation systems that enable them to identify effective instruction and to treat teachers like professionals.

In that context, Harrison was a trailblazer. They created an evaluation system that was based equally on performance and student achievement. The framework they’ve created includes multiple measures for each category as well, meaning that no one measure—be it student growth on a particular assessment or performance in only one observational area—determines a teacher’s rating. Rather, the Harrison system provides a full picture of what’s happening in the classroom, with the teacher and with the kids. Further, busting yet another myth, Harrison’s evaluation system takes a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to evaluating teachers of all subjects and grade levels using objective measures of student learning growth, demonstrating that just because there’s not a state assessment already in place doesn’t mean it’s too complicated to come up with a fair and accurate measure of a teacher’s impact in the classroom.

Like any true trailblazer, Harrison has improved its system since its initial implementation in 2009.

At StudentsFirst, we strongly advocate that states and districts figure out how they’re going to measure educator effectiveness AND that they use that information to inform their decision making. Here, Harrison also takes the right path. They were one of the first districts in the country to professionalize their pay structure, meaning that on average their teachers earn more than their peers in other jurisdictions and effective teachers realize their earning potential early in their careers. There are clear career progression and growth ladders as teachers become more effective, with special recognition for the most effective educators.

Like any true trailblazer, Harrison has improved its system since its initial implementation in 2009. They’re figuring out how to do it better and how to ensure that the bar for success is set high but still attainable, how to expand the evaluation to even more school-based staff, how to improve the assessments—but the point is they’re committed to moving forward because they know it’s what’s best for kids. And in doing so, Harrison provides a model that other districts would be wise to consider.

As we predicted, there have been several articles describing the coming changes and what they mean for districts across the state. The Columbus Dispatch today quoted the superintendent of Bexley City Schools, a suburb of Columbus, as saying, “I don’t know how a high-performing district like ours and many others gets a B?” “It might be a way of communicating in the simplest way but you miss a whole lot.” Bexley, currently rated Excellent with Distinction, would fall to a B under the new system.  Superintendents of currently high-performing districts in Montgomery County will also see a decline in their academic rating under the new system. Of the 28 districts in Montgomery that received a rating of Excellent with Distinction or Excellent on the last report card, only three (Oakwood, Miami East, and Mason) would receive an A with the new system.

We expected to see district leaders, teachers, and parents to be surprised at how their districts and schools fare under the new system. As Marc Schare, a member of the Worthington Board of Education stated, “The notion that so many school districts in Ohio could be rated excellent or effective is simply not possible given the remediation rates from kids going on to Ohio colleges.” There will surely be much more backlash in the coming months, but moving forward with this improved and honest rating system is the right thing to do for our kids and their future.

The EPIC (Effective Practice Incentive Community) award recognizes schools that make substantial gains in student academic growth. In partnership with Mathematica Policy Research, student test data are analyzed, and schools with the highest gains are selected as winners. To be eligible for an EPIC award, schools must have student populations of at least 30 percent eligible free and reduced-price lunch (over 90 percent of KIPP Journey students are considered economically disadvantaged) , submit three years of state test score data for all students, and be willing to share their effective practices with NLNS EPIC partners. As part of the award, KIPP: Journey Academy will receive approximately $50,000 to be distributed among its staff.

Of the 179 charter schools from 24 states and the District of Columbia that participated, only 14 winners were selected, and KIPP: Journey Academy was the only school in Ohio - and the only KIPP school nationally- to receive an award.

On behalf of the school, Ms. Powell said, “We are thrilled and honored that KIPP: Journey received this award. This award recognizes the dedication of our teachers and staff as they help our students climb the mountain to and through college.”

As the sponsor (aka “authorizer”) of KIPP: Journey Academy, we extend our warmest congratulations to the leadership, staff and students. We know that behind this award is three years of hard work by the staff, board, and students; a steadfast commitment to markedly improving student academic performance; and the unwavering believe that any child that comes through the doors can and will go to college.

Ohio’s current rating system uses vanilla terms for rating schools and districts like “Excellent with Distinction,” “Continuous Improvement,” and “Academic Emergency.” Worse, the state’s rating system provides inflated grades for performance. For example, in classic Lake Wobegon fashion, 57 percent of Ohio’s school districts were rated as “Excellent with Distinction” or “Excellent” (the best possible ratings) in 2011. Conversely, not one of the state’s 609 rated school districts was rated “Academic Emergency” (the lowest possible rating).  

Ohio’s new system would incorporate an A-F letter grade system, and grades would be based on a basket of performance metrics ranging from number of academic standards met or surpassed to value-added gains to progress in closing achievement and graduation gaps. Under the proposed new system – which has to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education and put into Ohio law – districts and schools will be provided with an overall grade and separate grades in the categories of: 1) student performance, 2) school performance, 3) gap closing and 4) student progress (see details here). 

The proposed changes would not only be easier for parents, citizens, and others to understand because it will use the old education staples of A-F ratings, but the grades promise to be better gauges of actual school and district performance. State Superintendent Stan Heffner has shared that “Parents won’t see as many As” on school report cards,” which means parents, taxpayers, and others will be given a more honest appraisal of actual district and school performance. This would undeniably be a step forward for Ohio, its children, and its schools in that the first step to improvement is acknowledging you’ve got a problem or weaknesses to improve upon. 

Using data provided earlier this week by the Ohio Department of Education we have summarized how school districts and schools across the state would be rated using the current system and using the proposed new system. It should be noted that the data simulations were created using actual performance data from 2011 and do not project into 2012. These are not a prediction of future scores, but rather a way to compare recent results under the two different systems. What’s clear from the charts below is that Ohio would see a more balanced, and we think more honest, rating system under the proposed changes.

For example, under the new system only three percent of Ohio’s school districts would receive an A grade, which is a stark contrast to the nearly 60 percent of school districts in Ohio that received a top rating of Excellent or Excellent with Distinction in 2011. Conversely, whereas no school districts fell into Academic Emergency in 2011, under the new system two districts would receive an F.   

Graphs 1 and 2 below demonstrate results under the current system and how things would potentially change under the proposed A-F system.

Graph 1: Academic Ratings for Ohio’s School Districts Under Current System
(Using 2010-11 Performance Data)

Graph 2: Academic Ratings for Ohio’s School Districts Under Proposed System
(Using 2010-11 Achievement Data)

The same kind of shift in performance rating can be seen among individual school buildings across the state (there are about 3,400 public district and charter schools in Ohio that receive academic ratings). Graph 3 shows the percentage of schools by each current academic designation. Again, the Excellent and Excellent Distinction range is inflated. However, graph 4 shows that the distribution changes significantly under the proposed system. Under the new system there would be as many schools rated F as there are rated A.

Graph 3: Academic Ratings for Ohio’s Public Schools Under Current System
(Using 2010-11 Achievement Data)

Graph 4: Academic Ratings for Ohio’s Public Schools Under Proposed System
(Using 2010-11 Achievement Data)

Ohio’s planned move away from its current rating system to the proposed A-F system is an improvement, a more honest and accurate description of how Buckeye schools and districts are actually performing. The decline in the number of Excellent and Excellent with Distinction schools and school districts would likely come as a shock to many district officials, school principals, teachers, parents, and students. And, there will surely be much clamoring to water down the system as happened in the past, but moving forward is the right thing for the Buckeye State, its schools, and its children. The Ohio Department of Education deserves kudos for seeking to use the NCLB waiver process to elevate school expectations in Ohio. Hopefully the USDOE will approve the waivers quickly and without modifications, while Ohio’s General Assembly passes the legislation necessary for the state to move forward.

Finally, Ohio is worthy of a red pin on the TFA map.

While waiting for the meeting to start we sat in the lobby of the TFA office where there hung a large map of the United States with a red pin in every state where TFA corp members were teaching. Ohio stood out like a sore thumb because it was surrounded by states with red pins. When we met with Barth he told us bluntly, “if you want KIPP to be successful in Ohio and grow, we need TFA there.” TFA serves as the talent pipeline for KIPP teachers and school leaders, as well as the pipeline for numerous other high quality charter school programs, education reform organizations, and increasingly reform-minded school districts and states.

Today, Teach for America announced that it will place 90 teachers in 14 schools in Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky over the next three years, including Cincinnati Public Schools,  Covington Independent Public in northern Kentucky and Dayton-area charter schools (three sponsored by Fordham). Governor Kasich summed up what this means for Ohio when he said, “It’s great that communities across Ohio have partnered with Teach For America to help recruit new effective educators for some of our highest-need urban schools. I’m confident that the long-term leadership and dedication of these teachers will have positive impacts in schools across our state.”

Finally, Ohio is worthy of a red pin on the TFA map. This is surely a good day for education and the children of the Buckeye State who will benefit from the passion, smarts, dedication and expertise of TFA corp members.

It is because of these personal connections to the schools over the years that I found the recent “Special Audit of the Richard Allen Academy Schools” such painful and disturbing reading. The Special Audit provided a litany of “missing money, missing records and self-dealing” that has led to $929,850 in findings for recovery. The audit describes a situation where public dollars were used without any basic accountability or transparency. It reads as if the schools’ leadership considered the schools a private operation free of any responsibility for how the state dollars were spent. There also seemed little understanding as to whom the public resources were meant to support.

For example, the audit details how the schools contracted with the Montgomery County Department of Jobs and Family Services to provide summer and after-school readiness enrichment services to needy Dayton families. The RA administration, despite receiving public dollars for the express purpose of providing programs, charged participating families a weekly fee – to be paid in cash – for attending the after school program. According to the audit, “the fees were paid in cash. We could not identify any program fees recorded or deposited by the Schools.”

In response to the audit, Richard Allen officials issued a statement to the Dayton Daily News that read:

The language chosen for use in the audit report attempts to create the perception that there was intent to run afoul of the laws of this state by the parties referenced therein. What the auditors were tasked with ascertaining was whether the funds expended by the schools were for a proper public purpose. As stewards of public funds, we would expect no less. However, we are dismayed by the arbitrary and capricious nature in which the auditors determined what documentation they would and would not give credence to.

Such defiant language might have more credibility if the state auditor were someone other than Dave Yost. Yost is a Republican who supports charter schools and school choice generally. He also is a former prosecutor who knows how to follow the facts. He made his name in politics for his vigorous prosecution of political corruption. His stated mission as auditor is “to protect Ohioans’ tax dollars while aggressively fighting fraud, waste and misuse in public spending.”

The problems facing the leadership of the Richard Allen family of schools are likely just beginning as the auditor has referred many of the findings to the Ohio Ethics Commission, the Ohio Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, state retirement agencies, and the Montgomery County Department of Job and Family Services. If the Ohio Ethics Commission, for example, finds that a violation has occurred, its findings are turned over to the appropriate prosecuting authority for criminal prosecution.

The Richard Allen Academy Schools Audit highlights, yet again, the need for Ohio statute to clarify the roles and duties of school governing boards, school operators, and school sponsors (aka authorizers). Some of the problems highlighted in the audit are a result of state law that allows the blurring of responsibilities and accountabilities across the different authorities responsible for charter performance. The auditor reported:

As a result of these relationships, the Schools, their management company, and sponsor are generally operated by the same individual, the organizations are closely related, financial operations have been commingled, and management lines have been blurred. The lack of separation between the Schools, their management company and their sponsoring organization increases the risk of financial mismanagement, inappropriate relationships and statutory ethics violations.

This blurring of responsibilities was the topic of a February 4 Columbus Dispatch editorial that observed:

The greatest weakness in Ohio’s charter-school system is a lack of clear boundaries between the principal players in a charter school:

• The governing board, which creates the school and is responsible for it;
• The sponsor, which is authorized by the state to oversee a school and hold the governing board accountable for performance;
• In some cases, an operating company, nonprofit or for-profit, that is paid by the governing board to run the school;
• And the Ohio Department of Education, which oversees it all.

Legislation to address these issues has been introduced almost every year since 2005, and the most recent effort was included in the Senate’s version of the recent biennial budget. Each time the legislation is presented it gets killed by self-interested groups that benefit from the current confusion.

The situation with the Richard Allen Schools is surely a sad one for the hundreds of children and their families who attend the schools, for the dozens of teachers in the buildings who are working hard every day to provide first-rate instruction to their students, and for Dayton – which still has too few high-performing elementary school options for its children. Yet, maybe some good can come out of this if the General Assembly finally creates a system of reasonable checks and balances for Ohio’s charter schools.

The experts aren’t necessarily running short of ideas, but, like many experiments for improving education, new schemes often work best in small, intensive classroom situations then fall apart when they leave the hothouse for larger-scale application.

The latest idea gaining traction is using computer video games to teach mathematics. Educational technology companies are pushing specially developed games. But popular and big-name gaming staples like “World of Warcraft” may be effective research templates for teaching math concepts to elementary and secondary students. For the ignorant, like me, this hugely popular computer video game is played online and involves many players at once, with each player controlling a character that explores the landscape, fights monsters, completes quests, and interacts with other players. Some teachers have been experimenting with the game in math classes for the last four or five years and there are websites designed to help teachers adapt the game (see here).

Stanford University mathematician Keith Devlin is a “World of Warcraft” believer. America now has the know-how to develop computer games and puzzles to teach math, as well as other subjects, he believes. In less than a generation, American students could once-again shine. Devlin is a prolific author and is Stanford’s Carl Sagan Prize winner and executive director of the university’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (see here). The institute studies how people use technology and how it can be designed to make it more usable. But Devlin is probably best known as the Math Guy on National Public Radio.

Devlin made his pitch for educational virtual gaming at the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio (ESCCO) last Wednesday, where he spoke and participated in a panel discussion concerning educational gaming technology. State Superintendent Stan Heffner participated, too, along with 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. The forum was co-presented by the ESCCO, the Nord Family Foundation, and the Fordham Institute.

“Math is still a hard subject but using virtual gaming and puzzles will certainly improve learning,” Devlin said in an interview after the meeting. “Not everyone is going to like it. Not everyone even needs high-level math but everyone needs some math.”

Using computer games in education could at least partially overcome the age-old problem of learning math being a drudge. Traditional ways to teach math can be cold and dissociative, Devlin said. “It doesn’t help if you a dress up a math lesson as a word problem. First of all (word problems) ask you stupid questions: ‘There are three pipes emptying into a pool. How long does it take to fill up?’ It’s better to ask, `How long before an Amazon server fills up with data? When will the server overload?’ The math is the same. That’s the math those companies use.”

Devlin became interested in the potential of computer games by observing his own children. “My two really smart kids became avid players. They were clearly learning something and the engagement was powerful.” Eventually, Devlin started writing specialized games for math education, such as an early effort to teach students concepts of Cartesian geometry that they then used to locate buried treasure on an island.

Some early ed gaming efforts were aimed at children with autism and other learning disabilities. While autistic and dyslexic children and others often don’t perform well on written tests, they can demonstrate what they’ve learned using computer gaming, he said.

The idea behind gaming is to involve students in the learning process, which is probably a teacher’s most difficult challenge. In turn, a game provides immediate feedback. The more a student learns, the better he or she performs. “The sense of ownership of what’s being learned is tremendous,” Devlin said.

Virtual games also attempt to simulate a real learning environment. “If you go and live in Italy you will quickly learn Italian,” he said. Similarly, if a virtual computer game can illustrate the real world and how mathematics relates to that world it will be more meaningful and learning could be easier. “If you can interest people in any of the many things in which math is useful then the math will flow.”

Devlin believes a $500 million national effort could develop computer educational games as tools for math, science, history and other subjects. “We need to do it in stages. Start small and pick off bite-size chunks,” he said.

First, game experts and teachers need to develop better games. Although millions of children avidly play the games, it has been difficult to pin down exactly what works for educational purposes in a game and what doesn’t. Lots of factors are at play such as graphics, animation and characters; behavioral science; and how the user interfaces with the game. Most early gaming ideas didn’t work or didn’t work well because game designers didn’t understand how students learn through a game. Especially difficult is avoiding the situation in which a student does well at a game simply because he’s a good gamer, but doesn’t learn much subject matter.

Educational game publishers, a small but growing group, still peddle a wide variety of quality from junk to not bad. Devlin is confident education games will continue to improve, especially if students are using them and that classroom data is fed back to game developers. Pennsylvania has launched an effort to eventually use games to teach math and science in schools (see here). Microsoft and other software companies are actively developing new games to market to the education community (see here and here).

Games and puzzles – at least the good ones – are built on mathematical concepts. Students may or may not do well but they interact with math and they end up knowing what it’s like to do math in a fashion similar to someone playing on a piano. “I’m lousy at playing a piano but I know what it’s like to play one,” Devlin said. “Kids may be lousy at math but with educational gaming they will appreciate and understand how math works.” The games, however, don’t make math a snap. “Math is hard but doable. The only question is how far up the ladder do you get before you give up.”

Using games also does not reduce the importance of teachers. However, the games allow a teacher to target a student’s strengths and weaknesses by following the student’s progress through a game’s increasingly difficult skill levels. “You can’t take the teacher out of system. The moment you do that you’ve lost,” Devlin said. “But there’s no need for the teacher to stand up and give an explanation. The teacher has to make sure each child understands. “A YouTube video can give the same instruction a teacher can at the blackboard....But the teacher still has to be able to deal with whatever questions comes up.”

Many teachers may like this approach, but many won’t, especially older teachers. “Some teachers will make the transition and a lot won’t be able to. It’s a world shift. It could take 20 years before older teachers unable to adapt leave teaching,” he said. Many younger teachers, however, are naturals. “First of all they’re all gamers. Many young teachers come to me asking how they can use games to teach.”

Games are starting to be used in college-level courses, especially in engineering classes where a group of students may be asked to design a race car and successfully race it around a virtual road course. That means library research to learn automotive and mechanical and electrical engineering concepts or bouncing ideas off professors or other students. “The only way to drive that car around the course is by covering the math. It’s a whole engineering project,” he said.

Using educational games to teach math also won’t dumb it down, Devlin argues. “If you want to be an engineer or scientist you still have to be good at the symbolic stuff,” he said. But many others can use algebraic concepts without the Xs, Ys, and Zs. After all, Devlin said, algebra was developed by Arab traders, not by rocket scientists.

Ohio is one of 26 states, along with the District of Columbia that applied for a second-round waiver. If approved (and most observers believe it will be), what will the waiver mean for the Buckeye State? What changes will it bring about in the coming months and years? The chart below breaks down some of the biggest changes and outlines what Ohio schools can expect to see under the plan. (See table below)

State Superintendent Stan Heffner hopes that the proposed changes will result in more students being prepared for either college or the workforce when they leave high school and help end the academic disparity among students. According to the most recent achievement data from the Ohio Department of Education the graduation gap between white and black students is 24 percentage points, a gap of 26 percentage points exists between white and black students on the seventh-grade reading test, and the gap is even larger when looking at fifth-grade math where 37 percentage points separate white and black students.

Ohio has already implemented numerous reform efforts such as smarter performance and accountability laws for charter schools, a meaningful teacher evaluation system, and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Yet, the state’s increased focus on rigorous standards, accountability, and performance will make for a rough transition, as Heffner warns: “parents won’t see as many As on school report cards.”

For more information on the NCLB waiver process don't miss the upcoming event: Weighing the Waivers: Did the Administration Get it Right on ESEA Flexibility on Friday, March 2, 2012 at 9:00am in our DC office. The event will be webcast, so simply tune in here at 9:00am to watch.

In short, if there is market demand for a school – and the school is in compliance with basic regulations like fire and health and safety codes – then no more evidence is needed to keep the state dollars flowing. Free-market purists believe that school choice is an end in itself. If public policy creates a marketplace of school options then issues of school quality will work themselves out as parents will naturally seek quality and abandon failure. Free-market purists believe school operators know best what families and children need and that the state should have no say in matters of school “quality” and academic performance.

The second camp of school-choice supporters – I’ll call accountability hawks – believes that market demand for schools is important (no child should be trapped in a failing, monopolistic school system), but of equal importance is holding schools that receive taxpayer dollars accountable for their academic and fiscal performance. Accountability hawks – of which I am one – believe that the state has an inherent interest in ensuring that all children receive a quality education because the taxpayers footing the bill deserve outcomes for their investments. More importantly, citizens need to know that future generations are provided with the knowledge and skills needed to perpetuate a good and just society.

Accountability hawks take inspiration from the writings of Alexander Hamilton, et al. who wrote in Federalist No. 51 that:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

For public education to work, as in a republic itself, there needs to be a system of checks and balances in place.

For public education to work, as in a republic itself, there needs to be a system of checks and balances in place. Everyone in public education benefits from transparency and accountability, from having someone watching over their shoulder, giving them feedback on performance, and holding them to account for progress. Rewards can take many forms (promotions, accolades, bonuses, diplomas, etc.) and so can interventions (replace the principal, require summer school, put the school on probation, etc.). But, accountability hawks believe nobody is better off when information is concealed, when self-interest trumps performance, or when ill-considered financial incentives tempt one to tolerate and even expand academic mediocrity.

With proper checks and balances in place between school operators, school governance structures (boards of education and charter authorizers), and the state, school choice is more apt to deliver performance and avoid scandal than if schools are simply left alone to operate free of external demands beyond market forces. We’ve seen these two views clash publicly in recent months in Ohio. In the debate around the state’s most recent biennial budget the Republican-controlled House sought to reshape Ohio’s charter school program around the “free-market purist” position while the Republican-controlled Senate pursued policies better-aligned to the position of “accountability hawks.”

More recently, the Ohio Department of Education (which was required to become a charter school authorizer as part of a compromise in the biennial budget debate between the House and Senate) rejected charter applications from the Akron-based for-profit charter operator White Hat. White Hat management sought an arrangement as school operator that would have given the company carte blanche control over all school operations and state dollars received. The department’s arguments for rejecting the White Hat applications were very much aligned with the principles of “accountability hawks.” Specifically, school operators, the department argued, must be answerable to non-profit governing boards that provide a check on school spending and school performance issues.

Taking a phrase from Hamilton, if all charter operators were angels we wouldn’t need charter school accountability beyond market forces (and likewise in the district sector of public education). But, history has taught us that not all charter operators are angelic in their motives and pursuits. As such we need accountable hawks to keep charter schools honest and focused on serving the needs of children and taxpayers first.

These issues have made White Hat a fixture in the press, most recently with a report that the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) rejected four of six White Hat applications to the department to authorize new schools that were slated to open in the fall of 2012. (ODE is allowed to sponsor up to five new charter schools a year as part of a compromise in the biennial budget that made the department a charter authorizer almost a decade after being forced from that role by an earlier General Assembly.)

The rejection of the White Hat applications will come as a surprise to many observers because ODE has rarely challenged large, not to mention politically well-connected, operators. It appears, however, that the department has committed itself to quality and performance. Its rejection of the White Hat applications appears to be based on merit – they simply weren’t very good applications and lacked basic clarity on matters of separation of authority between the operator and the schools’ governing authorities.

This decision by the state department comes on the heels of the biennial budget passed last June that put in place several measures to advance the charter quality agenda in Ohio. These changes included stricter rules on the opening of new charter schools via stronger parameters around sponsor accountability, with the law now prohibiting sponsors from opening any new schools if their portfolio of schools (dropout recovery and special needs schools excepted) is ranked among the lowest 20 percent of community school sponsors based on student achievement.

While the Ohio Department of Education botched sponsorship in the early 2000s, this new focus on accountability and performance is to be commended. Ohio’s charter school program will be stronger and better if decisions around schools, and the opening of new schools, are based on merit and performance rather than politics and influence. ODE’s “sponsorship 2.0” is off to a very good start.

House Bill 191, co-sponsored by Rep. Patmon (a Cleveland Democrat) and Rep. Hayes (a Republican representing rural east-central Ohio), would change the definition of a school year from 182 days (of roughly 5.5 hours in length) to 960 hours for K-6 (excluding half-day kindergartners) and 1,050 for 7-12, define a school week as five days in length, and eliminate calamity days.

The bill would also make true for Buckeye teachers the old joke that “there are three good reasons to become a teacher: June, July, and August” by prohibiting schools from operating between Memorial Day and Labor Day and banning extracurricular activities over Labor Day weekend. Such proposals are offered in the legislature here every year or two, pushed by the state’s two large amusement parks and other summer tourist destinations that want cheap, teenage labor available for the full summer, not to mention more summer days when families can visit. (Rep. Hayes readily admits he sponsored the bill in order to boost the state’s tourism industry.)

Much of the clamor over the bill, which has been panned by several newspaper editorial boards and education groups, regards the fact that districts could essentially shave five weeks off the current school year if they adhered to the minimum hours. That’s certainly a risk, though perhaps not as likely as critics worry. Charter schools in Ohio are required to offer only 920 hours of instruction annually but most outpace that by at least ten percent. And with all of the new accountability provisions for schools and teachers that were put in place via last year’s budget bill, school leaders would be foolish to drastically curb the amount of time students spend learning and teachers spend teaching.

My problem with the bill is that while it unties districts’ hands in one regard, it shackles them in others. Changing to a school year based on hours could provide schools a tremendous amount of flexibility in scheduling. For example, charter schools relish the ability to schedule frequent half-day professional development sessions for teachers but still get “credit” for the several hours of instruction provided to students the other half of the day, while district schools are limited in the number of such PD days they can offer and “count” as school days. The bill also admirably eliminates calamity days, requiring schools to make up missed instructional time.

But requiring that a school week lasts five days removes the opportunity, as just one example, for districts to save money on transportation and energy by moving to a four-day week. And it’s well-documented that students slide back academically over summer break. Lengthening that break (few, if any, districts in Ohio currently adhere to a Labor-Day-to-Memorial-Day schedule) would only worsen the regression. Changing those provisions could make this bill a model for states providing true flexibility and autonomy to districts when it comes to how and when they offer instruction.

Last month I led a delegation of education-reform advocates from the Ohio cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton to spend a day with leaders of The Mind Trust, an education reform nonprofit that is paving the way for transformative change in K-12 education in Indianapolis. For several years, Indianapolis has been leading the Midwest in education reform. It started when former Mayor Bart Peterson launched the city’s award-winning charter schools initiative.  It accelerated with the launch of The Mind Trust that brought a concentration of the nation’s best education entrepreneurs to the city and made Indianapolis the envy of the region.

Most recently, Indianapolis is inspiring other Midwestern cities to propose big ideas for driving systemic change in K-12 education. The Mind Trust issued a report in December proposing bold reforms to the Indianapolis Public Schools district. That plan, “Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools,” influenced a report Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson issued earlier this month offering prescriptions for how the city can improve its K-12 system. Jackson’s plan, “Cleveland’s Plan for Transforming Schools,” cites and draws from The Mind Trust’s report. Both plans seek to:

• Give high-performing schools far more control over staffing, budgets, culture, curriculum, and services, in return for increased accountability for student performance;
• Drive central-office spending down so more can be invested at the school level;
• Force schools that don’t deliver results to close;
• Push new investments, such as early-childhood education, to help expand enrollment in excellent schools and improve student performance;
• Strategically recruit and place top teaching talent and leaders in schools that serve the neediest children; and
• Give the mayor more authority over city schools.

This is a bold agenda – no matter the city – but such boldness is necessary to improve schools that have failed to meet the educational needs of their children for generations. Student performance in both Indianapolis and Cleveland ranks among the most woeful in the nation.

But with both cities’ plans on the table, Indianapolis now has competition as the center of education reform in the Midwest. Cleveland has a serious advantage over Indianapolis because the mayor already has control of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.  And Cleveland’s superintendent is firmly behind Mayor Jackson’s ambitious plan, ensuring alignment between the city’s two most powerful education leaders.

With Indianapolis’ Opportunity Schools plan and the Cleveland Plan, the pressure is now on these two communities to prove that all stakeholders can come together and embrace the bold steps necessary to ensure that all students get to attend life-changing public schools. Cities across the country need the inspiration and example these two communities can provide. I hope both Cleveland and Indianapolis show the nation that an urban school system can be transformed to create opportunities for all students.

I live near Dayton - another struggling former industrial power that is a shadow of its former self - and spend a lot of time in Cleveland meeting and working with some of that community's fantastic civic leaders, philanthropists, educators, and business people who are trying desperately to save their city. There is no doubt that Cleveland is hurting and it is bleeding families and children. The city has 30,000 fewer children today than it did just a decade ago, and many of the children left behind are struggling academically. In 2010-11, 56 percent of students in Cleveland attended a school rated D or F by the state. This is despite the fact the district spends a little more than $14,000 a pupil.

Because Cleveland is shrinking, its schools are facing a serious fiscal crisis. The district faces at least a $64.9 million budget deficit in 2012-13, and without additional cuts and or revenues the district's five year budget forecast shows a shortfall of close to $300 million by 2016. Despite the fiscal challenges, Cleveland has seen the emergence of some truly high-performing schools. Some of these schools are innovative district-operated schools like Campus International, a high-demand K-3 school housed on the Cleveland State University campus, and MC²STEM high school located at the Great Lakes Science Center. The district also has some successful “traditional” schools, like Louisa May Alcott Elementary (which we featured in our 2010 report on high-performing, high-need urban schools).

Other high-performing schools in Cleveland are charters like the Breakthrough Schools network, in which student achievement rivals and even surpasses that of the highest performing suburban schools in Ohio. In fact, in 2010-11 nine of Cleveland's top 15 schools were charters. While Mayor Jackson’s plan puts a priority on partnering with such high-flying charter schools, NOTHING in it favors for-profit or low-performing charters, and certainly the plan is no gift to White Hat or any other management company, as Diane alleges.

The fact is that Jackson’s plan seeks to confront a stark economic and academic reality by focusing on what works in education and cutting out what doesn't. Those schools that work for children and deliver academic results - be they district schools or charter schools - will be encouraged to expand their enrollments and even add new buildings. Those schools that are struggling the most (be they district or charter) will face either serious restructuring or closure. The plan focuses on performance and seeks to identify and keep in Cleveland the community's very best teachers while in time recruiting more to its schools through programs like Teach For America and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program.

In order to maximize its talent pool, however, Jackson is calling for giving the school district more flexibility over personnel by doing away with damaging policies like Last In/First Out (this will require a change to state law). Currently, as Cleveland has shrunk it has had to dismiss its teachers based solely on seniority. This has hurt the district in two ways. First, such quality blind policies mean that some of the district's most effective teachers have been let go for more senior,and possibly less effective teachers. Second, the per teacher costs in Cleveland are higher than most other school districts in Ohio because it is populated by older teachers who have accrued larger salaries by accumulating years of service.

What Diane calls an attack on teachers is actually an honorable response to a brutally tough dilemma facing a city that has to shrink its overall number of schools and teachers. Mayor Jackson's plan is an honest effort to do this in a way that will result in fewer, but better, schools. It is in fact a brave effort to try and make the best of a truly difficult situation. Fair-minded people in Ohio understand what Mayor Jackson and his district CEO, Eric Gordon, are up to. This is why the State Board of Education - both Democrats and Republicans - gave Eric Gordon a rousing applause when he presented the plan to them earlier this week.

Cleveland and its leaders are trying to do right by their children, their city, and their future. They need and deserve all the support and encouragement they can get. They certainly don't deserve to have bullets shot at them by a drive-by pundit.

Nearly 400 people gathered to discuss why the Common Core standards are necessary to improve educational outcomes in Ohio, as well as the challenges and opportunities associated with the new standards. The opening keynote speaker was State Superintendent Stan Heffner, who stressed that Ohio’s current K-12 system isn’t working and is letting kids down and not preparing them for the future. He went on to emphasize that the Common Core gives us the opportunity to do better and we must capitalize on that. Cleveland Metropolitan Schools CEO Eric Gordon and Reynoldsburg City Schools Superintendent Steve Dackin shared how they have already begun to implement the Common Core standards in their districts. Mike Cohen, president of Achieve, spoke to the specifics of PARCC (the assessment consortia Ohio joined last fall) and warned that the implementation of the new standards in ELA and math will not be easy and that districts should start the implementation process now. State Board of Education President Debe Terhar; Deb Tully of the Ohio Federation of Teachers; Melissa Cardenas from the Ohio Board of Regents; the new director of the Governor’s Office of 21^st Century Education Dick Ross also participated.

The event was chock full of great discussion and interaction not only among those in attendance but also those watching online and in the Twitter-sphere. Here are some of the top tweets related to the event:

• SchoolChoiceOH: Eric Gordon is breath of fresh air. Talking with districts across the country about how to approach common core. #ccohio

• OhioGadfly: Gordon: we know we have to get better- we have to get serious about changing this educational system #CCOhio

• Jen Smith Richards: Ohio Supt. Stan Heffner says schools could be using new Common Core standards in k-2 right now. Why wait? he asks. #ccohio

• ChristinaHank: Heffner: We're not going to keep repeating content yr after yr; we're going to build on knowledge #CCOhio #CommonCore

• OHEducation: Heffner: College ready- proficient enough in English and Math to take entry level college courses without remediation. #ccohio #ohioed

• OhioGadfly: Heffner: in 6th grade kids only have to get 35% of items correct to be considered to proficient- this is a problem #CCOhio

If you missed the event, or want to check it out again, you can watch the video here and access all the materials on our event page. Stay tuned for more coverage in the weeks and months ahead on implementing the Common Core in Ohio.  And as always, for all things Common Core head over to our Common Core Watch blog.

1)    Significantly increase the number of high-performing schools, both district and charter, while closing failing schools;

2)    Maximizing enrollment in Cleveland’s existing high-performing district and public charter schools;

3)    Investing in promising schools by giving their leaders additional resources, the freedom to build high-performing teams, and the ability to make financial and instructional decisions based on their students’ needs;

4)    Seeking flexibility in the hiring, retention, and remuneration of teachers (this change will require a change of state law); and

5)    Sustaining both district and public charter transformation schools through a set of innovative legislative reforms and a levy request that would provide new dollars for both district and effective charter schools.

In recent years Cleveland has embraced a series of reforms - including a highly touted transformation plan in early 2010 put forth by then superintendent Eugene Sanders, and largely crafted by current district head Eric Gordon - while the city has seen a steady growth in both the number of charter schools and children receiving public vouchers to attend private schools. Despite these efforts student achievement in Cleveland is still atrociously low (only 30 percent of fifth graders are proficient in math), and 55 percent of the city's schools (charter and district) were rated D or F by the state in 2011. Telling, more than 30,000 children have abandoned the city's schools in the last decade alone for other options.

Jackson’s plan would turn things around by making education more high-profile and increasingly the responsibility of the mayor (Cleveland’s mayor has had control of the school board since the late 1990s). Further, the plan focuses on school quality regardless of school type and will reward strong schools (charter and district alike) while seeking to close or turnaround broken schools (charter and district alike). This focus on performance is to be backed up with new dollars for high-flyers.

Mayor Jackson and his team (including district CEO Eric Gordon) are to be commended for undertaking a bold plan that offers hope of actually turning around the city's long-suffering schools. It will, however, face at least five challenges.

First, for the plan to fly it needs the General Assembly in Columbus to pass legislation that will give the mayor more flexibility over things like teacher contracts and closing failed schools. Republican lawmakers were battered with their last go-around with the unions over Senate Bill 5 and some may need to be bulked up to support the same teacher reforms for Jackson’s plan.

Second, the teacher unions have not been part of the planning process and they have a history of rejecting or at least watering down reforms that seek to make changes to things like "last- in/first-out rules," and requiring teachers in failing schools to reapply for their jobs.

Third, the plan seeks to pay for the reforms through a district levy. Cleveland hasn't passed an operating levy in 16 years, and taxpayers in Ohio have shown little appetite for new spending on schools in recent years.

Fourth, key to the plan's success is improving the quality of the human capital available to schools; especially the 55 percent rated D or F. Cleveland will benefit from the presence of Teach For America, which is expected to place corps members in Ohio for the first time in August. Further, Cleveland has access to teachers from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program. However, unlike places like Indianapolis and New Orleans, Cleveland currently lacks the talent pipelines for school leaders such as New Leaders for New Schools, KIPP or homegrown incubator efforts. This is a void Cleveland's reformers should seek to address ASAP.

Fifth, and finally, Jackson’s plan does not provide much detail per mechanics. For example, the plan speaks boldly of closing or turning around truly troubled schools - the district has four elementary schools that have been rated F for at least five consecutive years and an equal number of broken charters - but the plan does not seek to create an entity for forcing the closure or turnaround of these schools. The plan calls for the creation of the Cleveland Transformation Alliance that will be made up of business leaders, educators, community partners, and parents to push for accountability and transparency. This will surely help parents in failed schools get better information about their plight and provide information on better choices. But, there doesn't appear to be a sort of School Recovery District in the plan that would have the mandate and resources to close or force dramatic changes in troubled schools.

Despite the challenges, Cleveland is embarking on the boldest citywide school reform effort that state of Ohio has ever seen. Their success or failure will resonate throughout the state and likely beyond. All school reformers should be rooting for Cleveland's success and offering whatever help they can.

In the interview Sommers notes that while 2011 was a big year for education reform in the Buckeye State there is still work to be done, namely the creation of a P-20 data system that will allow the state to collect data on everything from Kindergarten readiness to employment rates of college graduates. Sommers also says the state’s report card must be amended, “We have a convoluted report card system that can label a school with a fifty percent rate of failure as ‘honors with distinction.’ That just doesn’t work.”

Sommers likewise admitted to some mistakes that he and the Administration made in the last year, including the failure to explain Issue 2 to the public, “We just didn’t do a good enough job of explaining to the public the problem that we tried to solve. The public didn’t see the problem that we saw.”

Finally he discusses the status of Race to the Top Implementation, key challenges in implementing reform, and what surprised him the most about his job as the Governor’s top education advisor. But I won’t spoil it all for you. Go check out the interview for yourself in its entirety here, it’s a good read!

Our two organizations – KnowledgeWorks and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute – are committed to seeing Ohio become a leader in the implementation of digital learning opportunities for the state’s 1.8 million students. Ohio now stands at an important crossroads and 2012 could be a pivotal year on whether we move forward in the digital learning environment.

Our state has been a path-breaker when it comes to availability of full-time e-school options that leverage technology in learning. In fact, if all 33,000 children currently enrolled in Ohio e-schools were in one school district they would comprise the state’s third-largest district, just behind Columbus and Cleveland. Despite such numbers, Ohio has yet to harness fully the potential of digital learning for all students. And, given that digital learning can yield improvements in student achievement and offer solutions for more efficient spending, Ohio can’t afford to wait.

In 2011 Keeping Pace, a national review of policy and practices in digital learning, Ohio received the highest rating possible for its availability of full-time online learning opportunities for students due to the state’s 27 virtual charter/community schools. Ohio e-school enrollment of 33,000 students is up 15 percent since 2008. But digital learning can and should take many different forms—from the full-time online options of e-schools to individual students seeking supplemental coursework to meet needs not met by their brick and mortar schools.

New blended learning options like Rocketship in California have shown significant academic gains for traditionally under-served students, while Carpe Diem in Arizona improve the student experience because they allow for customization and personalization of learning in a way that is both “high-tech” (through the seamless integration of appropriate technologies with teaching practices) and “high-touch” (through meaningful and relevant learning experiences with in-person teachers to complement online instruction).

There are districts, schools and teachers in Ohio that are starting to show the way as well. The Dayton Regional STEM school, for example, teaches its students Mandarin Chinese through an online course, while the Clermont County Educational Service Center has partnered with area districts to create a Virtual Talented and Gifted program at a time when traditional gifted programs are being scaled back or otherwise eliminated. But, to maximize digital learning opportunities for all its children Ohio has to develop systems for learning that are radically different to what was crafted long ago for a place-bound, 180-day school year in which children sat in rows of desks from morning to early afternoon.

To move Ohio from its industrial model of education to one better suited for education in the digital age we propose the following policies for 2012.

Remove barriers to digital learning

• Remove teacher-student ratios and class size limits created for a traditional classroom.

• Establish competency-based learning models that allow students to advance upon demonstrating mastery of knowledge or skills, not seat time.

• Educate students and parents about their right to choose high-quality online courses and make available credible information about which digital courses or programs work best under what conditions as well as the costs of those courses or programs.

Encourage innovation

• Provide all students in all grades access to a robust offering of high-quality courses from multiple high-quality providers in a competitive, data-driven marketplace.

• Define in law blended (bricks-and-mortar combined with online instruction) schools so as to encourage new designs, generate pilots, and attract proven models while ensuring their funding.

• Guarantee that funding follows the child to the individual course provider of his/her choice, evaluate providers based on student performance, and pay them in installments that incentivize completion and achievement.

• Unbundle, define and enable new educator roles and challenge universities, the private sector and others to prepare adults to serve in new capacities.

Promote equity

• Weight the funds for low-income and/or hard to serve students so as to control for the unintended consequences of digital providers selectively serving only students who are likely to demonstrate competency.

• Power up all regions of Ohio by aggregating purchase request data and leveraging bulk discount pricing to support connectivity and device acquisition for all.

Create accountability for a new era of learning

• End the archaic practice of funding seat-time, and fund course providers based on student performance instead of attendance.

• Require student performance and student and family satisfaction data are published as indicators of quality of course providers.

High-quality customizable learning options should be the rule rather than the exception. To more fully realize this goal in 2012 and beyond, Ohio lawmakers and policy makers need to embrace policies in education that encourage and support schools to innovate with digital learning technologies and opportunities, while ensuring all innovations are held accountable for performance and funded fairly and equitably.

Dr. Lisa Duty is director of external affairs at KnowledgeWorks, a social enterprise that incubates and scales up innovative schools and education initiatives. Terry Ryan is vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

The immense diversity in Ohio’s school landscape speaks to the fact that one size fit all doesn’t always work for children and their families. Ohio’s school choice options include the following:

• Special Needs Schools
• Distance Learning & E-schools
• Dropout Recovery Schools
• Career Preparatory Schools
• Vouchers/Scholarships
• English Language Learners Schools
• College Preparatory Schools
• STEM Schools
• Home Education
• Charter Schools
• District Schools

School Choice Ohio also recognized schools and school leaders that are thinking creatively about what it means to educate children and as a result are achieving outstanding academic results in the face of many adversities. One such school is located in Fordham’s hometown of Dayton, The Dayton Early College Academy. DECA is a college preparatory school offering students the chance to take courses that count towards both a high school diploma and an Associate’s Degree. Congrats to DECA for being recognized as being an excellent school choice options for students in Dayton.

DECA was not the only school recognized, others lauded include: Marburn Academy in Columbus, DePaul Cristo Rey High School in Cincinnati, and Butler Tech in Hamilton. Kudos to School Choice Ohio and Forum for Educational Options for hosting, and lifting up the numerous examples of school choice options providing quality education to students around the state.

Governor Kasich and legislative Republicans delivered some sizeable reforms in the state’s biennial budget last June. But there is much left to be done. The most pressing issue facing the state is putting in place a proper school funding plan. The biennial budget dismantled the state’s ill-conceived move toward an evidence-based model of school funding and promised a new funding formula before the next biennium. The governor and his team need to deliver.

Fordham has long-advocated (with many others) for a move toward a weighted, student-based funding system based on three key principles:

• Full state funding (and, properly encouraged, local funding) follows the child to the school the he or she attends, including charter schools. (This could also be extended, voucher-like, to private schools willing to participate fully in the state’s academic accountability system.)
• Per-pupil amounts vary according to children’s individual learning needs and circumstances. For example, disabled and economically disadvantaged youngsters would have additional dollars in their “funding backpacks.”
• Resources arrive at the school as real dollars that can be spent flexibly with an emphasis on results, rather than on predetermined programs, rigid staffing rations (or number of positions), and immutable activities.

Weighted student funding equitably directs more funds to schools that serve high proportions of needy children, regardless of where they live, and it ensures that a student’s school receives all of the resources generated by that student, whether it’s a district neighborhood school, a magnet school, a STEM school, or a charter school and regardless of whether it is located in a poor or affluent neighborhood, a tranquil suburb or a tough urban neighborhood. Weighted student funding enables school leaders and other educators to deploy available resources in ways that meet the needs of their specific pupils, aligning authority and responsibility in a modern, performance-oriented management system, and making resources flexible even as their total quantity may be reduced. WSF also fosters accountability, for if fewer children enroll in a school, its budget shrinks, which gives management and staff strong incentives to improve their school’s effectiveness.

A weighted student funding system would encourage flexibility, as Ohio schools would be free to determine how to use their funds.

Of course, when it comes to school funding, lawmakers always look to the bottom line: What will the new formula mean for schools in my legislative district? Here, Governor Kasich and lawmakers should bite the bullet and find some new money for schools to assist in the transition to a more effective system of funding. They wouldn’t be alone among Republicans. Florida’s Governor Rick Scott, for example, urged lawmakers in his January 10 State of the State to boost spending on education. He argued, “While lowering taxes and eliminating unnecessary regulations are critical, the bedrock of any sound, sustainable economy is an educated workforce well equipped to meet the challenges of an advanced global marketplace.” Governor Scott is seeking $1 billion more annually for schools.

Governor Kasich should follow Scott’s lead, but attach all new money to a new funding formula that pushes innovation, equity for schools of choice, and more control of decision making for the educators closest to the kids. 

In other words, Kingsland reasons, superintendents should rid themselves of the notion that “current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement.”

Kingsland’s argument is a powerful one because it is based not on philosophy or concepts, but on real academic gains made in a city that for decades had some of the lowest performing schools in the country. “In the next five years,” Kingsland writes, “New Orleans will likely be the first urban city in the country (that I know of) to surpass its state average.” The Louisiana Legislative Auditor backed up such optimism when it reported in 2011 that New Orleans “is making progress toward improving student performance based on multiple measures of accountability reported by LDOE [the Louisiana Department of Education].”

The future, insists Kingsland, belongs to the “Relinquishers” and not to traditional system reformers. I’d argue this isn’t a lesson unique to New Orleans, although it’s a true path breaker. Similar lessons are emerging in places like Denver; Washington, DC; New York City; Albany; Indianapolis; and even in Cleveland, where reform is being driven one school at a time.

Today 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 leaders were just as antagonistic – waging aggressive legal, public relations, and political battles to win as many new charters as possible in historically low-performing districts such as Dayton, Ohio; Milwaukee; and Los Angeles.”

Despite this stormy past, there are an increasing number of school districts working with high-performing charters to pursue a “portfolio strategy” to district management of schools. In assessing the nation’s charter landscape the CRPE team notes that “what began with a handful of pioneers almost a decade ago has grown to include at least 24 portfolio school districts across the country…. Common among the portfolio school districts is a commitment to open the best possible schools for students and close low-performing schools, whether the schools are charter schools or traditional public schools.”

CRPE’s director and founder Paul Hill has suggested over the years that communities should consider a “tight-loose” system of school management where districts are no longer just owner-operators of their own schools but also quality control agents for portfolios of independently operated charter schools. In recent years, such efforts have received encouragement and funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting district-charter collaboration compacts. According to CRPE there are 14 cities – including New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Nashville, Denver, and Boston – with such compacts that are “crafted and signed by superintendents and charter leaders willing to commit to collaboration on difficult and often divisive issues” like funding, facilities, charter growth, accountability, and transportation.

Back in Ohio, meanwhile, there are 45 school districts sponsoring 64 schools. A handful of these district-charter relationships (e.g., Cleveland Metropolitan Schools) are worthy of inclusion in the CRPE report because they are examples of reform-minded districts working with quality independent charter schools to band together as equals to provide better options for kids who have been shortchanged educationally. But, many of these district-charter “partnerships” are little more than money makers for districts that also serve the purpose of being dumping grounds for kids with low test scores. The districts, as captured by the Dispatch, collect the money for the schools because they provide all the services but aren’t accountable for the student’s test scores because the schools are set up as their own independent entities.

Charter-district collaboration takes many forms; some are worthy of praise and replication while others are downright deviant. Yet again, when it comes to charter schools, the Buckeye States seems  unique in its ability take a worthy concept and turn it completely on its head.

Each year, Education Week chooses a theme that serves as the underlying message of 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 the following 6 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.

o   Ohio’s Score: C+ (78.4)

o   Nation’s Score: C+ (77.6)

2.       K-12 Achievement: Examines at 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.

o   Ohio’s Score: C- (71.2)

o   Nation’s Score: C- (69.7)

3.       School Finance: Looks at the equity of school funding throughout 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.

o   Ohio’s Score: C (76.0)

o   Nation’s Score: C (75.5)

4.       Standards, Assessments, & Accountability: Reviews a state’s course- and grade-specific standards, types of test items, assessments aligned to standards, and school accountability.

o   Ohio’s Score: A (96.1)

o   Nation’s Score: B (85.3)

5.       Teaching Profession: Assesses teacher quality initiatives, including coursework requirements for licensure, alternative licensure programs, merit pay, and professional development programs.

o   Ohio’s Score: C (76.4)

o   Nation’s Score: C (72.5)

6.       Transitions & Alignment: Was not updated in 2012

o   Ohio’s Score: C+ (78.6)

o   Nation’s Score: C+ (78.3)

Ohio ranked 10^th nationally with an overall grade of C+ (79.5); slightly ahead of the U.S. average of C (76.5). While Ohio should be applauded for ranking 10^th, a C+ is an average score that most states also received. It seems the Buckeye State is simply the best of the mediocre states. Results ranged from first place Maryland, B+ (87.8), to last place South Dakota, D+ (68.1), and a majority of the states fell into the C range.

Ohio’s best performance was in the category “Standards, Assessments, & Accountability.” This should come as no surprise. Ohio has long been a leader in the standards and accountability realm, and while many (Fordham included) have lamented that Ohio fell behind other states in recent years when it came to reforms like adopting a strong teacher evaluation system, our Race to the Top grant has helped spur changes.

Ohio’s worst performance was in the “K-12 achievement” category. And again, this shouldn’t surprise many – the state’s performance on NAEP (aka the Nation’s Report Card) has been stagnate, and unimpressive, for years now.

As states look internationally to countries like were Singapore, Japan, Finland, Canada, England, Hong Kong and New Zealand for education policies and programs to help advance our students’ achievement, this report is useful to help Ohioans understand where we currently stand.

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.

In reading about the woes facing Ohio’s highway improvement efforts I couldn’t help but wonder if education in Ohio doesn’t face problems of similar scale. Despite recent cuts at both the state and local levels in the Buckeye State, have we made more promises than we can possibly meet? Ohio is in the midst of totally revamping its academic standards as part of the Common Core and this means new assessments, new curricula, new pacing guides and lots of professional development. Added to this, Ohio is putting in place new teacher evaluation systems, seeking ways to turn around its most troubled schools, and hoping to expand school choice programs of various sorts. Fordham supports all these reforms because we believe they will result in improvements in student performance.

But, all this change is suppose to happen in school systems that are strapped with collective bargaining agreements that are burdened with fixed costs that steadily increase year-to-year to deliver the same services. Consider the practice in collective bargaining agreements of step and lane annual raises of two or three percent for teachers and other staffers for just surviving another year on the job. There is no evidence that these increasing labor costs improve productivity or student achievement. In fact, as the state’s teaching force ages it may actually result in reduced productivity. Economists call this Baumol’s Disease: too often, labor-intensive organizations increase expenses without improving productivity

The fact is that Ohio, like the rest of the country, has seen inflation adjusted spending on education increase two to three percent a year for most of the last century. But, like in highway construction, we face a “new reality.” The new reality is schools and school districts are being asked to do more with less. Have we overpromised in education like we have in infrastructure development? Will we soon be seeing calls for extending needed reforms like the Common Core from 2014 to 2020 or 2024?  

But, despite both federal and state legislation and millions of dollars in things like “school improvement grants” there are still far too many schools that seem impervious to improvement efforts. Consider Cleveland where there are 15 elementary schools that have been rated Academic Emergency (F) by the state for at least the last four consecutive years. Collectively, these schools serve about 6,000 children and in 2010-11 they met a total of just eight state performance indicators out of a possible 225. In these schools fewer than half of the children attain basic proficiency in reading and mathematics by the time they leave eighth grade. Yet, these schools, and many others across the state, keep failing kids year after year. This despite all the talk, money, and policies aimed at school turnarounds over the last decade.

Does it have to stay this way? Not necessarily, but it is hard to revitalize gravely ill schools without tackling the governance arrangements that led them – or at least enabled them – to fail in the first place. And it is clear that many lawmakers, mayors and other civic leaders, business leaders, school reformers, and others have grown impatient with the persistence of dismal schools and school districts that seem incapable of fixing themselves.

Across the country, there are some bold efforts underway to turn around both persistently failing schools and even failing school districts. Among the boldest and most interesting of these is Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD), which is accomplishing both significant gains in student achievement and consequential impacts on district-level standards and governance. Its success has already drawn the attention of policymakers in other states and similar entities are now operating in Michigan and Tennessee. The RSD has been in business long enough (since 2003) to produce some important lessons.

We at the Fordham Institute wanted to find out how the RSD concept might be applied in Ohio; so we commissioned the report (released today) – The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State. We asked Nelson Smith, former president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, to lead the study because of his long experience in Louisiana, particularly in post-Katrina New Orleans, working with state education leaders, RSD leaders, and practicing educators doing their utmost to start, re-start, or turnaround schools.

Smith shows how the RSD came about to tackle chronic dysfunction and corruption, especially within the New Orleans Public Schools where two-thirds of the state’s “academically unacceptable” schools were located. The RSD was set-up legislatively in 2003 “with extraordinary powers that could take control of individual chronically failing schools.” According to Smith:

Although the bulk of failing schools were in New Orleans, the RSD was created as a statewide entity aimed at turnaround of schools rather than takeover of districts. Based on Chapter 11 bankruptcy law, it could override existing contracts including those governing personnel. Schools could be transferred into the RSD if they failed to meet minimum academic standards for four consecutive years and were in a district ‘academically in crisis.

For two years, things moved slowly with the RSD and its turnaround efforts; then Hurricane Katrina hit and things took off as people in New Orleans, Louisiana, and across the country fought to save and revitalize “The Big Easy.” Important to the overall recovery effort was doing better by children and their education. The RSD played a major role in this effort and by 2011 there were 112 New Orleans schools in the RSD: five prior to the hurricane and 107 after.

But, even more important than the scale of the change in New Orleans is that student performance in the RSD schools is improving. A report issued in September 2011 by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found, “Overall, the RSD is making progress toward improving student performance based on multiple measures of accountability reported by LDOE [Louisiana Department of Education].” Smith points out, however, that despite the improvements made by the RSD schools there is still a lot of work to be done in New Orleans to ensure every child there has a high-quality education, but the speed and scale of improvements there is vastly superior to anything we’ve seen in any of Ohio’s most troubled schools over the same period of time.

Smith’s paper provides seven lessons from the RSD for Ohio, but he cautions readers that the lessons have to be taken with major differences in state contexts in mind. For example, where Ohio is a strong union state Louisiana has no public sector collective bargaining laws. Smith’s lessons for Ohio include thinking strategically and knowing what the right target is for intervention – is it the district or troubled schools within districts? Ohio has tried to target both districts – Youngstown is currently overseen by an academic distress commission for example – and individual schools for corrective actions. Maybe Ohio should focus solely and more forcefully on schools?  Further, Smith says it is critical to have the people in place to do the work – at the state level, at the RSD level and in the individual schools targeted for turnaround. “Be realistic but aggressive on human capital,” advises Smith.

And, leadership matters big time. According to Smith, “Someone needs to play the charismatic insurgent; someone needs to lead both the state agency (department) and the ‘RSD’ itself with vision and a non-excuses attitude. And of course, legislative champions must first be found.” Smith concludes with one final piece of advice, “If Ohio chooses to launch a statewide turnaround effort, it should obtain plenty of guidance and feedback, in real time, from parents and local officials who see the results not on a spreadsheet but in their homes and schools and neighborhoods.”

Fordham is profoundly appreciative of Nelson Smith’s illuminating work on the Louisiana RSD, and hopes it fosters a renewed discussion across the Buckeye State about what it really takes to fix the state’s most troubled schools and districts. A key lesson here is that Ohio is not alone in its desire to improve schools and school systems that have proven incapable of fixing themselves over years, if not decades, because of broken governance and failed systems of management and operations. And, as New Orleans and others are starting to show, change is possible with the right strategy and people in place to lead the effort. What are we waiting for? Ohio and its big cities already have some of the leaders in place, and they now need the tools and support necessary to get the job done.

The Atomic Credit Union is establishing student-operated credit unions in the three elementary schools in the Jackson City School District. 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.

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."

The average household carries more than $10,000 in credit card debt and college tuition continues to rise (in fact, Sec. Duncan and Vice President Biden are talking college affordability in Columbus today). People – especially in areas like southern Ohio, where unemployment rates still top 10 percent – need to learn how to save and manage money. If this partnership can help achieve that, it would be terrific to see it expand to other schools in the area.

In 2008, the school was rated F by the state and student performance on state assessments was abysmal. Today the school is rated A+ (aka, Excellent with Distinction) and boasts achievement levels that best that of nearly all of the area’s top-performing schools (and are leaps and bounds above the state’s definition of “proficiency”). This transformation was achieved while the school continued serving a challenged student population – about 72 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch – and retained nearly all of the same teachers and staff members who were working in the school when it was failing (in a school that now employs 30 teachers, the principal said just seven or eight teachers have left during his four-year tenure).

So what are the keys to CPA’s success? Two things immediately stand out:

Leadership. Principal Chad Carr (who has led the turnaround since taking over the school four years ago) is committed to the success of his students, staff, and school like few others in his field. I don’t say that lightly as I know a lot of absolutely terrific school leaders, but spend five minutes with Carr and I think most people would be hard-pressed not to agree that he is in a leadership class with few others. Early in his tenure at the school he made a series of important changes that he and the teachers I talked with agree have made a tremendous difference: eliminating rampant violence in the building; reassigning teachers to roles better suited for them and providing them with improved professional development and other support; and taking discipline, parent complaints, and similar non-instructional work off his teachers’ plates so that they can focus their full time and effort on teaching.

Use of data and goal setting. Everyone – from the principal and teachers to kindergartners and classroom aides – is focused squarely on raising student achievement. Every child in the building knows the school’s goal for its Performance Index score this year (the PI Score is an Ohio calculation that reflects overall student achievement on the state’s exams and doesn’t include value-added measures or AYP), and there are visual reminders throughout the building of this goal and where individual students are on their path toward meeting it. Teachers use data daily to drive instructional decisions and measure progress toward long-term goals, and staff use testing and data to inspire, challenge, and boost the confidence of their students.

These certainly aren’t “secrets” to success. They are common themes in most all successful schools and especially among successful turnarounds (and were common among the high-performing urban schools we featured in 2010’s Needles in a Haystack report). But as rare as successful turnarounds are, they are worth repeating and sharing.

We’ll keep an eye on Columbus Prep’s performance and report back when this year’s results are released come summer. Everyone involved with the school expects them to be outstanding. The principal pointed out that CPA’s third graders are the first cohort to have come up since kindergarten under the turnaround. Those students haven’t yet taken a state assessment, and he sees only excellence to come when they finally get a crack at them.

The Parthenon Group (the national research firm that helped craft Ohio’s winning Race to the Top application) provided the research. They conducted more than 50 interviews with entrepreneurs, policy experts and school leaders across the country to come up with “an informed set of estimates regarding the cost of virtual and blended schools” across five categories – labor (teacher and administrators), content acquisition, technology and infrastructure, school operations, and student support.

Using these five categories as the basis of comparison the researchers compared a “typical” traditional model (brick and mortar school where instruction is delivered by teachers), a “typical” blended model (students attend brick and mortar schools where they alternate between online and in-person instruction) and a “typical” full virtual model (all instruction takes place online). In blended schools like Carpe Diem, Rocketship, and KIPP Empower, technology is used as a tool to personalize instruction for students who spend part of their time in traditional classroom settings and part of their time learning through varied and personalized forms of digital learning opportunities. In contrasts, virtual models like Florida Virtual School, Connections Academy, and K-12 offer online instruction that students usually take from home via a computer.

The Parthenon researchers show that across the country, on average, a traditional brick and mortar education costs $10,000 a student, a blended model approach costs $8,900 a student, while a fully virtual model costs $6,400 a student. The savings in both blended and fully virtual models are based on the lower labor costs in each. Both blended and fully virtual models save money on labor because they replace costly teachers with less costly technology. This is how industries across America have increased productivity in recent decades while employing fewer people. But such savings are new to education where technology has traditionally been seen as an addition and not a replacement. Or as the researchers note, “From investment banks to grocery stores to vacation planning, big and small businesses have used technology to accomplish more with less, while public education reform has remained frustratingly stagnant.”

But, and this is important, according to the Parthenon researchers, technology in education does not likely mean the end of teaching or the teaching profession. This is a fear widely expressed by some educators and others in Ohio, but as researchers like Bryan and Emily Hassel document in their report Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction, technology could very well help make teaching a far more compelling and rewarding profession. Technology in education not only has the potential to save money but also – and far more importantly – improve productivity and increase student achievement by helping teachers become more effective.

The Parthenon team argue, “traditional classroom teachers face extraordinary challenges: often a 30:1 student-teacher ratio, and a classroom full of students with varying educational needs, interests and learning styles.” They continue, “Teaching is multiple jobs rolled into one; schools of the future will likely continue to search for ways that can ease this challenge while boosting instructional effectiveness. Many entrepreneurs are beginning to break down the various elements of a teacher’s day, and look for points of opportunity for technology to take over certain elements, freeing up teacher time to focus in other places, such as more time with students.” 

Of course, depending on how much different models – be they fully virtual or blended – invest in things like content and technology and infrastructure it is possible to create digital models that are vastly more expensive than traditional classrooms. Some states and school districts have in fact invested millions in up front development costs, as have some of the country’s largest for-profit providers like K-12 and Connections Academy. Such upfront costs can be amortized over time, but such significant investments explain why some virtual school courses can cost $800 or more per student per year.  Further, Paul Hill shows in his recent Fordham paper, School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era, that the cost of entry for high end models combined with the political uncertainty around education innovation creates an “innovation-hostile environment.” Hill worries that even if education “were more open to new ideas, grave uncertainty about whether any K-12 education idea can ever turn a profit limits venture-capital investments.”

In this unsettled and shifting environment the Parthenon team breaks important new ground. But, they acknowledge the limitations of their findings and caution readers “against looking for one simple ‘price tag’ for online learning, or to assume that savings necessarily translates into lower overall costs per pupil.” Despite such caveats, they do a fantastic job of creating research parameters and definitions for a critically important and timely topic. Their contribution is surely going to be the first of many such analyses we are likely to see as more and more students across the country enroll in emerging digital learning opportunities and researchers and policy makers try to better understand what adds value and what doesn’t. Such analysis will begin to offer insights into those programs that offer the highest and lowest returns on investment. This is important as it will allow the school funding conversation to move beyond just talking about how much is spent on various inputs to actually what impacts student learning and at what cost.

The Parthenon findings are especially important for Ohio were there are some 33,000 students currently enrolled in the state’s e-schools, and close to $200 million spent on their education. This sector is growing fast and policy makers working on the state’s Digital Learning Task Force would surely benefit by studying closely the findings from Parthenon, and ultimately weaving them in their recommendations to the General Assembly.

First, it might be helpful to revisit the major commitments Ohio made. They were to:

• Increase the high school graduation rate by 0.5 percent per year with an eventual goal of an 88 percent graduation rate. Right now only 84.3 percent graduate from Ohio’s high schools.
• Reduce the graduation rate gap between white and minority students by 50 percent. The current gap is 16 percentage points.
• Reduce the performance gap between Ohio students and some of the nation’s highest performers like Massachusetts.
• Double college enrollment for Ohioans under the age of 19. Ohio ranks 35^th in terms of adults with a two-year degree of higher.
• Adopt and implement high-quality academic standards aligned assessments.
• Ensure great principals and teachers in every school (however that’s measured).

Ohio has more than 600 school district, 3,500 district schools and over 300 charter schools so it had its work cut out for it when it applied for RttT dollars and then won. The list of goals stated above is no easy task.  So how is Ohio doing a year into the process?

Year 1 Successes

• Ohio adopted the Common Core State Standards in English and mathematics, ensuring a system of new high quality standards. Ohio also developed numerous web-based resources to help educators and administrators learn and understand the importance of the standards. 
• Ohio developed a teacher evaluation system of which 50 percent must be based on student growth, many details still need to be worked out on this though. Around 130 school districts volunteered to be part of the pilot year that started in the 2011 school year. By the 2013 school year all districts and charter schools must participate.
• Ohio is still on track for developing a statewide longitudinal data system that includes pre-kindergarten through higher education data by 2013.
• An increase in pathways for aspiring teachers and principals. Year one of RttT saw several legislative victories including the potential for Teach For America to set up shop in Ohio.  
• Established the Ohio Appalachian Initiative- a collaboration among 22 rural districts to help share data, train teachers, and engage members of the community.

Ohio has made some gains in the first year and compared with laggards like Hawaii and New York one could argue the first year has been a real success for the Buckeye State. However, a great deal of work remains if Ohio is going to move from doing a lot of activities to actually bumping up gains in student achievement. Year 2 and beyond looks to be the years when action has to start translating into success and most importantly gains in student achievement.

The following issues remain on the table:

• Continuing to reach out to educators to help them understand and successfully implement the Common Core Standards.  
• Putting in place workable teacher evaluation systems. While the state provided a framework for the evaluations districts can choose to create their own or adapt the framework provided, potentially resulting in a variety of different evaluation systems with some being stronger than others.
• Getting Teach for America corps members into schools around Ohio is proving to be a challenge. Raising external funding in tight fiscal times in not easy, especially when there are many competing interests for scarce dollars. School districts are also having a hard time selling the idea of TFA to unions and their teachers when many are, or have in recent years, been laying off teachers.   

Ohio should be applauded for their accomplishments thus far, but now the tough job of beginning to implement the new policies begins. Hopefully, the progress report for year 2 will tell a similar story of success.

Stay tuned !

Property Tax Levy

One option to fill the gap is putting a new tax levy on the ballot in the November election. Dayton voters last approved a 4.9 million operating tax levy in 2008 which was supposed to generate $9.3 million annually. However, due to a decrease in student enrollment, high foreclosure rates, and delinquent taxes, the district is actually collecting less in property taxes than it did before the levy. Consider the following: in 2001 DPS had 20,147 students enrolled in their schools; fast-forward to the 2010-11 school year and only 14,174 students remain in DPS. The news doesn’t get much better when you look at the amount of tax money that is not collected. In 2010 DPS lost out on almost $5 million dollars (collecting only 85.5 percent of taxes due to the district). Considering the track record of tax collection and the not so bright future for the jobs market in Dayton, school officials ought to think twice about relying on another levy to fill the budget gap.

Cuts

If the school system can’t increase the amount of tax money collected it will have to turn to another option – cuts. No district likes to cut services or staff from their school, including Dayton. However, the reality is that Dayton needs to make smart cuts, those that that save a great deal of money while not harming the academic instruction being provided.  Dayton Public Schools should consider thinking of different ways to save money. After all, the district is educating 30 percent fewer kids today than in 2001, where is all the money going?

Dayton’s situation is not unique. Cities around the country, including Cleveland, are experiencing severe budget problems. Cost cutting is never an easy task and one that many organizations would rather not deal with. But with the new normal being one of less money and resources the exercise of cutting costs and services should be more than just that, district leaders should take the challenge as a way to drive school reform and improve student achievement and learning. Isn’t that what it’s all about anyways? 

Most exciting out of this change for our small (but mighty!) team in Ohio is that we now have our own blog, Ohio Gadfly Daily. This blog, which will be co-authored by the entire Fordham-Ohio team (with occasional guests bloggers), will allow for keen insight into Ohio’s education policy scene, where we not only advocate for educational excellence for all students, but attempt to put those policies into action with  the sponsorship of eight charter schools.

Be sure to stay tuned to Ohio Gadfly Daily for what is sure to be an exciting and busy year, and as always our Ohio Education Gadfly will continue to provide thoughtful and original analysis and commentary on all things relevant to K-12 education in the Buckeye State.

This is sure to come as a surprise to many, given the decade-long cry from Ohio’s school districts about charter schools “stealing” their students (and funding).  But it’s no surprise to us at Fordham.  Last year, we commissioned a study of student mobility in our hometown of Dayton.  Among the many findings:

-          Far more students moved among Montgomery County districts, or left the county altogether, than moved between Dayton Public Schools and the city’s charter schools.

-          No charter school or district was “creaming” good students.  High-performing and low-performing students alike were mobile, and families didn’t appear to be selecting new schools based on the school’s academic performance.

-          The greatest indicator of a student’s mobility was his/her score on the state’s third-grade reading test.  The lower the score, the more likely the child was to be highly mobile.

Our Dayton study generated much conversation and debate in the city around questions like, “If nearly half of our students will attend several different schools between kindergarten and fifth grade, should we have a city-wide elementary curriculum to provide education stability?” and “How should we develop and amend the state’s school- and teacher-accountability provisions to properly account for the challenges of mobility?”

The findings from our Dayton study led us to launch a statewide student mobility study in the Buckeye State.  Toward this end, the data referenced in today’s Dispatch is drawn from the initial work on that study to be conducted by Community Research Partners (CRP). The statewide analysis of student mobility will be out later in 2012.  In the meantime, here is what we know about mobility in Columbus, based on CRP’s pilot:

-          One of every four Columbus students moved in or out of the district over the past three years (to say nothing of mobility among schools within the district).

-          Most students transferred (3,488 times) to or from South-Western City Schools (a growing urban district on the city’s south side).

-          More than 2,500 students switched between Columbus City Schools and the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (the state’s largest online school).

The statewide mobility study will go deeper, examining trends for Ohio’s major metro areas and large e-schools, connecting mobility data with data on students’ academic performance and discipline records, and more.  We, and the research team at CRP, hope to provide both interesting and informative data along with sound policy recommendations for legislators and state leaders grappling with issues of school funding and accountability, for local education leaders who guide curriculum and instruction, and for parents and community members who want to better understand who attends school where, and why.  Stay tuned to Ohio Gadfly Daily for more!

So far, however, the state’s STEM network has not yet opened a school that is aimed at the state’s dynamic agricultural sector and all that supports it. Senator Chris Widener (a Republican from Springfield who chairs the Senate Finance Committee) hopes to tackle this void in the state’s STEM sector. There is a whole lot of merit to this effort.

As I learned (somewhat surprisingly) in talking with Sen. Widener, one in seven jobs in Ohio is connected to the “AgBioscience” sector. This sector comprises food, agriculture, environmental, and bio-based products industries. As a whole the sector employs about a million workers statewide with an annual economic impact of over $100 billion a year. It is one of Ohio’s fastest growing sectors with thousands of jobs going unfilled because there aren't enough skilled Ohioans to do the work. Consider the following statistics provided last week by Sen. Widener:

• Ohio has added on average 59 new bioscience companies a year since 2004, and the state is currently home to 1,300 such companies. These include Bob Evans, JM Smucker Company, Wendy’s International, Kroger, Dannon, Nestle, and WeightWatchers – to name just a few.
• Average salary in the AgBioscience sector is $68,384.
• If the demand for labor can met the sector is set to grow 20 percent this decade in Ohio.
• The planet will add 2 billion more people in the next couple of decades and as countries get richer they eat more meat. 60 percent of the world's feed corn for cattle, chickens, etc. is raised in just five American states and Ohio is one of those.

Sen. Widener is trying to mobilize allies across the state (his targets include industry leader Battelle and Ohio State University) to help launch a handful of STEM AgBioscienceacademies in some of the state's rural counties. The Springfield school district in Clark County (located between Dayton and Columbus) is so excited about this project that it has already donated a $10 million building to start the first academy there in 2013.

The big idea here is to attract young people to a growing sector that has not been seen as particularly “sexy” for young people. For most Ohioans and Americans more generally, anything with “ag” in it still means toiling away for long hours on a farm, which is simply no longer the case. But, one of the challenges facing Sen. Widener, and other supporters of such schools, is making the sector more attractive to young people and their parents.

There are also numerous implementation challenges here to tackle; including:

• Crafting an academic program for the academies that includes curricula aligned to the Common Core;
• Finding talent to lead these innovative academies that target fairly unique academic content and student populations;
• Finding and developing teachers who not only excel at math and science but can weave these and other subjects across the AgBioscience sector; and
• Creating a workable governance structure for schools that will need to attract students from multiple counties and school districts.  

STEM AgBioscience academies are new territory for educators, and putting together a viable academic program in AgBioscience for middle and high schoolers is sure to be a heavy lift. But, done well and with the right partners this effort could pay serious dividends for the state’s economy and its young people. With 500,000 Ohioans currently unemployed it makes sense to create academic programs that actually help prepare young people for where the jobs are. In Ohio, the jobs are connected to food and all the businesses that support raising it, getting it packaged, and getting it to people across the globe.

My entire K-12 education was in Ohio public schools.  When it came to history, I didn’t take any electives or special courses beyond whatever was required for me to earn a diploma.  Yet, I was taught all of these important historical texts, multiple times, from seventh grade through twelfth.  So I was surprised to see a bill moving through the Ohio legislature that would require schools to teach what I thought were standard fare for Ohio’s students. In fact, at first blush it seemed implausible to me that many schools weren’t already doing so.

My husband, also an Ohio public school alum (from a quote-unquote better district than I attended), had a different reaction when I told him about the legislation. He guessed at least two-thirds of students learn virtually nothing about the Federalist Papers in high school. And he said he wasn’t taught anything about the Ohio Constitution in K-12.  Huh, maybe there ought to be a law.

This issue isn’t a new one for Fordham.  The bill’s sponsor in the Ohio House, Rep. John Adams, cited Fordham’s February 2011 The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011 as evidence of the need for a change to state law. That report gave Ohio’s history standards a D and specifically dinged Ohio for not calling for enough specific content, including important historical texts and documents.

I respect and value the ability of individual schools and teachers to make expert judgment about what information they present to their students and when.  And I certainly don’t want the state to be micro-managing what happens in the Buckeye State’s 3,400+ public schools.  But this is exactly the sort of area in which the state should meddle.

An editorial in today’s Columbus Dispatch (which also cites the Fordham report) sums up nicely why Ohio’s history standards should be amended to clearly call for instruction of these texts:

A clear understanding of the Constitution and other documents is vital if children are to grow into effective citizens and uphold the values that distinguished the American experiment: limits on government power, to prevent it from crushing individual liberties; and a reverence for civil rights that protect individuals from a majority with which they might not agree.

Those are concepts that any American should embrace.

Moreover, study of historical documents, rather than summaries, offers a more-rigorous challenge to students and allows them to consider the ideas without any ideological filter.

(PS – Thank you Mr. Reinhart and Mr. Kight, and the rest of my K-12 history teachers for sharing these texts with me all those years ago, when, apparently, you didn’t have to!)

The Mind Trust report observes that great schools across the country share a set of core conditions that enable them to help all students achieve. Among these core conditions are the freedom to build and manage their own teams, refocus resources to meet actual student needs, hold schools accountable for their results(and close those that don’t perform), and create a system of school choice that empowers parents to find schools that they want their children to attend.

In an attempt to halt the status-quo of under achievement among too many Indianapolis schools the Mind Trust proposed:

• Downsizing the Indianapolis Public Schools district office while allocating resources to school level leaders. According to the plan the IPS central office would be reduced by about 450 jobs and its budget would be cut by $53 million, and these resources would flow to building level decision makers.
• Giving high performing schools complete control over their staffing, budgets, and curriculum so building level decision makers can staff and run buildings as they see fit.
• Uniting all public schools (district, magnet, and charter) under a new banner of quality called Opportunity Schools. Thus, creating a unified system of high-quality schools that would send a strong message to the community that educational excellence is the central goal of public education. Through this strategy the debate would shift from what type of school – district versus charter – to performance being the end all and be all. Schools that deliver would be encouraged to grow and expand their efforts while persistent underperformers would ultimately close and be replaced.
• Building on the current efforts underway in Indianapolis, a significant teacher and school leader recruitment effort would work with Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to bring a new generation of top talent to Indianapolis. Further, the Mind Trust would launch a charter incubator program that would seek to develop a new generation of homegrown school leadership talent and place them in Opportunity Schools.

The most controversial part of the reform plan relates to school governance. The Mind Trust calls for neutering the role of the current IPS school board, while turning governance over to a new five member board appointed jointly by the mayor and the City-County Council. This radical governance change would be a key to the plan’s success. The CEO of Mind Trust, David Harris, told the Indianapolis Star, “We need elected leadership of the community to embrace this or we don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Indiana’s state superintendent Tony Bennett has expressed his full support for the plan and committed $500,000 to cover most of the $700,000 cost of the Mind Trust report. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the state house have expressed interest in the plan as well. But, a key player, the Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has taken a more cautious and measured approach, while the current IPS school board president has attacked the plan as unfair and outrageous as “Voters need to have a voice in selecting board members.”

Mind Trust has presented a truly bold and audacious school reform plan for Indianapolis to pursue. Sitting a mere 120 miles down Interstate 70 in Dayton, Ohio, we are cheering for the Mind Trust and its reform-minded allies. Not only will their success or failure resonate in Indiana but also across the Midwest. Here’s rooting for Indy.

The TUDA results for both reading and math in the fourth and eighth grade followed the same trend as the national results that were released last month: scores show little to no significant change since 2009. At the fourth-grade level average reading scores did not significantly improve in any of the 18 districts that previously participated. In eighth grade, the results are almost the same, with only one district, Charlotte, showing a significant improvement in its scores from 2009. The results in mathematics are somewhat more encouraging. Four districts -- Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore City, and Boston -- demonstrated higher scores than 2009, and ever more encouraging is the fact that, at the eighth-grade level, six districts performed better than they did in 2009.

Cleveland, Ohio’s second-largest district, is a TUDA participant. And like most of the other TUDA cities, its scores in both reading and math at the fourth and eighth grade level were not significantly different than 2009.  The district also had lower overall average scores than the state of Ohio. (For a recap of how Ohio did on the NAEP see here.)

Cleveland’s results are even more discouraging when compared to other large cities and to the nation. For example, 68 percent of Cleveland’s fourth graders scored at a below basic level in reading, compared to 45 percent of students in other large cities and 34 percent nationally. The same trend continues when you look at math. Forty-seven percent of fourth graders in Cleveland scored below basic proficiency, compared to 26 percent in other large cities and 28 percent nationwide.  

These lackluster results come in the wake of several reform efforts that Cleveland has been pushing hard for the past 18 months. Almost two year ago Cleveland launched a far-reaching strategy to improve achievement and repair the district. Included in the strategy is a systematic way to identify chronically low- performing schools and address them and more school choice options for students in the form of alternative schools and charters.  The district has also broken down high schools into smaller schools focused on specific themes and is moving forward with a rigorous evaluation system to distinguish highly effective teachers.

Cleveland should be applauded for these efforts; however, today’s NAEP results show that these nascent efforts have not yet begun to move the achievement needle.

White Hat runs 33 schools in Ohio, broken down into three brands: Life Skills Center for dropouts and alternative high-school students, The Hope Academies for elementary and middle grades, and OH-DELA- an online school serving students statewide. The 17 Life Skill Academies have lost more than 1,170 students since 2006-2007 equating to a loss of at least $6.7 million dollars according to a Columbus Dispatch analysis.

Much of the pain that White Hat is experiencing can be attributed to an increase in competition. When White Hat first got in the business of charter schools in Ohio the late 1990s there was very little competition in the charter school market, making it easier to attract students to its schools. Fast forward twelve-plus years and the Buckeye State now has 339 charter schools serving 113,736 students. And, as the Akron Beacon Journal also points out, charters are now also facing competition from suburban districts that permit students from other districts to enroll in their schools. Southside Academy (a White Hat school) in Youngstown lost 600 students when some surrounding suburban districts began accepting Youngstown students via open enrollment.

In the midst of this recent crisis White Hat is also tied up in a lawsuit with the boards of ten of its schools, who sued the company for its lack of financial transparency and accountability. The schools want White Hat to disclose how it spends public money on things such as payroll, equipment, and salary.  In October a judge ruled that White Hat needed to open its books, but the case has been on hold since.

David Brennan was a pioneer in the charter school and school choice movements in Ohio, and he should be applauded for this. It remains to be seen what the next chapter for him and his schools will hold.

-Bianca Speranza

Since their inception in 1997, charter schools have been at the center of some of the most politically contentious debates about education in Ohio. The past year offered yet another example of charter school controversy, but this time with a twist. The 2010 elections were very good for Buckeye State Republicans, with John Kasich winning the governor’s race (replacing Ted Strickland who had been a charter adversary throughout his four-year term). Republicans also took control of the House while expanding their majority in the Senate.

Almost immediately GOP lawmakers set out to make the Buckeye State more inviting to charter schools. Governor Kasich’s budget proposals in House Bill (HB) 153 offered a solid plan for not only increasing the number of charters in Ohio but improving their quality. Crucial elements included encouraging successful operators to clone good schools; leaning hard on authorizers to fix or close failing schools and banning the replication of failure; placing schools’ ostensibly independent governing boards in clear charge of any outside organizations that they engaged to run their education programs; creating professional and ethical norms for all parties; insisting on transparency around academics, governance, and finances; channeling fair funding into successful schools; and introducing best practices and expert advice into every step of the process. This was a vision that excited us and many others in Ohio and beyond because it sought to boost quality, not just quantity.

It seemed at the time that finally the Buckeye State was positioning itself to become a leader in both charter school quality and expansion. Then the House version of the budget came out in April and with it an enormous risk that yet again the charter school community in Ohio would shoot itself in the foot. The House’s budget would have done away with any meaningful accountability for school operators just when it seemed like we were moving in the right direction. It would have, among many other items:

• Neutered both governing boards and authorizers of their oversight responsibilities and authority and given charter school operators carte blanche authority over virtually all school decisions; and
• Exempted charter schools from compliance with most of the state’s education laws and rules, essentially transforming them into publicly funded private schools.

We were not the only ones upset by the House’s charter school proposals. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers wrote in a joint letter to Senate leadership, “We are writing today to express our serious concerns with HB 153 as passed by the House. In the guise of helping charter schools, we believe that HB 153 will actually harm charter schools.” The letter continued, “Many of the provisions in HB 153 contradict the charter school model, thwart efforts to strengthen charter school accountability and quality, and will ultimately undermine popular support for Ohio’s community schools. As passed by the Ohio House, the charter provisions of HB 153 represent a significant risk for Ohio’s community school sector.”

The president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools warned that the House’s budget, “takes the public out of public education,” while the Columbus Dispatch editorialized that “School choice is meaningless without good charter schools from which to choose, and that requires accountability and effective oversight.” The Senate agreed with the critics and ultimately purged most of the troubling language from the bill, but yet again there had been much political drama and uncertainty around charters and their future in the Buckeye State. This time, however, the danger came not from charter foes but from friends of school choice who had sought to neutralize authorizers, including Fordham, and governing boards in the name of efficiency for well-heeled school operators.  

But, fortunately, the larger charter school community rallied itself around the need for charter school quality and at the end of the day Ohio’s charter school law came out of the budget process stronger on some fronts while weaker on a few others. Improvements included requiring all charter schools and charter school authorizers to be rated by their performance index (PI) scores. Under the changes to law, the authorizers with the lowest 20 percent of students accordingly to the PI cannot open new schools until they improve or close the ones they have. Further, the budget allows schools to open in districts rated in the bottom five percent of all school districts.

Unfortunately, the law also requires the Ohio Department of Education to yet again sponsor charter schools – it was fired from the role in 2003 by the General Assembly after a blistering report from the Attorney General at the time chronicling the many failings of the department as a sponsor. There is no evidence that the department or the state board wants the job authorizing schools and they now find themselves dealing with some potential troubling conflicts of interest. The most bizarre is that the department is now responsible for not only overseeing and rating all 80 plus sponsors across the state (and it has struggled to do this job well), but is also now also responsible for authorizing schools of its own. In practice, this means the department’s Office of Community Schools must now hold the department’s Office of School Sponsorship accountable for the performance of its schools and take corrective action against itself as needed. This will likely be a painful situation for the department as it will surely create divided loyalties and confused responsibilities within the department. Better would be to have the department out of sponsorship all together, while giving it the resources and legislative mandate to hold all authorizers accountable for the performance of their schools.

FORDHAM’S CHARTER SCHOOL PORTFOLIO: IMPROVING SCHOOLS BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH

Despite the uncertainty around the state budget and the future of charter school authorizers in Ohio, Fordham’s sponsored schools made gains in 2010-11. With the exception of one school, Fordham-sponsored schools made academic gains last year. Three Fordham-sponsored schools were rated “Effective” (a “B”), two “Continuous Improvement” (a “C”), and one “Academic Watch” (a “D”).

The next three exhibits use data from the Ohio Department of Education provide detail on how the Fordham schools as a whole stack up against those of the other major authorizers in the Buckeye State. Graph 1 below shows that, while we don’t currently have any schools in Academic Emergency, 11 percent of the students in our portfolio were in a school rated Academic Watch (Springfield Academy of Excellence). Fifty-two percent attended schools rated Continuous Improvement, and 37 percent attended schools rated Effective. 

Graph 1: Fordham-sponsored Schools v. Portfolios of Other Sponsors, by State Rating

Graph 2 shows how Fordham’s portfolio fared against other authorizers regarding “value added.” Of the 10 largest Ohio authorizers studied (by number of students), fully 57 percent of students in Fordham schools made “above expected” growth in 2010-11. Note, when a school makes above expected gains it automatically gets an academic rating jump of one level (from Academic Watch to Continuous Improvement for example). However, 38 percent of students in Fordham-sponsored schools did not meet expected growth in 2010-11.

Graph 2: Fordham-sponsored Schools v. Other Ohio Sponsors, by Value Added Designation

Graph 3: Academic Performance of Ohio 8 District and Charter Schools (Fordham-Sponsored Schools as Pull-outs), 2010-11

In the Big 8 cities, approximately 80 percent of schools (district and charter) were able to help their students meet or exceed expected value-added gains. This, however, does not translate into a solid “Performance Index” (PI) score, an indicator that takes into account whether students actually reach proficiency, not just whether they’re making gains. More specifically, PI scores reflect averages of a school’s student achievement in all tested subjects in grades three through eight, with the most weight given to students who exceed state standards. The PI runs on a scale from 0 to 120, with a state target of 100 for all schools. Graph 3 tells the PI story at a glance. It shows that fully eight in ten schools (district and charter) in the Buckeye State’s biggest cities met or exceeded academic growth, but less than five percent (25 out of 510) earned a PI score of 100 or higher.

Ohio’s urban schools have done a decent job meeting or exceeding value-added growth, but few receive a PI score above 100 because many students in these schools are still not reaching state proficiency expectations. Unfortunately, Fordham sponsored schools are a microcosm of this trend.  

CONCLUSION

Since we first started as an authorizer in July 2005, our sponsorship portfolio has evolved considerably. Six years ago we started with a total of 10 schools (all in the Dayton-Cincinnati area) that collectively served about 2,700 students, and all but three of these schools we inherited from the Ohio Department of Education as they were booted from sponsorship in 2003. For the most part, our initial crop of schools were troubled academically with five being rated Academic Emergency, one being rated Continuous Improvement, and one being rated Excellent (three new start-up schools were unrated). Over the last six years we’ve had six schools leave our portfolio either through closure or by jumping to other sponsors; we’ve opened one new school only to see it close after a year; and we’ve birthed two new schools. We currently sponsor only four of the ten schools that originally signed with Fordham in 2005.

This year, Fordham-sponsored schools serve approximately 2,500 children and as the data show these schools have made progress. This is a reflection of the hard work and dedication of the educators, school board members, and students in each building. But, more work remains to be done. We know it and we won’t hide from the challenge, but more importantly the teachers, school leaders, and board members working in the schools we sponsor are committed to making a difference in the lives of children who need it and they are making progress.

For more analyses on the performance of Fordham-sponsored school as well as more context on the last year in sponsorship, read our full report: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Fordham’s 2010-11 Sponsorship Accountability Report.

In September, the White House announced its “Digital Promise” campaign, while a number of states have been embracing initiatives and campaigns in this realm, aided and encouraged by the Digital Learning Council, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and Fordham itself (via our “Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning” series.)

Ohio’s biennial budget launched the Digital Learning Task Force charged with ensuring that the state’s “legislative environment is conducive to and supportive of the educators and digital innovators at the heart of this transformation.” There have been many conferences this year on fresh digital-learning possibilities and prominent innovators in this field – people like Sal Kahn, Tom Vander Ark, John Chubb, Rick Hess, Susan Patrick, and John Danner—have been much in demand to offer insights and share possibilities with Ohioans. 

Education visionary Paul Hill captured the opportunities when he wrote for Fordham:

Capacities like these open up vast possibilities for improved instructional delivery. Students who do not want to attend school can access entirely self-managed online learning. Self-managed ‘virtual’ schools can match a student’s interests, learning rate, and even work schedule. Students can also take advantage of blended or hybrid schooling that uses computer-based and online resources to deliver some coursework while also providing in-person teacher-student interaction, and relying on teachers to act as diagnosticians and mentors. These ‘blended’ schools can also individualize instruction while assuring parents that a responsible adult is keeping an eye on their children.

Digital learning opportunities offer ways to help teachers and parents do a better job of educating children AND at less cost.

But those promises have been on the table for a long time. Indeed, it was this dual promise that encouraged lawmakers in Ohio and other states to birth statewide e-schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The best known of these is the Florida Virtual School, which now educates over 120,000 students from across Florida and 49 other states.

Ohio took a different approach than Florida. Instead of a single statewide e-school, it created a marketplace of e-schools. That sector is now made up of 27 on-line schools serving some 33,000 students. Most of them are small charter schools, authorized by their districts and focused on drop-out recovery. But five large e-schools dominate Ohio’s e-school marketplace with more than 75 percent of the students enrolled. Because the state currently has a moratorium on new e-schools that isn’t set to be lifted until 2013, this quintet is likely to continue dominating Ohio’s e-school market for students and the funding that follows them for at least the next two school years. 

Table 1 lists Ohio’s big five e-schools by enrollment and state funding in 2010-11.

Table 1: Ohio’s Big Five E-Schools by 2010-11 enrollment and state funding

Source: Ohio Department of Education: Final Received for FY11

 Ohio Department of Education: Interactive Local Report Card

 If all 33,000 children currently enrolled in e-schools in Ohio were in one school district it would make up the state’s third largest school district just after Columbus and Cleveland. The for-profit ECOT is itself the state’s 15^th largest school district while the for-profit Ohio Virtual Academy is 19^th. As Table 2 below shows, when it comes to per pupil expenditures both ECOT and the Ohio Virtual Academy spend far less than do traditional school districts. In fact, their per pupil expenditures are about half of what urban districts like Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati spend.

Table 2: Ohio’s 20 Largest School Districts by enrollment in 2010-11 with Per Pupil Expenditure and Academic Designation

Source: Ohio Department of Education: Interactive Local Report Card

Ohio Department of Education: 2011 District Preliminary Ranking List.

E-schools have the obvious advantages of not having to pay for buildings and all of the associated maintenance expenses. Nor do they have to pay for the daily busing of students or for lunches and security. Done well, e-schools can plow their spare resources into things like content, technology, and expert supplemental teaching. Despite their promise, however, Ohio’s e-school performance has been mixed. Some do well on the state’s academic measures year after year while others have struggled to perform any better than moribund district schools long criticized for failing students.

As they’ve grown and profited, e-schools have naturally become adept at politics. E-schools, like district-centered teacher unions and professional associations, fight hard for their self interest (see yesterday’s Washington Post story on this subject.) In Ohio, for example, William Lager, ECOT’s founder and CEO of Altair Learning Management, has donated more than $1 million to candidates (in both parties) in the last decade. Ask any politically astute person in Columbus and they will tell you that e-schools are now formidable political players in Ohio’s education and budgetary debates, and that their influence goes beyond just issues of digital learning.

The fact is that e-schools in Ohio have become big business. This has allowed them to compete effectively against other major education players like teacher unions, the school board association, and other established interest groups. Unfortunately, they also appear at times—like so many other one-time-pioneers-turned-vested-interest—far keener to protect their own turf, jobs, and money, than they are in seeding and pushing a second wave of digital learning reforms. 

Ohio’s e-school space doesn’t need protectionism. It needs competition matched with high standards for academic performance. Ohio, like other states, is on the cusp of a second wave of digital learning opportunities and innovations, if these efforts are given the encouragement and space to operate and flourish. For this to happen, Ohio needs to proceed with opening up its market to quality outside digital providers while also drafting or incorporating high quality performance standards for all– current and future – digital learning programs. If Ohio gets this balance right it could become the nation’s leader in creating a high-performing digital learning environment for the state’s children in coming years and decades.

I still remember when I was 13 years old and began my first job bailing hay for a local farmer.  I remember the heat, the dirt and the sweat that went into that job; it was hard work–for some of us.  As much as I remember the difficulties of that job, I remember some of my older co-workers that had been working for this farmer for a couple of summers sitting down watching a few of us younger kids do most of the work.  To this day I remember the frustration I felt when I found that not only were some of them getting paid as much as me, but many were getting paid more simply because they had been there longer.

A week after Issue 2 was voted down, I’ve had some time to ponder the reasons why I supported it in the first place, and they still hold true. Here are my reasons:

• As an up-and-coming teacher I desperately want to work in a system that rewards me for my efforts.  I am not going into teaching for the money; however, I believe that I should be properly compensated for my efforts. I am inspired by systems like IMPACT in Washington D.C. where top end teachers can earn bonuses as much as $25K and it doesn’t matter how long you have been teaching! I wouldn’t be able to give away my tenure fast enough for that opportunity.
• As someone who studied economics in college, I understand the troubles that federal, state, and local budgets are facing during this long recession.  So why am I disappointed that Issue 2 failed?  Its failure will result in more lay-offs and fewer job opportunities for yours truly.
• The passage of Issue 2 would have sparked a flood of retirements across the state of teachers eager to protect their precious pensions.  If the collective bargaining reforms had survived, job openings across the state would have flooded the marketplace providing opportunities for new teachers with fresh ideas, keeping some of those college graduates in Ohio.  This particularly affected me. A teacher, whose position I was hoping to fill, may decide not to retire now that Issue 2 failed potentially leaving me seeking employment in another city or even another state.
• Now, we have more of the status-quo. More strains on state and local budgets.  More begging for levies during stagnant economic times. More cuts to gifted-programs for students. More cuts to sports and other extra-curricular activities.  More low-performing teachers protected by tenure. More cuts in busing and administrative support. Now we are fixing these problems with less incentive for improvement and less opportunity for students.

So what ever happened to that frustrated young man bailing hay?

Since I was not yet part of a union, I was able to take my grievance to the farmer who employed me.  I received my first raise, and for some odd reason the next day several of the older boys began to work much harder.  We even began to brainstorm on ways to improve our efficiency and began to work well as a team.  It was a small victory in my life, but a powerful lesson.  At that time, I never would have expected to be facing the very same frustrating circumstances over a decade later.

Heffner argued lackluster performance in K-12 isn’t a product of laziness, ineffectiveness, or incompetence on the part of educators and leaders. Rather it results from an outdated system that “traps them in mediocrity,” and has everyone working to the lowest common denominator.  But this wasn’t just a hollow declaration, or a convenient way for Ohio’s school chief to shift blame away from demoralized educators and cast it vaguely on “the system.”

Ohio’s educational framework quite literally is the problem. Namely academic standards, expectations, accountability structures, proficiency cut-offs, and the fact that the “system” shields us from brutal realities rather than serving as a true yardstick of how our schools and children are doing. According to Heffner, student performance in Ohio is middling because academic expectations for students are set too low. Ohio’s education system focuses on getting students over a threshold of “minimum competence” instead of expecting excellence. As a result student performance (and teachers’) languishes once that bar has been cleared. (For example, once a student passes the Ohio Graduation Test in 10^th or 11^th grade, it’s smooth sailing from there.) Compounding this reality is the fact that our statewide accountability system lacks rigor, and masks hard-to-swallow truths from parents, taxpayers, educators, and the students themselves.

Lest this sound exaggerated or alarmist, Heffner presented staggering facts illustrating that Ohio’s expectations for (and characterization of) student performance are falling short, no matter which way you slice it:

• Two words: grade inflation. Last year, 57 percent of Ohio’s school district earned Excellent or Excellent with Distinction (A or A+). The number of districts earning that grade has more than doubled in five years.
• Students aren’t college-ready. Of those districts rated A or A+, 41 percent of their graduating students (attending Ohio colleges) require remediation in reading and/or math. Only 28 percent of students in the class of 2010 who took the ACT were college-ready (scoring 22 or higher) in all four content areas.
• Proficiency on our state exams has all but lost its meaning. A sixth grader can earn proficiency on the state reading exam by answering just 35 percent of questions correctly. To be proficient in seventh-grade math, a student needs to answer just 32 percent correctly. Even among advanced proficiency (the highest of five levels) there is a staggering degree of inflation: to be advanced on the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT) a student must answer 79 percent of questions right in reading and just 77 percent in math. And the OGT really isn’t a gatekeeper for college, either; it’s based on an eighth or ninth-grade reading level and according to Heffner has not a single “algebra-two level question” on it.
• Comparisons with other tests confirm that Ohio’s is watered down. Fordham has long argued that NCLB’s high-stakes environment has led to a dumbing down of academic standards – a race to the bottom that’s easily exposed when you compare NAEP scores to a state’s results. How else might you explain the fact that while 43 percent of Ohio’s fourth graders scored “advanced” in reading on the Ohio Achievement Assessment, but just nine percent achieved advanced on NAEP? Similar gaps persist when you compare Ohio’s achievement scores against international tests (PISA, TIMSS).

With gainful employment increasingly dependent on having post-secondary education, the old model of minimum competence won’t cut it if Ohio hopes to prepare its young people for the jobs and opportunities of the future. 

Ohio is smart to adopt the Common Core standards in English Language Arts and mathematics, and in revisiting it social studies and science standards. Those standards will be fully implemented by the 2014-15 school year, but there’s no sense in waiting until then to start raising the academic bar. Raising expectations (and increasing proficiency cut-offs some each year until 2014-15) will condition students and educators to the higher academic demands and mean higher rates of passage on state exams after the new standards go live in 2014-15. In the interim, this could mean that passage rates drop. Unsurprisingly, this conversation elicited frustration and defensiveness from some local school board members in the crowd, who feared having to admit that their Excellent with Distinction-rated schools aren’t delivering a gold-star education to students, and who theorized that it’d be difficult to meet higher demands without more state dollars.

Heffner’s only misstep during the speech was perhaps not pushing back enough on this complaint. First and foremost, Ohio’s accountability system must serve as an accurate gauge of how students, teachers, schools, and districts are performing against real world expectations. This is true even if that makes schools  look worse off in the short term. To do anything less is to mislead our educators, our communities, and our children.

Heffner deserves credit for spurring this honest conversation and he will surely need support and encouragement from the Governor’s office, state board members, lawmakers, and educators out in the field when the going gets tough. Instead of making excuses for the state’s schools – that times are tough, that federal dollars have withered, that more and more students are coming to school with painful personal and academic challenges (all of which are true but don’t pardon us from our responsibility to students)–  Heffner insists that Ohio’s educators have got to do better regardless of these difficulties and deficiencies. This starts with an honest assessment of where we’re falling short, and what we need to do to get better.

It seems ironic that while society in general is starting to realize that the over-coddling, self-esteem pushing mentality doesn’t always serve kids very well, and that qualities like grit, perseverance in the face of obstacles, and learning how to handle failure are attributes worth cultivating in young people, we’ve yet to apply to that concept to the adults that work with children every day.

Kudos to Heffner for stepping up to the plate on this, and for supporting statewide rankings for all districts and school buildings according to Performance Index score; more accurate data on teacher effectiveness that reveals great variations in quality instead of lumping all teachers together as “satisfactory” (note, Heffner acknowledges that Ohio’s value-added calculation might still need some work); and the need for higher expectations and more rigorous ways to measure how schools are delivering on those expectations. As Steve Jobs said, “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”Heffner has done a fine job of setting the bar for Ohio and now the state’s educators need to meet it.

The event featured Fordham friend Rick Hess (director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute) as well as superintendents from districts across Ohio recognized by OEM's benchmarking study for exceptional cost-savings measures.

These on-the-ground ?efficiency experts? included superintendents from several schools districts including Canton City (Michele Evans); Perry Local in Stark County (John Richard); Sandy Valley (David Janofa); Western Reserve (Charles Swindler); and Salem City (Tom Bratten). Except for Canton City, the majority of examples of cost-savings and service-sharing came from districts that are fairly small.

It was apparent by the way superintendents in the audience were taking diligent notes that districts are really on the market for new ideas. Several good ideas emerged:

• Per-pupil budgeting. Perhaps most encouraging is that districts are taking the advice laid out by Marguerite Roza in Stretching the School Dollar to cost out various activities on a per-pupil basis (e.g., illustrating the cost per student for various subjects as well as extra-curricular activities), so as to identify outliers, provide transparency, and balance tradeoffs. As Superintendent Evans (Canton City) noted, this type of budgeting can reveal surprisingly high costs for activities that are non-instructional. To make informed spending decisions you first need to collect the data.?
• Energy efficiency. Several superintendents talked about consolidating buildings, installing energy-savings devices in schools, harnessing the power of green/solar energy, and purchasing electricity in a consortium (for example, this saved Canton City half a million dollars).
• Hiring people who wear many hats. This is probably easier for smaller districts, but superintendents reported that being able to cross-train their maintenance/custodial staff, as well as their central office administrators, yielded enormous savings (as human capital is the greatest expense to begin with). For example, Superintendent Swindler said that for large repairs, Western Reserve hires outside contractors but then ensures that its own staff can be trained simultaneously to learn how to tackle future repairs on their own. Even more impressive is how Perry Local Schools reorganized central office administration so that principals of individual buildings also serve as district-wide test coordinators, special ed coordinators, etc. ? thereby eliminating the need to create those positions. Superintendent Bratten of Salem City noted that his special education coordinator is also the bus mechanic. And in instances where this isn't practical, districts may share positions with other districts.
• Relentless focus on finances in all district-wide decisions. Another theme emerging from the panel's discussion was the necessity to try to crush silos in district management. Financial realities must be a key part of decisions affecting schools, students, and teachers. It was encouraging to hear superintendents report that they have ?weekly? meetings re-evaluating any and all things related to the budget; that they pinpoint costs in very specific ways (costs per student per bus ride); and that treasurers are integral to their teams.

Overall, district superintendents ? at least those in the room ? seemed to understand the need to cut costs and be more pragmatic. But as Rick Hess aptly pointed out ? ?optimizing? by cutting corners on things like electricity and busing can only go so far. ?

Given the serious trouble districts will be in over the next decade ? because of withering federal stimulus dollars, a real estate market that won't fully bottom out for several more years, and competing pressures on state budgets (namely Medicaid) ? it's time to start rethinking the way K-12 does business. Hess explained scenarios in which schools could re-configure the use of teacher talent; take better advantage of technology (a la School of One and Rocketship); and do a better job of understanding the value of each dollar (for example, a teacher making $70,000 is essentially paid $4,600 for patrolling the cafeteria during lunch duty ? why not have her use that time for instruction?).

By the end of the event, two challenges to achieving real cost-savings (especially the ?rethinking? kind) were crystal clear. First, K-12 leaders still have an aversion to attaching dollars and cents to children. Superintendent Evans (Canton City) noted that it's ?a sick thing? to delineate costs per pupil and that she never anticipated talking about money so much when she took on the role of superintendent. If tracking your spending can help drive more money toward areas that matter, per-pupil budgeting is actually a very student-centric way of doing business. It's sick not to.? And it does no one any good to continue perpetuating this kind of rhetoric in education.

Secondly, after hearing Hess' speech ? my table was buzzing. I asked one district leader from a central Ohio school district what she thought of his ideas. Her response? ?We'd love to try some of those things (virtual learning; re-imagining staffing structures; paying great teachers more) but we're sort of boxed in. Unions, regulations, rules, etc. make it very difficult for us to change much of what we do, especially when it comes to staffing.? ???

That sounds familiar.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Correction: the original article said "Canton Local," but it was supposed to read "Canton City."

Though teachers and their unions were most definitely included???both in Senate Bill 5 and in the frantic, well-funded ($30 million) effort to persuade voters to repudiate it???education-policy watchers outside Ohio may not appreciate the extent to which this was really a referendum on policemen, firemen, and other ???first responders??? in the public sector. They and their unions were covered by the measure, too, and played the lead role???and by far the most visible role???in the campaign to undo it. There is, in fact, every reason to believe that if the first responders hadn't been involved, Senate Bill 5 would have survived Election Day.

[pullquote]On the same ballot, Ohio voters repudiated Republican plans to restructure collective bargaining in the Buckeye State and the big plans of Beltway Democrats to reshape the nation's healthcare system.[/pullquote]At their raucous victory party on Tuesday night, union leaders said the vote should send a clear message to Governor Kasich and GOP legislative leaders. ???Their biggest mistake was to think they (Republicans) could come up with a solution and impose it on a bunch of people,??? said Bill Leibensperger, vice president of the Ohio Education Association. He continued, ???There has always been room to talk. That's what collective bargaining is about. You bring adults around a table to talk about serious issues.???

He was half right. Ohio's voters indeed rejected what they were persuaded was a Republican over-reach to reshape state and local government and how it deals with its employees. The same day, however, and by an even greater (2 to 1) margin, Ohioans spurned key pieces of President Obama's l Affordable Care Act. Issue 3, thereby exempting Buckeye State residents from the new federal health insurance mandate.. Supporters of that ballot item boasted that, ???Today, Ohio voters sent a clear message to President Obama??? We reject the mandates of ???Obamacare.'???

In sum, on the same ballot, Ohio voters repudiated GOP plans to restructure collective bargaining in the Buckeye State and the big plans of Beltway Democrats to reshape the nation's healthcare system. So what lesson should politicians and policymakers draw?

Ohioans???like Americans generally???are largely centrist in their politics. (That's why it's been a key swing state in so many national elections. Remember ???As Ohio goes, so goes the nation????) The political extremes on both sides are loud and polarizing, of course, yet most state voters are moderates open to compromise. They don't like one-party solutions and are skeptical of big fixes, wherever they originate. Lasting change and real reform in a state like Ohio requires some level of bipartisan support and collaboration.

What does this mean for education reform? Are we facing a period of political paralysis in Ohio (and beyond) where nothing can be changed even when change is needed? Will elected officials be so shell-shocked from this particular electoral pounding that they will simply nibble on the margins of reform?

That would be a terrible mistake. Surveys have consistently shown that Ohioans support bona fide school-reform efforts, and many of the other education reforms that were tucked into the 300 pages of Senate Bill 5 had and still have the support of voters. These include:

• Creating a salary structure free of automatic step increases;
• Requiring performance-based pay for teachers and nonteaching school employees;
• Limiting public employer contributions toward health care benefit costs;
• Requiring annual evaluations of teachers to include student performance data; and
• Requiring that any lay-offs be based in part on these evaluations.

The Fordham Institute polled Ohioans on education issues in 2005, 2007, and 2009 and in every one of these surveys Buckeye residents said they preferred paying teachers according to their ???performance and how effectively they teach??? rather than compensating them for ???years of service and degrees earned.??? In 2009, the margin was a striking 69 to 15 percent. Further, an overwhelming 87 percent favored ???giving local public schools more freedom to fire teachers that aren't performing,??? while only 11 percent opposed such a measure.

Quinnipiac reported two weeks ago that Ohioans supported (49 to 40 percent) the provision in Senate Bill 5 that pay increases for public-sector employees (including teachers) should be based on merit rather than seniority. And again, as Ohio goes, so goes the nation. Recent national polls show Americans overall support merit pay and tying tenure to performance. An Education Next survey earlier this year found that ???those who say tenure should be based on academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011.???

Nor does the economic imperative to do more with less go away with this week's vote. Budgets are tight. Revenues are down. Taxpayers are stressed, not least because so many of them lack jobs. (Ohio's unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and it has lost 400,000 jobs over the past five years.) It was this basic reality that mobilized Republicans to pursue the changes wrought by Senate Bill 5 in the first place: They would save a lot of money.

University of Arkansas economist Robert Costrell captured the profound challenges still confronting Ohio when he wrote of this week's vote:

The core fiscal issues that motivated SB5 remain unsolved for school districts.??SB5 was a very broad bill, which contributed to its defeat, but specific provisions are quite important for keeping school district costs under control.??There??were two particularly important provisions regarding health insurance.??First, the law capped district contributions at 85 percent, so that teachers would have to pay 15 percent.??By comparison, the collective bargaining agreement for Cleveland sets the employee share of premiums at about five percent.??Second, and perhaps even more important, the law gave districts the ability to set plan design, subject to best practices established by a state board.??Currently collective bargaining agreements establish which plans will be offered, what the deductibles and co-insurance rates??are, etc.??In Cleveland, for example, there are no??deductibles at all for in-network coverage, nor is there any??co-insurance.??This is quite astounding???well below industry standards, even for generous plans, like those we find in public universities.??These provisions are written into the union contract.??They will be very difficult to remove, under current bargaining law, which leaves school districts at a great disadvantage at the bargaining table.??So districts like Cleveland will continue to face huge budget difficulties, now and in the future.??The defeat of SB5 will mean layoffs and other education cuts,??unless these provisions are re-enacted separately.

Senate Bill 5 is now dead, but the underlying problems facing Ohio schools and budgets remain. To make any progress, bold changes are needed in education and other parts of the public sector. But as Philip Howard perceptively noted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, across the entirety of the public sector the unions are still powerful obstacles to needed change.

--Terry Ryan

Lasley is on the side of children and improving education when he defends the efforts of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) to rate the nation's teacher preparation programs. NCTQ wants to ensure that our nation's teachers are well-trained, and as teachers are the single most important in-school factor for student learning it seems a matter of common sense to try and rate the performance of the programs responsible for preparing future educators.??

But, the education school community is opposed to rankings for their performance and have attacked the NCTQ effort to rate the more than 1,000 teacher-preparation programs across the country. Lasley calls out the education schools in his Chronicle piece and warns, ???the ???circle the wagons' defensive strategy of the card-carrying teacher-education monopoly is impeding further progress toward quality. This is neither in the best interest of teacher-preparation institutions nor, most important, of students in elementary and secondary classrooms.???

America's children need the very best teachers they can get, and as the nation's education schools are the overwhelming provider of new teachers to schools it is imperative to know which programs work and which don't. Lasley and NCTQ are to be applauded for taking on this fight and for calling out the self-interested behavior of those education schools that refuse to be held accountable for their performance and that of their students. Our children and schools deserve better.??

-Terry Ryan

But the fact that TFA teachers outshined other teachers is actually the less interesting/relevant part of these data. As Education Week points out, there's some clear selection bias in what type of teacher trainee joins TFA versus a traditional program. TFA's pool includes ?only high-scoring college graduates? to begin with. More telling might be a study showing how average-scoring teacher candidates fared under TFA's training module or how traditional coursework offered by universities impacts TFA teachers' effectiveness ? or doesn't. Training between sites, even in the same state, varies quite a bit. For example, TFA teachers in Memphis don't have to take any university coursework while those in Nashville take courses through Lipscomb University; what impact, if any, do those formal courses have?

More important than the TFA-trained v. traditionally-trained teacher comparison is the fact that at a state level, Tennessee is collecting and publishing this data. Over time, this enables the public to glean information about how other (non-TFA) alternatively licensed teachers perform, which programs produce poor results, and which traditional ones do well. Teacher candidates can make better decisions about where to receive training. And the state itself can crack down on or reward programs for their performance.

This sort of data on teacher training programs is invaluable, and asking tough questions about the efficacy of the way we train teachers should not be something that ed schools shy away from, as Terry noted this morning. Here's to hoping that Ohio will follow suit, shedding light on which preparation programs are doing right by their teacher trainees ? and ultimately doing right by students.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Despite the heavy spending by the teacher unions most of the anti-Issue 2 commercials have featured first responders, and one of the most effective and widely used spokespeople for We Are Ohio ??? the coalition leading the fight ??? has been a Cincinnati firefighter warning Ohioans about the impact of the bill on the safety of firemen and police. The Columbus Dispatch reported, ???We Are Ohio's campaign has featured heavy doses of police and firefighters, with a sprinkling of nurses and teachers.???

In studying poll numbers around the reform measures in SB 5 that effect teachers it is not surprising that SB 5 opponents have focused their attention on public sector employees like first responders and not teachers. Based on both national and Ohio polls many of the reforms in SB5 that would impact teachers are supported by Ohioans and have been for years. The Fordham Institute, for example, polled Ohioans on education issues in 2005, 2007, and 2009 and in each of these Ohioans said they preferred paying teachers according to their ???performance and how effectively they teach??? over ???years of service and degrees earned.??? In 2009, the margin was an overwhelming 69 percent to 15 percent. Further, an overwhelming 87 percent of Ohioans favored ???giving local public schools more freedom to fire teachers that aren't performing,??? while only 11 percent opposed such a measure.

Quinnipiac reported on October 25 that Ohioans supported by a 49 to 40 percent margin the measure that pay increases for public sector employees, including teachers, should be based on merit rather than seniority. Recent national polls show Americans overall support merit pay and basing tenure on performance. An Education Next-PEPG poll conducted earlier this year found that ???those who say tenure should be based on academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011.???

With all of the media attention swirling around SB5 and its potential impact on police, firemen, and other public sector employees, Ohioans may well have lost sight of the significant and mostly valuable changes in public education embedded in this controversial measure. But, as many of the education measures are supported by a majority of Ohioans they are sure to keep coming up. In fact, Ohio's Speaker of the House William Batchelder promised as much when he told the Associated Press yesterday that elements of the contentious law ???could be proposed again if the law is rejected.??? Batchelder told reporters he knew through polling which elements of the bill people like and dislike.

??

-Terry Ryan

As I shared in my legislative testimony, ???Nothing matters more to student learning than teacher quality. The fact is that highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced levels in a single year. The significant of this finding can't be understated.??? I went on to argue, ???Ohioans, for the most part, understand that strong teachers and good schools are a critical investment in our children's and our state's future. Consider that in 2010, the state invested more than $18.3 billion in K-12 public education ??? roughly $2,078 for every adult living in the Buckeye State. In fact, school funding in Ohio has steadily increased over the past three decades. Just since 1991, when the first DeRolph lawsuit was filed, per-pupil revenue for Ohio's public schools has risen 60 percent (even accounting for inflation.)???

This growth in spending saw the number of K-12 public employees statewide grow 35 percent (from about 181,000 to 245,250), while K-12 enrollment in the state actually declined about 1.5 percent. The math didn't add up when I testified and it still doesn't. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that education spending in Ohio, and indeed across the country, has peaked and we need to figure out how to educate children to a higher standard with less money.

To do this, school districts need more flexibility over personnel and especially personnel costs as they make-up about roughly 85 percent of school spending. Senate Bill 5 would provide districts with needed flexibility that includes:

• Creating a salary structure free of automatic step increases;
• Requiring performance-based pay for teachers and nonteaching school employees;
• Limiting public employer contributions toward health care benefit costs to 85 percent.
• Banning seniority as the sole or primary determinant of who gets laid off when lay-offs are unavoidable;
• Requiring annual evaluation of teachers to include student performance date; and
• Requiring that any lay-offs be based in part on these evaluations.

The bottom line, as the editorial pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Canton Repository have noted, Ohio can't continue doing business as usual. Does SB5 need some improvements and fixes? Absolutely, and this is what the legislative process is for, but throwing it out completely and returning to the status quo will mean tougher times for school districts, more teacher cuts, and a diminishment of quality in a time when we need to do more with less.

Now is not the time to backtrack on reform. Hopefully Ohio's voters will see it the same way, but if they don't lawmakers should seek to move forward anyway. The state's future is at stake here and doing more of the same is not an option.

-Terry Ryan

But what else will the model framework include, especially for that remaining - and some would argue more important - 50 percent of a teacher's rating? To what degree will districts and charter schools need to enact a replica of the state's forthcoming model, or something closely resembling it, instead of merely repackaging their current systems? And how will teacher evaluations impact other key personnel decisions, if at all? Despite the fact that legislation clearly spells out a handful of requirements surrounding Ohio's new teacher evaluations, the answers to these questions aren't as straightforward as one might think.

In Fordham's analysis of Ohio's education legislation from the first half of 2011 (primarily the biennial budget, HB 153), we observed that when it comes to teacher evaluations, ?the budget leaves many decisions to local districts.? Depending on whom you ask ? this can be a recipe for watering down evaluations or it could be a fact worth celebrating, in that it allows districts themselves to take ownership and drive meaningful reforms to teacher effectiveness.??

Recent analyses from two well-respected national organizations put statewide teacher evaluations in national context. In State of the States: Trends and Early Lessons on Teacher Evaluation and Effectiveness Policies, the National Council on Teacher Quality summarized the state of teacher effectiveness policies nationwide, zooming in on 17 states and the District of Columbia (including Ohio) that require student growth to be a predominant factor for teacher ratings. (Note, NCTQ publishes a comprehensive annual yearbook on state teacher policies broadly that is also worth checking out.)

In State of the States, Ohio was among just a handful wherein teacher evaluation ratings aren't directly tied to dismissal, certification, or tenure. That is, among the dozen and a half states under study, the vast majority have prescribed not only what shall comprise a rigorous teacher evaluation but also how it will factor into high-stakes decisions ? whether rewards or sanctions.

Democrats for Education Reform's Built to Succeed? Ranking New Statewide Teacher Evaluation Practices took it a step further and ranked states, attempting to measure ?which of those [19 states plus DC] states' laws are tough enough to withstand the challenges ahead and are most likely to succeed in increasing teacher quality.? DFER depicted Ohio as one of just a few states with ?clear potential for weakening the evaluation process at the ground level,? ranking Ohio among the bottom third of states overall and bottom-most among states in the Midwest. When it comes to having real implications for poor ratings (dismissal, layoffs, placement, tenure, and compensation) Ohio earned only three points out of a possible 21. (In each strand, a state can earn zero to three points; there are a total of 20 strands in areas such as ?strength of evaluation plan,? ?employment implications,? etc.)

Fordham unapologetically supports accountability for educators, an end to LIFO (last in, first out) layoffs, and more performance-based decision making in schools generally. But it's hard to escape the truth that no state ? not even those heralded by DFER and NCTQ ? has had teacher evaluations for long enough to be able to discern what impact it's had on student achievement, and how or if it's changed teachers' behavior or ensured better teachers for the kids who need them the most. Lest this sound like backtracking on our beliefs around teacher effectiveness, let's reiterate: Ohio must craft and implement more meaningful evaluations for teachers that differentiate for quality.

But perhaps designing that system and collecting data on teacher effectiveness (and sharing that data in a transparent, but low-stakes way) should be priority number one. Once the state has several years of data, a list of robust and meaningful assessments from which to draw that data (which the State Board of Education has been tasked with devising, but which doesn't exist yet), and enough time so that educators can observe for themselves that the data make intuitive sense (namely that it accurately gauges their own abilities and those of their colleagues) ? then the state can worry about tying meaningful rewards and sanctions to those evaluation ratings. Or possibly by that point, districts themselves will be motivated to do so on their own.

It's understandable to want to improve teacher quality by pulling all levers at once. DC Public Schools and Harrison School District 2 have done phenomenal work in developing rigorous teacher evaluations that, while not perfect, are worlds better than previous systems and that educators on the whole seem to buy into. But we should keep in mind that these reforms happened on a local level; DCPS has 44,900 students and HSD 2 has just over 10,000 students, a splash in the bucket compared to Ohio's 1.8 million students. Creating such a system for an entire state, let alone a state as large and diverse as Ohio, requires a lot more work (and a lot more cooperation and buy-in from schools and the people working in them).

The danger in launching fully ahead and tying all personnel decisions ? layoffs, transfers, pay, certification, tenure, etc. ? to evaluation systems before we've seen the accuracy of those evaluations systems is obvious: it threatens credibility and could foster hostility from districts and schools. Worse, by tying high-stakes rewards and consequences to an evaluation system that doesn't exist yet, we risk creating dozens of incentives for principals to inflate scores instead of honestly evaluating teachers and providing them with meaningful feedback to improve.

This isn't to say that high-stakes decisions shouldn't eventually be directly connected to teachers' ratings. But while Ohio ranks low according to DFER's likelihood-of-watering-down scale, it also ranks low in terms of absolutely screwing up, unfairly dismissing teachers, or creating hostility. That may sound unnecessarily risk-averse, but caution in this realm may end up producing a better ? and more importantly, more sustainable ? outcome for Ohio's teachers, schools, and students.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

This piece orginally apperead in the Ohio Education Gadfly

A new choice bill is now being debated in the House that would vastly expand the number of students eligible to receive a voucher. HB 136 would create the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Scholarship (PACT) Program and give children who come from families with annual incomes of up to $62,000 a year a voucher worth up to $4,563. Furthermore, 25 percent of families in the state could be eligible for smaller vouchers awarded on a sliding scale for families with incomes up to $95,000. This expansive growth in school choice options via vouchers is contentious to say the least.

A myriad of opinions offering both support and opposition to the expansion of vouchers have been voiced over the past several months (see Terry's recent op-ed here); however, one criticism in particular warrants a response. An October 12 Columbus Dispatch editorial, ?Many Questions,? stated that ?advocates should be able to show that students who go to private schools using vouchers do better than their peers who remain at the public schools they left. So far no one has collected such data.? While better data are certainly needed, what we have now is telling.

With the limited data available from the Ohio Department of Education (we can't get at value-added growth or growth over time) we are able to compare the academic performance of students using an EdChoice voucher to those students who remain in voucher-eligible public school buildings, on a single-year, snap-shot basis.??

The results for Ohio's ?Big 8? districts (from which the majority of voucher students hail) are encouraging for school-choice supporters. The chart below provides a one-year snapshot for the performance of EdChoice students in Columbus versus students in voucher-eligible district schools. Voucher students outperform their peers in every subject and grade except one, and in some cases do so by a significant margin. Particularly, voucher students' performance in the eighth grade is strong. Eighth-grade voucher students outperform their district peers by 31.9 percentage points in reading and 18.3 percentage points in math. These results are an improvement to a similar analysis we performed last year in which voucher students in Columbus out-performed their district peers in eight tested grades and subjects.

Chart 1: Columbus EdChoice Students vs. Voucher Eligible Students

Source: The Ohio Department of Education

The results are also positive in Fordham's hometown of Dayton.

Chart 1: Dayton EdChoice Students vs. Voucher Eligible Students

Source: The Ohio Department of Education

Last year, voucher students outperformed their district peers in seven of fourteen academic tests in Dayton. Perhaps most encouraging is the fact that they are outperforming their district peers in third grade reading by 22.4 percentage points (see Emmy's piece above on the importance of early reading proficiency).

While voucher performance in Columbus and Dayton, is positive the same cannot be said for Canton. District students outperform voucher students in Canton in every subject and grade, and in the case of fourth-grade math they do so by 37 percentage points. These results are somewhat of an anomaly (voucher students in the remaining Big 8 districts perform fairly well comparatively), but it is still worth noting that while voucher students' performance is strong in some urban cities, it is not necessarily the case for all.

The results are mixed, but overall a majority of students using vouchers are outperforming their peers who remain in traditional district schools. Reading proves to be an area of strength for students using vouchers in the Big 8 ? in Cincinnati, for example, students using vouchers outperformed their district peers in reading in every grade. The Dispatch argued that if advocates of vouchers could show that voucher students are performing at higher levels than their district peers, such programs should continue.

While the data available for an analysis of this type are limited to one year snapshots, the data we do have has shown that in fact voucher students are performing well, and that in cities like Dayton and Youngstown, where traditional public school performance has languished years, vouchers appear to be a good option for the children using them. The lack of data available, however, is a yet another clear call for why Ohio needs a system of accountability for all publicly funded students that will not just show us raw achievement data for one year, but rather how schools, and students, are performing over time. Until such a system is created and put in place it is difficult to really tell what impact vouchers are having on student learning in the long run but what we can see now is that children using vouchers outperform those who stay in their district schools.

-Bianca Speranza

This piece orginally appeared in the Ohio Education Gadfly

Ladner attributed Florida's success to a set of reforms, one of which was the reading guarantee. In other words, Florida third-grade students cannot advance to fourth grade if they do not pass the state's third-grade reading assessment. The logic behind this policy is that if students aren't competent readers by fourth grade, they will struggle to comprehend tougher subject matter in late elementary and middle school and beyond, and will fall further behind academically. A report out last year from the Annie E. Casey Foundation supports this argument. It stated that while the failure to read is consistently linked to higher rates of dropping out of school, ???of the fourth graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test in 2009, 83 percent of children from low-income families???and 85 percent of low-income students who attend high-poverty schools???failed to reach the ???proficient' level in reading.???

Ohio should embrace Ladner's recommendation, and in fact we already have. We just haven't earnestly implemented it yet.

The Buckeye State has a history with a ???reading guarantee??? that goes back to 1997 and the Voinovich administration. Fourteen years ago lawmakers in Ohio acknowledged the fact that all fourth graders should be able to read and as such they enacted a reading guarantee. The legislature passed Senate Bill 55, which laid the groundwork for much of the state education accountability system we have in place today. Among its many provisions was a "fourth-grade reading guarantee." Set to take effect for the 2001-02 school year, it was a fairly stringent measure that stated if a child didn't score "proficient" or better on the state reading test, s/he couldn't progress to fifth grade.

Everyone from parents' groups to teacher unions was outraged by the requirement. And given the strong local control and heavy local funding base of Ohio's schools (especially at that time), districts didn't take kindly to the state encroachment on their local grade-level promotion policies either. Before the measure could take effect, it was ruled an unfunded mandate in 2001 by the Ohio Supreme Court in one of the DeRolph (school-funding lawsuit) rulings. Subsequently, the guarantee was amended by the legislature and watered-down to appease opponents and let fourth graders who can't read move onto fifth grade, and beyond.

Fast forward a decade and additional legislative changes to Ohio's law. We still have a reading guarantee on the books (at the third-grade level now), but in practice nothing has changed. School Choice Ohio reports that ???although 20 percent of Ohio third graders were not proficient in reading as judged by the state assessment, just 0.6 percent of them were retained in the 2010-11 school year.??? Those students who do fail the third-grade reading test and still advance to fourth grade are supposed to receive reading intervention services, though there is little evidence such intervention is having much of an impact. Last year, 16.2 percent of Ohio fourth graders were below proficient on the state reading test and our NAEP reading scores have barely budged.

A real reading guarantee won't be a silver bullet for Ohio's academic woes, but it surely has enough merit to inspire renewed debate among lawmakers and state education leaders. And that debate can be informed by recent efforts in Florida and Indiana. The Hoosier State, for example, enacted a comprehensive third-grade reading guarantee as part of its sweeping education reforms in recent years and added additional reading support and K-2 diagnostic testing to help prepare students, teachers, and families for the requirement. If Ohio's lawmakers are willing to debate (and in some cases legislate) school funding changes, expansion of school choice, reporting on students' Body Mass Index, and religion in schools (and more), surely a frank conversation about how well our students can read and should be able to read, and what thein ??state ought to do about it, is warranted. Ohio's students ??? and this state's future ??? deserve at least that much.

??- Emmy Partin

This piece orginally??appeared in today's Ohio Education Gadfly

C. Jack Grayson, founder and chairman of the American Productivity and Quality Center, kicked off the event with a discussion about the need to increase efficiency and productivity in the public sector. Grayson stressed that local governments must think differently when it comes to cutting costs. The commonly used across the-board cuts hurt both efficiency and effectiveness, and more times than not lack a process of who to cut and why, resulting in a loss of talented people and knowledge. Instead, Grayson advocated for the need to focus more on process and performance management (PPM). Everything involves a process and in order to improve the outcomes we must evaluate the entire process from the beginning to the end.? Grayson also discussed the need to reduce functional silos and the tremendous amount of waste associated with them.? He noted that most educational organizations are organized functionally with different silos focusing solely on individual task such as HR, instruction, and IT. Downsides of functional silos include redundancy, focusing more on improving the function instead of the customer or outcome, which in turn produce large amounts of waste.

Another dynamic conversation about increasing efficiency and cooperation in local government occurred between Bart Anderson (ESC of Central Ohio), Barbara Gellman-Danley (University of Rio Grande), and John Weithofer (Miami Valley Communications Council). These panelists represented the K-12 education community, higher ed, and local government. They discussed the need to share services more now than ever before, and the challenges that sometimes lie in the way of doing so- such as political tension and legal barriers. Each panelist brought a unique and different perspective to the table.

To find out more about this important and timely issue and view footage from the event click?here.

-Bianca Speranza

You can view the full document here (or skip ahead to Ohio-specific policy recommendations; again, they're useful for other states), but the gist is simple. And impressive.

Over the last decade, Florida has managed to eke out steady improvements to student achievement (measured by fourth-grade scores on the NAEP), specifically for students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and for Hispanic and African American students. For example, Florida's FRPL-eligible fourth graders saw a 14 percent increase in scale scores on the NAEP (reading) from 1998 to 2009. In contrast, Ohio fourth graders saw a drop, then a slight increase, and then an evening out such that their scores have gone virtually unchanged in 11 years. (However, despite raw scale scores going up, it was unclear from Ladner's presentation where the proficiency cut-off was and whether/to what extent more at-risk students are reaching actual proficiency.?

Perhaps most impressive is that when you compare Florida's minority youngsters with students statewide (including high-income and white students) in other states, in several instances the former outscores the latter. Florida's African-American students scored better than students statewide in eight other states. And the average for Hispanic students (again, in fourth grade reading) was higher than the statewide average for students in 31 states.

What accounts for these remarkable trends? Ladner was the first to admit that there's no exact explanation or correlation, but attributed the Sunshine State's success to several reforms enacted in the late 90s by then-Gov. Jeb Bush:

• ?A clear A-F grading scale for schools that heavily incentivizes gains for low performers (25 percent of a schools' score is based on student learning gains for the lowest performing tier of students);
• Financial rewards and consequences (e.g., schools were given $100 per student for improving their letter grade);
• Stricter promotion and graduation requirements-for instance third grade students can't advance to the fourth grade unless they are proficient in reading;
• Funding for student success; and
• More school choice (Florida has some of the largest and most established voucher programs in the country, as well as a robust charter sector).

It came as no surprise, then, that the policy recommendations for Ohio followed directly from these perceived elements of success (read about them in greater detail here).

Of course, it's difficult to credit any one of these reform ideas among all the noise and the variety of efforts happening in Florida across a decade. Ladner's research brief explores other possible reasons underlying the trends (demographic change? Class size? Preschool?).? But one thing's for sure ? Florida has done something right when it comes to achieving hard-to-come-by improvements for demographic subgroups (on the NAEP, nonetheless). And that's worth our attention.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Ohio's House Bill 136(Huffman) would create the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Saving Scholarship Program (PACT), a private school scholarship program open to all students statewide whose families meet a maximum income threshold, regardless of whether their home district is failing or not. PACT would award up to $4,563 per child to families with annual household incomes up to $65,000 for a family of four, and could affect every school district in the state. The breadth of this proposed voucher program as well as the fact that Ohio currently has three other voucher programs and a myriad of other school choice options such as charter and on-line schools, is turning the debate over HB 136 into somewhat of a school choice war.

SCO's Chad Aldis made the philosophical case for the expansion of vouchers when he penned that

?As parents, we want the best for our children, and we make choices every day to achieve that. We choose the food they eat, the doctors they see, the amount of television they watch. Our choices help shape the people they become. Yet, among the hundreds of choices we make each week, one very important choice is not available to thousands of Ohio families.??

Aldis' argument is straightforward and points out that HB136 would enable thousands of families whether to send their child to school, a choice that many affluent families already exercise either by paying for private school tuition or moving into a school district of their choice. Aldis's op-ed did not address issues of accountability and left the reader with the notion that more school choice in and of itself is good enough for public policy.

Fordham's Terry Ryan takes a different approach and points out that Ohio is already a hot-bed of school choice and that new choices should be matched by an equal concern for quality and student performance. Ryan states:

??The genie of school choice is out of the bottle. The question for state policymakers is how to ensure that this widening of options is matched by improved school quality and ultimate gains in student achievement. It little avails a child to choose a school that's no more effective than the one he or she is exiting. Improved achievement has to be the state's foremost education policy goal.?

It is no secret that Ohio's school choice options have had mixed results, and we at the Fordham Institute have readily admitted this. As more and more school choice options make their way into the Buckeye State it is critical to ensure that these programs are actually improving student achievement and that choice doesn't simply become an end in itself. Choice, Ryan argues, is not an end in itself but is rather a means to an end, with then end being improved student outcomes. ?

The debate over improving school choice in the Buckeye State is just starting to heat up, stay tuned for what is sure to be an interesting next few months. Read both op-eds in their entirety here and here.

-Bianca Speranza

The first part in the series, ?Thirteen Years Into the Charter School Experiment,? provides a decent (if brief) overview of Ohio's charter history and landscape. The piece points out several benefits that charter schools have provided in the Buckeye State, namely parental empowerment, pressure on traditional public schools to get better, and freedom from ridiculous red tape stipulating things like the size of a school cafeteria.

At least one missing fact ? and the cause of a lot of misconception about charter schools ?draining? the public school system ? is worth highlighting, however. The piece begins by noting that ?Ohio is paying upwards of $500,000 to support these schools? but fails to point out that in the Buckeye State, charters schools are and historically have been severely underfunded compared to their district counterparts. For example, in FY 2010, each pupil in Columbus City Schools received $8,200 in local revenue. Meanwhile, charter schools in Columbus ? including two of our own - receive zero dollars in local funds, and the amount captured from the state, approximately $5300 per pupil, doesn't even come close to making up for this gap amount. (Never mind the money that public district schools receive on top of the local amount. The total for CCS was over $14,000 per pupil in FY 2010.)

The second part of the series, ?Disappointed with Local Schools, Urban Parents Start Their Own,? tells the story of one Cleveland-area parent who joined forces with other parents to start their own charter school modeled after one of the highly performing Breakthrough Schools. And the article lifts up the great work of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, one of Ohio's most collaborative districts when it comes to partnering with schools of choice:

Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon says he's tired of the us-versus-them attitude between charters and public schools. He says Hovis, Breakthrough Schools and everyone else involved with Near West Intergenerational really impressed the folks at CMSD. So, ?not only did Cleveland sponsor them but we actually created a lease agreement where they are co-located in one of our buildings.?

As an authorizer of charter schools and an advocate of choice broadly (and rigorous accountability for schools of choice) Fordham is interested to see how this series develops. We hope the reporters at StateImpact will compare charter performance to their district counterpart schools (not to the statewide average) and explore funding inequities, while also answering tough questions about accountability and management in state that's riddled with some high-profile scandals and examples of mis-management.

Speaking of charter schools, listen to Terry Ryan's thoughts on yesterday's WOSU's ?All Sides with Ann Fisher? here.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

In short, Ohio's major city school districts have quite an abysmal showing compared to their international counterparts.?

Among the eight districts Akron Public Schools had the best showing, ranking in the 28^th percentile in Math and the 41^st percentile in reading. As poor of a result as this may seem, Dayton Public Schools and Youngstown City Schools struggled even more by comparison.? Both Dayton and Youngstown ranked in the bottom 15 percent in math while ranking respectively in the 24^th and 25^th percentiles in reading.? Here is how Ohio's big eight fared in comparison to their international counterparts:

What is more concerning is that these numbers improve (significantly in math) when these districts are measured against just the rest of the United States, meaning the country as a whole is continuing to fall behind other developed nations. This is largely due to the fact that many wealthier suburban school districts are not faring too well either. The following list is comprised of examples of some of the wealthiest suburban schools and how they compare to their international counterparts:

Considering that most of these districts are either the highest performing or one of the highest performing districts within their county, the numbers are rather unimpressive.? Not one of these top-end schools ranks even in the top 20 percent in math achievement, and only one district (Ottawa Hills) is barely in the top ten percent in reading achievement.?

After examining these figures, it is evident that not only are Ohio city school systems falling by the way-side, but the best public alternatives in the state are struggling to keep pace internationally, especially in mathematics.? Despite knowing U.S. schools have been falling behind other nations for some time, academic improvement is still proving to be elusive. In an age of globalization and increased worldwide competition these numbers combined with lackluster improvement paint a bleak picture for our future. Not to be redundant, but if the United States wishes to maintain a sense of global economic and political superiority then we still have work to do.

?-Matthew Kyle, Ohio Policy and Research Intern

This is a provision Fordham fully supported and in fact helped craft, as a means to ensure better quality and accountability in the charter school sector. The rankings, found here, include 47 authorizers including us (our sister organization, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, is an authorizer). On a list of 47 authorizers, we ranked 24th. Nine sponsors fell into the bottom 20 percent and cannot open new schools.

We've never shied away from the truth when it comes to our schools.?? Each year, we publish a comprehensive, public account of our schools' performance (our 2011 edition will be out next month and you can peruse past editions here).?? We've also been among the first to admit that the work is tough; that more school choice without parallel accountability measures is pointless (kids need better options ??? not just more of them); and that closing schools is an important part of quality authorizing. Historically we've accepted the challenge of closing troubled schools poor academic results.

But because these state rankings are new and high-profile, we wanted to take a moment to put them in context and reiterate our emphasis on continuous improvement for all of our schools.

It's important to note a handful of facts about the rankings shared by the department of education:

• PI score only accounts for absolute achievement (proficiency) of students for a single year.?? It does not include value-added growth or consider performance gains over time.
• The performance of drop-out recovery schools, which are among the lowest performing charters in the state, do not factor into any authorizer's PI score (Fordham sponsors none of these schools).
• Likewise, the 26 authorizers who only sponsor drop-out recovery schools or schools serving special needs populations aren't included in the ranking at all.
• An authorizer's PI score is based on how its portfolio of schools performed, on average. In our instance, our largest school (500 kids) also happens to be our weakest performing academically, while our top-performing school is one of our smallest.

That said, while our weakest school pulled down that average, we're happy to report that it also improved this year, moving up from Academic Emergency to Continuous Improvement. And we are not in the business of authorizing so as to only take on the highest performing schools. ??

A little history here is useful. Fordham's sponsorship portfolio has evolved considerable since we started in 2005. When we began sponsorship in July of that year with a total of ten schools (all in the Dayton-Cincinnati area) that collectively served about 2,700 students, and all but three of these schools we inherited from the Ohio Department of Education as they were forced out of sponsorship by state law. For the most part, these schools were troubled academically with five being rated Academic Emergency, one being rated Continuous Improvement and one being rated Excellent (three new start-up schools were unrated). Over the last six years we've had six schools leave our portfolio either through closure or by jumping to other sponsors, we've opened one new school to see it close after a year, and we've birthed two new schools. Two established schools voluntarily joined our portfolio this year. We currently sponsor only four of the ten schools that originally signed with Fordham in 2005. This year, Fordham-sponsored schools serve approximately 2,500 children; three schools carry an Effective (B) rating, four schools have a Continuous Improvement (C) rating, and one is rated Academic Watch (D).

Fordham-sponsored schools have made progress. This is a reflection of the hard work and dedication of the educators, school board members, and students in each building. But, more work remains to be done. We know it and we won't hide from the challenge, but more importantly the teachers, school leaders, and board members working in the schools we sponsor are committed to making a difference in the lives of children who need it and they are making progress. We are honored to be their allies in this struggle.?? ??

-Terry Ryan

This week the U.S. Department of Education and Arne Duncan announced a second round of awards totaling nearly $5 million. This round of grants went to 23 charter schools around the country that have demonstrated the ability to produce outstanding results. The grants are to be used to help these schools assist in their planning to expand and open new high quality charter schools. ?The grants will also provide the opportunity for three high -performing charters to partner with non-charter public schools to improve their academic performance and share effective practices.

Among the list of high-performing schools to receive this prestigious grant was Fordham-authorized Columbus Collegiate Academy. CCA received a grant totaling $600,000 for the next three years.? Over 94 percent of CCA students are?economically disadvantaged and since opening their doors in 2008, they have become the highest performing middle school in Columbus. The school's ability to continue to make tremendous student gains has caused it to rank among the best charter schools in the country. CCA is planning to use this grant money to open a new school and spread their successful practices in the near future. ?

Fordham's director of charter school sponsorship Kathryn Mullen Upton noted:

"We are delighted that Andrew Boy and his team will receive a federal start-up grant to help replicate the highly successful Columbus Collegiate Academy. The grant process is quite competitive, and receipt of one of only two Ohio awards for start-up funds speaks to the overall quality of the program."

This is the second award this year for CCA. In March they were awarded a Gold-Gain Epic award by New Leaders for New Schools for dramatic gains in student achievement.

Two other charter schools in Ohio also?received federal grants under this program. The Graham School in Columbus received the start-up portion of the grant, while the ISUS Institute of Health Care in Dayton received a slightly different grant for dissemination. These grants are extremely competitive and all three schools deserved to be recognized.

Congratulations!

-Bianca Speranza

My piece is below in full but be sure to check out the full discussion online and leave your own comments.

?Know it when you see it?? Hardly.

We can't improve the quality of our nation's educators or teacher training programs without a serious dialogue around what good teaching looks like, especially for the most at-risk students for whom excellent teaching is most vital. Further, policies must be structured in ways that tease out the attributes and skills of excellent educators and identify and develop these in less effective teachers.

In Ohio, we frequently hear that it's just not possible to do this fairly. But experiences from other states and districts prove otherwise. We interviewed teachers evaluated under the District of Columbia's IMPACT system ? which measures hallmarks of strong instruction like checking for understanding, engaging students, and delivering content clearly. Overwhelmingly DC teachers believed that it correctly identified high and low performers as well as identified tangible ways they could improve.

We heard a similar theme when we interviewed Mike Miles, superintendent of Colorado's Harrison School District 2. HSD2 measures teacher quality according to curricular alignment, classroom management, student engagement, and student growth, among many indicators. The district has seen more teachers achieving advanced levels of proficiency under this system, proving that instructional improvement is possible once we begin defining and measuring excellence.

The truism that good teaching can't be quantified ? that you ?just know it when you see it? ? is anything but true. These new systems may not be perfect, but they are worlds better than what we had previously. And they are a starting point if we want to finally get serious about improving teacher quality.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Several high-quality charter schools across the country are making an amazing difference in our children's lives, especially when charters in inner-city communities are performing as well, if not better, than their counterparts in much wealthier suburbs.

One recipient of the grant money was Breakthrough Charter Schools from Cleveland, Ohio. Breakthrough serves more than 1,400 K-8 students across six schools, of which 95 percent are minority and 80 percent are considered low-income. Despite what some would call challenging conditions, Breakthrough has managed to outperform the city of Cleveland and state average on every single test in every single grade.

?

Source: Breakthrough Charter Schools

This is quite the accomplishment and one that should be applauded. ?The U.S Department of Education awarded Breakthrough $3,488,060 to open eight new schools and expand three schools that they already have in Cleveland. One Breakthrough school in particular, Citizens Academy, was also recently recognized for their commitment to accelerating student growth and preparing their students for college. Citizens Academy was named a National Blue Ribbon Schools of 2011. They were one of only 304 schools that received the awarded this year.

Congratulations, Breakthrough!

-Bianca Speranza

Whatever the outcome of the November 8^th referendum (and both sides are investing millions in television ads to sway voters to their side), Schoen's survey findings make clear Ohioans, and Americans more generally, are fed-up with how elected officials run their states, with the generosity of public sector employee wages and benefits, and with the overall fiscal health of their states.

Two-in-three American voters express frustration with the direction their state economies are moving and say their state is on the ???wrong track.??? A plurality (48%) blame their elect officials for their state budget problems, and a plurality (47%) say cutting government spending is the best way to address the problem facing states, while 31% would require public employees to contribute more towards their benefits. Just 13% of voters think the best way forward is raising taxes.

American voters expressed serious skepticism about the value of tenure for teachers and would like to see changes to defined benefit pension systems. Specifically, 56 percent of voters ???favor phasing out tenure for teachers because it protects bad teachers from being fired while making it harder to bring in new and better teachers, while just 39% say teacher tenure is a longstanding right for public school teachers.??? When it comes to pensions, seven in ten ???strongly favor moving all new public employees from the existing defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan.??? A majority also says that overall salaries and benefits for public employees are too high (41%), while 31% of voters think they are just about right.

But, despite their frustrations with the costs of the public sector and their obvious desire for reforms and real leadership on these issues, Ohioans oppose the collective bargaining restrictions in Senate Bill 5 by a 52% to 43% margin. Ohio's voters are skeptical about how much money will actually be saved by limiting collective bargaining for public sector employees, and only 38% think the change to law will result in more reasonable benefits for public employees and thus help the state close its budget gap. Further, Ohioans overwhelmingly say it is more important to reform ???public employees' benefits??? (59%) than it is to reform ???collective bargaining??? (17%). Ohio's voters don't see the connection between changing collective bargaining rules and controlling public employees' costs and benefit packages.

Schoen's findings and survey methodology were released by the Manhattan Institute on September 20^th and can be found here.

But meeting AYP is like trying to ride an escalator that speeds up with each step you take. As schools progress toward 2014 more and more are labeled as failing, in part because states set low targets in earlier years and then increasingly steeper ones in the years leading up to 2014. Even those school serving kids well have an increasingly difficult time of getting every child to proficiency. On a national level, Secretary Duncan predicted earlier this year that as many as 80+ percent of schools could fail to meet AYP. On a school level, among those that are already very high performing, good schools may inadvertently be punished (anecdotally at least, Fordham knows this to be true).

This has become a common meme in education circles. And it's intuitive, like the law of marginal returns and the line graph that extends into infinity. Most educators and policy people alike ? even those who have high expectations for poor kids ? admit that 100 percent proficiency is impossible.

But how heinously inaccurate is the AYP measure when you really break it down?

In Ohio, among the top-performing schools and among the bottom tier alike, it's surprisingly accurate according to a rudimentary glance at the data. Using data from the recent 2010-11 report cards, we looked at schools statewide that were low growth (according to Ohio's value-added data, so only those schools serving some combination of grades 3-8) and low achieving (those with a performance index score of less than 80 out of 120, which indicates the schools' students are not meeting overall proficiency targets). (So these would be the schools statewide to fall into the lower left hand corner of a chart like this.)

Eighty-four schools statewide were low growth and low achieving. Of these, 74 of them failed to make AYP and just six managed to eke by under the metric. Those that were poorly performing but did make AYP did so through the Safe Harbor provision (just one of them) and Ohio's growth model (four of them). One school met AYP via both escape routes.

So for the poorly performing tail end of schools, AYP was largely accurate. But what about the best schools, the ones allegedly penalized by rapidly increasing expectations as we hurdle toward 2014? We looked at schools that had performance index scores above 100 (the state's goal) out of 120, and that met or exceeded value-added growth expectations. Of these 832 schools, 735 (88 percent) met AYP. Twelve percent of these schools, then, could miss AYP and possibly be unfairly penalized, though Ohio's accountability system has few sanctions for those schools that are otherwise deemed ?Excellent? or ?Effective? but miss AYP.

At least for now we know that among the best schools in the state, relatively few are missing AYP. And among failing schools, most of them merit their AYP label.

A more interesting take might be a look at the large, middle swath of schools to see how/to what extent decent schools are failing to meet AYP and whether this warrants the waiver that Ohio may be seeking.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Chart 1 takes a look at average proficiency rates in reading for charter and district schools. On average charter schools in the Big 8 outperformed their traditional school peers by 65 to 62 percent. Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton in particular had a higher percentage of their charter students outperforming district students. One of the most notable results comes from Fordham's hometown of Dayton where the pass rate for charter schools is 11 percentage points higher than the district's. The lowest performance in reading can be found in Canton where only 48 percent of their charter school students are proficient in reading, 27 percentage points away from the state average of 75 percent.?

CHART 1: URBAN CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE VS. OHIO BIG 8 DISTRICT PERFORMANCE IN READING, 2010-11

Chart 2 looks at charter and district school performance in math for 2010-11. While the results in reading proficiency are somewhat encouraging the same cannot be said for math. Charter and district school performance in the Big 8 proves to be almost equal with 55 percent of charter students proficient in math compared to 53 percent of district students.

CHART 1: URBAN CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE VS. OHIO BIG 8 DISTRICT PERFORMANCE IN MATH, 2010-11

Along with reading and math state tests, students also take science and writing tests. The performance on the state science test for charter and district students is far from where they need to be. On average, charters outperformed district students by 39 to 41 percent. Keeping in mind that the state proficiency goal is 75 percent, Ohio's Big 8 charter and district schools have a long way to go. Traditional schools in Cincinnati take the top spot with 50 percent of their students proficient in science. On the contrary, performance in writing is considerably better. On average, the pass rate for charter schools is 76 percent and the pass rate for district schools is 81 percent- both above the state goal. Performance in Cleveland for charters and districts is identical with 76 percent proficient, where 81 percent of students in Canton are proficient, compared to only 54 percent for charter schools.

Chart 3: Urban Charter Schools and Ohio 8 District Schools Making Expected or Above Expected Growth in Reading, 2010-11

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Chart 4: Urban Charter Schools and Ohio 8 District Schools Making Expected or Above Expected Growth in Math, 2010-11

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Charts 3 and 4 look at the percent of charter and district schools in the Ohio Big 8 making expected or above expected growth in reading and math. The charts show that about the same percent of charter and district schools made expected or above expected growth in both reading and math. Canton's results stand out due to the fact that there are only 2 charter schools in Canton, making a charter school who received below expected growth more influential on the average than other cities.

To check more detailed information about charter and district schools in Ohio's Big 8, check out our detailed city by city analyses. See here for a recap of all our analyses and blogs thus far.

-Analyses by Dana Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

-Bianca Speranza

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But in most instances, these charter/district comparisons aren't very useful (or accurate) as charter schools ? located primarily in Ohio's urban centers or other challenged districts  serve a student population that is far more disadvantaged than the statewide average. In other words, how useful is it to know that only 21 percent of charters  achieved a ranking of Effective, Excellent or Excellent with Distinction compared to 93 percent of district schools, when wealthier schools comprise the vast majority of those in the latter category? Not very.

For this reason, in our yearly achievement analysis we look at charter schools and compare them to the Big 8 districts (not the state average). With the help of our friends at Public Impact, who did this year's analysis, we also weighted the analysis such that if in 2010-11, 30 percent of charter students were in third grade, then third graders in district schools would be counted as 30 percent of the district average. Similarly, if 30 percent of charter students were in Akron, then Akron city district students would be counted as 30 percent of the district average as well.

When done this way, students in charter schools actually outperform their district peers in both reading and math, by a slim margin. Even more impressive is the upward trajectory in both subjects over time.

CHART 1: URBAN CHARTER SCHOOL VS. OHIO 8 DISTRICT SCHOOL PERFORMANCE OVER TIME IN READING

Source: Ohio's interactive local report card

Source: Ohio's interactive local report card

When student achievement data were first made available by the Ohio Department of Education in 2001-02, urban charter school performance lagged significantly behind that of surrounding district schools. Between 2001-02 and 2005-06, charter school performance in both reading and math rose to the point where it was similar to that of the urban systems where the charter schools reside.

Although performance is still similar, student performance in charter schools has slightly edged out student performance in surrounding district schools in the Ohio 8 over the last two years. On average, 65 percent of students attending a charter school were proficient in reading in 2011, compared to 62 percent in traditional district schools. Math results were similar; 55 percent of charter students were proficient in 2011 compared to 53 percent of students in traditional district schools.

There is still much room to improve (the statewide proficiency goal is 75 percent). But the good news is that students in the Ohio 8, regardless of whether they attend charter schools or district schools, have attained proficiency at increasing levels. Charter schools especially have made tremendous gains.

Analyses performed by Dan Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Chart 1 compares the distribution of Performance Index Scores of e-school charters in Ohio to the distribution for traditional schools in districts enrolling e-students. (Performance Index is a measure of student achievement across all tested subjects and grades; the score ranges from 0-120, with 100 being the state goal for all schools.) As can be seen from the graph below, Ohio's e-schools trailed behind traditional schools in districts where e-school students are enrolled. Eighty-five percent of e-schools received a PI score between 65 and 85, while 77 percent of traditional schools received a PI score between 90 and 105. The highest PI score for an e-school- 92- was also significantly lower than the highest score for a traditional school- 116.

Chart 1: Distribution of Performance Index Scores, E-Schools vs. Traditional Schools in Districts Enrolling Students in E-Schools, 2010-11

Chart 2 shows the percentage of e-schools and traditional schools by value added rating. Value added is a measurement of how much growth students are making in reading and math over the course of one year, compared to how much the state expects them to gain. Value added data were avaliable for 11 e-schools and 2,411 tradional schools. A higher percentage of traditional schools(23 percent) ?made expected growth compared to e-schools(9 percent). On a brigher note, it should be pointed out that no e-schools made less than expected growth, compared to 19 percent of traditional schools.

Chart 2: Distribution of E-Schools vs. Traditional Schools in Districts Enrolling Students in E-Schools by Value-Added Growth Category, 2010-11

Finally Chart 3 takes a looks PI and academic growth for e-schools and traditional schools in districts where e-school students are enrolled. The highest- performing schools made above expected growth and received a PI score of 100 or better, while the lowest performing schools made below expected growth and received a PI score of less than 80.? As you can see Chart 3 shows that almost all of Ohio's??? e-schools demonstrated either expected growth and average performance or expected growth and low performance.

Today's shout out goes to Ohio Virtual Academy for being the only e-school to achieve above expected growth and average performance. While we recognize that OVA was not high achieving and high growth, it was the highest performing e-school in the state. Kudos!

Chart 3: E-Schools vs. Traditional Schools in Districts Enrolling Students in E-Schools, Performance Index Growth in Reading and Math, 2010-11

Stay tuned for more analysis to come!

-Analyses by Dana Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

- Bianca Speranza

Chart 1 compares the distribution of Performance Index scores of high-poverty charters in the Big 8 to the distribution for high-poverty district schools in those cities. ?A greater percentage of charter schools than district schools have performance index scores of 100 or better (PI ranges from 0-120), and 2.9 percent of charters met or exceed the state goal of a PI score of 100, compared to 0.5 percent of district schools. High-poverty charter schools also had a higher percentage of schools with a PI score of 60 or below (7.6 percent), compared to only 3.9 percent of district schools. Despite the overrepresentation at both ends of the performance spectrum, high-poverty charters overall earned an average PI score of 78.2 compared to 77.3 for high-poverty district schools.

Chart 1: Distribution of Performance Index Scores, High-Poverty Ohio 8 Charter Schools vs. High-Poverty Ohio 8 District Schools, 2010-11

Note: Schools were sorted into five-point Performance Index score ranges (40.0 to 44.9, 45.0 to 49.9, etc.).? Each data point on the chart above indicates the percentage of charter or district schools that fell into that five-point Performance Index range. For example, the highest point of the blue charter curve indicates that 20 percent of all high-poverty charter schools and 23.7 percent of all high-poverty district schools earned a Performance Index score between 75.0 and 79.9.

CHART 2: 2010-11 Performance Index and Growth in Reading and Math, High-Poverty Ohio 8 Charter Schools vs. High-Poverty Ohio 8 District Schools

Chart 2 looks at PI and growth in reading and math for high-poverty charter schools vs. high-poverty district schools. The highest-performing schools made above expected growth and achieved a PI score of 100 or better, while the lowest performing schools made below expected growth and received a PI score of less than 80. As you can see, the largest percentage of schools fell in the lower, middle square, representing schools that made expected gains, but still earned a PI score below 80.

One of the most praiseworthy findings from today's analyses is that the only school- district or charter- that had both high growth and high achievement was the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA), located in Fordham's hometown of Dayton. DECA earned a PI of 100.5 and achieved above expected growth. Congratulations to DECA for earning this distinction and being the only high-poverty school to do so.

Stay tuned for more to analyses to come!

*Analyses by Dana Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

-Bianca Speranza

We took a closer look at the 10 largest authorizers (aka ???sponsors??? in the Buckeye State) in Ohio by the number of students enrolled in their sponsored schools. Taken together these authorizers sponsor about two-thirds of the state's 339 charters, and enroll about 80 percent of all Ohio charter students. In all three analyses (looking at academic ratings A-F, value-added growth, and Performance Index score) there is some fluctuation between authorizers that do well and those that struggle. For example, the Fordham Foundation stands out in Graph I because it has no schools rated in Academic Emergency, but in graph II Fordham's value-added results are lacking.

For Ashe, however, there is no fluctuation as its results are poor no matter how you cut it. ??This is backed up by the fact that Ashe has seen more of its schools closed automatically under the state's charter school academic ???death penalty??? than any other sponsor.

Graph I: 2010-11 Academic Ratings by Percent of Students Tested

Graph I provides the percent of students in schools by building academic ratings for the state's ten largest charter authorizers. The Ashe Culture Center sticks out with almost half of the students in its sponsored schools enrolled in a school rated Academic Emergency (F), while the authorizer with the next highest percentage of students enrolled in schools rated Academic Emergency is the St. Aloysius Orphanage with about one in five students. Further, an additional 48 percent of students in an Ashe-sponsored schools were in a building rated Academic Watch, meaning that more than 90 percent of children in an Ashe-sponsored school attended a building rated D or F by the state.

Graph II: 2010-11 Value-Added Rating by Percent of Students

Graph II shows the percentage of students in schools by building value-added rating, again for the state's 10 largest authorizers. This measure shows how much progress a school's students made in reading and math over the course of one year compared to how much the state expected them to improve. Value-added data are available in Ohio for grades four through eight. (For more on Ohio's value-added system see?????From ski slope to a bell curve: Ohio's evolving value-added measure.???) Here, again, Ashe is one of the lowest achievers with 59 percent of its students enrolled in schools achieving below expected gains and only ten percent of the students were in a school that exceeded expected gains.

Fordham, unfortunately, also sticks out in this category with 38 percent of our students in schools achieving below expected gains (this is caused by one school with a large enrollment falling below expectations), but this is balanced somewhat by more than 57 percent of students making above expected gains. No sponsor saw a greater percentage of its students making above expected gains.

Graph III: 2010-11 Performance Index Ratings by Percent of Students Tested

Graph III shows the Performance Index (PI) Score by percentage of students tested. The PI Score is an indicator of student achievement on state tests ??? it takes into account how well students perform on the exams and does not factor in whether they are making academic gains. More specifically, a school's PI Score reflects the average of the school's students' achievement in all tested subjects. The PI runs on a scale from 0 to 120, with a state goal of 100 for all schools.

Overall, the thing that jumps out here is how few students there are in schools that actually meet or exceed the state target of a PI of 100. And, again the Ashe Culture Center jumps out as atrocious among a weak group with 94 percent of its students enrolled in a school with a PI Score below 80.

This deeper look at authorizer performance in Ohio shows us that all of Ohio's authorizers (including Fordham) need to do more to help improve student performance in their schools. But, the data make obvious that the Ashe Culture Center is a truly troubled outlier. Such remarkably poor results should be considered seriously by the State Board of Education, which is expected to consider at its September meeting whether Ashe should be allowed to continue as an authorizer.?? If accountability is to have any meaning in Ohio, then Ashe should lose its ability to continue authorizing charter schools in the Buckeye State.

-Terry Ryan

*Analysis done by Bianca Speranza

* There was a minor error in the 2010-11 charter school enrollment data provided by the Ohio Department of Education.?? The department fixed the error and posted the correct data on its website on September 1, 2011, and the charts above have been updated accordingly.?? The error did not impact any calculations for Ashe Culture Center.

Ohio committed itself to embracing higher standards that cross state lines when it joined 45 other states and the District of Columbia in adopting the Common Core standards in math and English language arts (ELA) in June 2010. These standards, crafted by experts and practitioners convened by the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, are more rigorous than Ohio's current ones. In Fordham's 2010 analysis of state academic standards, outside expert reviewers found that Ohio's ELA and math standards both earned an undistinguished C, while the Common Core standards in ELA and math are rated B+ and A ??? respectively.

The Common Core standards as promulgated appear deeper, more specific, and more cogent than most state academic standards, including Ohio's. They are well grounded in what students will need in order to be successful in college and in a career. In the language of current reform efforts, the K-12 common core standards will better ensure that students are college and career ready.

But, adopting rigorous academic standards is just the first step in a long journey. High academic standards do not automatically translate into stronger student performance. These higher standards must be accompanied by adequate, ongoing training for current and future teachers, principals, and district leaders to understand the new standards; new, aligned curriculum at the local level; aligned and well-designed assessments; and rigorous accountability systems.

At the local level, educators should begin learning and integrating the new standards into their classrooms.?? As a state, Ohio is at an implementation crossroads where it must decide how best to align its assessments with the new standards.??

Ohio could ultimately develop its own assessments, though that is costly, challenging, and time consuming.?? And even if Ohio were able to muster the money and capacity to develop its own rigorous, content-aligned assessments, it would not be able to compare Ohio students and schools with those in other states and the nation as a whole. Further, Ohio would have to go it alone in terms of developing curricula, professional development tools, and computer systems.????

Alternately, Ohio can join one of the two voluntary consortia of states working, with nearly $200 million of Race to the Top funding apiece, to develop Common Core assessments: the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC). (Ohio is presently a member of both but a decision-maker in neither.)??

The decision between the consortia isn't an easy one, but it should be made soon.?? Choosing a consortium sooner rather than later gives the Buckeye State the opportunity to influence the assessment development, but it does not bind the state to ultimately using it.

To help state education leaders better understand and compare SBAC and PARCC, Fordham staff Kathleen Porter-Magee, Jamie Davies O'Leary, and Emmy Partin have crafted a nifty primer about both. The Common Core and the Future of Student Assessment offers a side-by-side comparison of key components of each consortia, including what tests will be required and which will be optional, what resources will be available to support teachers, how much the new assessments will cost, and the timeline for rolling them out.

Fordham is partial to PARCC and would advise Ohio to commit to it as a governing state; thus joining such seriously reform-minded states like Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee. Whichever consortia Ohio decides to join, however, fast action in the decision-making is warranted. If Ohio commits to a consortium now, and the chatter in Columbus is that the state board may make a decision as soon as September, it will give the state an important head start in the enormous amount of work involved with rolling out new academic standards and everything associated with them.

Many states are already modifying their existing systems (and curriculum, professional development, and statewide accountability systems) to be aligned with the Common Core, and in anticipation of the new assessment systems being developed. Ohio would be wise to make the commitment to do the same, especially as selecting a consortium isn't binding and the state can opt out at any time. The real danger is in waiting; transitioning to new standards and assessments is a serious undertaking for the state, its schools, and its educators and the more time they have for the transition the better. By making the decision sooner rather than later the Buckeye State will improve the odds of success for both its educators and its students.

-Terry Ryan

Ohio, like most states, issues data on both schools' annual achievement (a snapshot of performance) and academic growth over time. Ideally, schools will have high proportions of their students achieving at (or above) grade level and making measurable growth or progress in test scores over the course of the school year.

Chart 1 plots Ohio's Big 8 charter and district schools by both achievement and growth. Each square represents an elementary or middle school (high schools do not receive a value-added ??? growth -- score in Ohio). The upper-right section of the matrix is the ideal: high achievement and high growth. The vertical placement of each square represents a school's achievement; the higher a square, the higher the achievement. The horizontal location of each square represents a school's value-added category only (that is, a square on the left side of a box does not necessarily have lower value-added than one on the right; they are both in the same value added category).

Chart 1: Urban charter schools vs. Ohio 8 district schools, Performance Index growth in reading and math (2010-11)

Source: Ohio interactive local report card

Overall, it doesn't appear either type of school has the performance advantage.?? While charters have an edge in growth measures, district schools have a higher Performance Index score average.?? A greater percentage of charter schools (5.8 percent) than district schools (3.6 percent) met or exceeded growth goals and met the state's performance index goal of 100. But the percentage of charter and district schools meeting and exceeding growth and scoring 80 or better on the performance index were virtually the same (39.6 percent of charters and 38.6 percent of district schools).

And let's take a moment to give kudos to those high performers (schools in the top-right box).?? Table 1 lists these schools.

Table 1: High-performing schools in Ohio urban 8 districts (2010-11)

??Source: Ohio's interactive local report card. Blue schools are charters; red schools are district schools.

Among the lowest-performing schools???those with a performance index below 80???a greater number of such charters met or exceeded growth targets than did district schools (44.2 percent vs. 41.6 percent respectively). District schools, however, outpaced their charter counterparts for exceeding growth targets at the lowest-performing schools; that is, a greater percentage of district schools (12.1 percent to 9.0 percent of charters) achieved better-than-expected gains at schools where students are furthest behind.

When looking at brick-and-mortar charter and district schools across the Ohio 8, charters made better growth but their Performance Index average is lower than their district counterparts.?? Next week, we will look at charters through various lenses???by authorizer type, start-up vs. conversion schools, brick-and-mortar vs. e-schools, and schools serving high-poverty populations.?? These analyses will deepen our understanding of charter and district school performance in Ohio and may reveal differences muted by averages across the Ohio 8.

*Analyses by Dana Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

Emmy Partin

First let's look at raw achievement of students attending Ohio's Big 8 district schools, and bricks-and-mortar charters in the Big 8. (We'll look at e-school charter performance later in the series.) Achievement is measured by a ?Performance Index,? a weighted average of student achievement in all tested subjects in grades 3-8, and which ranges from 1-120 (100 is the state goal).

Chart 1 compares the distribution of PI scores of bricks-and-mortar charters in the Big 8 districts to the distribution for traditional schools in those districts. There are two things to look for in the chart below. First, the higher the point on the graph, the more schools with that PI score. Second, the further to the right the curve, the higher the PI score.

Not surprisingly, charter schools are overrepresented at both the upper and lower tails of the performance scale.? A greater percentage of charter schools than district schools have PI scores of 100 or better; 8.4 percent of charters are in this high-flying category compared to 5.6 percent of district schools.? Unfortunately, the same is true for schools with PI scores of 60 or below. While only 4 percent of district schools fall into this category, 14.2 percent of charters do.

Chart 1: Distribution of Performance Index Scores, Ohio 8 Charter Schools vs. Ohio 8 District Schools, 2010-11

Next, let's look at value-added growth, which Terry also wrote about this morning. Ohio categorizes each school as making Above Expected Growth, Expected Growth, or Below Expected Growth. (Value-added scores are only available for schools serving some combination of grades 3-8.)

Chart 2 shows the percentage of Ohio 8 charter and district schools that fell into these categories in 2010-11. While 60 percent of both charter and district schools made expected growth, charter schools generally outperformed their district counterparts on growth measures.? A smaller percentage of charters (16 percent) failed to meet growth targets, compared to 20 percent of district schools.? And nearly a quarter (24 percent) of charters exceeded academic growth expectations, compared to only one in five district schools. ?(To see how each city fared, go to our city-by-city analyses from yesterday. Columbus charters, for example, blew it out of the water on value-added.)

Chart 2: Distribution of Ohio 8 Charter Schools?vs. Ohio 8 District Schools by Value-Added Growth Category, 2010-11?

Source: Ohio interactive local report card.

Don't miss highlights from yesterday's data release, our take on Dayton's achievement trajectory, a look at trends in value-added data, or our city-by-city analyses. To help you keep track, all of these snapshots will be housed on our 2010-11 report card webpage.

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for more!

*Analyses by Dana Brinson, Daniela Doyle, and Tom Koester

Jamie Davies O'Leary

1. Above expected growth ??? indicates that the students in a school or a district made greater progress than expected. These schools and districts are ???adding value.???
2. Met expected growth ??? indicates that students made the amount of expected academic progress in one school year. Districts and schools in this category are still adding value, but not as much as those schools rated Above expected growth.
3. Below expected growth ??? indicates that students in the school or district made less academic progress than the state expected.

Chart 1 shows the distribution of Ohio's public schools by overall value-added rating for the past three school years. Note the fluctuation in the percentage of schools making Above expected growth and Meeting expected growth during the last three academic years. In 2008-9, almost two-thirds of the schools in Ohio made above expected growth while in 2010-11 this number dropped to just about 1 and 4 schools. During this same period of time, the percentage of schools Meeting expected growth almost doubled from 27 percent to 59 percent. The percentage of schools Below expected growth has remained relatively stable.????

Chart 1: Distribution of Ohio Schools by Value-Added Rating (2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11)

What should one make of these numbers? It is clear that determining value-added gains is as much art as it is science. We documented this in our 2008 primer on the valued-added measure, and education researcher Doug Clay wrote about the fluctuation, or ???yo-yo effect,??? for our Ohio Education Gadfly.

Beginning with last school year's data, the Ohio Department of Education has begun tweaking its value-added metric in order to better balance results and make them more accurately reflect what is happening in the state's schools. As a result, while the 2008-09 results reflect a ski slope racing down from Above to Below, the 2010-11 numbers are more closely shaped to a bell curve. It appears as though the state has succeeded in adjusting its value-added metric to be a more accurate and balanced representation of growth than in previous years.

And while this adjustment is interesting to policy wonks and education researchers like me, it also matters mightily to schools and districts. In Ohio, a school's state rating can be bumped up or down based on value-added results, and these ratings largely define the quality of a school to its parents and community. Because of the state's efforts to smooth out the curve of value-added results, a number of schools and districts used to getting the bump up didn't see it this year.?? Seeing their stellar rating seemingly drop a notch may not make teachers and school leaders feel better, but it should help them better understand what's going on in their schools and thus better explain it to their parents and community.

We'll be writing much more about Ohio's value-added results throughout our two-week blog series on Ohio's local school report card data.?? Stay tuned to Flypaper for more!

-Terry Ryan

The good news is that the public schools ??? both district and charter schools ??? posted academic gains in 2010-11. While just two years ago, no student in Dayton attended a public school that was rated Excellent or Excellent with Distinction, this past school year five percent of the city's students attended such a school. Further, in 2010-11, 55 percent of Dayton students attended a school rated Continuous Improvement (a C) or better, up from 36 percent in 2009-10. The percent of students in Academic Emergency (F) rated schools dropped from 36 percent in 2009-10 to just 15 percent in 2010-11. Furthermore, far fewer students in Dayton ??? in districts and charters ??? attended a D or F-rated school. And far more students in Dayton are meeting or exceeded ???expected growth??? than falling below it.??

What's driving this improvement? There seems to be at least four factors involved in these gains. First, the Dayton Public Schools' (DPS) academic reform (see here) plan is starting to bear fruit. District high school results are mostly improved from 2009-10, and two Dayton high schools ??? Stivers School for the Arts and the David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center ??? are in the top eight of all Dayton schools in terms of student performance.?? Further, the district-authorized Dayton Early College Academy was the city's only school ranked Excellent with Distinction. But, the DPS reforms go deeper and include improvements to the district's K-8 schools. Of the 23 district K-8 schools that received academic performance ratings, 17 showed overall gains on their Performance Index (PI) Scores. This PI score is the purest measure of student achievement gains.

Second, Dayton's charter schools have gotten better in recent years. This is the result of the state's academic death penalty for persistently woeful schools, and market competition that has been driving out underperforming schools. Since 2008, seven charter schools have closed while newer schools that have opened recently include some decent ones (Horizon Science Academies). Note, in 2005 Dayton had 38 charters in operation while in 2011 that number was down to 30 schools (and overall enrollment in charters has remained flat). Further, high performing charters in Dayton have high enrollment numbers. The two largest charters in town ??? Pathway School of Discover and Emerson Academy (both operated by National Heritage Academies) ??? enroll more than 1,200 students and each are rated Effective by the state. These two schools alone enroll about 20 percent of all children in Dayton attending a charter school.

Third, more and more children in Dayton have left public schools ??? DPS and charters ??? for area private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers. In 2010-11, 1,668 students from Dayton used a voucher to attend an area private school. These students and their test scores are no longer reported by either DPS or areas charters. This matters because we know from 2009-10 data (performance data for voucher students is not yet available for 2010-11) that only about half of these students are proficient were English Language Arts and only about a third were proficient in math.

Fourth, there is undeniably some amount of ???grade inflation??? in the results issued by the state for Dayton schools (and all schools statewide). In 2007, Fordham issued The Proficiency Illusion, which reported Ohio's ???estimated reading and mathematics cut scores generally rank among the lower half of the 26 states examined for this report.??? ???Proficient??? by Ohio's standard doesn't always mean a student has mastered what he should know and be able to do in the subject area. Further, Ohio's value-added measures of student growth provide schools with an opportunity to bump up their academic rating, regardless of their overall proficiency scores. For example, a school can jump from Academic Watch (a D) to Continuous Improvement (a C) based on making above expected growth. In Dayton, this is an important factor in improved school ratings. Of the 39 Dayton schools that have value-added data, 11 saw their overall rating increase because of value-added.?? But just three of these schools were decent performers moving among the highest rating levels (e.g., from C to B or from B to A).?? Among the remaining eight, three moved from F to D because of value-added and five moved from D to C.??

In sum, Dayton's educators are making steady gains in improving student achievement for the city's youngsters, more than 90 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. This is a real accomplishment. The results, however, are both a mix of hard work by educators and students, and public policy decisions over the years. State policies have created a thriving market-place of schools in Dayton that seem to be bearing fruit in terms of improved student achievement, while also creating an accountability system that is less than perfect and tends to be generous in terms of bumping up overall performance for schools and students.

Terry Ryan

A few highlights about Ohio's biggest cities:

• ??Cincinnati is Ohio's top-performing urban district and when you break down the data, the district's outstanding performance is clear. Forty-three percent of the district's students attend a school rated A or B by the state, and just four percent attend an F-rated school. Further, 88 percent of students in the Queen City attend a school that met or exceeded state value-added expectations.
• Kudos to Cleveland's charter schools for the academic strides they are making. Three years ago, 42 percent of Cleveland charter students were in an F-rated school and just nine percent were in an A school. Today, the percentage in F schools has nearly dropped by half (to 21 percent) and the percentage in A schools has more than doubled (to 20 percent). Furthermore, six of that city's ten top-performing schools are charter schools.
• In Columbus, just four percent of charter school students attend a school that didn't meet the state's value-added expectations (compared to 14 percent of district students and 21 percent of all ???Big 8??? public school students).

And as Jamie promised, we'll keep up the analysis through a two-week blog series in partnership with our friends at Public Impact. Stay tuned to Flypaper for more!

-Emmy Partin

With the help of our friends at Public Impact, we'll be doing it again this year and will be releasing various findings over the course of the next two to three weeks, so stay tuned.?

On tap this year are some new analyses, including: a comparison of performance and growth of charters by charter type (conversion v. start-up) and authorizer type (of which Ohio has many); a look at growth of schools over time (and exploring whether the recent changes to Ohio's value-added system impact how many schools end up meeting ?expected growth?); a look at performance and growth among high-poverty schools, and more.?

Stay tuned!

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

The school is rated F by the state. Its achievement results are lower than literally any Ohio school I recall looking up data for: across all tested and grades and subjects, 96.6 percent of students tested ?limited? in their knowledge ? the very lowest category one could achieve. Just over three percent of students scored ?basic?; none scored proficient or advanced. Is this for real?

Beyond shameful academic results, the school has been in the news constantly for poor bookkeeping ? to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Ohio's auditor temporarily halted funding to the school last April.

And this is the school Rev. Miller wants to take on. (By the way, it seems even more tragic than normal when these kinds of schools are named after prominent African American leaders. The irony is just painful.)

According to the Plain Dealer, he's not na?ve:

Miller said he knew what he was stepping into. ?They are a school that's had some difficulties. I've been asked to come over and help fix it,? he said. ?Just because there's problems," he added, "doesn't mean kids don't deserve our help."

There are multiple things to comment on here. For starters, while it's admirable/noble/well-intentioned for Miller to attempt a turnaround, why not just start a new charter school, or expand an existing (high-performing)?charter school? Why charters are slated for turnaround to begin with is somewhat of mystery, as the concept behind them ? getting a temporary contract in exchange for freedoms that district schools don't have ? is odd. If a charter isn't working, shouldn't it close?

That said, it's tough to be too critical here as more leaders like Rev. Miller are desperately needed to enter the fray. Solving the problems in urban education requires the involvement of the religious/civil rights/African American communities. But let's hope that his ?soft,? collaborative approach to leadership (as described by the Plain Dealer) can get the job done. ?

Jamie Davies O'Leary

In Dayton, Fordham's hometown, there is no doubt that education reform efforts are entangled with brutal Rust Belt economics, poverty, job loss, fractured families, and the constant churning of children between schools. Recent news out of Dayton has not been good for children and families here.

First, the community has been on edge over the recent death of a young African-American male who died while in police custody. In speaking with community leaders who work closely with Dayton's families and neighborhoods it is clear that they have been working very hard to keep the tensions bubbling under the surface from blowing up in ways akin to what's been happening in London. There is much anger and misunderstanding in Dayton, and it is stoked by high unemployment, extreme poverty, and despair. A drive around town or a walk in some of the city's more beaten down neighborhoods make this all too clear.

Recent statistics reaffirm how needy the community is. The Columbus Dispatch reported this morning that 28 percent of Dayton families with children say they did not have enough money to buy food in the past year. The Dayton Business Journal reported yesterday that the ???Dayton-area ranked as the 5th-worst metro out of 100 cities across the country for percentage of manufacturing jobs lost during the past five years.???

And in looking at education data (from the 2009-10 school year), at least 18,000 of Dayton's roughly 20,000 K-12 students are enrolled in a very high-poverty school (those with 75 percent or more students labeled as ???economically disadvantaged). This includes charter schools and district schools alike. Nearly all Dayton students are enrolled in a school with a very high concentration of poverty, and have few options to attend a school that isn't overwhelmingly poor.

It is in this context that Dayton's children are returning to classroom across the city. There is no doubt that great schools can make a difference in the lives of these children and others like them across the country, but in recent years the job is getting harder for educators in Dayton and other struggling communities. This is a humbling reality facing teachers and school administrators in Dayton as they return to work this month.??????????

-????Terry Ryan

The report rated Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee against specific metrics measuring the quality of the actual legislation passed (not the fidelity of implementation or progress made toward goals). Indiana received the highest rating (11.25 out of 13). Not that we needed validation, but this should reaffirm to Ohio lawmakers that our spring visit from Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett was a worthwhile one, and that the Hoosier State has some ideas worth borrowing. Illinois, which received loud praise for its unanimous/bipartisan passage of SB 7 earlier this year, rated lowest (6.5 out of 13). This isn't wholly unsurprising; we raised issue with Illinois' teacher reforms back in April:

A?quick?look at the bill raises several questions about its ability to improve teaching effectiveness when the time comes for actual implementation:?The bill requires locally-approved teacher evaluation plans in "good faith" consultation with unions serving on a joint committee with administrators, and sets a 90 day window after which all bets are off.?There's no hard requirement that 50 percent of evaluation be based on student achievement.?There's no hard deadline for developing a new plan.?Districts can request a waiver and it will be granted automatically if the state doesn't respond within 45 days.?

The variables used to judge the rigor of teacher effectiveness laws are good ones, and worth comparing Ohio against. The following are Bellwether's questions and an attempt to see how Ohio's recently-passed HB 153 measures up.

1. ?Are teachers evaluated annually?? Yes (mostly). HB 153 rightly requires evaluations to be annual, and for teachers under limited contracts (non-tenured) there will be two evaluations a school year. For teachers rated ?accomplished? (the top tier of effectiveness), however, evaluations will be biennial if the district's board elects to pursue it.
2. ?Are teacher evaluations based on student achievement?? Yes. The State Board of Education has to come up with a model evaluation framework by the end of 2011, and then districts and charter schools will have to adopt their own versions by 2013. All frameworks require that student academic growth be 50 percent of the evaluation.
3. ?Are there multiple, clearly defined levels of teacher effectiveness?? Yes ? four: accomplished, proficient, developing, and ineffective.
4. ?Are parents and the public provided clear information about teacher effectiveness?? No, though theoretically the State Board could write this into the model framework and strongly suggest or incentivize districts to make such data readily available.
5. ?Can ineffective teachers be dismissed?? No. Unfortunately, earlier versions of the law would have allowed districts to dismiss teachers for chronic ineffectiveness. Ohio did undo seniority-based layoffs (embedded in law since 1941) but seniority can still count in instances where teachers with comparable ratings are in line for layoffs.
6. ?Is teacher tenure awarded based on effectiveness?? No.
7. ?Can ineffective teachers lose tenure?? No, at least for now. Districts can opt to craft evaluation systems and policies that tie dismissal, tenure, pay, etc. to evaluation ratings. But the law only expressly requires that districts provide support/professional development to poorly performing teachers, and? develop ?procedures? for using evaluation ratings for retention, promotion, and removal. (We'll suspend judgment in either direction until we see what districts come up with.)
8. ?Is teacher effectiveness, rather than seniority, the primary consideration in reductions in force and excessing decisions?? Yes ? well, sort of. The requirement to lay off teachers based on seniority was removed from state law, but immediately following HB 153's passage a more fine-toothed reading of the bill revealed that preference will still be given to teachers on continuing contracts (tenure). This means that only among non-tenured teachers will effectiveness matter. And since tenure is not tied to effectiveness (yet, or in any systematic, statewide manner) this gives preferences to teachers with more years in the system. Reformers in Cleveland ? Mayor Jackson included ? have picked up on this nuance and are fighting for clearer, fairer language here.?
9. ?Is teacher effectiveness the primary consideration in excessing decisions, and may districts dismiss excessed teachers who do not find new positions through mutual consent?? Earlier versions of the law would have allowed districts to excess teachers who couldn't find positions through mutual consent. Teachers rated in the bottom two tiers of effectiveness would not have been forced on any school/principal that didn't want them. Unfortunately, this language was removed. There's nothing in place to prevent the infamous ?dance of the lemons.?
10. ?Does the law protect students from being consecutively assigned to ineffective teachers?? No.
11. ?Do principals have the authority to decide who teaches in their schools?? No.
12. ?Are effective teachers rewarded with increased compensation?? Yes ? well, sort of. Districts participating in Race to the Top (and charter schools) must come up with a performance-pay scale as soon as possible. The rest of the state's districts can design performance-pay scales that replace traditional salary schedules, or conform to existing ones (I'd place my bets that most will stick with the latter).
13. ?Does the law support school leaders' autonomy to make human capital decisions that meet their schools' needs?? No.

*Caveat on Senate Bill 5: Ohio's ratings according to Bellwether's list of questions would/could change depending on the outcome of Senate Bill 5, a controversial measure to reform public sector collective bargaining in Ohio signed by Governor Kasich this spring and up for referendum this fall. (Specifically ? it would change the answers to #5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13; SB 5 would effectively abolish tenure ? so theoretically effectiveness would replace seniority in key personnel decisions ? and it would also weaken collective bargaining and possibly give principals more freedom over staff decisions. It would also require merit pay across the board.)?

Ok - we see why Bellwether didn't include Ohio. Overall, it doesn't fare well? ? at least not compared to other states or even to earlier iterations of HB 153. As we've said before, details are up in the air (districts have a lot of autonomy to determine their own evaluations) and rigorous and thoughtful implementation of teacher effectiveness policies will make a world of difference in whether any of these changes make a dent in student achievement over the long haul.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Specifically, Heffner shared with me his ideas and concerns for making sure Ohio's schools and teachers successfully implement and take ownership of the Common Core academic standards in English language arts and mathematics. (Ohio is one of 46 states that have adopted these common standards, which are slated to come online in 2014.)

The state will have to make some serious implementation decisions in the coming months and years around the Common Core, including which assessment consortium to join (right now, the Buckeye State has a foot in both the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and how to adapt the state's accountability system to the new tests and tougher standards.

But where Heffner sees the most potential, both positive and negative, is around the practical implementation issues that will face schools and school districts. This is because, as a lifelong educator, he clearly understands that at the end of the day what matters most for public education is student learning and that teachers are key to facilitating it.

Heffner argued to me (and previously had written in a February 2011 paper for the Council of Chief State Schools Officers) that the successful implementation of the Common Core, in any state, will come down to teacher involvement and ultimate buy-in. He believes that teachers should be involved in the implementation process in five significant ways:

1. They must have a significant presence in the development of the new common assessments.
2. They will have to change their instructional practices in critical ways if the Common Core is to ultimately lead to higher levels of student achievement.
3. They will need model curricula ??? either generated by states themselves or by SBAC or PARCC in partnership with states ??? to help them understand and embrace the rigor and expectations of the Common Core standards.
4. They must be involved in the development of the model curricula.
5. They will need significant amounts of professional development in order to change their established practices and culture in favor of a new design that the Common Core standards and common assessments will demand.

America's top educators and experts have been involved in the design of both the Common Core standards and the two assessment consortia, Heffner noted. But, none of this will matter if the nation's 3.5 million teachers who will be asked to deliver the new system in America's 132,000-plus public schools don't buy into it.

Change is hard. But for it to happen, the people leading it have to enter the fray with their eyes wide open. Ohio's new state superintendent clearly understands the challenge the state faces in transitioning to the higher expectations of the Common Core. I wish him well and hope for the best not only because I have two children in an Ohio public school, but because all the state's children need the best education than can get.

The Fordham Institute, via the Ohio Grantmakers Forum, is the recipient of a two-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help support the smart implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned assessments in the Buckeye State.?? Look for white papers, events, op-eds, and more on Common Core implementation issues in the months and years to come.?? First up, later this month, is a primer on the two assessment consortia to help guide Ohio's decision.

-Terry Ryan

This article also appeared in today's edition of the Ohio Education Gadfly

Reporter: How much more would you like to see going to educate students?

Ohio woman: How much money do you think children are worth? There is no set price that can be set on a child's life and learning.

Reporter: So if you want the government to spend more, how much more do you want them to spend?

Ohio woman: A billion.

Reporter: A billion dollars per student?

Ohio woman: Sure, why not?!

You can watch the interview in its entirety here, pick up at the 2:30 minute mark.

That interview got me thinking. Assuming that the State of Ohio didn't have an 8 billion dollar deficit and could afford to spend a billion dollars per public school student, how much would it cost? There are approximately 1,885,618 public school students in Ohio. If each student received a billion dollars that would amount to $1,885, 620,000,000,000, that's over a quadrillion dollars! Needless to say this is not a viable option.

-Bianca Speranza

Fordham, a charter authorizer in Ohio, has long experience working with EdisonLearning. Fordham president Chester E. Finn, Jr. helped launch Edison in the early 1990s, and Fordham has served as authorizer of the two Dayton schools operated by Edison since 2005. These two schools have been in operation for nearly a decade, and despite declining enrollment that resembles a ski slope (see below) have received more than $93.5 million in public funding. Yet after all that time and money, one school's academic performance is middling at best; the other has struggled mightily to deliver students to even basic levels of achievement.??

??

* The Performance Index score is a weighted average of a school's or district's students' performance on state exams across all tested grades and subjects.?? PI scores range from 0-120, with 100 being the state's goal for all schools and districts.

??

All of which led us to write, nearly a year ago:

We were??more than a wee bit??surprised to read in the paper that EdisonLearning was working with ERCO to launch eight new schools in 2010-11.

It's not that we don't think Edison should have the opportunity to open new schools in Ohio at some point, but based on the firm's mixed performance in Dayton, is it in the state's best interest to okay eight new schools this year? Have they earned the right, based on their performance in Ohio, to go from two schools (one decent and one failing) to 10? (In fairness, Edison runs some swell schools in other states, though nowhere is its track record perfect.) Has ERCO made a responsible decision as authorizer and has the state department made a responsible decision in allowing this?

These are tough questions, but just the sort??that need to be asked and answered if Ohio is??ever to get beyond its troubled and tempestuous charter history. Quality must accompany quantity ??? a lesson that is apparently still unlearned??by too many in the Buckeye State.

Seemingly, these tough questions were never asked. Before issuing the new schools' contracts, no one from ERCO, or for that matter the Ohio Department of Education, contacted us to ask about our experience with EdisonLearning and whether or not their supporting of the opening of new schools was a good bet. If they had, we would have raised some honest red flags. Of course, nothing in law required such an inquiry, but one would think it thoughtful due diligence to ask a current authorizer about an operator before issuing seven new contracts for new schools.

A recent change to state law ??? a change Fordham supports mightily ??? holds authorizers accountable for their schools' performance.?? Hopefully, it will result in authorizers raising tough questions before issuing new contracts, bring about honest conversations between authorizers about the quality of schools and operators, and finally help Ohio learn the charter quality lesson.

-Terry Ryan

Earlier this year, lawmakers scrapped former Gov. Strickland's school funding model ? which was inputs-heavy, overly prescriptive, and simply untenable. In Ohio's just-enacted FY 2012-13 budget, lawmakers installed a two-year ?bridge? funding formula, and Gov. Kasich has signaled his intention to craft a thorough school-funding overhaul by the year's end, hinting that dollars should follow students (weighted-student funding!).

The timeline for designing this new funding formula is an ambitious one, indeed. Barb Mattei-Smith, a veteran of state government and an Ohio school finance guru, has been holding meetings around the state to gather input, which is where the OEA finds greatest offense. Among the blog's complaints are:

The fact that she met stakeholder groups individually (gasp!): ?Mattei-Smith held meetings at locations around the state, but kept each stakeholder group separate from one another.?

A missed meeting: ?Unfortunately Mattei-Smith was a no-show for the last scheduled meeting with teacher (sic) because she went to the wrong room.? Heaven forbid the woman should go to the wrong location.

The fact that the governor's team is not posting meeting notes online. ?After all, all of Strickland's forums were aired live on local PBS stations.?

And ? this is the best one ? the fact that Mattei-Smith did not announce the meetings as early in advance, or in as collaborative of a spirit, as the author did for his own student-teacher conferences. ?(Seriously.) ?What I do know is that if my parent-teacher conferences were held with just my students' parents, and I gave them short notice that the conferences were scheduled at a time when they would probably be unable to attend, they wouldn't help my students. Likewise, changing school funding in Ohio requires more than a series of meetings held over a three-week period in the summer.?

To state the obvious, school funding is a complex subject. Third-grade reading or eighth-grade science, or your child's homework completion rate, are not. This comparison is useless.

I get the need for politicians and political appointees to demonstrate they're listening to the people and considering their opinions. But let's stop pretending that the majority of us ? myself included, I'm not a funding expert ? even have a cogent opinion about school funding or necessary background knowledge to be useful in a conversation about it.

The author gives kudos to former Gov. Strickland for holding ?12 forums throughout the state over? three months to get input from Ohio citizens about reforming our education system.?

Those forums were by invitation-only. I went to one. Then in grad school and home on Christmas break, I had to wrangle my way into one of the discussions held in my home town. It was a circus of misinformation. I stopped counting the number of questions raised about why the state was allowing charters to ?steal? public money (and no one ever clarified that charters are public schools). When I asked the governor his thoughts on New Jersey and the notion that constant increases in spending do not, in fact, correlate with better achievement, he had no answer. Audience members (mostly teachers, principals, and superintendents) looked at me like my head was screwed on sideways. The conversation didn't seem very informative or very useful. (Terry shared about his experience at the Dayton school funding talk in an Ohio Gadfly article three years ago.)

But I suppose it was planned in advance, and had wide entrance standards ? which are the metrics against which the OEA is evaluating the quality of school funding decision-making.

The problem is that it didn't result in a sound funding formula for Ohio schools. And quite frankly, if the current governor's team can come up with a better formula ? one that would give districts more flexibility and direct dollars to students to attend the school they wish to ? I couldn't care less who was invited to the discussion party.??

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Ouch. (No offense to college athletes.) There's no question that the quality of education schools varies greatly. Even one of the more defendable components of traditional educator training, student teaching, has come under recent fire. That teacher preparation programs are often woefully inadequate seems to be a well-accepted fact among reformers and traditionalists alike. But how to change that seems is a bit more up for debate.

There are a bevy of policies that could improve teacher quality at different points during preparation: at the front (higher entrance standards), middle (harder coursework; teacher residencies happening earlier to weed out non-performers prior to their last semester of college), or tail ends of training (check out the extraordinarily intuitive exit requirement that New York's ?Relay? School of Ed is installing ? a teacher actually has to prove that students learn under her purview before graduating).

And then there are attempts to improve teacher quality once they're out in the field, such as Ohio's just-passed requirement that teachers in the lowest performing schools statewide be re-tested in subject-area knowledge. (Shouldn't we raise the bar for content-area knowledge before teachers are given their own classrooms and teach for several years, to kids in the neediest schools nonetheless?)

I've pondered this question a lot, wondering which is the most effective, fairest, and/or most cost-effective way to separate the educator wheat from the chaff. (The most glaring concern with raising the bar on entrance, to me at least, would be crowding out teachers from racially and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds, as those factors are strongly correlated to standardized tests like the SAT or GRE.)

I'm not sure there's a clear answer, but one thing I think everyone concerned about the quality of teacher preparation programs can agree on is that the more data we have, the better. Ohio (as other states have already done) passed a requirement that the Chancellor of the Board of Regents collect and report academic growth data for students, tracing them to teachers who came from various teacher prep programs. The data will be aggregated and can illustrate persistently low- and high-performing schools of education. ?Should there be glaring discrepancies in quality, Ohio could make funding performance-based and force the ed schools themselves to figure out the best strategies to improve their student teachers.

?-Jamie Davies O'Leary

As a charter authorizer, Fordham's experience with digital learning has been humbling and frustrating, in part because we have struggled ??? along with many others ??? to define success for the digital learning programs and policies we have supported. Rick acknowledges how hard all this is in his paper and our on-the-ground experience confirms his analysis.

We have had two direct experiences with trying to help birth quality digital learning opportunities for children in the Buckeye State through ???hybrid??? charter schools. The first was in 2007 when the two schools we authorize in Dayton piloted EdisonLearning's E2 education program. At the time Edison described the effort as a ???multi-million dollar R&D project to engineer whole school design.??? Key to the E2 design was ???a new realm of curricula that is as effective as it is efficient in meeting the individual learning needs of the next generation. Diverse software and web-based applications, like ALEKS, Achieve3000, and Rosetta Stone, expand access to information and offer effective one-on-one instruction to ensure that every child is optimally challenged.??? E2 relied heavily on the use of technology and digital learning to customize instruction for K-8 students. Students spent a significant portion (two to three hours a day) of their time using technology guided instruction.

Edison committed serious resources, talent, and energy to the effort and as authorizer of the two schools we did our best to understand what Edison was doing and to gauge whether or not the blended learning effort was working for kids. Frankly, this was hard for us to do because the only data we had to validate the effectiveness of the program were state test scores and data shared with us by Edison. The state test scores showed mixed results while the Edison data showed student achievement trending upwards in both schools. After two years of serious commitment, Edison largely moved on from the E2 effort in Dayton. We came away disenchanted from the experience because we couldn't find solid evidence of student learning gains. We also came away appreciative of just how hard and expensive it is to integrate digital learning experiences and opportunities into the academic program of high-need urban schools, and how difficult it is to create viable accountability models for such programs.

Our second effort working with a school to launch a blended learning model that integrated digital learning opportunities with traditional class-room based instruction was this past school year. Our partner in this venture was a well-regarded and successful on-line charter school that had been established by one of the state's larger consortia of school districts. As authorizer, we offered the school a one-year pilot contract; both we and the partner understood we were moving into unchartered territory and that the model could fail.

In seeking to hold the school accountable for its student performance we came up with three questions for gauging the school's academic success. The three questions got at what Rick referred to in his paper as ???input-oriented, outcome-driven and market-based approaches to promoting quality.??? The questions in our contract language were:

1. Are the students enrolled in the community school making substantial gains from autumn 2010 to spring 2011, as measured using a nationally norm-referenced test? ????
2. Has the school implemented sound learning opportunities and curricula for students?
3. Is the school attractive to its student market? Does it have at least 25 kids enrolled?

Over the course of the year we also made regular visits to the school and spoke with students and teachers to get their comments and feedback on what was going on and if they felt learning was taking place. All of this, of course, was done in the traditional compliance framework facing all charter schools in Ohio, so we and the school still had to worry about things like total number of hours of instruction offered, special-education requirements, etc. After a rocky pilot year both we and the school operator decided to non-renew the charter contract.

Neither we nor the operator have given up on the belief that digital learning has the potential to change schools and schooling in a revolutionary way, but it is clear that creating working models and designing ways to hold them accountable is, as Rick says, ???a formidable task.??? It is a task many frontline educators in Ohio and across the country are willing to embrace and having top-notch thinkers like Rick Hess offer guidance on how to proceed is badly needed and truly appreciated. Our experience would also urge humility as there will surely be a number of missteps and set-backs along??the way.

-Terry Ryan

I spoke with some of the scholars ??? ranging in ages from 5 to 13 ??? who came from across the Dayton area and its schools. Some were Dayton Public School students, some were from area charter schools, and others were from local parochial schools. All seemed to be enjoying this summer learning program, and the families involved felt fortunate to have their kids in the program. Two years ago there were more than 200 children in Freedom Schools summer program in Dayton, yet this year there were only 60 spots available because of state funding cuts and fewer philanthropic dollars.

The Freedom School is a 30-day program that runs over the summer from 8:00 AM to 3:30 PM. I asked one of the program leaders if they had data showing the impact of the program on academic achievement. She admitted this is something they wanted to try to measure, but simply didn't have the resources to do it this year. She also made clear that if the kids weren't in the Freedom School they'd most likely be at home watching television bored out of their minds and losing learning opportunities.

The young scholars I saw this morning were anything but bored. They were excited to pull together and to spend time with young adults ??? college students or recent college graduates ??? who obviously cared deeply for their young charges, and were working hard during the dog days of summer to provide a stimulating and rich learning environment for the kids. It was a good way to start the day.

-Terry Ryan

The bill's co-sponsor, Rep. Cheryl Grossman, says 40 percent of Ohio's college graduates leave the state after graduation.?? That figure could be much higher, depending on the particular college and community.?? For example, a 2009 Fordham Institute survey of students at top Ohio colleges found that 58 percent of students planned to leave the state after graduation (a whopping 79 percent of out-of-state students said they intended to leave Ohio, and 51 percent of native Ohio students were set on departure).??

But that same survey also showed support for incentives like the one proposed in House Bill 258.?? When offered a menu of incentives designed to encourage young college graduates to stay in Ohio, respondents to our survey found ???A state income tax credit of up to $3,000 per year for 10 years for college graduates who stay in Ohio??? most appealing (65 percent).

The bill, which is currently pending in committee, has the support of the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents Jim Petro. Petro cites (subscription required) the economic benefit of keeping graduates in the state:

It's a simple calculation. Right now Ohio has 26% of its workforce have baccalaureate degrees. Across the country, the higher the portion of the baccalaureate degrees in the state, the higher the per capita income. It's a direct relationship. For every one percent we increase the percentage of baccalaureate degrees ... involve, in our best estimates, over $2 billion in annual economic activity added on.

The recently passed state operating budget also included a measure aimed at attracting native Ohioans who have left the state to return.?? Ohio graduates who have left the state can return and attend college at in-state tuition rates.

??-Emmy Partin

When it comes to charter school start-ups, eligibility would expand (based on last year's data) to include 16 new school districts. This is up from 23 school districts, for an increase of 41 percent. Under previous law, a start-up (as opposed to converting an existing district school to a charter ? which can happen anywhere geographically in the state) could only open in a ?challenged? school districts. This was defined as any of Ohio's Big 8 districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, or Youngstown), a district rated D or F (see here for a list of such districts last year), or a school district in Lucas County that was part of the original charter school pilot area a decade ago (eight school districts in total, one of which is Toledo and already counted under the Big 8 list).

The budget added to the definition of challenged school districts any that rank in the bottom five percent of all districts statewide (according to Performance Index score), regardless of their grade (A-F). If you haven't noticed by now, there's an obvious affinity for ranking systems in this year's budget; various sanctions (and rewards) will apply to schools, districts, and educators based on rolling or relative rankings (bottom or top xx percent) instead of absolute, fixed ratings. (Whether that's a worthwhile approach to spur improvement in K-12 education is a different conversation altogether.)

The new list of eligible school districts within which charters could start up (based on last year's data) is below. Notice that all of them earned a ?C? (Continuous Improvement) from the state but still rank in the bottom five percent of school districts.??

Newly eligible Ohio school districts within which charter school start-ups can operate

The eligibility could change once this year's statewide achievement data is released (in late August). But overall, Ohio can expect a significant increase in eligibility of districts that are rated C based on this new budget provision.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary and Amanda Pierce

We've already analyzed the budget in broad brush strokes, and concluded that much will depend on the quality of implementation and leadership from the department of education, new state superintendent, and from districts themselves. Now we're getting down to a more granular level; to keep the painting metaphor alive, we're now breaking out the tools and working in small dabs to figure out precisely how Ohio's schools, educators, and students will be affected.

The budget increased the number of slots available for the EdChoice scholarship (from 15,000 to 30,000 this year and 60,000 next year and beyond). EdChoice is a voucher program that allots stipends of $4,250 for K-8 students and $5,000 for high school students to attend private schools of their choice. Access to vouchers has always been limited to students attending chronically failing schools, specifically students in district public schools rated D or F by the state for two or more of the last three consecutive years. This year, lawmakers broadened that eligibility to include not just D/F schools, but school buildings ranked in the bottom 10 percent of performance (according to Performance Index, an average of students' proficiency in tested grades and subjects) for two of three consecutive years.

But, according to available data (see the Ohio Department of Education's list of eligible schools here), this is barely a drop in the bucket. Just 31 schools statewide enrolling a total of 8,700 students are newly eligible. To put this in perspective, this is less than one half of one percent of Ohio's public student population (1.9 million).

Below is the list of schools newly eligible to lose students to the voucher program (highlighted schools are those in Ohio's Big 8 districts). On average, these schools collectively have a student population that is 77 percent non-white and 81 percent economically disadvantaged, though as you can see, the range is pretty wide. Some schools have very few non-white or economically disadvantaged kids. (Note: Cleveland students are eligible for the Cleveland Opportunity Scholarship Program, not for EdChoice, which is why none of that district's low-performing schools are reflected here).

Public district schools newly eligible to lose students to EdChoice voucher program

??Source: Ohio Department of Education

In sum, broader eligibility for EdChoice will probably not drive up enrollment very much at all. What's more likely to affect enrollment, according to School Choice Ohio's Director of Community Programs Sarah Pechan, is timing. The department reopened enrollment for EdChoice after the budget's passage, and parents and families will now have until mid-August to apply for one of the many open slots. Having a wider time frame ? especially during the summer months when parents are weighing schooling options heavily ? will likely increase uptake. Seeing as how there's 15,000 new scholarships available, let's hope that Ohio families will capitalize on them.

Stay tuned for more granular analysis of Ohio's budget.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

The budget is chock full of other provisions that will impact not just students but teachers. One such provision requires that all core subject-area teachers working in public school buildings statewide (including charter schools) ranked in the bottom 10 percent of performance (according to Performance Index, an average of students' proficiency in tested grades and subjects) must re-take any written tests prescribed by the State Board of Education for licensure.

Across the state last year, there were 353 such school buildings. Of those 353 schools 126 are charter schools and another 166 are located in the Big 8 (Ohio's largest eight urban districts). Additionally, Fordham's home town of Dayton has 15 schools located in the bottom 10 percent.? This means that core teachers in those schools will be mandated to re-take their licensure tests. How many teachers does this really impact, and will it result in them becoming more effective teachers?

Since not all teachers in a school building teach a core subject, such as reading, math, or science we had to estimate how many teachers this impacts. Assuming that each teacher on average teaches 22 kids and about half of those teachers teach in a ?core subject? you are left with approximately over 2,400 teachers that would be required to re-take their licensure exams this coming school year. ?

The goal behind this provision is somewhat ambiguous.? Is the point of having teachers re-take exams to inform professional development needs or are schools going to do something else with under-performing teachers? Or is this provision just meant as a way to call out the lowest performing schools and teachers in hopes that embarrassment will be motivation to improve?? Either way this provision can be somewhat questioned on a number of different fronts. ?First, there are great teachers in failing schools and poor teachers in great schools. By targeting all teachers regardless if they are effective or not will not only demoralize teachers but it will also drive people away from ever wanting to teach in high-poverty-high-need schools. Instead, if requiring teachers to re-take exams was somehow informed by a teacher evaluation system that pointed out the teachers most in need of improvement, regardless if they were located in building ranked in the bottom 10 percent , it could have a greater impact on improving teacher effectiveness statewide.

Secondly, this provision assumes that teachers in these schools are not performing well due to a lack of knowledge and that by re-taking the licensure exam it will help rectify that. While in some instances this might be the case, I would venture to guess that most teachers would benefit more from personalized professional development rather than a test. Some people would argue that the reason for these tests is to inform who needs professional development, I would say determine specific areas that teachers need help with (again through a rigorous teacher evaluation system) and use that information to tailor professional development to individual teachers.? And third, let's not forget about the amount of time and money involved with re-testing over 2,000 teachers.

Stay tuned for even more granular analysis of the Ohio budget.

-Bianca Speranza

It's no surprise to anyone that a teacher's effectiveness has a tremendous impact on a child's learning and academic trajectory ? more so than any other in-school factor. The quality of the evaluation framework developed by the Ohio Department of Education - and the integrity with which districts and charters implement them and design other teacher personnel policies informed by them? has the potential to dramatically improve Ohio's teaching force and enhance student achievement.?

For this reason, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, along with the Nord Family Foundation and Ohio Grantmakers Forum, is convening two free, public events in northern Ohio around assuring highly effective teachers for all Ohio students. Mark your calendars for September 12 (Lorain County Community College, late afternoon) and 13 (downtown Cleveland, early morning). Additional details are forthcoming.

Featured speakers will include Mike Miles, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, a district on the cutting edge of teacher compensation reform, will share about the teacher effectiveness work his district is doing and the successes they are seeing as a result.? A representative from the National Council on Teacher Quality will talk about the teacher effectiveness movement nationally and what research tells us about teacher quality, and an Ohio voice will also be represented on the panel. Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, will moderate both discussions.

Stay tuned for more details and RSVP information.

While Heffner's appointment may be a surprise, it isn't a disappointment.?? He has experience at the local and state levels in Ohio (and in other states).?? Having served as associate superintendent of curriculum and assessment since 2004, he knows the Ohio Department of Education and its staff and operations well and is better-poised than perhaps any of the other candidates to hit the ground running when it comes to implementing the slew of important and tight-timelined new education policies passed in the state budget bill last month.

And speaking as someone who doesn't want to see academic accountability rolled back in the Buckeye State, I think he is an outstanding choice.?? He appreciates the value of having robust, accessible data about public schools and knows the importance of assessments and accountability in improving K-12 education. His work as Associate Superintendent helped make Ohio an early leader in the use of value-added data and other accountability metrics, and there is no reason to think he won't make Ohio a leader in other reform areas now as state superintendent.

- Emmy L. Partin

Last month the board selected three finalists from forty applications: Steve Dackin, superintendent of Reynoldsburg (Ohio) City School District; Robert Schiller, education consultant & former Michigan and Illinois state superintendent; and Robert Sommers, Director of (Ohio) Governor's Office of 21^st Century Education.

Sommers was an early favorite. He has experience in virtually every sector of the K-12 education system. Further, as Governor Kasich's point-person on education, who could be better to implement the governor's education policy reforms? As it turned out, Sommers was too close to the governor to serve as state superintendent, at least in the eyes of the Ohio Ethics Commission. The commission advised Sommers that if he became state superintendent, the state's ???revolving-door??? rules would prevent him from communicating with his former employer for one year. Being state superintendent is challenging enough, but to do it without regular access to the governor and his staff, who are driving much of the state's reform work? That's a recipe for impossibility. (Yes, Ohio's revolving-door rule is a bizarre one, at least when applied to cases of people moving jobs within state government; as Mike Petrilli commented to me, ???That's like saying Margaret Spellings couldn't have become Secretary of Education.???)

Now the board's tightfistedness may have cost a second finalist. Dackin announced yesterday that he was removing himself from consideration and signing a four-year contract extension with Reynoldsburg. The district is expected to give him a $25,000 raise in order to keep him around, bringing his salary to $145,000 before bonuses. The grapevine reports that the salary amount discussed between Dackin and members of the state board of education for the state post was unworkably low.

Is Ohio trying to get top-notch leadership for a key position on the cheap? Possibly.

The right salary for the job is certainly debatable. Deborah Delisle, who resigned as state superintendent in April, made $194,500. Her predecessor, Susan Tave Zelman, earned more than $200,000. In Florida, Eric Smith made $245,000 as education commissioner. Members of the Ohio governor's cabinet make anywhere from about $116,000 to $182,000, and the governor himself is paid $144,000.

Consider also that next door in Indiana, where the superintendent position is a statewide elected office, State Supt. Tony Bennett makes about $80,000 per year.

But if Dackin did make his decision based on money, his last-minute withdrawal is the board's own fault. Ideally, the board should have been flexible about how much to pay the person they decided to hire. But if that weren't possible, why not make the salary limitations clear to all candidates months ago?

The board had intended to announce the new state superintendent tomorrow, and all bets were on Dackin. What happens now? The board doesn't have to hire Schiller tomorrow; its timeline is self-imposed so it may re-open the search and beat the bushes for more candidates. Stay tuned to Flypaper for the latest.

- Emmy Partin

[That] question, it seems to me, will soon be answered by Michelle Rhee's new endeavor, Students First. Rhee's potential donors and supporters surely include many well-educated, well-to-do parents; she is encouraging them to contribute money and time in order to fix the schools of other people's children, not their own. (Teach For America alumni?sensitized to the plight of inner-city education?will play a key role, I would bet.) The gambit is whether a ?social justice? pitch to fix urban education can resonate?and be sustained?with people with the resources to engage politically, but without a personal stake in the fight. Time will tell whether Rhee can pull it off. (Emphasis added.)

I've grappled with this question for a long time, not just when it comes to education reform but when it comes to improving urban communities generally. Mike is right that Teach For America, to some extent, has been able to accomplish just that ? engaging young people, the bulk of whom do not come from poor communities, to jump into the fight for educational equity. Here's where I think the discussion should dive deeper.

Whether Students First can effectively tap into this base and compel the middle-class to develop a stake in the fight says more about SF's (and Rhee's) strategies around mobilizing and messaging than it does about whether the middle-class generally can be mobilized. The answer to the first seems like ?maybe.? The answer to the second question, to me at least, is?YES. And I think more energy needs to be devoted to the question of how we do it better.

Several years ago while in grad school I developed an obsession with HBO's The Wire. It kept me up many mornings until 3am. I couldn't stop watching the narrative of inner-city Baltimore, its youth, gangs, police force, politicians, reporters, innocent bystanders, teachers, drug addicts, social workers. I wept more during that series than seemed normal ? seeing the gang/drug culture reminded me so much of Camden, where I had taught.

But I wasn't moved because I had some basic background knowledge/experience with urban hardships. Plenty of friends I knew ? who had no such experience ? were captivated and moved by it, too. This is the power of messaging, of creating a narrative within which we can begin to identify with the ?other America? that David Simon (creator of The Wire) talks about frequently. During the height of my obsession with the show, Simon came to speak at Princeton. This was his most powerful message: Most of us don't know about the ?other America? reflected in The Wire, in North Camden, East Columbus (Ohio) or in pockets all across the country. Once you meet characters who live it each day ? whether via your flat screen, a book or article, or in person via volunteering and getting involved ? your worldview will shift. To give a shit about policies or legislation or advocacy ? enough to actually do something - you need to be able to conjure up a human face to those issues. (This is a paraphrase. David Simon swears a lot.)

When it comes to education reform, the middle-class/suburban/affluent mass needs to hear a clearer and more consistent narrative. Education reformers need to do a better job of sharing it. Too often we get caught up in wonk-ish debates or attribute ?reform? to polarizing figureheads with whom we identify or loathe, and forget to put a human face on issues of educational inequity. (This is one thing TFA does very well, and probably why they have record-breaking numbers of applicants each year.)

So to me, the question isn't whether the affluent can be compelled to join the fight, and stay in the fight. It's how can we as education reformers put a human face on educational inequity such that we can mobilize more of the community to care? There are groups doing it, namely educational advocacy organizations like Students First, 50CAN, Stand for Children, and other members of the PIE Network. Theirs is important work; if we can't translate the problem into one that elicits emotion and spurs action, then it should come as no surprise if affluent communities remain largely unaware of education in the ?other America? and politically inactive.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

The ultimate success of the budget's education reforms will depend greatly on the quality of implementation by the State Board of Education, the new state superintendent, and his team at the Ohio Department of Education. This may sound obvious, but it's worth hammering home: The budget puts an enormous amount of responsibility and faith into the Department of Education (to sponsor new charter schools, a move we opposed during the debate), the State Board (to approve model frameworks for teacher evaluation), and already thinly-stretched staffers who are still deciphering what the budget provisions actually mean.??

Now that the legislative debate has ended, where does Ohio stand on the big education-policy issues of charter schools, teacher policy, and school accountability and improvement? And why will implementation be so crucial? Let's dig in.

Charters & Choice

Fordham is a long-time supporter of school choice and believes in the expansion of quality options for families. However, we made it clear in recent months that we opposed proposals in the House that would have severely undermined accountability and the quality of authorizers and charter schools. Thankfully, the most egregious House language offered by some for-profit school-management companies was stripped out in the final budget deal, so Ohioans need not worry about charter schools or groups of individuals running schools without oversight. Plus, lawmakers strengthened accountability for charter-school authorizers, stipulating that those ranked in the bottom 20 percent of all sponsors cannot open new schools.

Other positive provisions include: shortening by one year the timeline for automatic closure (?death penalty?) of failing charter schools; putting in language to establish and fund a public boarding school; giving charter schools better access to unused district facilities; and dramatically expanding the number of EdChoice Scholarships available and the students eligible for them. The budget also launched a new special-needs scholarship program.

On the troubling side, the budget reinstates the Ohio Department of Education as an authorizer of charter schools, a duty it fully botched a decade ago, with many risks remaining today. These risks include an understaffed and ill-prepared charter-school office, conflicts of interest (the department now will sponsor schools, oversee the state's other charter-school sponsors, provide technical assistance of myriad sorts, and fund charters), and enormous pressure to sponsor charter schools quickly and without a proper vetting of applicants. However, a rigorous screening process, combined with strong leadership from the State Board and the interim and new state superintendent, can help mitigate these risks.?

Teachers

While not as strong as language approved in the House, the final budget deal is still two steps forward for the Buckeye State when it comes to improving teacher effectiveness. Most critically, Ohio districts will now have to dramatically improve their teacher-evaluation systems, and must no longer make layoff decisions based on seniority alone.

Moreover, the legislature wants to see action quickly?maybe even too quickly. By December 31, 2011, the State Board must develop a model evaluation framework to guide the development of local evaluation systems. Those systems must be in place by July 2013, and must base 50 percent of a teacher's rating on the academic growth of his or her students. The systems also must rate teachers according to four tiers (accomplished, proficient, developing, and ineffective). School districts?rather than the state?will then decide how to tie policies on dismissal, tenure, retention, and pay to the evaluations. The primary state mandate governing all of this is that districts can no longer make seniority the predominant determiner of layoff decisions, except in cases of a tie (when teachers have the same rating).

Merit pay, one of the more controversial provisions debated during the budget process, will now only be mandated in districts, STEM schools, and charter schools participating in Race to the Top. Others will be encouraged, but not required, to create a performance-based salary schedule, and hopefully an abundance of teacher-effectiveness data accumulating over time will prompt local officials to reward highly effective teachers accordingly. Other provisions worth lauding include: Teach For America applicants won't face any new barriers to entry, and alternative licensure will extend across all grades (K-12, instead of only grades 4-12). Teachers at the state's persistently lowest-performing schools will be required to be tested on their subject-matter knowledge, but will not incur the costs of exams or be required to take the test more than once every three years provided they pass it. Finally, the Board of Regents' Chancellor will report aggregate student growth data and trace these data to teacher graduates from various teacher-prep programs.

Accountability and School Improvement

Fordham has long advocated holding all schools accountable for performance (not just charter schools) and the budget does that well. District schools performing in the bottom 5 percent of schools statewide for three or more consecutive years will undergo major restructuring (?turnaround?). The controversial ?parent trigger??whereby parents and families can precipitate school reconstitution?will be piloted within Columbus City Schools. Schools wishing to operate outside of traditional regulations and rules (imposed by the state, teachers unions, etc.) can now apply for status as innovation schools or zones in an effort to spur rapid change and achievement improvements that might not otherwise be possible in traditional and more regulated settings.

Finally, individual school performance as well as classroom expenditures (an attempt to measure return on investment) will be published by the state and schools will be ranked and recognized accordingly. This transparency?especially in spending as it relates to achievement?is a leap forward in terms of changing the dialogue in public education. Instead of measuring inputs and dollars in a vacuum (i.e., regardless of achievement), Ohio will begin asking, ?What bang are we getting for our buck??

Conclusion

Considering the fiscal climate in which this budget was written, it is an impressive piece of work that sets the conditions for moving Ohio's education system forward. There is still plenty that could be derailed through poor implementation by the Ohio Department of Education, the State Board, and individual school districts. But there is no doubt that the budget language moves Ohio towards a performance-based system of education that rewards success, highlights problems, and punishes abject failure. Let the hard work begin.

- Terry Ryan, Emmy Partin, and Jamie Davies O'Leary

This year was my first experience with the state budget process. As this year's debate comes to a conclusion (Gov. Kasich will likely sign HB 153 into law tomorrow) I feel like I've learned a lot about a lot, so here's an attempt to distill that down into some relevant (and not-that-relevant) observations.

• You can't predict everything. Fordham was especially blindsided this year with the charter school language inserted by the Ohio House (most of which thankfully was removed in the final version). Arguing against ludicrous charter language that would severely undermine accountability and quality wasn't on our initial radar; in short, you can never know what political tactics are being used behind closed doors and the extent to which lobbyists will influence what gets to the table.
• Ohio is somewhat unusual in the amount of substantive policy put into the biennial budget. Ohio's budget ? for the last several biennia at least ? is not just about appropriating funds for various programs and agencies but contains a semi-load of actual policy. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for lawmakers to understand the nuances of proposed changes (the final version is some 5,000 pages!), to be thoughtful, deliberate, and estimate the impact of said changes.?
• Spend political capital wisely. As each version of the budget (Kasich's initial proposals, then the House's, then the Senate's, etc.) morphed into something new it became apparent that the 20-some things flagged at the outset were no longer as important as the five main ones worth struggling for.
• Keeping up with the Joneses? At various points during this process I've wondered about?several education provisions ? which may seem like good ideas on paper ? but which?seem to have been merely lifted from the recent annals of history in other states (e.g., the ?parent trigger? idea, specific language on teacher evaluations) in order to shove as much through this policy window as possible. To what extent were these provisions sought out because they're good ideas in their own right and make sense for Ohio, and to what extent was the motivation merely to keep up appearance and prevent Ohio from looking like a laggard compared to other states?
• Too wonky for the average Ohioan. With hundreds of pages on education alone, and several iterations (not to mention analyses/estimates we conducted along the way to figure out which teachers/schools/charters/authorizers would be affected by various provisions) it's hard to keep it all straight. Translating those provisions ? and their implications ? into something meaningful that the average Ohioan should care about is difficult and points to a possible need in Ohio for an entity to do that sort of messaging and mobilizing work (an education advocacy organization like those in the PIE Network?).
• Is incremental change worth celebrating? Even here at Fordham I think some of us would disagree about whether the new teacher effectiveness provisions are worth celebrating. They're better than what Ohio had before (essentially a totally seniority-based system not requiring meaningful evaluations at all) but not nearly as robust as the version passed by the Ohio House. Same goes with the charter language ? we're certainly happy that the worst of it was stripped out, but Fordham's hope for a new statewide authorizer was dashed, and the Ohio Department of Education ? with a terrible track record of sponsoring charter schools ? will now be a sponsor again. All isn't totally lost ? but it's sort of like feeling more disappointed when your team makes it to the Super Bowl and then loses than if they had just lost in the early round of playoffs.
• These comparison docs are pretty awesome.

Oh, and this provision didn't make it through.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Details are still emerging, but at first glance education reformers can declare at least a few victories from this battle, especially when it comes to issues of teacher effectiveness.?? Included in the budget are provisions requiring that:

-?????????????????? By 2013-14 all Ohio school districts must implement a rigorous, multiple-measure teacher evaluation system that is based 50 percent on student performance data;

-?????????????????? Schools participating in Race to the Top must develop a merit-pay system for teachers based in part on that evaluation (this is optional for non-participating districts);

-?????????????????? Seniority is no longer the primary determiner of teacher lay-offs in the Buckeye State and may only be used as a tie-breaker when all other factors are equal.

The conference committee reportedly upheld most of the Senate's smart charter-school provisions, lifted restrictions on the start-up of new charter schools, and expanded eligibility and availability of the EdChoice voucher program.?? The committee also added new education policy language, including a provision giving Cleveland mayor (who has control over that city's school district) the ability to revoke collective bargaining rights of employees in his district's conversion charter schools.

We'll be following the budget developments closely this week. Follow us here on Flypaper or Twitter (@OhioGadfly) for the latest.

- Emmy Partin

Among the myriad ways these policies would change the face of teaching and learning, however, ?merit pay? seems to be the maelstrom?toward which the majority of coverage and attention has been pulled. (For a quick experiment, google ?merit pay and Ohio? and ?teacher evaluations and Ohio? and see how many more recent hits the former returns.)

The House's teacher provisions (fingers crossed that that it will get re-inserted during conference committee) would get rid of seniority-based layoffs, develop a rigorous and sophisticated rating system for teachers, undo forced placement of ineffective teachers, use student test scores in evaluations, and effectively get rid of tenure (among other things). And yet the media seems to have a fixation on ?merit pay,? dwindling the entire teacher policy debate down to this one issue, or conflating ?merit pay? with other ? arguably more critical ? teacher policy reforms.

Even worse is that those who oppose merit pay can drum up legitimate points against it ? the research showing that merit pay improves student achievement is weak; Ohio doesn't have a rigorous enough system by which to evaluate and reward teachers (yet) ? and in doing so effectively convince Ohioans that the teacher provisions on the table are worth tossing out altogether.

Such is the conversation in Ohio. Regardless of what happens with SB 5 (which is up for referendum in November) or the budget, or how comfortable (or not) lawmakers, teachers, and the public are with ?merit pay,? this doesn't diminish in the least Ohio's need to overhaul teacher evaluations and policies associated with them. First and foremost, we need to rate teachers in a meaningful way (and frequently). Once that data begins to pile up, and teachers know and trust the system by which they're evaluated (see our videos of DC teachers describing that), and can see how it legitimately assesses the qualities of effective teachers ? only then should Ohio introduce the ?m? word.

We've done it all backwards ? beginning with Kasich's somewhat random performance pay plan that would have given teachers $50 per student who made more than a year's worth of learning (this, happening in a vacuum of data about teacher effectiveness or a thorough evaluation system that would help build that data), being fueled by misunderstandings about what's actually in each bill per teacher evaluations (the majority of Ohioans still don't know the different between what's in SB 5 and HB 153), and then culminating by calls to toss it all by the wayside.

Instead, Ohio needs to consider teacher evaluations as the fundamental foundation to any other teacher policy change, and the media needs to focus on this ingredient far more (forcing people to really understand what's at stake instead of identifying as pro- or anti-merit pay and then calling it a day). If lawmakers accomplish nothing else to improve teacher quality in this legislative session, they must set in motion the creation of more meaningful rating systems (and statewide; among RttT participants is not good enough). Merit pay, tenure reform, etc ? those can all come later; they're like toppings on the pizza. But first we need the crust.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

In fact, we have been a strong voice for charter school quality for more than a decade and played a critical role in the production of Turning the Corner to Quality: Policy Guidelines for Strengthening Ohio's Charter Schools. This report, released collaboratively with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter Schools Authorizers in October 2006, recommended a ???housecleaning??? to close down Ohio's poorest performing schools. Partly in response, the General Assembly passed a law in December 2006 to force failing schools to improve or face automatic closure.

Because we have been such outspoken and visible critics of the recent House language, many who disagree with us are raising questions publicly and behind the scenes about our motivations. Some have accused Fordham???in its advocating for a statewide authorizing entity that would merge the portfolios of existing sponsors, including Fordham???of trying to give birth to a ???super- sponsor??? in order to orchestrate some form of a charter school power grab. Still others claim we are motivated by greed and want to build our sponsorship efforts in order to make more money. These accusations are hokum and need to be refuted.

Our charter-school sponsorship philosophy

Sponsors (aka authorizers) are the organizations responsible for helping birth charters, for holding them accountable over time for their performance, for providing technical assistance and guidance when appropriate, and???if necessary???for closing schools that no longer work for children.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has been sponsoring charter schools in the Buckeye State since 2005. Two of our schools are in Columbus (KIPP: Journey Academy and Columbus Collegiate Academy), two in Dayton (Dayton Liberty and Dayton View), one in Cincinnati (Phoenix Community Learning Center), and one in Springfield (Springfield Academy of Excellence). Collectively, these schools serve about 1,850 students; more than 85 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. In July, we will add two new schools to our portfolio (Sciotoville Elementary Academy and Sciotoville Community School, both located outside Portsmouth, in southern Ohio).

We believe quality sponsors provide their schools with maximum flexibility and space for innovation while holding them accountable for performance. If a school performs well it should rarely see or hear from its sponsor beyond basic compliance issues and required school site visits. If, however, the school struggles to deliver academic achievement, faces financial problems, or encounters other serious operational deficiencies then the sponsor has a solemn duty to push hard for needed changes, corrective actions, and improvement. Such pressure under Ohio law includes threats about probation and closure as needed, and quality sponsors carry these threats out if a school simply cannot or won't improve over time. Nothing is worse for children than allowing them to languish in a failed school that lacks the capacity to improve. As a sponsor, Fordham has closed four schools since 2005.

Financing Fordham's sponsorship efforts

In contrast to many sponsors in Ohio, we believe it is inappropriate for sponsors to sell any supplemental services to the schools they authorize. Whether these services take the form of business management, instructional support, special education, professional development, or something else, such an arrangement creates an inherent conflict of interest, invites profiteering by sponsors and their agents, and pressures schools to obtain services from entities that wield enormous power over their very existence. It also creates strong economic incentives for sponsors to turn a blind eye to poor quality.

Fordham doesn't ???make money??? as a sponsor. While Ohio charter law allows a sponsor to charge a sponsorship fee of up to three percent of a school's state funding, Fordham charges just two percent. Fordham invests more than $100,000 a year in its sponsorship operations (money from our endowment or raised from external funders) beyond what we receive in school fees (see annual report here). Further, we reward performance, providing performance rebates based on a school's academic rating and student enrollment.

New statewide sponsor entity

We have sponsored schools in the past, but see no need to do so in the future if there is a better option for our sponsored schools and the children they serve. Fordham's sponsorship efforts are aligned with the National Association of Charter School Authorizer's (NACSA) Principles and Standards for Quality Charter School Authorizing. Other organizations in Ohio embrace these quality principles and standards, including the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, Montgomery County Educational Service Center, Dayton Public Schools, Reynoldsburg City Schools, Loveland City Schools, and the Columbus City Schools. Together???and others who share the same principles may join the effort???these entities are joining forces to form a new sponsor entity that has the scale and resources necessary to advance the improvement of the state's charter program. [quote]

This work is driven by the need for quality in a time of doing more with less. We explained the logic to the State Board of Education in public testimony in May 2010 thusly:

It is no stretch to say that, for most sponsors in Ohio, quality sponsorship costs more than school fees can generate. Consider the numbers for a moment???the state has sixty-seven active sponsors. Two of these???the Lucas County ESC and the Ohio Council of Community Schools (both based in Toledo)???collectively authorize one third of all Ohio charter schools. The state's remaining sixty-five sponsors authorize on average three schools each. Fifty-two sponsors have two or fewer. Yet quality sponsorship costs money to deliver. For example, sponsors need the resources to meet the legal costs of closing a school, which can accrue quickly.

It is because of limited resources for sponsors and the need for scale and shared expertise that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio (ESCCO) are proposing???with planning-grant support from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers???to launch a new statewide charter school sponsor. Both ESCCO and Fordham have developed the tools, resources, and expertise needed for quality authorizing, in Fordham's case with help from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are willing to cede these assets to a new entity that we believe can help consolidate and improve Ohio's charter-school sponsorship landscape.

Fordham is committed to advancing educational excellence in Ohio and nationally. We embrace this struggle openly and transparently. Charter schools are an important tool in the reform struggle, and for more than a decade we have put our money, time, and energy where our mouth is.

Not everything we have done in the Buckeye State has worked and we have in fact had plenty of failures as both a sponsor and as a charter advocate. But through it all we have been motivated by trying to improve educational options for the state's neediest children. We are honored to work with lawmakers, policy makers, others in the state's charter sector, and with district educators who are committed to creating, leading, supporting, and sponsoring great charter schools that embrace high standards of excellence. We are proud to call these individuals allies and friends.

???Terry Ryan

As we waited for the elevator, I looked to my left and saw a sign above the drinking fountain declaring, ?Whites Only.? Two Columbus Collegiate Academy graduates ? one black, one Hispanic ? noted the sign, too, and continued to read the commentary below it. The remaining portion of the sign explained the historic division of the races, recognized the efforts made to close that gap, and then ultimately welcomed all who read the sign to drink freely from the water fountain. As we finished reading, the elevator doors opened and we rode to the third floor of the King Arts Complex.

The King Arts Complex of Columbus, Ohio, is devoted to increasing awareness of the ?vast and significant contributions of African Americans? to our country and the world. It was a fitting location for the first Columbus Collegiate Academy eighth-grade graduation, an event three years in the making and one of the many efforts across this nation to close the achievement gap. There's no question that graduates from Columbus Collegiate Academy, where 81 percent of the students are African American and 94 are economically disadvantaged ? but achieve scores that place them among the nation's best, will be among those making vast contributions to our community.

Founder and Executive Director Andrew Boy began the program by thanking everyone who made CCA's success possible and introducing guest speaker Ray Miller, a former member of the Ohio General Assembly. Miller offered words of encouragement and advice to the graduates, ending with Marianne Williamson's quote, ?As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.? Certainly, CCA's students and their success have lit the path for fellow schools to aspire to the same high expectations and believe that those expectations can be met with a rigorous curriculum, a dedicated staff, and a culture of excellence.

The graduation ceremony also featured four student speakers: the class poet, co-valedictorians, and salutatorian. Each student's speech conveyed a similar message about the CCA experience: the path was hard, the teamwork necessary, and the results great. They recalled the nervousness with which they began, the excitement with which they are leaving, and the gratitude they have for all those who helped them along the way. One of CCA's valedictorians recognized the historic nature of the moment and its binding power on all the graduates: ?We're not just classmates or associates, we are a family...and we will always be the founding class of Columbus Collegiate Academy.?

Ms. Kathryn Anstaett, CCA's social studies teacher, captured the widespread feelings of possibility and enthusiasm, and exemplified the school's culture of high expectations and dedication, when she said, ?I'm so happy and excited that people like you are going to be leaders of the future because you have passion, compassion, empathy, tolerance, and problem-solving skills that I know are going to make our world, our country, greater in the future than it is today.?

The program ended with advice and kind words from Minister Rhesa Green and each student walking to the front of the room to receive a diploma. The audience clapped, cheered, and celebrated the end of the students' three-year journey at CCA. But, the ?Class of 2019? banner that hung above the students ensured no one forgot that the end of their time at CCA was really just one more step toward their ultimate goal - college graduation. And thanks to CCA, each of them has the skills, knowledge, and passion to achieve that goal.

Though the era of ?Whites Only? signs has passed, racial segregation and its impacts on student achievement? especially in our schools ? have not. I am sure CCA's graduates will continue to encounter systemic roadblocks throughout their lives, but, I am also certain that when faced with a roadblock, they will do what they've been trained to do at CCA through the culture of high expectations and an unrelenting pursuit of success: acknowledge its existence and then proudly rise above it.

-Nikki Baszynski

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• Districts would be required to offer up unused space to charter schools for lease if the space goes unused by the district for two years,
• When multiple charter schools express interest in the space, the district would have to lease it to the highest-performing school among the mix, and
• If the leasing charter school is in the top 50% of all schools statewide, based on its ???performance index score??? ??? a measure of academic achievement ??? the district would lease the space for $1 per year.

Gene Harris, superintendent of Columbus City Schools, Ohio's largest district and one with a history of blocking charter schools from its unused facilities, is opposed to the change. Her reasons include that charters might not have sufficient funds to maintain a facility and that it prevents the district from leasing to other ???important??? organizations. I admit that these aren't invalid concerns.?? But I can't help but see this as yet another instance where anti-charter sentiment among the education establishment is so ingrained that districts don't recognize those pro-charter policies that they should be supporting.

For starters, this provision is fiscally smart for districts. If a district must maintain unused facilities regardless, why not lease to a charter school that will pick up those costs??? Further, this provision requires districts to lease, not sell, the space (as current law requires), so if a district's enrollment rebounds or it otherwise needs to use the space in question, it can certainly reassume occupation and care of the facility down the road. ??And let's not forget that the buildings charter schools are after are older ones that, for the most part, are emptying out because the state is pouring billions into building fancy new schools for districts.

Second, this provision is good for students.?? It encourages the growth of high-performing schools, not the unchecked flourishing of lousy ones. Consider the $1-annual-lease clause. Last school year, 3,503 Ohio school buildings had a Performance Index score (another 172, for various reasons, did not). Because of the overall mediocre performance of the state's charter schools (and this budget bill separately tackles the issue of charter quality), just 21 charter schools statewide would meet the bar for the $1 annual lease.????

These are schools that any urban superintendent should be comfortable ???losing??? students to ??? schools like Citizens Academy and the Intergenerational School, both in Cleveland and members of the Breakthrough Schools network of high-flying charter schools; Dayton Early College Academy in Fordham's hometown; the Charles and Graham Schools at Ohio Dominican University; and Arts & College Preparatory Academy in Columbus.?? All of the schools that make the cut are out-performing their home school districts and many are doing it whilst serving the neediest and most challenging students in their communities.??

Unlike the notoriously bad charter provisions inserted in the budget bill by the Ohio House (and rightly and swiftly removed by the Senate), this charter policy change is one that districts should embrace.?? They should let go of their instinctive, immediate opposition to anything that could ???help??? the competition and instead be supportive of those policies that can be mutually beneficial and, most importantly, improve education options for students.

-Emmy Partin

Despite reasons for optimism about charter growth ? there are now over 5,000 charters serving more than a million kids (and many states, facing pressure from Race to the Top and/or GOP leaders, will stimulate more growth as they lift charter caps) ? Rotherham points out what we here in Ohio have been noting for nearly a decade:

Charter schools range in quality from among the absolute best public schools in the country to among the absolute worst. That variance in quality is proving a political Achilles heel for charter schools and is fueling a serious backlash.

He goes on to outline places where charter schools are victim to strong opposition from teachers unions (New York City ? the teachers union and NAACP filed a lawsuit to curb charter growth; Rhode Island ? one mayor is facing an uphill battle to bring one of the best CMOs in, Achievement First). It's reminiscent of the scene in The Lottery where Eva Moscowitz of Harlem Village Academy is verbally assaulted by parents trying to thwart the growth of her charter school (the very parents and families whose kids could benefit most from school choice).

And then comes the flipside of the coin ? how to make sure charter growth and accountability are held in check -- and here's where Ohio, predictably and unfortunately, becomes the poster child of dysfunction. Fordham was among the first to call out Ohio House Republicans for a slate of provisions in the state's budget bill that would have weakened charter accountability and oversight. And they deserve to be called out and reminded, as Rotherham writes, that ?one spectacular charter screw-up counts more than 100 quiet successes.?

But Rotherham grossly oversimplifies the experience in Ohio. Here, not all Ohio Republicans are trying to undermine accountability (though some members in the House ? motivated by the influential Akron industrialist David Brennan - certainly did). Many others have fought those provisions, notably lawmakers in the Ohio Senate who have thus far stripped those provisions out of the Ohio budget. And Ohio's Republican governor and policy team put forth ? in the original version of the budget ? policies that would restrict charter growth among only those networks of authorizers and operators that were high-performing, and preserve/strengthen other accountability measures.

Moreover, it's worth reminding readers that ? despite recent and well-deserved dismay over threats to charter accountability and quality ? Ohio has also served ? for several years mind you ? as the poster child for the first type of dysfunction that Rotherham describes. Former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland tried decimating charter schools on repeated occasions; former Attorney General Marc Dann (also a Democrat) filed a high-profile series of lawsuits against charters; parents and teachers unions filed other lawsuits against them, challenging the fundamental fact that they are public schools, etc. The list could go on. More recently, we've seen school districts refuse charter schools ? even the best-performing ones ? public facilities, make transportation a living nightmare, and continue propagating the misperception that charters are a drain on public tax dollars (they are public schools, too).

The point is that if Ohio is to serve as the prototype of dysfunction in the charter sector, let's not forget both sides of the coin. Republicans and Democrats alike in this state have made some pretty bad decisions in both directions. And the Buckeye State desperately needs some balance.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Last week we released a video, What Ohio can learn from DC's teacher evaluations, featuring interviews with teachers evaluated under the DC IMPACT system. The teachers we interviewed ? which include science teachers, an elementary math coach, a fourth-grade teacher (of all subjects), a special ed middle school teacher, an art teacher, and a master educator (who conducts the observations on behalf of DCPS) ? shared what it's like to be evaluated via five observations each year and have part of their performance linked to student test scores.?

Today we released two more videos, wherein teachers evaluated under DC's IMPACT system address common fears and myths about rigorous evaluations.

Part 1

Part 2

Even prior to Ohio's legislative battle over teacher evaluations, myths and fears expressed by educators and policymakers about teacher evaluations have been rampant here. Opponents of overhauling teacher evaluation systems argue they're inherently unfair, arbitrary, prone to bias, focused too much on test scores, ruin collaboration, create competition, etc.??

But are they really? The teachers participating in DC's rigorous evaluation system had some candid and powerful responses. Their insight begins to peel back the myths and fears we've heard here in the Buckeye State. Do evaluation systems like DC IMPACT water down the art of teaching to one set of test scores on one day? No. Frequent and unannounced observations spread out over the year, along with several other metrics ? like commitment to school community and professionalism, and student test scores ? actually capture the measures of effective teaching far better than previous evaluation systems. Teachers in non-tested subjects, like art and science, explained how IMPACT evaluates them fairly even though their scores are somewhat different from those of teachers in tested grades and subject areas. And every single teacher we interviewed could point to specific areas of instruction that improved as a result of the feedback cycle and relationships with master educators (who conduct the observations). In short, while IMPACT isn't perfect ? and neither is any evaluation system out there ? it's certainly far better than what Ohio has in place and should compel us to institute a more meaningful system in the Buckeye State.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary and Emmy Partin

In its version of the state budget (HB 153), the Ohio House put forth legislative language on teacher effectiveness that is some of the most progressive in the country. It would connect measures of pupil academic growth to teachers and further connect teacher effectiveness to key personnel decisions. Teachers would be rated, in part, on the academic performance of their students over time, and they would receive ratings according to four tiers ??? highly effective, effective, needs improvement, and unsatisfactory.

With a fair and rigorous system that measures gradations of teacher effectiveness using state assessment data, expert and peer evaluations, building- and district-level performance metrics, and even student evaluations, school systems can make smarter personnel decisions. They can reward their ablest instructors and put them in the classrooms where they are most needed, target support for teachers who warrant it and weed out those who are not a good fit for the profession. Layoffs can be based on performance instead of solely on seniority. These improvements would upgrade teacher effectiveness over time as they focus on what teachers ultimately contribute to student outcomes.

The House language is right per teacher effectiveness because it focuses squarely on performance. Unfortunately, the House got charter school policy wrong because, there, it focused on everything but performance and accountability. In short, the House charter language would make it easier for for-profit school operators to function without oversight. The House language would neuter both governing boards and authorizers of their oversight responsibilities and authority and give operators carte blanche authority over virtually all school decisions. Further, it would exempt these schools from compliance with accountability requirements like annual testing.?? The House would create a new class of schools ??? corporate private schools funded directly by the state and free of all state accountability requirements. Under this new corporate school model student performance would matter not one iota, nor could it even be measured and reported.

The Senate took the budget language it received from the House and sought to fix it by purging the parts that dismantled anything to do with charter school performance. Further, it built on Governor Kasich's initial budget proposals that tried to find a balance between expanding school choice and ensuring that both charter schools and their authorizers are ultimately held accountable for their performance. The Senate language sets performance expectations for authorizers to open new schools. Specifically, a new school can be opened only if at least 80 percent of its current portfolio of schools does not rank in the bottom five percent of schools for academic performance.

Charter schools, by their very definition, enter into a performance contract (a charter) with a sponsoring organization that acts as a quality control agent. If the school fails to live up to its contract, its sponsor can revoke the charter or choose not to renew it. The Senate version of HB153 would maintain and strengthen the charter model in Ohio because it focuses on performance and pressures sponsors to do more about it.??

But, while the Senate got charter schools right, it got teacher effectiveness language wrong ??? by deleting it entirely from the budget. If the House language doesn't make it back into HB 153 then Ohio's law defaults back to teacher effectiveness being equated with meaningless inputs like paper credentials, certificates, and length of service rather than actual classroom performance and impact on student achievement. As with charters in the House, it looks as if politics trumped matters of performance when it came to Senate decision making per the issue of teacher effectiveness.

The current budget situation is messy. It somehow has to be resolved between now and the end of the month when the budget is to be finalized and signed into law by Governor Kasich. Most of the heavy lifting is apt to take place in conference committee. If members can focus on issues of performance above issues of politics it would give Ohio not only consistent and fair education policy, but policy that would make Ohio a leader in the move towards performance-based public education.

??-Terry Ryan

Like many states, Ohio is trying to figure out the best way to improve its teacher evaluation system as well as teacher personnel policies linked to them (like how best to remunerate teachers, grant them tenure, connect them with professional development, and ? when district budgets or enrollment levels leave no other choice - determine layoffs). Many states and districts already have dramatically overhauled these policies, while others are in the midst of intense debates over whether tying student growth to teacher evaluations is fair, whether states should mandate policies or leave it up to districts, what should constitute ?multiple measures? in an evaluation, and much more.

In Ohio, Fordham has witnessed this debate firsthand. Just yesterday, Terry testified to the Ohio Senate Finance Committee, imploring them to restore the excellent teacher personnel provisions passed by the House that would have overhauled tenure and pay, ended LIFO and forced placement of teachers rated ineffective, and more. A similar op-ed also ran in today's Columbus Dispatch. If the Senate does not change course, all of those provisions will be removed and Ohio will be mired in antiquated teacher personnel rules and procedures (some of which have been around since 1941).

Even prior to this particular legislative battle, however, Fordham Ohio had been hearing lots of myths and fears expressed by educators and policymakers alike. Opponents of overhauling teacher evaluation systems argue they're inherently unfair, arbitrary, prone to bias, focused too much on test scores, ruin collaboration, create competition, etc. We wondered if any of these realities were true in places where teachers are evaluated in rigorous ways (rather than through the traditional binary rating system ? ?satisfactory? or ?unsatisfactory?). So we reached out to DC Public Schools, where the DC IMPACT evaluation system has been in place for two years. And we decided (with the help of our incredible colleagues in DC and a new media manager with fantastic video skills) to go into the field and ask teachers who are already participating in rigorous evaluation systems what they think about these matters.

We interviewed six teachers in DC Public Schools who are evaluated under the IMPACT system. Overwhelmingly, even despite some concerns expressed by several of the teachers, common themes emerged: a binary rating systems (?satisfactory? or ?unsatisfactory?) is neither informative about which teachers are effective and which are not, nor does it help teachers improve their practice. The teachers we interviewed ? which include science teachers, an elementary math coach, a fourth-grade teacher (of all subjects), a special ed middle school teacher, an art teacher, and a master educator (who conducts the observations on behalf of DCPS) shared what it's like to be evaluated via five observations each year and have part of their performance linked to student test scores.? Even teachers with significant concerns expressed that IMPACT correctly identifies the worst performers and the top-flyers. And several teachers who have not yet earned the distinction of ?highly effective? said that IMPACT motivates them daily to improve their practice.

Their responses were pretty powerful. We're glad we interviewed them and can share this footage with all our viewers, but especially our Ohio audience where in just the last few days the entire future of teacher personnel policies has shifted underfoot. While IMPACT isn't perfect and neither is any evaluation system out there, it's certainly far better than what Ohio has in place and should compel us to institute a more meaningful system, and specifically to reinstate the excellent provisions that were in the House version of Ohio's biennial budget.

As Ohio and other states struggle to reach agreement on how (or if, depending on who you ask) to make teacher policies focused on effectiveness and performance, and more conducive to attracting the best and brightest, these are conversations that absolutely must happen. We hope that lawmakers, policy makers, and teachers alike realize that any efforts to improve teacher effectiveness across the state rest on our ability to evaluate teachers and use this data to make key decisions that are in the best interests of students.

We'll continue this video series through June with videos tackling specific issues related to teacher evaluations. Watch your inbox next week for our second video.

But even the removal of provisions that would have dramatically weakened charter quality and accountability can't make up for the fact that the Senate removed all of the excellent teacher personnel language in HB 153.

Fordham's Terry Ryan testified yesterday afternoon to the Ohio Senate Finance Committee to express our collective disappointment and implore lawmakers to prioritize policies to improve teacher effectiveness. ?

He described what's at stake by removing this language:

For as long as anyone can remember, in Ohio as in the rest of America, a public-school teacher's effectiveness and performance in the classroom have had little to no impact on decisions about whether she is retained by her district or laid off, how she is compensated or assigned to a district's schools, or how her professional development is crafted. Instead, all of these critical decisions are made on the basis of quality-blind state policies, like the notorious ?last-in, first-out? mandate governing lay-offs, and tenure rules that allow teachers to have job protection for life and ?bump? less senior teachers when jockeying for positions. Effective teachers are forced to go simply because they have not taught as long as others, regardless of how successful (or not) other teachers might be, students are left with whichever instructors have been in the system the longest, and teachers receive professional development that is not tied at all to their individual improvement needs.

To their credit, Governor Kasich and the Ohio House have been trying to transform the system by which the state handles these crucial teacher HR decisions. The biennial budget bill passed by the House assigns classroom effectiveness a key role in determining how teachers are assigned to schools, whether their contracts are renewed, and ? when budgets make it unavoidable ? how they are laid off. It would put in place a teacher evaluation system that incorporates student academic growth and several other key job-related performance factors and would rate teachers according to four tiers. Basic personnel decisions around tenure, placement, dismissal, and professional development would be tied directly to the evaluation results.

Unfortunately, however, the Senate has dropped all of these provisions from its version of the budget, preferring instead to maintain Ohio's status as a laggard state with archaic laws that force school districts to consider only seniority when making teacher layoff decisions.

Fordham genuinely hopes that the Ohio Senate will reconsider its move away from performance-based policies for teachers.?

Read Terry's full testimony here. An op-ed similar to the testimony also ran this morning in the Columbus Dispatch.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

I was a bit puzzled when I read the GothamSchools ?remainder?: ?Researchers in Houston are asking whether students can give teachers post-traumatic stress.? Post-traumatic stress? Is the study investigating whether teachers have bouts of depression, nightmares, etc. after they have stopped teaching?

I followed the link to the Edweek blog by Sarah Sparks, which bears the headline, ?Can a Class of 7th Graders Give Teachers Post-traumatic Stress?? But the article itself made it seem as though this were a study of teacher stress, not post-traumatic stress. (Sometimes the headlines are written by someone other than the blog's author.)

Indeed the study ? while potentially interesting ? has nothing to do with?post-traumatic stress?(it just so happens that the researcher conducting it has a background in researching trauma and PTSD). This mis-characterization of mental illness, and about teachers nonetheless, is frustrating in several other ways.

First, it completely misconstrues an actual medical definition. According to the DSM-4 PTSD occurs only after one's life ? or that of someone they love ? is threatened by serious injury or death. If one is aware of the true definition, then the headline leads you to believe that this particular class of seventh graders must have been armed with weapons or holding the teacher hostage. Alternatively, and more likely, it begins to dilute the actual meaning of the term such that stress = post-traumatic stress = all the same. This may seem like a wasteful argument in semantics, but I've overheard one too many conversations where people wrongly refer to the illness in the context of breaking up with a boyfriend, getting stung by a wasp, or getting into a nasty argument with one's mother-in-law. (This might seem petty, but to me it all stems from the infuriating people-don't-treat-mental-illness-the-same-as-physical-illness phenomenon. No one claims they have diabetes if they don't actually medically have it. Why is it that we accept flinging around mental illness labels? Or use them jokingly ? e.g., ?this weather is schizophrenic??)

Second, while the actual study sounds interesting (examining teacher stress levels and whether they negatively impact student achievement) there are a host of other studies related to PTSD and education waiting to be done. Don't waste headlines on it now. For instance, I'd love to know whether teachers are impacted not only be stress but by ?vicarious trauma? ? that is, how does the trauma incurred by their students affect them? How can we better serve students and their teachers in communities where violence spills over into the classroom? Are teachers prepared by their training programs to know how to handle it? In my experience as a TFA teacher, I know I wasn't. Teach For America had a robust ?diversity? training component but I had zero heads-up on how deal with the vicarious trauma that spilled into my classroom say, when a child admitted abuse in front of the class, or described a violent event in a way that upset other students, or merely acted out not because of mis-labeled ADHD or hyperactivity or a learning disability but because of undiagnosed, unrecognized, un-talked about symptoms related directly to trauma.

Trauma and stress in communities ? among both students and teachers ? are hugely relevant and deserve to be discussed, but accurately.

(Note, this soap box was constructed in large part because I've worked in volunteer settings with trauma victims who have PTSD and have also read far too many psych books as a result of being married to a psychotherapist. Stepping down now.)

* Correction Diana Senechal was guest blogging for Joanne Jacobs; I originally reported that Joanne had written the blog.

Governor Kasich's original version of the budget sought to find a balance between expanding school choice and ensuring that schools of choice are held accountable for their students' performance. For instance, it expanded the state's EdChoice voucher program to provide immediate education options to more students who would otherwise attend failing public schools. It also imposed a ?smart? cap on charter authorizers while removing other barriers to opening new schools. In marked contrast, the House version significantly diminishes charter school accountability and basically empowers school operators as the functional equivalent of private schools unburdened by state rules and accountability requirements.

But that's just one small piece of a big story. Amid the clamor over the charter provisions, too little attention has been paid?or applause offered?for the many terrific features wrought by the governor and/or the House. In several key areas, the House built on the solid foundation laid out by Governor Kasich, upholding his dual goals of improving education in the Buckeye State while helping schools and districts adjust to doing more with less. Without raising taxes, the governor and House have proposed a balanced budget that would free schools to manage their resources at a time when those resources are diminished.

For example, HB 153:

• Encourages the creation of innovation zones in which schools could seek waivers from many state regulations to achieve cost savings or efficiencies, as well as improvements to student achievement, by working together in new ways;
• Promotes the expansion of distance learning opportunities by school districts not only as a potential source of cost savings, but also as a way to customize student learning and deliver courses currently unavailable to pupils in smaller schools and districts; and
• Expands innovative and cost-conscious educational service centers (ESCs), while reducing their state subsidy, setting the conditions for ESCs to compete in offering professional services not only to school districts, charter and STEM schools, but also to municipalities, counties, and other public entities.

The House also deserves plaudits for strengthening sections of the governor's education budget, most notably the provisions dealing with teaching personnel. In the governor's budget, these reforms were headed in the right direction, but language that would allow districts to regress and use antiquated measures (e.g., paper credentials and years of service) to retain and reward teachers still lurked within the new language.

The House dramatically improved those provisions. If the Senate keeps them intact, and it should, teacher evaluations in Ohio will be radically different in the coming years, as will several other personnel policies:

• Teacher evaluations will incorporate students' academic growth (50 percent); use three year's worth of data when measuring such growth; and rate teachers according to four tiers ? highly effective, effective, needs improvement, and unsatisfactory.
• Principals will undergo similar evaluations, which will also incorporate student growth.
• Teachers' level of effectiveness will determine the order of layoffs (ending the woeful, dysfunctional, and costly practice of ?last in, first out?) with teachers who are rated ?unsatisfactory? facing job loss first, followed by teachers rated ?needs improvement,? and so on.
• Principals will be able to reject assignment to their buildings of teachers rated ?unsatisfactory? or ?in need of improvement.?
• Decisions around tenure and dismissal will be tied directly to performance evaluations, with teachers earning unsatisfactory ratings placed on limited contracts and eventually let go.

Besides such reforms of teacher policy, the House made other thoughtful improvements. Realizing that the ?parent trigger? is an untested idea (done only in one school in California), lawmakers approached it cautiously, partnering with the Columbus City Schools in a pilot instead of going statewide. They increased the scholarship amount for the Cleveland voucher program to match that of the EdChoice program. This is important as the Cleveland program has long been sorely underfunded (even when compared with Ohio's other school-choice programs). And in an attempt to stanch the brain drain, state representatives also created opportunities for Ohio high school graduates who leave the state but return within 10 years of graduation to receive in-state college tuition rates.

No one envies the work confronting Ohio's lawmakers. They inherited an $8 billion budget shortfall and a host of tough decisions and painful trade-offs. That they are now tackling these massive fiscal challenges while also pushing needed education reforms is to their credit.

The last several weeks have seen much to-do about charter schools, due to the House's ill-advised budget changes in that realm. We fervently hope that the Senate makes the needed repairs. But it is also important to note that the budget sent to the Senate by the House contains many important reforms that deserve to be highlighted, applauded, and retained.

- Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan, Emmy L. Partin, and Jamie Davies O'Leary

This piece originally appeared in today's Ohio Education Gadfly

In a joint letter to Senate Finance Committee chair Sen. Chris Widener, Peter Groff and Greg Richmond, presidents of NAPCS and NACSA, respectively, say:

Many of the provisions in HB 153 contradict the charter school model, thwart efforts to strengthen charter school accountability and quality, and will ultimately undermine popular support for Ohio's community schools.?? As passed by the Ohio House, the charter provisions of HB 153 represent a significant risk for Ohio's community school sector.

They go on to explain their opposition to the House changes in detail and offer up recommendations for how the Senate can improve HB 153's charter provisions.?? Many of these recommendations echo the 2006 report Turning the Corner to Quality: Policy Guidelines for Strengthening Ohio's Charter Schools, which was issued jointly by NAPCS, NACSA, and the Fordham Institute. They include:

• Removing the ability of schools to seek direct authorization from the Ohio Department of Education, and strengthening the department's oversight of current and future charter sponsors;
• Guaranteeing school governing boards are independent and have control over the operators they hire, and strengthening ethics and transparency rules;
• Eliminating the provision that allows for-profit entities to become governing bodies;
• Providing greater funding equity and access to facilities for charter schools; and
• Promoting the replication of high-performing charter schools.

Read the letter in full here.

This originally appeared in today's Ohio Education Gadfly

The Buckeye State is in the midst of its biennial budget debate, and with the budget bill ? mangled in some areas yet also improved in a few ways by the Ohio House ? now on the Senate table, state senators were eager to hear from two leading education practitioners who have been down the road before. And the road to reform is rough; neither Bennett nor Driscoll minced words about Ohio's financial challenges, the pushback lawmakers and policymakers will receive along the way, and the difficulty in achieving comprehensive, statewide reform.

The good news for Ohio is that we're not alone in pursuing the reforms embedded in HB 153 (or even in SB 5) and Bennett's and Driscoll's testimonies reaffirmed that the state is on the right track.

Bennett ? whose past career as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and sports coach became apparent through the countless sports metaphors in his testimony (titles for his slides included ?staying on the offense? and ?hitting the grand slam?) ? depicted a sense of urgency around lifting student achievement. With his team putting in place high goals for student performance and growth ? 90 percent of students will pass ELA and math; 25 percent of graduates will pass an AP exam or earn college credit, etc. ? this sense of urgency is warranted. Bennett said there is a ?scoreboard? as well as a time clock (literally) in the Statehouse illustrating student achievement data and Indiana's rankings compared to peer states, so it's no wonder that ?competition? is one of Bennett's guiding principles. Much of what he described about Indiana's comprehensive education reform package sounds very similar to what has been proposed or is already in place in Ohio:

• a value-added growth model, and A-F letter grades;
• plans to revamp the lowest one percent of district schools (though Ohio is proposing reconstituting the lowest five percent);
• a move toward lifting caps on charter schools, and expanding choice through a tax credit scholarship;
• a move away from LIFO and automatic salary increases and toward performance-based decision making (informed by rigorous teacher evaluations);
• collective bargaining reform (focuses contract negotiations primarily on salaries and benefits).

However, there are several takeaways from Bennett's description of the Hoosier State that Ohio would do well to borrow:

• A performance-based compensation system that goes beyond the traditional definition of ?merit.? Ohio's proposed system would allow districts to pay more for teachers in shortage areas or subjects and for taking on larger class sizes, and also aims to pay $50 per student making more than a year's worth of growth. Indiana will reward teachers in similar fashion but also for mentorship and leadership roles, which builds professionalism and a sense of mobility and opportunity in the profession. Indiana also will leave seniority and credentials in place (as 33 percent of the sum) which seems to make sense at least in the interim before more performance data is available.
• Strong accountability for voucher-receiving schools. These private schools must test all students and be rated on the same A-F school as other public district schools, and will lose vouchers if they're consistently rated poorly.
• A clear vision to communicate reforms to educators, achieve buy-in, and dispel myths from the outset. Bennett described the need to cut misinformation off at the pass. He and his team met with more than 38,000 teachers statewide, communicated via email and social networking sites weekly as reforms were being shaped, and formed an ?education reform cabinet? made up of teachers through which to vet ideas.

David Driscoll's testimony was equally powerful, in part because he sits on the opposite side of the political aisle yet agreed with Bennett, and in part because Massachusetts has experienced wild success (compared to other states) in terms of ensuring a rising student achievement tide for all students.? Driscoll, who was the commissioner of education for eight years (1999-2007), pointed to Massachusett's Education Reform Act of 1993 as the key impetus for change.? That legislation lifted expectations for students (in the form of more rigorous academic standards, cut scores for proficiency, and graduation requirements); educators (in the form of content-area testing and accountability); and schools/districts (requiring a disaggregation of student data and transparent reporting).

Perhaps his most compelling argument came in the form of a response to a peer Democrat, Ohio Sen. Smith, who asked a question about non-school circumstances affecting learning (?social issues,? ?family issues,? ?learning disabilities?) and how these play into the education reforms Driscoll and Bennett were proposing.

Driscoll's response was equally kind but unyielding (this is a paraphrase): ?There are two sets of facts. You are describing the first set of facts, and that's a given (poverty, non-school factors, etc.). But there's also a second set of facts that we can't ignore ? and that's that some schools do a better job educating kids of the same background than other schools. What will we do with that first set of facts ? just stop and do nothing? (I think the exact wording was something like ?we can cry in our beer,? which, with a Boston accent, sounded more like ?beeh? and was a pretty cool way of describing the pervasive culture of low expectations for poor kids.) We've got to do better than that.?

You can see Tony Bennett's full presentation here. David Driscoll did not provide written remarks.

Tony Bennett's and David Driscoll's visit to Ohio was made possible by the generous support of the Cleveland Foundation, Diggs Family Foundation, Farmer Family Foundation, Fordham Institute, George Gund Foundation,?Mathile Family Foundation, Nord Family Foundation, and the Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation.

The issue, in short, is whether for-profit charter operators should be allowed to operate free of any oversight beyond market forces. The proposed legislation from the Ohio House would neuter both non-profit governing boards and authorizers of their oversight responsibilities and authority, and give school operators carte blanche authority over virtually all school decisions. Let's be clear, we understand that oversight and accountability are things few people or organizations like if they can avoid them. Further, in Ohio charters have to pay their authorizers a fee of up to three percent of their per-pupil funding for this oversight, and that's money that could be spent on programs or in support of the bottom line.

But, consider the alternative. Let us imagine an Ohio without authorizers (aka sponsors in Ohio) or governing boards, which is what the House changes would allow. School operators would police themselves in key areas such as:

Test administration. Absent external oversight, operators would be solely responsible for administering and monitoring state tests. Should an allegation of testing impropriety arise (i.e., teachers cheated), the operator would be responsible for conducting an investigation into the allegations and forwarding the results to the Ohio Department of Education. This situation would be especially troubling for schools that are on the state's automatic closure list for poor performance, where the incentive to cheat to stay alive and keep revenue from kids flowing to the operator is present.

Student safety. Without authorizers or governing boards, there is no system of checks and balances for student safety. Operators would be responsible for policing themselves in critical aspects of school operations related to student safety: transportation, building maintenance, building security and classroom environment. One can easily imagine myriad scenarios where an operator might be inclined to turn a blind eye to costly but necessary repairs/action if it would affect its bottom line, at the expense of students in the building.

Parent complaints. Minus outside oversight, a parent that is having problems with teachers or staff in the school would have no recourse for issues (minus the state department in certain circumstances) other than to the organization causing the problems in the first place.

Teacher complaints. Without oversight, is it reasonable to expect that teachers with legitimate concerns will report them to the operator, the same company that signs their paychecks? Test improprieties, inappropriate conduct, fiscal shenanigans, etc.

Fiscal health. With nobody responsible for checking the books except the operator it would be close to impossible to determine how public dollars are being spent.

Special education. Special education is a very highly regulated area, and also an expensive budget category for schools. Minus oversight, operators would find it very tempting to skirt the IDEA. One could envision scenarios where services are sub-par, kids aren't evaluated, IDEA deadlines aren't met, appropriate supports aren't secured, etc. If no one is watching if these services are provided would all schools actually provide the services?

Everyone benefits from having others oversee what they do. This is especially true when public tax dollars are involved. Is there a better way to do this than what is currently in state law in Ohio? Surely, but the direction the House wants to go isn't it.

-by Terry Ryan and Kathryn Mullen Upton ??

Consider a few facts about the rise in the Hispanic population.

• Between 2000-2010 the national Hispanic population grew by 15.2 million people ? accounting for over half of the overall population growth during that time period!
• The Hispanic community is a young one with 17.1 million Hispanics under the age of 17
• Hispanic students comprise 22 percent or one in five of all prek-12 students

The recent rise in the Hispanic population combined with their youthfulness makes them a vital component to the future success of our nation. However, educational achievement for Hispanic students is far from satisfactory. Rotherham states:

Only 17 percent of Hispanic 4th-graders score proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a national test given to samples of students each year) while 42 percent of non-Hispanic white students do. Nationally, the high school graduation rate for Hispanic students is just 64 percent, and only 7 percent of incoming college students are Hispanic, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education.

If the US is going to keep up in an ever-growing global and technology-focused world then it would only make sense that our fastest growing minority group would be a crucial component to our success. However, with the educational statistics mentioned above we won't be able to compete for long. But what is leading to discrepancies between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students? Rotherham suggests that it is a combination of having low access to highly effective teachers and a college prep curriculum, and the fact that they are more likely to attend a poorly funded school.

According to the recent 2010 Census data the Latino population in Ohio increased by 63 percent since 2000, and they now represent 3.4 percent of Ohio's total population. The rising Hispanic population and subpar educational achievement that is being played out nationally also rings true in Ohio. The Hispanic graduation rate in Ohio is 61.4 percent and the third-grade reading proficiency rate is well below the state average -- only 63.4 percent of Hispanic third-graders are proficient, compared to 78.4 percent statewide.

Rotherham also says Hispanic students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools. Three of the top five districts in Ohio in terms of the percent of students who are Hispanic also had below average ($10,564/pupil) per pupil expenditures. For example, Clearview school district has a Hispanic population of 20.89 percent but a per pupil expenditure of $8,511 (over two thousands less than the state average).

More money won't automatically rectify the problem. Other factors such as highly effective teachers that are equipped with skills and techniques to teach English Language Learners is equally as important. However, it's certain that as the Latino population continues to grow nationally and in Ohio, policy makers and educators must find ways to improve their educational attainment.

Ryan stated:

In a brutal economic environment the Governor's budget properly focused on the dual goals of improving K-12 education in the Buckeye State while helping schools adjust to doing more with less. The budget pushes reforms that seek to free up school districts to in fact do more with less.

For example, Ryan testified:

Probably the most significant item in the budget that has the potential to lead to significant cost savings over the long haul is language that promotes the expansion of innovative and cost-conscious educational service centers (ESCs), while reducing their state subsidy. HB 153 sets the conditions for ESCs to compete in offering professional services statewide not only to school districts, charter and STEM schools, but to other political subdivisions such as municipalities, townships, counties, and other public entities. This should help expand successful educational service centers while also facilitating economies of scale and consolidation of services and service providers. Ohio has built up an overcapacity of government service providers and support agencies over the decades, and HB 153 sets the conditions for right-sizing both the education sector and local government.

Despite the good things in HB 153, Ryan argued that watering down charter school accountability is troubling because it sets a double-standard that hurts children and families. Ryan told the Senate Finance Committee Members:

There is a matter of fairness here that is important if we want good public policy around education. This budget deals aggressively with district schools ranked in the lowest five percent of performance index scores for three or more consecutive years. This budget seeks to hold teachers accountable for the performance of their students. This budget provides a ?parent trigger? for families in troubled Columbus City Schools. If one supports these policies, as I do, it is then impossible to turn around and say that charter school operators should be free of accountability beyond whether or not kids show up at their door.

When children's education is paid for with public dollars, no matter what sort of school those children attend, the public has the right, even the obligation, to know how well those children are learning the skills and knowledge that they need to succeed in further education and in life. All schools that take public dollars to educate children but that cannot demonstrate their educational efficacy in transparent ways should be put on notice. If they can't fix themselves in a reasonable period of time, this situation must be addressed for the good of the children and the sake of the taxpayer. No school operator, no school district, no teacher should be above accountability for results. This is what we owe our children.

The FDR Group's recent survey of Ohio's school district superintendents, Yearning to Break Free (online here), conducted on behalf of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found these local education leaders eager to overhaul the collective bargaining process and to increase their authority over staff and money. ?Give us autonomy,? they said, ?and hold us accountable for getting results.? Easy to understand, right? Well, two unhappy University of Houston professors reviewing the study ?for the National Education Policy Center's ?Think Tank Review Project? had a lot of trouble comprehending it.

From the get-go in their review, the professors failed to realize that the study was giving voice to the opinions of these school leaders ? not our opinions as researchers or even Fordham's but those of Ohio superintendents. The professors say, ?the authors of the study recommend [emphasis added] that ?two promising ways to save districts money are to give superintendents greater control over combined state revenue streams and to mandate a statewide health insurance plan?'? But the report itself stated ?Ohio's superintendents think [emphasis added] two promising ways?? We (neither the FDR Group nor Fordham) didn't recommend anything. Yearning to Break Free is a study of perceptions so the whole report is filled with such modifiers as ?superintendents believe, say, think.? It's hard to see how the professors missed that.

The professors had other troubles. They didn't understand why we would force superintendents to choose between what they called ?inappropriate dichotomies.? They balked when we asked superintendents what would be more likely to lead to improved student achievement: ?significant expansion of management authority over staff? or ?significant increases in school funding.? But the dichotomy is valid and interesting ? and it pushes respondents to think harder and prioritize. (By the way, the result was 50 percent to 44 percent.) I've got a really unrealistic question for the professors: If you had to choose, would you rather have lunch with President Obama or Lady Gaga? See, even a far-fetched dichotomous question can tell you something interesting about your preferences.

I have my own complaints about what the professors say. The professors said the study aggregates responses for superintendents and charter leaders. That's just plain wrong ? it doesn't. They talk about a poor response rate when the response rate was very high for a study of this type ? 40 percent. Real-world survey researchers ? myself included ? dream of getting such high response rates on a regular basis. The professors say we don't know how the superintendents who didn't answer the survey differ from the people who did. Well, by definition that's almost always the case. We made extraordinary efforts to get non-respondents to take the survey (see the appendix of the report for more on those efforts). That's how we got such a high response rate.

Perhaps most amazing to me: in the end, after all the mistruths and mistaken comprehensions, the professors agree that the survey correctly captures the attitudes of superintendents! They say: ?some aspects of the report are not surprising?it is entirely predictable that superintendents would like to have greater control over both teachers' salaries and state regulations.? Oh. So this survey that they claim is badly designed, badly worded, not representative, biased, and narrow somehow got the right answer? Now that is interesting.

By Guest Blogger Steve Farkas

This piece also appeared in today's Ohio Education Gadfly.

The debate happening in the Buckeye State over the Ohio House's charter-related changes to the governor's budget, which would dramatically undermine accountability of charter schools as well as the separate groups that authorize and operate them, is an important one ? not just to Ohioans but to choice advocates nationally. As Checker argues, ?if the Ohio's House's version of the biennial budget makes its way into law, the state's mish-mash of a community-school? program will become a full-fledged contender for America's worst.? But with so many state capitols and legislatures run by charter-friendly Republicans, the debacle unfolding in Ohio should serve as a warning to other states, especially those with a smaller charter sector and less familiar with crafting policies and laws to ensure not only growth but smart growth and accountability.

The article by Tom Needles, lobbyist for the for-profit White Hat Management group and other charter groups, is misleading even in its title, ?Yes: Many states have similar laws that promote greater accountability? (this, in response to ?Are charter-school reforms on right track??). Needles goes on to lift only one significant change to Ohio law that would ?promote greater accountability?: allowing the Ohio Department of Education authorize (aka sponsor) charter schools. He's right that ?this governance model currently exists in one form or another in nearly two dozen states? (setting aside for a moment the fact that ODE already had the chance to authorize charter schools, and blew it). Further, ODE doesn't even want the job.

Needles is misleading when he argues ?some individuals and organizations? suggest? are unprecedented, even outlandish, and will result in a complete lapse in accountability.? What's outlandish and radical, and conveniently left out of Needles' piece, is every other egregious provision proposed by the Ohio House ? you know, the ones that garnered headlines over the last two weeks such as ?Charter school amendments in Ohio House would favor for-profit operators,? ?Ohio's botched charter school reforms reintroduced. Will we ever learn?? and ?Wrong direction: Changes proposed for charter-school law would do harm to school choice.?

In his piece, Checker outlines the charter landscape in Ohio and addresses the full set of proposed reforms in the House version, which would: ?invite creation of more schools by charter operators with abysmal track records; encourage ?authorizing' of more schools by sponsors whose existing portfolios are riddled with failing schools; renew the monopoly enjoyed by current ?cyber schools,'? (among other outlandish language that would exempt charter schools from any education laws or rules ?unless those laws also apply to the state's private schools?). Needles argues that those opposing these provisions ?are not without their own special-interest agendas,? which may be true inasmuch as Checker and Fordham have lived through Ohio's Wild West days where charter schools grew unabated, and led Fordham to have a strong interest in preserving quality in the sector and protecting students from abysmal schools. Checker describes it thusly:

Ohio's law has been out of whack for years, partly because of provisions inserted on behalf of special interests, partly because both legislators and the executive branch have failed to grasp which kinds of freedom and accountability benefit kids, and partly because too many school operators and authorizers either haven't known what they're doing or have placed other interests ahead of students.

The result is overregulation where autonomy is needed, slackness where results-based accountability is essential, restrictions on the growth of quality programs and skimpy funding of worthy schools combined with a whopping waste of tax dollars on poor performers. That's why almost no top-notch national charter operator wants to come to Ohio. That's also why so many Buckeye charters post dismal scores on state tests every year.

A thorough overhaul is needed, freeing schools from silly rules while holding everyone's feet to the fire for academic results. But the budget passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would push the state's charter program from mediocre to awful.

But, this is not a fight between White Hat and Fordham. Fordham's position is the same as that taken by the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools and by the Greater Cleveland Partnership. It is also the position taken by leading editorial boards across the state.

Fordham would agree with Needles that the charter sector in Ohio needs to be more ?innovative, quality-focused and responsive to diverse alternatives,? but the provisions currently on the table would set Ohio back and this is obvious to everyone who isn't invested in the changes advocated by Needles and his sponsor David Brennan.

Here's what the schools' turnaround plan entails. First, all of the teachers at Butchels and Perkins will have to reapply for their jobs at the end of the year. Half of them will be brought back to teach in the new ?combined? school building, while the other half will be placed elsewhere in another district school. Secondly, Akron is hoping to allow the current principals to remain in the school. Third, when the new school opens in 2012 they will belong to a network of 62 New Tech High Schools across the country that focuses on problem solving and computer literacy. Each student will be given a laptop or tablet so they will be able to access the school's network at any time.

While the reform intentions here should be applauded the plan is problematic for a couple of different reasons. ?How are school officials determining who will teach in the new school versus who will be placed elsewhere? Is it seniority-based? Or do they have other metrics for determining who goes where? ?Simply pushing teachers around ? some of who might be ineffective ? from one school to the next won't solve the problem. Furthermore, Akron should not allow the principals to continue to serve in the new school. If the same leaders are simply transferred over to the new school will anything really improve? Finally, the New Tech approach is costly to implement and sustain. The district will have to pay $500,000 up front to set up the new school and train the staff. They are also applying for several grants and hope to receive $5 million over the next three years to help sustain the new school. ?What happens when the funds dry up, or if they don't get the grants at all?

I congratulate the Akron Public Schools for recognizing the need to reform its lowest public schools, though I hope I'm wrong for being skeptical about whether their reform approach will be effective.

We've been drawn into this and haven't been shy about commenting (see here, here and here), but it has been seriously frustrating to be in this debate. In fact, the House charter language was so one-sided and out of kilter that it should never have even made it out of the House. If it had been presented to some of the state's charter school leaders ahead of time ??? like the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools ??? it would surely have been refined and improved upon before being put forth in the budget. Water under the bridge now, and hopefully the Senate will fix the mess passed their way.

Yet, despite the charter challenge, the House - building on some good stuff passed to them by the Governor - has gotten a lot right in the budget. First, considering the $8 billion budget deficit facing the state the House-passed the pain across school districts in what can only be described as fair and equitable. Poor districts and their students have not been hit as hard as wealthier districts, and for people who care about fairness and equity this is surely a step in the right direction. In fact, the Ohio budget proposal is less damaging to needy kids and school districts than the one currently being pushed by Democrats in New York (see here).

Further, the legislative changes around teacher-related policies in the House budget are very good and exactly the direction the Buckeye State needs to be moving. As Jamie described earlier this week, the House deserves credit for strengthening teacher evaluation language; instituting similar evaluations for principals (that incorporate student growth and will help teachers perceive their own evaluations as fairer); removing forced placement/hiring of teachers rated ???unsatisfactory??? or ???in need of improvement??? (and instead requiring mutual consent hiring); and tying decisions around tenure and dismissal directly to performance evaluations.

This language is leaps and bounds better than the original version. Fordham has been pushing for years to end LIFO-based layoffs, and while the governor tried to replace LIFO with performance-based metrics the language was still murky and preserved some aspects of teacher seniority. The House installed a provision that teachers must be laid off in order of effectiveness, starting with teachers rated unsatisfactory first, then ???in need of improvement,??? then effective, then highly effective. This is a huge step forward in teacher quality and will ensure that students across Ohio have the best teachers in place, and House members deserve big thanks for this.

In addition to teacher policy reforms, the House budget has thoughtful provisions to test teachers in failing school buildings as opposed to the entire district. This will surely save money while still get at teacher quality. Realizing that the ???parent trigger??? is an untested idea (done only in one school in California), House lawmakers approached this with caution and made it a pilot program in Columbus City Schools instead of a statewide program. Further, the House increased the scholarship amount for the Cleveland voucher program, which has long been underfunded in comparison to other choice programs in Ohio. In an effort to combat the brain drain, the House also created opportunities for Ohio high school graduates (returning to the state within 10 years of graduation) to receive in-state tuition rates.

In short, while the events of the last week have inspired much uproar around charter quality provisions -- and we were drawn into this in a big way ??? it is important to point out that the House budget has some important school reforms in it and they deserve to be highlighted and applauded. They also deserve the support of the Senate.

Sec.??3314.04. Except as otherwise specified in this chapter and in the contract between a community school and a sponsor entered into under section 3314.08 of the Revised Code, such school is exempt from all state laws and rules pertaining to schools, school districts, and boards of education, except those laws and rules that grant certain rights to parents. No community school shall be required to comply with any education laws or rules or other requirements that are not specified in this chapter or in the contract entered into under section 3314.08 of the Revised Code that otherwise would not apply to a chartered nonpublic school.

In short, this provision states that charter schools (they're officially called ???community schools??? in the Buckeye State) will not have to comply with any education laws or rules that exist outside of chapter 3314 of the Ohio Revised Code (Ohio's charter school law), unless those laws also apply to the state's private schools.

What does that mean in practice? Will charters now be exempt from the Ohio Achievement Assessments, the state's accountability system, basic teacher licensure rules, and rules governing things like student attendance?

Yes, charter schools need autonomy and there are some silly yet expensive compliance requirements embedded in state law right now. But autonomy must be thoughtful and awarded only in exchange for accountability for performance. Provisions like this one will move Ohio's charter schools away from being privately run public schools to being publicly funded private schools with zero accountability to students, families, or taxpayers.

The Ohio House continues its work on HB 153 today and tomorrow. Let's hope they see the error of their ways and don't leave too big of a mess for their colleagues in the state Senate to clean up.

In the original version, teacher personnel reforms were headed in the right direction but the details were off. While the bill eliminated LIFO, streamlined teacher dismissal procedures, and tried to establish meaningful performance evaluations and merit pay, it also retained antiquated variables like level of license (heavily correlated with having a master's degree) and highly qualified status as measures of ?performance? that would have allowed districts to continue making personnel decisions using these proxies for seniority. Teacher reforms are much clearer in the House version.

The timeline for the state superintendent (yet to be selected) to determine a model framework for teacher evaluations creates a sense of urgency (December 31, 2011); districts would have until July 2012 to submit their own frameworks. ?Teacher evaluations will incorporate student growth (50 percent); use three year's worth of data when measuring a students' gains; and rate teachers according to four tiers ? highly effective, effective, needs improvement, and unsatisfactory.

More importantly, these new teacher evaluation ratings (which will be published in the aggregate by the state department of education) will inform all other teacher personnel policies. This includes layoffs -- LIFO is replaced not with vague ?performance? language but a direct requirement that districts suspend teachers in order of their evaluation ratings, starting with unsatisfactory teachers; dismissal -- two consecutive years of unsatisfactory ratings would place a teacher on a limited contract and possibly lead to dismissal; and hiring/transfers -- a teacher rated unsatisfactory or in need of improvement cannot automatically be placed at another school unless there is mutual consent from the teacher and hiring principal. Those teachers can be placed on unpaid leave and eventually may be dismissed.??

Further, principals will be subject to similar evaluations, with 50 percent of the evaluation incorporating student growth data.

Of course, there are still pieces of the bill related to teachers that don't make much sense. The House version retains the statewide merit pay program that would award teachers $50 for each student making more than a year's worth of gains. Is $50 a large enough amount to matter? Shouldn't that money be better targeted to the most highly effective teachers (arguably those reaching a higher bar than 1.1 years of growth)? How will the state pay for this?

It also upholds one of the more alarming sanctions from the original budget ? testing teachers' content knowledge. In the House version, core subject teachers teaching in the lowest 10 percent of buildings (not districts, as before) statewide will be required to take a content-area exam. Further, the House extended this provision to all schools statewide, including charter schools. While we understand the sentiment behind it, we're skeptical of this provision. For starters, it assumes that lack of content knowledge or expertise is the primary reason for ineffective instruction. Second, teacher effectiveness varies widely within buildings and this disincentivizes higher performing teachers from teaching in troubled schools, not to mention the fact that it would cost approximately $1.5 million annually. A better requirement would be to test those teachers who consistently receive ratings of unsatisfactory or in need of improvement rather than large swaths of teachers in poorly performing schools.

Still, most of the language as it relates to teachers is a huge step forward, and creates a meaningful foundation for Ohio to hire, retain, reward, evaluate, develop, and dismiss teachers in a way that finally values effectiveness over credentials and seniority.

Ohio early on hewed to a laissez-faire approach to school growth and quality. As a result some of the people and organizations that launched schools were ill-prepared. Some had eccentric views of what a school should be. Some operators turned out to be more interested in personal enrichment than in delivering high-quality instruction to poor kids.

As a result, headlines such as ???Charters Fail to Deliver,??? ???State Audit Says Charter School Company Owes Thousands,??? and ???Wild Experiment??? were ubiquitous. Things were so bad that the then Republican State Auditor Jim Petro issued a report blasting the Ohio Department of Education for being such a weak and non-selective charter school authorizer. Less than a year later the Republican-controlled General Assembly had passed HB364 which required the Ohio Department of Education to get out of the business of sponsoring charter schools entirely.

This was the first effort at cleaning up Ohio's troubled charter school program and it would be followed up in subsequent years by further reforms to the program by Republicans that included the implementation of one of the nation's toughest automatic charter school closure laws.. As a result of seeking a better balance between choice and accountability Ohio's charter school program has seen far fewer school blow-ups in recent years and the overall quality of the program has improved as really atrocious schools have been forced out of the market for poor performance.

Yesterday the Ohio House decided the Buckeye State should go back in time and instead of seeking a balance between choice and accountability, its plan focuses exclusively on how more schools can open, especially those by for-profit companies with less-than -stellar track records of success in the state.?? Some of the more troubling parts of the bill include:

??????????????? Allowing charter school operators to apply directly to the Ohio Department of Education for direct authorization to establish a school and upon approval of the application operate the school without a sponsor (the same Department of Education that was banned from the job in 2005).

??????????????? Allow charter school operators the right of first refusal for future management services and that an operator's consent should also be required for renewal of any existing contract between a governing board and a sponsor (giving operators veto power over their regulator).

??????????????? Allow a charter school sponsor ??? no matter how bad its current crop of schools ??? to open many more new schools.

??????????????? Permits an individual aged 22-29 who does not have a diploma or certificate of equivalence to enroll for up to two years in a dropout recovery program free of tuition and earmarks $1M per year from economic development program funds for this purpose (this during a time when all schools are facing cuts to their funding).

In late January I wrote an op-ed for the Cleveland Plain Dealer that warned:

???For too long, charter school education has been a political battlefield on which powerful political interests have waged war. As such, charter quality has suffered and children who badly needed better educational options have all too often bounced from troubled school to troubled school. Gov. Kasich and Republican lawmakers should break the cycle of political acrimony around school choice. This means resisting the temptation ??? and the encouragement they will surely receive from some in the charter sector ??? to push for more charter schools while also scaling back on school accountability. This would be a grave mistake.???

So much for the power of the pen, but the message is still true. Ohio needs to take the lessons of the past seriously and not return to the days of charter schools run amok.

Beyond the obvious questions about TFA's move onto Ohio soil, several other things stood out from the bill signing. First, despite wide-ranging support for the program, there's still a lot of opposition to the program and until teachers are working successfully in classrooms to bust some myths, I don't expect that to go away.? Second, it shouldn't be surprising but is interesting nonetheless how the governor took credit for bringing TFA here (he drew a direct line between mentioning TFA in his State of the State speech, and the swiftness with which legislation was passed). But it was good to see the legislators who introduced both sets of bills standing by his side (along with countless aides who worked hard?to get it?passed). Third, Kasich is known to speak off the cuff, but this comment certainly made most people bristle and gives opponents of TFA something absurd to glob onto, unfortunately. But over time, hopefully criticisms of the program will erode.

It was pretty cool to watch a piece of legislation actually get signed (and it takes forever with all the switching of the pens) ?cooler than I'd anticipated. As an alum and a proud Ohio native, it was hard not to feel emotional, actually. While others were focusing on Kasich's remarks, or wondering about the impossible budget situation facing districts and the uphill battle TFA may face, or feeling irritated by leading questions asked by reporters (I felt all of those things to some extent), the clearest thought in my head was of my own kindergarteners in Camden; the mix of pride and sadness I felt when packing up my classroom and driving away from New Jersey; the incredible 12-sentence essay that Freddy wrote that one time; the improvement in not just DuKwan's reading over time but his new-found enthusiasm for school. I think all of us alums were feeling that when we stood up there with the governor.? That's the thing about being a teacher? it makes you a perennial optimist, and too sentimental for your own good, at least when it comes to kids.

The panel spoke to the different challenges facing the Dayton community and the desperate need for education reform in the city. While the panelists disagreed about certain things there were two big areas of agreement that stood out.

The need for a supportive community

The moderator, Ellen Belcher from the Dayton Daily News, asked a question about what was needed of the Dayton community to foster reforms in education and move the city in the right direction. The panelists agreed that community support and involvement is crucial for education reform; however, they noted that it is extremely difficult to build in Dayton because of a variety of factors. They noted that obstacles, such as children coming to school hungry or who have even seen a parent been shot before their eyes, bring challenges to the classroom that are difficult to overcome. It is also no secret to anyone in the Dayton community or the state for that matter that the city is struggling economically. ?With the recent departure of major corporations such as NCR the Dayton community has had the wind knocked out of its sails. These setbacks not only impact those who lost their jobs, but the community at large. Talented and influential leaders that could be a crucial part of solving the problem are becoming less and less available, and Dayton needs to stem their loss.

Good teachers matter

This sentiment is one that the panelists seemed to agree on wholeheartedly. Everyone agreed that teachers are the most important component of a child's success in the classroom. In order for students to gain the best education possible they must be taught by the best and brightest teachers, and for this to happen a meaningful evaluation system must be put in place that allows for the best and worst teachers to be identified. Lori Ward, DPS Superintendent said it best when she said ?when you have a weak link, they have to go, plain and simple.? Ohio districts must work towards a fair and objective evaluation system that meaningfully evaluates teachers based on student data, peer reviews, and their commitment to the school and its overall growth.

As a Dayton native and someone who cares about the future of the city very much, I left the event both with a sense of sadness for a city that was once thriving and now barely breathing,?yet optimistic?because of the sense of urgency and provocative ideas for reform that were present among the panelists and audience today. Increasing community involvement and creating a teacher evaluation system are just two tools for reforming the condition of education in the Gem City. There are many more that must be utilized. At the end of the day Dayton must find a way to pick itself up and attract talented and young individuals who can educate the youth of the city. Dayton must find and inject talented people into schools if they want to see results. This is easier said than done, but we must find a way to persevere for the future of the children of Dayton.

The substance of SB 7 is good news for schools and students ? it ends last in, first out layoffs and allows teachers' seniority to only serve as a ?tie breaker? after performance is considered; gets rid of forced (seniority-based) transfers; and ties dismissal and tenure to meaningful performance reviews. (It also makes the Chicago Teachers Union's ability to strike contingent on 75 percent approval by membership. For more details, read a summary of the bill by the reform group Advance Illinois.) But what's more notable than the bill's details is the broad bipartisan support it earned, the political process behind its passage, and the lessons this bears for Ohio ? where similar teacher personnel changes are being passed but in dramatically different fashion.

Prairie State Politics

For starters, it's worth pointing out that the political situation in Illinois is quite different from that in Ohio, where unions have wholly rejected teacher policy reforms. The Buckeye State passed a bill ending LIFO, streamlining teacher dismissal procedures, and putting performance metrics in place that would supersede seniority ? yet a quick glance at local and national news coverage would seem to belie the fact that Ohio has reforms worth celebrating. The obvious reason is that teacher personnel reforms are couched in the controversial collective bargaining bill, Ohio's Senate Bill 5. Contrast this with Illinois Education Associate President Ken Swanson's statement regarding his union's support of similar changes: ?You don't need to attack collective bargaining rights. It should be recognized that unions have a great deal to bring to the table in shaping reforms that work.?

But it's not just the messaging behind each set of bills that's different (with Illinois's original ?Performance Counts? legislation sounding emphatically more pro-teacher than Ohio's collective bargaining rollback). Other political factors were at play. Andy Rotherham, former domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, points out about SB 7's unanimous passage in the Illinois Senate:

While the narrative is all about collaboration, it's important to note the context in which that collaboration happened ? the teachers unions were boxed in because legislation was going to move and there was a lot of pressure on key elected players.

And in reading the official response from Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, the union's negotiating position does seem precarious:

In an unprecedented effort, the three unions? joined forces to stop these millionaires from turning teaching into a low-wage, high turnover job.

We successfully made the case that the right to strike, seniority, due process and a solid evaluation system all play an integral role to make possible the promise of democracy, equity and quality in public education. Our next challenge is to ensure that that evaluation under the PERA law being constructed now is indeed fair and equitable.

PERA, referring to the 2010 Performance Evaluation Reform Act that was passed to make Illinois's bid for Race to the Top more competitive, laid the groundwork for SB 7 and is clearly at the top of the unions' list of concerns. As education observer Alexander Russo suggested on his blog, cooperation from the state's major teachers unions on Senate Bill 7 may represent an attempt to water down teacher evaluations put in place last year:

A?quick?look at the bill raises several questions about its ability to improve teaching effectiveness when the time comes for actual implementation:?The bill requires locally-approved teacher evaluation plans in "good faith" consultation with unions serving on a joint committee with administrators, and sets a 90 day window after which all bets are off.?There's no hard requirement that 50 percent of evaluation be based on student achievement.?There's no hard deadline for developing a new plan.?Districts can request a waiver and it will be granted automatically if the state doesn't respond within 45 days.?

Lengthy Campaign for Change

There is another significant difference between Illinois and Ohio: The Prairie State overhauled the state's teacher evaluation system over 16 months ago, and SB 7 builds on top of those reforms. Stand for Children's policy director noted that ?without PERA, it would have been very difficult to get at a lot of what we did? PERA laid some great foundation for what's coming next.?

In contrast, Ohio is pushing hard and fast on teacher personnel policies, but putting the proverbial cart before the horse when it comes to ending LIFO, streamlining dismissal, and setting up a merit pay system as there's not yet a robust, fair, transparent teacher evaluation system in place. This is an important lesson for the Buckeye State. Until teachers and their unions see the roll-out of a meaningful evaluation system that differentiates varying levels of effectiveness, can the state expect them to follow willingly on ending tenure, LIFO, or installing merit pay? To what extent does collaboration a la Illinois matter?

Impact of Advocacy Organizations

Finally, the experience in Illinois points to the usefulness of state education advocacy organizations (EAOs) in building momentum for legislation through months of careful planning and strategy. Advance Illinois and Stand for Children helped broker three months worth of negotiations between all relevant groups and also messaged SB 7 as part of the state's charge to ?build better schools in Illinois.? A quick look at the ?Performance Counts? website illustrates the how the messaging behind the campaign matters. The site is user friendly, links into various social media outlets, and the EAOS have helped build a broad coalition of supporters. While Ohio has various non-EAOs that conduct important policy work, research, and some on-the-ground outreach (think School Choice Ohio on vouchers, and KidsOhio and Fordham on research and policy), Ohio has no purebred EAO doing the sort of micro-targeting and messaging that might be necessary to bolster the palatability of Ohio's teacher reforms.

This piece also appeared in today's Ohio Education Gadfly

It is interesting to go back in time and see how the current step-and-lane system emerged. My friend and long-time Daytonian Nancy Diggs wrote a book in 1997 on the life of Evangeline Lindsley called My Century: An Outspoken Memoir. Lindsley was one of Dayton's truly outstanding 20^th century educators and was recognized as one of city's Ten Top Women in 1981. Lindsley also served as president of the Classroom Teachers Association in Dayton, and was elected as only the second member of the Executive Committee of the Ohio Education Association in the 1930s. She lived to be over 100.

In My Century Lindsley shared how the single-salary schedule came to be in Dayton during the Great Depression:

It was in the early ???30s that I found out that there was quite a difference in the pay between men and women teachers. I was asked to fill in to take tickets at one of the football games. It was in the evening, after 6:00, and the man on the gate who worked with me got paid, and I didn't???

Later on when I became president of the Classroom Teachers Association, I brought up that pay discrepancy and soon we had a single-salary schedule.

As I said, back in the early ???30s, we were not getting all our pay. There wasn't any money to pay us, so they were issuing scrip, which was a kind of I.O.U. When you took the scrip to the store it was discounted, and then the (School) Board redeemed it when they got the money. If you got a $50 scrip and they gave you $25, that's all you had.

We finally decided that we needed to do something about that, so when I was put in as president of the Classroom Teachers, I said we needed legal advice, because the Board wasn't getting any money from the state. It was terrible, it was a bad situation. It was in the midst of the Depression, you understand, but nevertheless they expected us to keep teaching. One of the school board members of the city of Dayton, a bachelor, by the way, even proposed that the teachers teach without pay for love of teaching. I don't know what he thought we'd live on.

We hired Estabrook, Finn and McKee,* one of the most prestigious law firms in the city. With their advice we secured the services of Don Thomas, who was a member of the state legislature. Later he was a judge of Common Pleas Court in Dayton. With his help we went into the records at the Montgomery County Courthouse and we found millionaires on the tax duplicate who hadn't paid taxes to the County for twelve years that had never been reported as delinquent. We found that the treasurer and the auditor were not collecting money that could be collected.

The amount of delinquency was horrendous, so we went to the state legislature. With the help of Don Thomas we introduced a bill that provided that people who were delinquent in their tax payments could arrange with their county treasurer to pay their back taxes on the installment plan without penalty. This law was passed and is still on the books today???

We did ever so many things like that, all with the legal advice of Estabrook, Finn and McKee. I'm very proud of that record. That's the kind of problem we had to deal with professionally???

I also found out that there was a differential between elementary and high school pay, and I felt that was ridiculous, because I couldn't see any difference between the importance of high school teaching or the required professionalism of teachers of first or second grades from ninth or tenth or eleventh or twelfth. So we fought that through the Classroom Teachers, and we won it. We established the principle of a single-salary schedule. That's one of the things of which I am very proud, because I really did fight that through. I wasn't very popular with the high school teachers, though. They liked to think they were better than the elementary teachers.???

Times change, but it is important to understand how the fights of one era still resonate today. This is especially true for those of us who are advocating for changes to systems that have served teachers well for decades.

*Note: Estabrook, Finn and McKee was founded by Samuel Finn ??? Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr.'s grandfather.

My sense is that the school reform movement?roughly defined as those who believe that schools alone can make a dent in the seemingly intractable problems arising from the confluence of race and poverty?is headed into a major beat down.

Why the pessimism? I'm watching Ohio Gov. John Kasich make one of the most boneheaded moves I can imagine, trying to solve his budget problem by trimming back union collective bargaining while simultaneously imposing school reforms such as ushering in better teacher evaluations.

Does he really think teachers horrified at a peel-back of their collective bargaining are going to embrace a new teacher evaluation system? A similar package of twinned reforms is working its way through the Tennessee legislature. In Ohio, teacher union officials vow to place the governor's reforms on the November ballot, putting both budget and education reforms at risk.

Set aside for a moment Whitmire's, well, boneheaded analysis on the policy merits of Kasich's reform plans. (What's the point of introducing a rigorous teacher-evaluation system if poorly performing teachers can never be fired, thanks to provisions in collective-bargaining agreements? And does Whitmire really believe that teachers in Ohio were going to ?embrace? tougher evaluations were it not for Senate Bill 5? Clearly Whitmire hasn't done much of the ?on the ground? reporting he likes to promote?in Ohio at least.)

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Photo by Frank Black Noir"][/caption]

Still, Whitmire raises an important strategic question: When pushing for major reforms, is it best to ?go for broke??even knowing that it will lead to a backlash?or better to go slow and steady? I don't know the answer, and maybe there isn't a rule that applies to all situations. And it's hardly just education reform that faces the dilemma. Consider President Obama's push for healthcare reform. Many conservatives have argued that he went too far, well to the left of the electorate. And sure enough, a resulting backlash cost him control of Congress last November.

But I suspect that Obama knew the risks and would do it all over again?because he achieved a major reform of the healthcare system that will be hard to undo. And the 2010 backlash is likely to fuel an equal and opposite backlash by 2012 as House Republicans push too far to the right.

Back to education. Try this thought experiment: You're John Kasich, or Mitch Daniels, or Scott Walker. Because of favorable ratios in your legislature you have a free hand to push the pedal to the metal on education reform. Do you go for broke?promoting school choice, tenure reform, teacher evaluations, curtailing bargaining rights?or do you play it safe? If you're worried about re-election, a middle course might be smart. But if you believe in what you're doing and want to make maximum progress in the long-term, going fast and furious isn't crazy. Yes, there will be a backlash. Yes, teachers will feel upset in the mid-term. Yes, you will energize the teachers unions to turn out big in the next election cycle. And yes, that will lead to some lost ground. But if you keep the long view, you'll surmise that some?maybe most?reforms will stick. And it's worth the short-to-medium term pain.

Again, I don't know the ?right? answer to the backlash question. But I do remember quite clearly that left-of-center reformers like Whitmire had no qualms with Arne Duncan using his free hand under Race to the Top to be aggressive. Now it's Republican governors with a free hand; shouldn't the same rules apply?

?Mike Petrilli

Changes to state law cannot trump existing collective bargaining agreements. So until a teacher union contract expires, teachers and districts won't have to comply with the bill's provisions. Those include (among other things): prohibiting strikes; removing decisions about leave policies, class sizes, and employee assignment from the scope of collective bargaining; prohibiting salaries from increasing solely due to time on the job; removing seniority as the prime determinant of layoffs; allowing districts to pay no more than 85 percent of employees' health care premiums; and prohibiting districts from paying any portion of employees' pension contribution.

We've seen a rash of one- or two-year contracts agreed to recently as a result of SB 5, including in Columbus, the state's largest district. A few locals have negotiated longer agreements, like Bexley, outside Columbus, where teachers and the district agreed to a four-year contract in quick fashion (a single day!). That agreement ends in July 2015, by which time Ohioans may well have ousted the current governor and Republican House majority and replaced them with Democrats who will have overturned the work of the previous administration.

What's missing from many of these agreements are attempts to deal with the fiscal cliff the state and local governments are driving off that would require dramatically different budget cutting than what's been done in the past. But the public might not know that. Today's Columbus Dispatch offered up the headline, ???No Raises for City Teachers??? ??? but the accompanying article revealed:

The Columbus contract will keep the average salary for a district teacher at about $57,000 a year, Johnson [president of the teacher union] said. And for the two-thirds of educators eligible for "step" increases based on their years of experience, the bump will be half its typical size.

A teacher with a bachelor's degree and eight years of experience makes $53,562 this school year. Under the old contract, a teacher on the next rung - with nine years of experience - would earn $55,675. The new contract spreads that $2,113 raise over two years.

Meanwhile, the district is maintaining its maximum class-size requirements and also has EdJobs money in the bank to soften the blow. I understand that unions are eager to rush contracts to avoid the effects of SB 5 on their members. But shouldn't district leaders, in exchange, be demanding at least a few changes that will actually put them in a position to deal with the ???new normal??? they will soon face?

- Emmy Partin

Governor Kasich and the Ohio legislature ??? in just over 100 days ??? have been working furiously on a series of changes to law that seek to give school district officials more flexibility in how they manage their districts in time of fiscal scarcity. For example, Ohio lawmakers have passed legislation (SB 5) that would give district officials flexibility to RIF teachers based on performance rather than exclusively on seniority, legislation has been passed that reduces state mandates (HB 30), and the current budget would allow for more innovation and sharing of services across schools, school districts and other government entities (HB153).

This is all for the good, but most of these changes will have little or no impact on how decisions are made in the coming months by districts dealing with their FY2012 budgets. Even reform-minded superintendents wanting to make smart cuts are bound ??by current law and contract language. As such, districts across the state are cutting pretty much in a cookie-cutter fashion, as the reforms embedded in SB 5 and the governor's budget won't go into effect until this summer at the earliest (and SB 5 will likely be up for referendum in the fall, thus freezing its provisions until then). Newspaper stories from across the state tell the tale. Here are just a few snippets from recent stories:

???Elementary guidance positions and gifted-and-talented specialists would be eliminated, as well as reading and math ???intervention' teachers in the grade schools and the family consumer science program in the junior highs. Bus routes would be consolidated, especially for high school students and transportation for some sports could become one-way, with parents expected to pick up their children after games. Pay-to-play fees would rise, lunch prices would increase by 25 cents in all schools, class sizes would grow, and elective course options would be reduced.

?????Sylvania school district unveils plan to cut $6 million,??? Toledo Blade (January 11, 2011)

?????Eighteen teachers will lose their jobs, many students will lose their buses and the program for gifted children will be axed in the London school district. In addition, eight classrooms aides, a principal and a mechanic will lose their jobs, a half-time dean's position will be eliminated and the preschool program will be revamped to save money. Pay-to-participate fees will increase.???

?????????????????????? ???London schools list cuts,??? Columbus Dispatch (January 13, 2011)

???The Pickerington school board approved $13 million in budget cuts last night that will eliminate the jobs of about 100 teachers, classroom aides, school nurses, secretaries and administrators. The cuts also eliminate field trips and the DARE anti-drug program and limit some bus service. They'll also reduce art, music and physical education in the district's seven elementary schools.???

?????????????????????? ???Pickerington school board's cuts cost 100 jobs,??? Columbus Dispatch (January 25, 2011)

?????The new round of cuts will leave the school system with fewer teachers, larger classes, higher fees for athletics and other extracurricular programs, fewer learning specialists and fewer electives at the high schools, officials said.???

?????????????????????? ???12.2M in Lakota school cuts detailed,??? Cincinnati Enquirer (February 24, 2011)

The lag time between needed policy reforms and impending budget cuts will hurt school districts and the children they serve, and district leaders can do nothing about it. It is significant that Ohio's lawmakers are modernizing state laws to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school districts, but the timing of this was all off by about two years.

??-Terry Ryan

Ohio's senator Sherrod Brown captured the frustration of many of his fellow Ohioans when he said, ???NASA ignored the intent of Congress and the interests of taxpayers. NASA was directed to consider regional diversity when determining shuttle locations. Unfortunately, it looks like regional diversity amounts to which coast you are on, or which exit you use on I-95. Even more insulting to taxpayers is that having paid to build the shuttles, they will now be charged to see them at some sites.???

Ohio has been dealt a series of blows in recent years from seeing long-time employers like NCR bolt to Atlanta, to losing two Congressional seats to faster growing states like Texas, to seeing Akron's native son Lebron James bolt Cleveland for the Miami Heat. It seems that the Buckeye State can't compete with the money, energy, and population of the coastal states. This hurts the vitality of our communities and makes it harder to fight the ???brain drain.??? To put this in perspective, on our current trajectory the Census projects that we'll have more senior citizens than young people in just 25 years (for the first time in history). So every single blow adds up, and will make it that much harder for Fordham's hometown state and city (Dayton) to remain competitive.

-Terry Ryan

Being provocative isn't always a bad thing ? and Ravitch does it well. Her latest charge to Twitter followers is pretty pointless, though. She suggests a naming contest for charter school names (#charterschoolnames) and then retweets suggestions from followers that range from mildly funny to offensive, especially to the poor, mostly minority families who flee their traditional school for an alternative and who certainly wouldn't categorize themselves as ?privileged.? Here are some of the worst:

• Dollars First Academy
• Privilege Academy
• Test Purgatory Hi-Tech High
• Letuslineourpockets High
• Erasure Secondary
• Dewey, Cheatum & Howe Academy
• Results By Attrition Network, Inc
• Wishful Thinking, Heavy Spending Academy
• I'm Better Than You Academy
• Village of Stepford Charter School
• W.A.S.P. Academy (Why Ask Stupid People)
• TFA Tours

Wow. This ridiculous Twitter anti-charter rant is more like giving the child a drum set. Ohio Gadfly suggests other charter school names that are probably more accurate, at least from the perspective of the families and kids who utilize such options, like ?Kids who would otherwise not have a shot in hell because their current school is failing ACADEMY.?

Flypaper readers, please weigh in with other suggestions if you're in the mood for a laugh or a blood pressure spike.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Given how powerfully teachers can alter students' life trajectories, it is not only prudent but imperative to push reforms that enable education leaders to distinguish effective teachers from ineffective ones. With a fair and rigorous system that measures gradations of teacher effectiveness - not just binary ratings such as "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" - school systems can reward their ablest instructors and put them in the classrooms where they are most needed, target support to teachers who need it and weed out those who are not a good fit for the profession. For Ohio, where low-income and minority children reach proficiency at far lower rates than their wealthier peers, the stakes are enormous.

But the evaluation system isn't working nearly as well as it needs to. As U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has noted: "Everyone agrees that teacher evaluation is broken. Ninety-nine percent of teachers are rated satisfactory and most evaluations ignore the most important measure of a teacher's success - which is how much their students have learned."

In Ohio, districts pay long-serving but mediocre teachers more than they pay less senior high-fliers. They reward teachers for credentials and advanced degrees, as well as years on the job, yet they offer the same pay for teachers whether their pupils thrive or languish. Layoffs are based on seniority. This may once have been acceptable, if only because there were few valid alternatives. But many states and districts have begun to craft evaluation systems that move the profession forward. It's Ohio's turn to do the same.

Gov. John Kasich's budget and the recently enacted Senate Bill 5 seek to move the state toward evaluations that identify the impact of individual instructors on student learning, in order to inform decisions around retention, pay, hiring and dismissal. This is a huge opportunity to raise the needle on student achievement. But Ohio has to get the details right. Systems that measure and reward performance are still at the pilot stage, and no jurisdiction has yet developed a perfect system.

The good news is that Ohio is better positioned than most places to build a modern and fair system for gauging teacher effectiveness because it has a relatively sophisticated system of value-added analysis of student achievement in reading and math in grades four through eight, and has accumulated these data since 2007. Value-added data - how much a child learns during a given school year - should be an important component for measuring teacher effectiveness.

Second, some Ohio districts, with the cooperation of their teachers unions, have been working to create better approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of classroom instructors. One of the best is Cincinnati's Teacher Evaluation System. It helps identify which teachers are more effective - and a recent study found that it has contributed to teachers significantly improving their instruction. In other words, it doesn't just judge teachers; it makes them better at their craft. Cincinnati's efforts and others like it need to inform where Ohio goes with it teacher-evaluation efforts.

Third, Ohio's Race to the Top proposal for federal funding committed the state and participating school districts to creating quality teacher-evaluation systems that incorporate student performance. The Ohio Department of Education has money, expertise and a mandate to develop such systems.

Creating better teacher-evaluation systems in Ohio is not as daunting as some would have us think. The key will be to encourage district and teacher participation. Don't wait for the state to do it - and don't expect to create a one-size-fits-all evaluation system to cover every local circumstance. Instead, press districts to come up with systems that incorporate common data elements from the state while also incorporating measures such as expert and peer evaluations, building- and district-level performance metrics, and even student evaluations.

Ohio is well-positioned to lead the nation in the development of high-quality teacher-evaluation systems. It has many of the necessary pieces already in place and it has the political momentum to get this done. Now is the time to do it.

???Terry Ryan

This post originally appeared in Saturday's Columbus Dispatch and Dayton Daily News.

Terry offered support for:

• The creation of Innovation Schools/ Zones, which would allow schools to achieve cost savings and greater efficiencies by allowing them to seek waivers from some state laws.
• The expansion of school choice. He praised the fact this budget would hold charter schools and their sponsors more accountable for their performance, but cautions that many details still need to be worked out and refined.
• The expansion of the EdChoice scholarship. He offered support for the proposed expansion of the voucher program, but called for the academic performance of private schools to be tracked and evaluated. As it currently stands documentation of academic performance of private schools is not required. Schools that receive public funding should be sanctioned to the same criteria as public school and use academic data to determine the success or failure of their academics.
• Capitalizing on effective teachers, what Terry argues are the most valuable tool that the state has. That being said, Ohio must create an evaluation system that gets rid of arbitrary terms such as ?satisfactory? and ?unsatisfactory,? and reward teachers based on their performance instead of credentials and seniority.

While there are certainly good provisions in HB153, there is still much work to be accomplished as Terry points out. Ohio already has a lot of good things in place to build upon, such as value-added data and RttT funds. Ohio must use this opportunity to build upon measures we already have in place and to ensure that all children will receive the best education possible.

To read Terry's testimony in its entirety click here.

-Bianca Speranza

The bill would allow parents to petition a school district to force reforms in a school that, for at least three consecutive years, has been ranked in the lowest 5 percent of all district-operated schools statewide based on its performance index score (which is a measure of student achievement across all grades and subjects). Parents would be allowed to file a petition requesting the district to do one of the following:

1. Reopen the failing school as a community school,
2. Replace at least 70 percent of the school's personnel,
3. Contract with another school district or a nonprofit or for-profit entity with a record of effectiveness to operate the school,
4. Turn operation of the school over to the state Department of Education, or
5. Any other restructuring that makes fundamental reforms in the school's staffing or governance.

This is strong medicine for sure, and for truly atrocious schools necessary. Now, the part of the story that has been missed by almost everyone is how few schools this law would actually impact. The bar for triggering the parent trigger is so low that based on 2009-10 data only 29 of the state's current 3,372 schools (that received academic rating data) would be eligible for the trigger (that's less than one percent of Ohio's district schools).

Almost half of these schools are in Cleveland and the others are scattered across the state's other big and mid-sized urban districts. In sum, the parent trigger is much ado about very little. One might fairly ask, why so few schools on the list?

- Terry Ryan

And as HB 136 is up for debate in the coming weeks, we'd predict that the accountability provisions within the bill may also be hotly contested. Should private schools receiving voucher students be subject to testing/accountability?? Does this infringe on their rights? What would this look like in practice? Why should we pump taxpayer dollars into schools without commensurate accountability requirements? (A 2009 Fordham report suggested a sliding-scale approach: as a private school enrolls more voucher students, ?the greater its obligation for transparency and accountability.?)??

As Ohio delves deeper into this debate ? precipitated not just by HB 136 but also by Gov. Kasich's plans to expand the EdChoice program in terms of both the number of scholarships and eligibility requirements surrounding them ? the state should pay attention to what's happening next door.

The Indiana House just passed House Bill 1003, which would create tax credit scholarships for families making up to $60,000 a year. Proponents of the bill contend that this represents a significant expansion of eligibility to the middle class, rather than limiting vouchers to only poor kids or those attending chronically underperforming schools. Ohioans in support of vouchers have expressed a similar sentiment (that choice shouldn't be limited to only the neediest families) but compared to Ohio's HB 136, Indiana's $60,000 eligibility threshold is far more targeted and means-tested. Lawmakers in the Hoosier State had to compromise on this, reducing the eligibility threshold from $80,000 a year (for a family of four) to $60,000 and also limited the number of kids receiving the voucher in its first few years. Ohio lawmakers may be expected to do the same, as it's far more politically palatable ? especially during a fiscal crunch ? to subsidize choice for the poorest families instead of for a broad swath of families, many of whom can already afford to pay for private school tuition from their own pockets.

Second, Indiana's accountability provisions are pretty rigorous and worth taking a look at. Specifically, private schools receiving voucher students will receive an academic designation by the state. Schools placed in ?either of the lowest two categories or designations for two consecutive years? will not be allowed to receive new voucher students the following year, until the school moves higher up in the ratings. The longer the school is stuck in the bottom two ratings, the longer they are put on probation (can't receive more students with scholarships).

Ohio's legislation, in comparison, plans to require ?to the greatest extent possible? value-added performance analyses on students receiving a voucher, which will be posted by the Ohio Department of Education but will not lead to any sort of consequences in the event that private schools produce poor results for voucher students.

In sum, while more school choice is a good thing in theory, lots of questions remain. Ohio needs to flesh out details related to accountability and financial feasibility, and might find some good ideas next door.

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

In fact, school funding in Ohio has steadily increased over the past three decades. Just since 1991, when the first DeRolph lawsuit was filed, per-pupil revenue for Ohio's public schools has risen 60 percent (even accounting for inflation). After decades of steady growth in spending on its schools Ohio now faces a funding cliff. Education in the state is facing cuts of at least $1.3 billion.

The state's schools are being asked to do more with less. How do we do this smartly, without damaging children, especially our neediest? To answer this question it is prudent to look at the data. Where are we making gains? Where are we falling flat? Where do the investments pay off? Where don't they?

The Akron Beacon Journal jumped into the debate with a recent news story and follow-up editorial using NAEP test scores (commonly referred to as the Nation's Report Card) to show Ohio has made ???great improvements??? since the 1990s, especially in math. The paper went so far as to ask readers ???why haven't gains ??? especially for African Americans ??? been trumpeted from the rooftops????

Further, the paper insinuated that Ohio's small gains in math over two decades on the NAEP resulted from increased spending on K-12 education. It said NAEP scores ???make the compelling case to maintain spending levels that sustain the upward trend??? and declared that Ohio communities ???need assurance of honest assessments, not political spin, of student progress.???

It's true ???Ohio students in fourth and eighth grades have made gains in math, but most of these gains were in the 1990s. Further, even with these gains, in 2009 only 39 percent of Ohio's fourth graders were proficient in math while only 34 percent of Ohio's eighth graders were. In reading, 8^th grade proficiency rates actually fell from 33 percent in 2002 to 32 percent in 2009. This despite steady spending increases.

It gets worse as you dig deeper. The black-white achievement gap has actually grown since the early 1990s. In 1992, the achievement gap in fourth grade math was 15 percentage points; in 2009 it had yawned to 40 percentage points. In every grade and subject measured the gap has grown over the last two decades, leading one to wonder how the ABJ could declare that gains have been ???extraordinary??? and that we should be happy about the achievement among Ohio's African American students.

Here's another way to look at it. Breaking out the NAEP scores (beyond just pass rates) shows how many students score at an ???advanced??? level. These numbers are abysmal, especially when one considers that academic achievement in other countries is fast outpacing ours. The scores are low for White students ??? in 2009 just 9 percent of fourth and eighth graders scored advanced in math, while 10 percent of fourth graders and four percent of eighth graders did so in reading.

How did African American students do? In looking at the NAEP data spreadsheet, several hash tags appear across columns. The hash tag refers to numbers that ???statistically round to zero.??? African Americans, in most grades, subjects, and years, are relegated to ???zero??? when it comes to advanced achievement. In 2009, in fourth grade math and reading, and eighth grade reading, that number manages to eke upward to one percent.

How's that for ???trumpeting from the roof tops???? In the last two decades, the number of African American students achieving at advanced levels on the NAEP has ??? at best ??? gone from zero to one percent. Even worse, advanced levels among Whites have grown by as much as 450 percent (from 2 percentage points to nine) over the same period.

Remember, these achievements, or lack thereof, came during a time of steady growth in education spending. We now face a funding cliff. Do we keep doing what we've been doing but with leaner rations, or should we try some alternative approaches that might deliver more gains with less? How we deal with this question will determine the success or failure of our state and children for decades to come.

- Terry Ryan & Jamie Davies O'Leary

Fordham's hometown of Dayton lost 15 percent of its population to reach a 90-year low. Since 1970 the city of Dayton has lost almost half of its citizens. Those left behind are increasingly poor. Fully a third of the city's residents had incomes below the poverty level in 2008, more than double the Ohio average. More than 80 percent of the city's school children are deemed economically disadvantaged.??

As Dayton continues to contract and get poorer its public schools struggle to educate the children left behind. The school district was rated Academic Watch by the state in 2009-10 and it met only one of the state's 26 academic indicators. No student in Dayton attended a public school (district or charter) that was rated Excellent or Excellent with Distinction, while in 2008-9 five percent of the city's children attended a top-rated school. In 2009-10, just 36 percent of students attended a school rated B or C (Effective or Continuous Improvement), while 65 percent of students in Dayton attended a school rated D or F.

I've been working in Dayton for the last decade and the numbers ??? both in terms of the overall decline of the city and the persistently weak academic achievement ??? are truly disheartening because I know and work with many dedicated educators who have been trying to turn things around. These educators include district administrators and teachers as well as those working in the charter sector. There have no doubt been some victories along the way ??? Dayton has seen the emergence of several decent high schools ??? but overall the fight all too often feels like a rearguard action to minimize casualties. In fact, I have doubts that the current reform tools being employed in places like Dayton ??? choice, standards, more money, etc. ??? are enough to get us over the hill. Dayton needs some fresh thinking and new partnerships or we are likely to continue withering away.??

- Terry Ryan

Republicans, especially those considering a run for president, don't usually challenge defense spending, let alone when the nation is engaged in multiple wars. But these are not ordinary times. More and more, voters and politicians alike are asking what can we afford and where should we cut?

Like with defense, most conservative Republicans have been staunch supporters of school choice and its expansion. For this reason, observers in Ohio expected Governor John Kasich to support a significant growth in both charter schools and private school vouchers. The governor's budget indeed offers up a healthy portion of school choice that includes lifting caps on charter schools and expanding the number of vouchers available to children in failing public schools through the state's EdChoice scholarship program. Such moves will expand choice, but not at a dramatic clip and not to many middle-class families or districts beyond the state's urban centers. Ohio's choice programs will continue mostly serving kids in failing schools and long-troubled districts.

This could change, however, if either House Bill 136 or Senate Bill 128, companion bills currently being debated in the General Assembly, becomes law. These bills would create the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Savings Scholarship Program, which would award private school scholarships worth $4,626 to students from families with annual household incomes of up to one-and-a-half times the federal reduced-price lunch eligibility level (up to about $61,000 for a family of four, based on current standards). Students from families with household incomes up to two-and-a-half times the reduced-price lunch eligibility level (just over $100,000 this year for a family of four) would be eligible for scholarships ranging from $2,313 and $4,626, awarded on a sliding scale based on actual income.?? There is no geographic restriction on these scholarships (as currently applies to charter schools) or requirement that the students come from a failing public school (as is the case with the EdChoice program).

Further, by the 2012-2013 school year HB136/SB128 would allow some families with children already enrolled in private schools to use the scholarship to meet tuition costs they are currently paying out of pocket. Ohio has roughly 250,000 students enrolled in private schools, and many of these children and their families would be eligible for some amount of assistance for tuition. The program would expand school choice in Ohio for middle-class parents with children in private schools, but it would create new costs for taxpayers.

The out-year cost of such an expansion in school choice raises concerns about the state's ability to fund it. Ohio's next biennial budget is already plagued by a nearly $8 billion deficit and no one expects a rapid recovery in the state's coffers. Public education is going to operate with at least a couple billion dollars less funding over the next two years, and no programs are immune from cuts.

These fiscal realities raise an uncomfortable question for school choice supporters, myself included.?? Is now the right time to support the creation of a new school choice program that is essentially aimed at middle-class families? Just as some Republicans are starting to question how much defense spending the nation can afford, it is time for school reformers to ask tough questions about how much school choice we can afford. What's more important for conservatives ??? more school choice or making our ends meet?

- Terry Ryan

Today legislation passed in both the Ohio House (HB 21) and Senate (SB 81) that paves the way for a Teach For America site (specifically, allowing TFA to place teachers across grades and not just in shortage areas) and also makes it easier for alums of the program to get certified here to teach.

The Ohio House passed HB 21 by a 64-32 vote margin, with five Democrats crossing the aisle to support it. Kudos to Reps. Celeste, Patmon, Sykes, Budish, and Salozzi for joining Democrats across the country ? including President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ? in supporting the program.

In the Senate, the bill was amended slightly so as to require Teach For America to partner with a local university (which is required in many other TFA states but which adds undo requirements to the program). It passed by a margin of 25-8. Kudos to Sen. Turner, Wilson, and Kearney to cross the aisle in support of the bill.

I, along with four other alumnas of the program now living in Ohio, sat in the House gallery on pins and needles this morning as we listened to lawmakers debate the merits of a program that would place talented and effective teachers in some of Ohio's poorest schools, and allow alums (like Abbey Kinson and Jenna Davis) teaching in Ohio to not have to fight tooth and nail to get certified here.

There were a number of claims about the program raised (and many of them in heated fashion) ? that Teach For America teachers think they can ?save inner city children? (the classic ?white missionary? euphemism that makes my skin crawl); that they are dramatically underprepared and do damage to poor children; that it's an ?experiment? to which we should not expose our children (never mind that it's in 31 states ? not exactly experimental status); that they'll steal jobs from our own teacher graduates (and again ? education is NOT about giving people jobs). Oh, and the ridiculous slippery slope argument that if we de-professionalize teaching, then we'll be hiring doctors and engineers and lawyers with ?5 weeks of training? (by the way, that's not accurate at all) and the implication that this will lead to collapsed bridges and medical malpractice.

But rather than let my blood pressure rise again to unpleasant levels, today is a day to celebrate!

Teach For America is on its way to the Buckeye State! Teach For America new site development staff deserve enormous thanks, as do all of the extraordinary alums living in Ohio who've rallied around the cause (many of them who have continued teaching, even on long-term sub licenses, because of a deep commitment to students and to closing achievement gaps). Education reformers like my colleagues here at Fordham, who've been fighting for far longer than I've even lived in this state, as well as education reformers at various other education groups in Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and other areas, have laid the groundwork to make this possible. And lawmakers who've taken up this cause and who've fought diligently over the last several months deserve a huge thanks.

This thanks is offered up on behalf of the kids living in Ohio's urban and rural areas who will be impacted by TFA's teachers in the years to come, students whose life trajectories may put them on the path to high school dropout, unemployment, prison, or worse. By bringing in more effective teachers to classrooms that need them the most, Ohio is one step closer to ensuring that such trajectories are changed, and that every child in this state receives the excellent education he or she deserves. ??

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

The BTU criticized KIPP for making public threats that they would have to shut down their schools if an agreement could not be reached rather than negotiating their concerns with the union.? KIPP tried to bypass the union through lobbying the state legislature to amend existing laws involving teaching contracts. The BTU and KIPP recently have come to a ten-year agreement that will pay teachers 20 percent of the overtime amount outlined in the union contract. Jay Matthews has been closely following the situation on his Class Struggle blog, and he reported that an agreement had been reached on Thursday.

I applaud the BTU and KIPP for ending an argument that never should have started in the first place.? The BTU's resistance to KIPP was nonsensical.? One hundred percent of teachers at the KIPP schools supported the current one-year agreement that reduced the amount of overtime pay that they received. Why would the BTU pick a fight with teachers who are content with their current pay agreement?? It would be different if the teachers at KIPP were unhappy with the lack of overtime pay they receive, but that is not the case.? Unions are supposed to represent employees in disputes with management, not create disputes with those whom they represent.? The BTU took their stand purely out of the principle that teachers at KIPP were having their contracted pay undermined, and that KIPP wanted to continue this practice for ten more years.? They failed, however, to recognize that teachers at KIPP are satisfied with the current system that KIPP officials were looking to extend, and as a result the BTU picked unnecessary battles with those they represent.? Luckily, both the BTU and KIPP came to their senses and came to an agreement that will allow KIPP to remain open beyond this year. Now that the air is clearing between the BTU and KIPP, they can get back to what really matters?improving education outcomes for students.?

- Andrew Proctor, Policy & Research Intern in Fordham's Columbus, Ohio office

The students are examples of the remarkable results that KIPP, which primarily serves economically disadvantaged students, has produced since it opened its doors in 2008. (Fordham authorizes KIPP Journey, Ohio's first and only KIPP school.) Already its students are scoring higher than the district average on the state mathematics assessment and higher than the state-wide community school average on the state science assessment. The STEP program is taught by a team of KIPP and Deerfield teachers, and includes three weeks of fully paid Deerfield courses focused on science and language arts.

After being accepted to the STEP program, McKeala and Michael each wrote an essay about their life goals and reasons for applying to the program. McKeala writes:

My goal is to become a News Reporter, to go to college at Spellman or the University of North Carolina (UNC), and to go to Columbus Academy for high school. I also want and to meet new teachers so they can inform me about how to be a better person. I will take this Deerfield experience as an honor since I am learning new studies in subjects and I'm glad to see this extravagant school in person. I will inspire others by this journey and show them that they can complete hard work. As long as they believe in themselves their dreams and goals will come true.

Michael writes:

Now that I go to KIPP I have learned that the future really depends on what you do in the next minute whether it will help you in your life or push you back. KIPP has taught me that if you believe and the people around you believe you can be and do anything. [?]

Some goals I have for myself is that I will push myself the hardest I can to reach the highest level there is. And my reading teacher always says to go above and beyond and I plan on doing that. I hope to go to a good high school and from there to a good college. Those are not only my goals, but they are KIPP's expectations and I look forward to coming to school and meeting those expectations. Thanks for all you do to support me and my other teammates at KJA!

Good work, KIPPsters and KIPP Journey!

- Nick Joch, Policy & Research Intern in Fordham's Columbus, Ohio office

The bill would enable the creation of a charter school that would ?serve adults of school age who are incarcerated or who have been released from the custody of the Department of Youth Services? (Gongwer News Service ? subscription required). The proposed school would be called WinWin Academy and would serve youths ages 18-22, and initially would be located at the Pickaway Correctional Institution. A second campus would open at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Unlike current educational arrangements for incarcerated youth, the charter school/s would continue serving students after their release from prison and thus would provide continuity and assist them in their transition back to society.

In her testimony, Kathryn noted that:

While there are other programs that provide incarcerated persons the opportunity to complete basic courses and earn a GED or diploma, WinWin Academy stands alone in that it provides educational and mentoring continuity to students during the critical time when they leave prison and attempt to re-enter society.

The proposed model for WinWin Academy is exactly the kind of innovative educational program that Ohio's charter school mechanism was designed to incubate, and, if successful, help replicate. Ohio's charter school program is almost 15 years old and during that time it seems that there has been a shift away from conceptualizing and implementing something truly innovative and a move toward using the charter mechanism to replicate what we know works. Replication of quality programs that deliver good results for students is of course a good thing and should continue. However, at the same time we should not lose sight of the reason charter schools were created in the first place: to provide an independent, accountable, public school space for educational innovation.

But innovation is not the only thing WinWin has going for it; Kathryn also noted the importance of accountability in the charter sector and points out that the school's authorizer (aka sponsor), the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, has a track record of actively monitoring its schools and making sure they are held to high standards. ?The ESCCO is not afraid to make tough decisions when it comes to schools that are underperforming, and in fact recently initiated closure proceedings at one school.?

Read her full testimony here.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

The most debated education-related policy changes here in Ohio over the last month have been about Senate Bill 5, the Buckeye State's controversial attempt to weaken public sector collective bargaining in the state. (Terry testified in support of the aims of the teacher personnel provisions in the bill, not expressly on rolling back collective bargaining rights.)

Hanushek's presentation today helped reframe the debate in a necessary way: undoing LIFO, or changing teacher salary schedules, or including value-added data in teachers' and principals' evaluations is not about weakening unions but about incentivizing performance, driving student achievement, and ultimately improving the quality of Ohio's future labor force.

Given the highly politicized environment surrounding the capitol lately, it was good to hear an outside expert explain the research and remind lawmakers that the need to move toward achievement-focused policies predates the Midwest's turmoil over collective bargaining and will certainly go on long after. Hanushek explained:

As important as the fiscal issues that motivate current discussions are ? they are actually secondary in my mind to other policy concerns about our schools, although we shall see that there is also overlap. The current fiscal situation is pushing us to make a variety of responses. We should first respond to these pressures in ways that improve the system. But, second, we need to recognize that ? even if the fiscal situation of Ohio improves ? there are fundamental reforms that are needed.

His testimony included several policy recommendations:

• Maintain a strong system of standards, assessment, and accountability. This is one area that Ohio especially needs to pay attention to. Hanushek called for more data and transparency, and noted the importance of looking at value-added as well as absolute achievement data (both are valuable).
• Empower local decision making. Hanushek noted that it's ?insane? to think that Columbus can run all of Ohio's 600+ school districts and 300+ charter schools. What works well in one setting doesn't always translate to another, and he was even hesitant to identify a ?state or district doing it well? (asked by one lawmaker) ? though he alluded to Washington, DC, and Florida.
• Reward success. Many current policies don't reward success and so we shouldn't be surprised when the variable we reward drives people's behavior (attaining master's degrees and credentials, rather than pursuing improvements to classroom effectiveness). Policies at all levels of the K-12 system need to be overhauled to incentivize the right things.
• Create meaningful evaluations. Hanushek praised Washington, DC, for its IMPACT evaluation system. Ohio lawmakers have yet to introduce details pertaining to a new teacher evaluation system that would adequately distinguish varying levels of effectiveness. Getting rid of LIFO is a good first start but Ohio has a ways to go toward creating a rigorous, fair, multi-tiered evaluation system that measures and rewards effectiveness.
• Fund schools rationally and equitably. If we are to hold schools accountable, of course we need to fund them sufficiently, Hanushek argued. But ?if the discussion starts and stops with discussions of the proper weight for this or that, you will have lost.?

Read his full testimony here.

Eric Hanushek's visit to Ohio was made possible by the generous support of the Cleveland Foundation, Diggs Family Foundation, Farmer Family Foundation, Fordham Institute, George Gund Foundation,? Mathile Family Foundation, Nord Family Foundation, and the Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Katter takes her faith (she's a Roman Catholic) seriously, and she has always been uncomfortable with the idea of paying dues to the OEA, as it and its parent organization, the NEA, often support pro-choice political candidates. From the moment she walked in the door at Wapakoneta City Schools she felt ?the stigma of being a union dissenter.? At the time, the union-management contract did not stipulate union membership for all teachers. Even so, Katter said she was ?ostracized? for not joining, and that union representatives continuously reminded her that ?we will be watching you [?] very closely.?

In 2005, however, the union re-negotiated its contract with the district, and the result was a provision requiring union membership for all teachers. Katter was disappointed and anticipated losing her job after she refused to fill out paperwork to join the union, but was surprised to learn that, against her will, a local union representative had obtained her Social Security number and birth date from the district's central office and filled out the paperwork for her. She objected to this back door procedure and promptly filed a request with the OEA for an exemption from union dues, based on her religious convictions.

A local council of OEA representatives convened for a hearing on her request. After hearing Katter present her case, one representative laughed slightly and said an exemption would not be granted unless Katter changed her religion. In the history of the union, followers of only two religions, neither of which was Roman Catholicism, had been granted such an exemption, he said. Not surprisingly, the council denied Katter's request.

Katter was prepared to lose her job once again when she was unexpectedly contacted by someone from the National Right to Work Foundation. It was only with the Foundation's help that Katter was finally allowed to re-direct her union dues to a scholarship fund for Wapakoneta students.

At the hearing this morning, Katter expressed surprise that, in a free country, she was far from free to choose against teachers union membership, even when she had strong personal convictions about doing so. One representative on the committee asked whether or not Katter's was an isolated case. Not by a long shot, she replied: Each year she receives many calls from teachers in similar situations who want to opt out of union membership but can't. They have heard about the exemption Katter gained and hope she can provide guidance on how to make her story their story. And although some teachers eventually win such exemptions for themselves, many of them, Katter says, find the pressure of constant bullying from the union too great and decide to coalesce into the ?silent minority? of would-be abstainers.

- Nick Joch, Policy & Research Intern in Fordham's Columbus office

This award is an incredible accomplishment on the part of CCA school leader Andy Boy and his dedicated staff. Only four charter schools in the entire country earned the Gold award. CCA won EPIC's silver award last year ? and was the only charter school in the whole state of Ohio to win. The school's ability to continue making tremendous gains with students ? 94 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged ? propelled it into the very top tier for student growth, among the ranks of some of the most impressive charter schools in the country.

CCA Executive Director and Founder Andy Boy explained the school's keys to success in a press release:

We are so proud of our students and staff.? Our teachers and staff share the belief that all students can and will learn when provided the right environment for academic success.? Through high expectations, a structured school day, and an uncompromising focus on academics our students are outpacing students from around the country.

Kathryn Mullen Upton, director of charter school sponsorship at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, noted:

We are thrilled that Columbus Collegiate Academy is a 2011 EPIC Gold Gain School. This award recognizes the exceptional quality of the academic program at Columbus Collegiate, the relentless efforts of its staff and leader, and the positive impact that Columbus Collegiate has on its students.

New Leaders for New Schools started EPIC ? the Effective Practice Incentive Community ? in 2006 ?to link principal and teacher incentive pay to the wide-scale sharing of effective educational practices.? EPIC recognizes and rewards school leaders and staff in these schools (CCA will receive approximately $42,000 in staff bonuses this year) and creates comprehensive case studies of their successes so that others may learn from them.?In this way, EPIC serves as not just a unique performance pay program but as a professional development platform for participating charter schools nationwide?and district schools in Washington, DC; Memphis; and Denver. ??

As its authorizer, we're incredibly proud of CCA and the hard work of Andy Boy and the school's teachers and staff. Last year on the Ohio Achievement Assessment, the school's sixth and seventh graders outscored their Columbus City School peers in every tested subject, by margins as large as 54 percentage points. One hundred percent of CCA seventh graders passed the state math test, while 93 percent were proficient on the reading test ? compared to averages of 77 percent and 84 percent statewide. In other words, the school's students are outpacing their peers in wealthier and suburban communities despite living in the heart of one of Columbus's poorest neighborhoods.

Congrats to CCA and to all this year's winning schools!

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Currently in Ohio, people who leave the state to participate in TFA but would like to come back and teach in Ohio have a very difficult time doing so. For these individuals to teach, they have to jump through several hurdles and often have to undertake additional course work. These difficulties deter a lot of talented and committed people from coming back to teach. This means that Ohio is losing out on teachers that sometimes have six plus years of college and who have achieved significant growth in the classroom. This can't happen if Ohio is serious about providing a quality education to all students.

As Jamie pointed out in her testimony, there are several alarming trends in Ohio that justify why SB 81 is good for Ohio. First, this bill would allow highly committed and effective teachers to teach in some of the most difficult and underperforming schools in the state. Many traditional teachers will tell you themselves that they don't want to work in some of Ohio's toughest classrooms, but TFA teachers are not only willing to teach in these kinds of environments, they would prefer it. Senator and Chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee Peggy Lehner reiterated this fact today when she told of a meeting that she had with twenty suburban teachers yesterday in the Dayton area. She asked them, ?If we were to give you a $15,000 bonus to teach in Dayton Public Schools would you do it??? All twenty of them said no. They said if TFA wants to teach there, let them.

Secondly, allowing TFA alumni to come back to Ohio and teach would provide a renewed sense of determination and excitement around education reform that this state so desperately needs. As Jamie noted, a common misconception and criticism of TFA is that people join because of its prestige factor and to boost their resumes. While this might be the case for a few individuals, I don't believe it is the norm. After listening to three former TFA alumni today, one of which is still teaching and the other a school director, one thing is clear: they joined TFA and are fighting for it here in Ohio because they believe in the power that it can have in making a difference in the lives of children. TFA corps members are placed in the some of the most challenging and low-income districts, yet still manage to demonstrate growth in the classroom. While these individuals might not have gone through a traditional ed school, they are clearly capable of teaching in the classroom.

Senate Bill 81 would allow for highly dedicated and committed teachers to come in and make a real difference in the lives of children who need it the most. This bill makes sense for Ohio, our children, and our future. In today's State of the State, Governor Kasich said TFA is coming to Ohio- hopefully he holds true to his word.

Read Jamie's testimony in its entirety here.

-Bianca Speranza

• Get rid of the provision in state statute that mandates automatic step increases in teacher salaries ??? about seven in ten said this would be important.
• Repeal the provision in state law that ???requires a last-in, first-out approach to layoffs??? ??? this is very important to two-thirds of Ohio's superintendents.
• Change state law to make it ???easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers ??? even if they are tenured??? ??? eight in ten say this is very important.

On Friday, the report's co-author and I met with about 60 superintendents around the state and shared with them our survey results. Those conversations were especially intense because the Ohio Senate on Wednesday passed the highly controversial Senate Bill (SB) 5, which as reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer seeks the following changes for teachers:

Wages still will be negotiated through collective bargaining. But management gets to decide much more than it does now, including leave policies, class sizes and where employees are assigned.

Employees can't strike. If agreement can't be reached on bargaining issues, a fact-finder's report and the last offers from both sides will be made public. The school board then chooses one of the offers.

Salaries must be based on merit. Automatic raises now pegged to years of service and education credentials - known as step increases -- will be abolished.

Seniority no longer determines who gets laid off. Performance will be the primary factor, though seniority still will have a role.

Continuing contracts for experienced teachers - more commonly known as tenure - will no longer be granted.

Districts will pay for no more than 85 percent of employees' health care premiums. Currently, at least 335 districts pay a higher percentage.

Districts won't pay for any of the employees' required contribution to their pension plans, which is 10 percent of their salaries. Some districts pick up part of that now, but it's unclear how many.

Since the Senate's passage of SB 5, superintendents have been inundated with phone calls and emails from local union representatives and teachers expressing their dismay and anger with the bill. Superintendents expressed serious concerns that the heat that came down on lawmakers ??? (e.g. thousand protesting at the statehouse and a group of union activists confronting lawmakers in a restaurant) ??? will pale in comparison to what they will face in their local communities as they work to implement the reforms in SB5.

Some made clear to us that they have spent years working to cultivate good management/labor relations in their school districts, and that SB5 and our survey will only make their jobs harder. They said there is a serious risk of exaggerating animosities between management and labor that would bury everything else they want to do in their districts.

Others, however, argued that now is the time for superintendents to step-up and tackle the tough issues. This was summed up in a note sent to me by a superintendents after the meetings, ???We are in unprecedented times which require unprecedented measures???It's the economy. The sooner we learn we have to do business differently the sooner we can make progress.???

All the superintendents we spoke with raised concerns about the implementation challenges that are sure to arise when SB5 becomes law. Most believe the law's provisions will end up in court. Some made clear that though they agree with the reforms they would not want to lead the way in terms of implementation. They would prefer to wait for the courts to ultimately decide the legalities of these changes before implementing them in their schools. In short, none want the headaches or legal costs of fighting for these changes and prefer to follow others after precedents are set.

In short, the mood among the Ohio supes I met with is, ???Be careful what you wish for.????? Clearly in January ??? anonymously ??? via our survey they voiced the desire for more authority and flexibility in their jobs.?? But now that that power might be just around the corner, they aren't quite so eager to hold it. Ohio's superintendents, as a group, are a reform-minded bunch.?? But they are skeptical and nervous about the implementation challenges associated with the substantial reforms in SB5. They want change, but prefer to follow others in leading it.

??- Terry Ryan

??

Yet schools?in Ohio and beyond?can produce better-educated students on leaner rations so long as their leaders are empowered to deploy the available resources in the most effective and efficient ways, unburdened by mandates, regulatory constraints, and dysfunctional contract clauses. That's the message that comes through loudest from a new survey of the state's school superintendents. And again there's no reason to believe that Ohio's situation is unique.

While governors and lawmakers are responsible for balancing state budgets, it is district and school leaders who must make their schools work on tighter resources while still boosting achievement and effectiveness. Over the past year, as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has organized various discussions, conferences, and symposia across Ohio on the big challenge of ?doing more with less? in K-12 education, we've been privy to innumerable comments?usually off the record?by superintendents and school leaders along the lines of, ?We could survive these cuts if we had real control over our budgets.? They called in particular for greater authority to manage their spending on and deployment of personnel. Many even said that enhancing that authority was more important than receiving more funding.

Due to political sensitivities, few of these leaders attached their names in public to such comments. But when the door was closed, they voiced them over and over. Keen on opening that door to the public?without making trouble for individual superintendents?Fordham enlisted the FDR Group to undertake a careful survey of Ohio superintendents and other public-education leaders.

Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out, released today by Fordham, shows that superintendents understand the scale of the fiscal challenges that the state and its districts face, and they crave the authority and flexibility to make the tough calls necessary to see their schools through budget cuts while also helping their students to succeed. Further, the report shows a major disconnect between the people who teach in our public schools and those who lead them. While many teachers and other school employees resist education reforms that might affect them, especially changes to collective bargaining laws, superintendents recognize the need for such fixes. In fact, they're hungry for them.

Indeed, it's the realm of collective bargaining and related ?personnel management? issues where district leaders most ardently seek change. Seventy percent favor the abolition of ?step and lane? salary increases while a full 80 percent believe state law should be changed to make it ?easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers?even if they are tenured.? As for statutory ?last hired, first fired? requirements, two-thirds of supes called for their repeal.

These school leaders don't view lack of funding as the central problem with K-12 education. Even in today's tightening fiscal environment, just 37 percent say the real challenge is ?that too little money is spent on the schools.? Instead, 52 percent say it's ?how and where the money is spent.?

To that end, they want greater management authority, particularly in high-need districts; 73 percent of urban and 60 percent of economically disadvantaged districts opt for ?significant expansion of management authority over staff? rather than ?significant increases in school funding.?

Superintendents say that, if state leaders want academic achievement to rise in a time of austerity, they must give district and school leaders more autonomy. By an overwhelming 72 to 14 percent margin, they say increased authority would result in measurable improvements in achievement, not just efficiency. Moreover, they are so confident that they can deliver better student achievement that nearly eight in ten (78 percent) favor linking their own pay to improved outcomes ? in exchange for greater authority over staff.

Among other survey findings:

• Superintendents support testing and accountability. Fifty-seven percent believe that evaluating schools and districts based on how well students do on standardized tests and publicizing the results is a good thing.
• They believe that Ohio's teacher-licensing system (much like that found in nearly every state) fails to assure good instruction. Almost none say ?that going through the licensure process in Ohio guarantees that a teacher is well-prepared to succeed in the classroom.?
• Superintendents accept some blame for the imbalance between managers and staff, with 55 percent agreeing that there have been labor issues where ?the leadership of my district?including myself?should have done more to hold the line.?

To be clear, untying such state mandates is not solely about granting flexibility to administrators or saving money. Empowering education leaders to ensure that the most effective instructors occupy the classrooms that need them most is critical if Ohio and the nation are to succeed in boosting the achievement of their children. And the need to strengthen academic achievement has never been greater, as recent PISA and NAEP assessments showcase.

In this tumultuous period of drying state coffers, America must rethink its attack on the stagnation of student performance and the achievement gap. And district leaders are key to this assault. They are the educators-in-chief for millions of needy kids, the front-line professionals responsible for executing state and federal education policies. They are the decision makers charged with making schools and districts more effective even as resources shrink. Ohio's superintendents are ready and willing to lead. They want the flexibility to do so. So, we strongly suspect, do their counterparts across the land. Now is the time to give it to them.

This piece also appeared in today's Education Gadfly. Check out the full report here.

- Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan, Emmy Partin, and Jamie Davies O'Leary

Where to begin? It's only eight pages long, but manages to mislead on a number of fronts.

For starters, the brief draws on two years' of data (2008 and 2009) showing the average annual wages for kindergarten, elementary, middle school, and high school teachers in Ohio. Comparing average wages for teachers between the two years, all four categories saw a drop from 2008 to 2009, with an average drop of 3.8 percent.

The average annual wage dropped from one year to the next. The brief builds on this trend ? an observable wage change from year to year?and calls it ?pay cuts? in the next paragraph, arguing ?only Utah and Michigan's teachers have seen larger pay cuts,? that the state was ?only one of six ? whose teachers saw salary cuts to all four categories of teachers,? and that ?teachers saw $150 million less in wages last year.?

Innovation Ohio uses this drop in wages as evidence of the extraordinary ?financial sacrifices ? among the largest in the country? that the state's teachers have faced. But a drop in the statewide mean wage (mean = the mathematical average of a set of numbers) does not mean teachers saw their salaries slashed. The vast majority of teacher contracts protect teachers from pay cuts, and even during the Great Recession many teachers unions managed to eke out pay increases during negotiations.

An alternative explanation might be that the makeup of Ohio's teacher pool changed from 2008 to 2009 and could be the cause of a lower average. Not quite as sexy as ?financial sacrifice,? but when conducting such research it's important to be honest about reasonable hypotheses.

Here's one: Ohio's teacher workforce, like that of most states, is aging rapidly. Teachers are retiring and younger ones are replacing them, so the overall face of the profession is getting younger. Teacher data listed on the Ohio Department of Education's website shows a unique drop between 2007-08 and 2008-09 in terms of Ohio teachers' average years of experience. The drop from 14.14 years to 13.98 years of experience means that in a given district, teachers were younger on average (and therefore cost less, since teacher salaries are based on degrees and years of experience) in 2009 than they were in 2008. ?

Of course, there are dozens of other reasons the statewide average might have been lower; the point is that a change in an average could mean lots of things other than that teachers saw pay cuts. (But if anecdotes are sufficient evidence for Innovation Ohio, then read here, here, here, here, and here for proof that most teachers unions have held the line and refused even wage freezes despite the recession? for dozens more, just google search ?Ohio? and ?teachers union rejects pay freeze?.)

Secondly, the report mistakes correlation for causation. The brief is riddled with this vice. It moves from a basic correlation or trend ? drops or increases in average wages across states, correlated with whether states happen to require collective bargaining or outlaw it ? to sweeping claims that collective bargaining (or its absence) is the primary cause of the observed trends. Using several frightening if-then statements, the brief attempts to make the case ? based on simple correlations found in two years worth of data- that if Ohio eliminates collective bargaining for teachers it will ?lead to salary increases ? that are more volatile,? cause ?uncertainty? for taxpayers, and will ?certainly? not have a significant positive impact on student success.?

But the absence of collective bargaining in a number of states didn't cause low achievement or spending volatility any more than it caused the flooding in northern Ohio this week. At the very least, if Innovation Ohio wishes to make such profound claims, it should hire the services of a statistician who can perform regression analysis or any number of techniques that can viably distinguish correlation from causation.

Third, the report uses Education Week's ?student achievement? rankings to measure whether states in collective bargaining or Right-to-Work states are correlated with student success. Why not use actual student data instead of a somewhat random ranking system (which by the way, changes thematically from year to year) that measures, among other things, non K-12 variables like ?adult outcomes.? State-by-state NAEP data are readily available, as are state achievement trends.

Fourth, Innovation Ohio uses a single Race to the Top reviewer's flattering comment about the state's application as evidence that current systems of teacher accountability and evaluation are sufficient. If the viability of Ohio's teacher evaluation current system rests on an anecdotal comment by a single grant application reviewer, Innovation Ohio's threshold of evidence is criminally low. One only has to read a few more pages of reviewers' comments to see phrases such as ?A weakness in the discussion of the design of the teacher evaluation system is a lack of specificity on how important the measure of student growth is expected to be.?

In sum, it's understandable that Innovation Ohio ? led by former buddies of Gov. Strickland ? wish to defend collective bargaining. But it fails to offer up compelling arguments (and there are such arguments out there) about retaining collective bargaining and instead presents some of the most flimsy evidence we've seen yet.

According to the brief, weakening bargaining will cause spending volatility; will lead to decreased student achievement; and is unnecessary because teachers (on average) have already seen wages fall. The first of these two claims are based on flawed statistical reasoning and questionable data. The third is incredibly ironic given that the people behind this report worked for an administration that never even acknowledged ? let alone came up with solutions for ? the profound fiscal crisis Ohio faces.

The authors of the brief also assume that the primary purpose of weakening collective bargaining is to save money. They defend existing evaluation systems and antiquated personnel practices that harm poor students the most, arguing that ?it can even be argued that Ohio has done it better and more comprehensively than other states.? Really? Tell that to Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, and others.

The teacher-related provisions in SB 5 are not merely about saving money. The bill seeks to undo the destructive practice of seniority-based layoffs, require that pay raises for teachers be based on effectiveness, and essentially gets rid of lifelong tenure (as many reform-minded states have already done). It also removes from collective bargaining issues such as class size and personnel placement.

These are common sense changes that many states have already put into law, changes that seek to put the most effective (rather than veteran) teachers in classrooms that need them the most. By failing to put forth reasonable evidence against the teacher provisions in SB 5 the authors make obvious that this new ?think tank? is anything but nonpartisan.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

According to recently released 2009 scores for the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), Cleveland fourth and eighth graders performed just as abysmally in science as they did in reading and math. At least according to NAEP scores, one might say that Cleveland's closest cousin is Detroit (the only district whose students fared worse in science). The bad news takes a variety of forms:

• Among the 17 participating districts in the NAEP TUDA, eight of them had students in both grades scoring lower than the large city average nationally. Cleveland earns that distinction.
• In both fourth and eighth grades (according to average scale scores) Cleveland ranks at the very bottom, beating out only Detroit.
• Scores for Cleveland eighth graders place them in the 21^st percentile in science nationally; fourth graders are in the 16^th percentile.
• Not only do Clevelanders fail to reach science proficiency, but 70 percent of fourth graders and 74 percent of eighth graders fail to meet even a basic level of understanding.

It goes without saying that this bodes badly for the economic vitality of that city (and Ohio as a whole).

And, despite the fact that there are other issues in K-12 education front and center at the moment, why has so little been said of Cleveland's science scores? It's a sad day when the predictability of our urban students' scores leads to an attitude of inevitability.

Moreover, as my colleague Emmy pointed out, why aren't Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson -- who've taken a stand on Ohio soil for Akron's Kelley Williams-Bolar, Ohio's collective bargaining bill (SB 5), and the far more tangential issue of the makeup of Ohio's State Board of Education, causing a ruckus over the sorry state of education in one of Ohio's most African American districts?

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

While Terry was in DC for a visit last week, we were able to talk to him about why he testified in favor of the bill, the atmosphere at the Ohio State House, and how the state is grappling with issues surrounding collective bargaining.

Take for example Kettering City Schools, a suburb of Dayton whose labor agreement states that teacher unions and school boards ?agree that negotiations are an effective and efficient method? to decide conditions of employment. ?If SB 5 passes it will force the district to evaluate teachers based on a combination of student growth and classroom observations.? The mere thought of having to do this has local education leaders in a ?frenzy.?? While Kettering City Schools does not currently have an effectiveness-based evaluation system in place it does not mean that they can't work toward creating one.

Skepticism or absence of a current evaluation system is not a valid excuse anymore. Districts and states across the country have made great progress in replacing antiquated evaluation systems with ones that actually measure and reward performance. Before Kettering City Schools throws up the white surrender flag they would do well to look at the way others have crafted and implemented such systems.

State such as Florida, Colorado, Tennessee, and Illinois have all signed pieces of legislation into law that would measure teacher effectiveness and making tenure, hiring and firing contingent on performance. Some school districts around the country such as New Haven, CT and Washington D.C. have also achieved radical overhauls.? In this area the New Haven Unified School District evaluates its teachers on three different components: instructional practice and professional values (which are based on observations by administrators), as well as a student performance component.?

The examples above are proof that evaluations systems based on merit do and can exist. If SB 5 passes, districts around the state- not just Kettering-- will have to begin to think about amending their current employment practices. While this task might seem overwhelming at first, its difficultly isn't an excuse to avoid from tackling it and putting into place a comprehensive evaluation system that enables students to receive a quality education from the most effective teachers, not just the teachers that have been around the longest.

Ohio is one of these states and we've seen firsthand how damaging this law is and how damaging it will likely be in coming months as the state grapples with cutting $8 billion from its next biennial budget.

Because state law in Ohio, dating back to 1941, requires that the last teacher in be the first one out, younger and less-expensive teachers must depart during times of layoffs. We wrote about the madness of this law in 2007 when Dayton's ???Teacher of the Year??? was given the award with one hand and his layoff notice with the other. These sorts of quality blind layoffs now face districts across Ohio and other states as they face massive budget deficits.

The New Teacher Project reports that such archaic laws threaten 79,000 more teachers across the country who ???would lose their jobs if budget cuts forces districts nationwide to reduce salary expenditures by 5 percent through seniority-based layoffs rather than seniority-neutral layoffs.??? This means several thousand fewer teachers in Ohio being dismissed if there was a focus on teacher effectiveness rather than solely on seniority.

Senate Bill 5, currently being debated noisily across Ohio would require teacher layoffs to be based on merit rather than seniority. While the layoff language in the bill could be improved, it puts Ohio on a path similar to where Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Washington are heading. It is a change these states all need to make for, as TNTP notes, ???Layoffs are always an option of last resort. But when they cannot be avoided, school districts and states should do everything possible to protect the highest-need students and most effective teachers???Teacher seniority should be a factor in layoffs ??? just not the only one. A teacher's actual performance in the classroom should always matter most.???

States need to kill off once and for all ???Last In/First Out??? laws for teachers and with brutal funding cuts coming, now is the time to do it.

To address these problems, Republican lawmakers and governors have proposed major changes to collective-bargaining laws and pension systems. In Ohio, Senate Bill 5 would continue to afford teachers the right to bargain collectively over wages, hours, and other conditions of employment. But the bill would also make profound alterations to the status quo, including: requiring all public-school employees to contribute at least 20 percent of the premiums for their health-insurance plan; removing from collective bargaining???and entrusting to management???such issues as class size and personnel placement; prohibiting continuing contracts and effectively abolishing tenure; removing seniority as the sole determinant for layoffs and requiring that teacher performance be the primary factor; and abolishing automatic step increases in salary.

Not surprisingly, these changes are being fiercely resisted by the Buckeye State's teachers, their unions, and their political allies. Battle lines are forming, and we at Fordham???as veteran advocates for ???smart cuts??? and ???stretching the school dollar??????have been drawn into the fray. In the past week, I testified at a legislative hearing on key education components of SB5, and joined a conversation in Dayton with Senator Peggy Lehner and a group of teachers and union leaders. On both occasions, large crowds of disgruntled protestors stood outside the meeting rooms, though most were respectful.

In those sessions and beyond, my colleagues and I have argued that changing state law to offer school districts more flexibility over personnel during times of funding cuts is critical for helping them maintain their academic performance. Further, this flexibility to make smart cuts is critical if our schools and students are to emerge out of this financial crisis stronger than ever.

And a crisis it is. The federal ???bail-out??? dollars that have cushioned Ohio and its school districts for the past two years will dry up by late 2011 and the state is required to balance its budget. Adding to the challenge, dollars for schools must compete with other valuable public programs. Though Ohio's K-12 enrollment has been all but flat for a decade, during that same period the number of Ohioans enrolled in Medicaid has leaped from 1.3 million to 2.1 million.

Something has to give. The state can either raise taxes or cut programs (or both), but Governor Kasich and the legislative majorities in both chambers were elected in November on the promise not to raise taxes. So cuts will be made and, as K-12 education eats up about 40 percent of the state's revenue, schools and school employees will bear a share of the pain.

Can this be done while protecting children and their learning? We know, for example, that relying on seniority-based layoffs to close fiscal gaps hurts pupil achievement. Last hired, first fired also hurts high-poverty schools, which typically have more junior teachers. Seniority-based reductions in force (RIF) will also trash some of the state's most innovative schools???like STEM schools???because they're new and staffed largely by younger teachers.

I made this case to the group of teachers in Dayton the other morning and they unanimously rejected it. They defended seniority on two fronts. First, they insist that district officials will axe their most expensive teachers first simply to save money. Second, they said, Ohio doesn't have a decent system for measuring teacher performance, and test scores???they insisted???don't prove much, and certainly not the caliber of a teacher's effectiveness.

Further, they kept asking, why the rush? Why all of the sudden is the state needing to make these changes? The teachers felt that GOP lawmakers are attacking them in retaliation for their unions' lack of support for Kasich in the last election. They seemed completely unaware of how thoroughly they (and other Buckeyes) had been left in the dark these past few years about Ohio's impending budget cliff???thanks to the federal stimulus dollars, some tricky accounting at the state level, and former Governor Strickland's celebration of his hocus-pocus school-funding scheme, which promised billions of non-existent new dollars for schools over the next decade.

Earlier this week, the self-same former governor emailed his supporters that ???thousands and thousands of Ohioans just like you have crowded the Statehouse because the livelihoods of Ohio's families are on the line. I was so inspired by these crowds that I decided to join them this past Thursday. There's just too much at stake to let Governor Kasich and the legislature roll back the clock on progress for Ohio's middle class.??? It's important to recall that not once during the three gubernatorial debates last autumn did Ted Strickland state that to balance Ohio's budget he would call for increased taxes. If that wasn't his intent, however, how did he expect to balance the budget other than by cutting???which is precisely what Republicans are proposing?

Teachers may be forgiven for feeling like all of this change has come out of nowhere because Ohio had zero leadership around the looming fiscal crisis before last month. The real debate in Ohio is just starting and there is no doubt that the current bills under consideration will be significantly amended or even put aside for alternatives. An air of suspense blankets the state until Kasich himself presents his budget by March 15.

Hinting at what's coming, the other evening he said, ???We are searching for a balance. Give our managers, our cities, our schools, and even our state the tools to control their costs.??? He added, ???Workers have been overpromised. This is not about attacking anybody. It is about fixing the state and making us competitive again.???

He's right. And it isn't just Ohio that he's right about.

???Terry Ryan

This piece originally appeared in today's Education Gadfly and in yesterday's Ohio Education Gadfly. Sign up here to receive The Education Gadfly in your inbox every Thursday, and here to receive the Ohio Education Gadfly in your inbox every other Wednesday.

• Creation of a statewide, limitless voucher program. The Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program would combine with the statewide EdChoice Scholarship program, and caps for both would be lifted.
• Abandoning the ?failing school model? as a way to determine eligibility for vouchers; currently, EdChoice recipients must attend a public school that was deemed as failing for two of the last three consecutive years by the state to be eligible. The new voucher system would not ?divide communities? and make value judgments about school quality or pit schools against one another in a competitive fashion. Instead, eligibility would be income-based and would allow low- and middle-income families regardless of attendance area to receive a scholarship worth up to 80 percent of the state per-pupil funding amount ($5,783 currently).
• A statewide scholarship for children with special needs. Currently, Ohio provides scholarships to students with autism but this program would enable all kids in grades K-12 with an IEP to be eligible.
• Education ?savings accounts.? If a school's annual tuition is less than a student's scholarship amount, parents could roll the difference into a savings account that could be used to pay for not just private school but textbooks, or tuition and fees associated with postsecondary education at an Ohio college. (Creative way to keep high school students in state!)

According to School Choice Ohio,

Eligibility for vouchers would increase more than ten-fold. This is the most meaningful school choice proposal we have ever had in Ohio and is one of the most forward-thinking proposals in the whole country.

We agree that the proposed reforms are bold and exciting, not only because of their substance but because of the bipartisan political coalitions that are supporting it. At yesterday's press conference, Rep. Patmon (D-Cleveland), an African American Democrat, spoke in support of the plan. This is groundbreaking for Ohio, where issues of choice have tended to be incredibly political polarizing.?

The second pioneering piece of Huffman's proposal is that it incorporates strong accountability provisions that are absolutely vital to ensure quality education for all children. According to the press release, ?students [at voucher-receiving schools] must take the same state assessments that are required of public school students, and the Ohio Department of Education is required to collect and report assessment data in the same manner that is required of public schools.?

Upholding accountability in parallel with expanding school choice options is critical for these reforms to succeed in the long haul, maintain bipartisan support, and ultimately ensure that kids are receiving quality educational options. ?

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

We arrived over at the Statehouse around noon, two and a half hours before the hearing was scheduled to start as we anticipated, rightly so, a packed house. We stationed ourselves in the hallway corner outside the hearing room (the doors were locked) with the plan of getting some work done on our laptops while we waited to go in. However, this plan soon changed when hundreds of union members and supporters converged on the Statehouse. After waiting for two and half hours, being physically pushed around and asked if I was a journalist ? or a member of the Tea Party (which is staging a demonstration in support of the bill tomorrow), trying to ignore supporters of the bill who were behaving like petulant five year olds, and seeing bomb sniffing dogs and not so happy State Highway Patrol officers roam about, we made it into the Senate hearing room.?

Needless to say SB 5 is controversial and contentious. Yesterday's testimony was for proponents of the bill (opponents of the bill will have a chance to testify tomorrow). This bill would impact all public employees, but most of yesterday's testimony came from the K-12 education sector.

District superintendents, local school board members, and representatives of the Ohio School Board Association and Ohio Association of School Business Officials shared anecdotes and data about why district administrators and school leaders need more flexibility in how they manage their employees and staff their schools. They called for changes to laws that mandate last-hired, first-fired teacher dismissal policies and mandatory automatic pay increases for public employees.?

Worthington City Board of Education President Marc Schare shared a story about his district's teacher of the year, to whom he would have loved to give a raise, but can't because of current law.? Schare told the committee, ?Teachers are white-collar professionals with a blue-collar contract. Great teachers are highly trained, highly skilled individuals ... yet we treat teachers like interchangeable factory workers, where one is as good as the next."

Senator Schiavoni asked Mr. Schare, "If you strip all these collective-bargaining rights from teachers, isn't it possible that other superintendents ... are going to hammer teachers in every way and create terrible public schools?"? Mr. Schare responded, "With all due respect [...] Why would anyone do that?"

Senators are clearly concerned about revoking teachers' rights. Senator Brown asked Kalida Local Schools Superintendent Don Horstman, ?Can you name one new right this bill gives teachers?? Superintendent Horstman replied, "It gives us the right to continue to employ people?who would otherwise be out of jobs."

Fordham's Terry Ryan also testified, providing a preview of our forthcoming survey of Ohio superintendents, and his testimony nicely sums up their concerns and suggestions for changes to state law.

When it was all said and done we left feeling exhausted yet inspired by the demonstration of democracy that took place. Also inspiring was the underlying message that came through despite the controversy and the crowds:? as one superintendent said in response to a criticism that undoing Ohio's collective bargaining law would harm the ?working man,? his job is to educate kids and do what's best for them.

- Bianca Speranza

I'll admit some of his post is funny; I can be as self-deprecating as the next person and point out the quirks and oddities and intensity and weird inflection of TFAers -- the oversized teaching bags, hipness of how they dress, etc. (as one tweeter said, many female teachers can be identified by their ?flats? and ?mustard-colored sweaters?).?

But here's the thing about TFA teachers or alums. Being compared to kids who expect praise for doing homework isn't that insulting. Anyone who's been a teacher in a poor urban or rural classroom will be the very first to admit that celebrating the small successes, the day-to-day victories ? including cheering on a student for homework completion -- is what keeps you going. It's part of the formula for success. I don't care how arrogant or na?ve or stupid Russo thinks the TFA community looked/acted/came across this weekend. Perhaps to some, celebration ? especially when achievement gaps persist -- seems like a waste.? But it isn't. Anyone who's jumped for joy when a student spells a word right, or doesn't get into a fist fight, or has been nearly moved to tears when a parent expressed high expectations for their kids for the very first time ? knows that small victories are important. ?(And I wouldn't call TFA's track record and the reform movement largely driven by alums all that small, either.)

Why shouldn't alums, 28,000 of them in total, and 11,000 who gathered in DC this weekend, feel a sense of accomplishment? What is premature about celebrating the fact that hundreds of thousands of our nation's poorest students have or had effective teachers for two or more years? Teachers who may have changed their life trajectory? What is immodest about declaring that your efforts in the face of tough odds resulted in tangible gains for kids who need them the most?

If one thing is for certain, every panelist and speaker this weekend ? including Wendy Kopp ? said that teaching in low-income communities and closing achievement gaps is one of the toughest jobs on the planet. Don't mistake the TFA community's zeal and energy for naivety or delusion. It's born out of a deep commitment to kids and to educational equity that we'd do well to foster, not denigrate.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

Not to force comparisons, but we've said before that Columbus should take a page from Cleveland's charter school playbook as that district has worked hard to share facilities with charters, learn from their successes, and invite new high-performing models to open there. (Meanwhile, Columbus has denied facilities to charters ? including a Fordham-authorized one?because, to state it simply, they're better at providing a quality education to low-income kids.)

Columbus should also borrow a page from Cleveland's school turnaround playbook. Last week Terry lifted up one of Columbus's biggest turnaround failures- Champion Middle School ? which also caught the attention of the New York Times.? Terry rightly cited the need for better school leadership, innovative principal training models, and the role of leadership as the lynchpin for addressing chronic school dysfunction.

This weekend, two of the state's biggest newspapers featured school turnaround efforts in their respective cities and the differences are telling.

From the Columbus Dispatch, one learns that Columbus City Schools has taken a ?hunker-down approach? with federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) dollars.? The SIG program in the Capital City is stunning in its level of mediocrity, specifically:

• The district chose ?transformation,? the least rigorous turnaround model, for its schools.
• It didn't hire ?outsiders or turnaround experts? and is instead relying on internal transformation.
• It left principals intact at some of its very worst performers (such as Weinland Park Elementary, where only 15 percent of fifth graders are proficient in math); and let principals at low-performing schools take on leadership of schools like Champion,? the prototype of failure.
• The district is opting for professional development instead of replacing staff or drawing in new teachers with proven track records.

In contrast, Cleveland is at least attempting to pull off dramatic changes, though the success of its turnaround efforts can only be determined by whether the student achievement needle moves over the next few years.

• At 10 of the turnaround schools, principals are being replaced.
• The district hired outside experts to lead improvements to leadership, curriculum, and instruction.
• District officials are seeking ?more thorough, data-based teacher evaluations.?

Cleveland has realized the need for replacing staff and principals- no matter how controversial- and has looked to outsiders for help. In other words ? whether the two cities' most chronically failing schools rehab themselves remains to be seen, but the likelihood of success at this point seems obvious. Cleveland has admitted it's got a problem and is at least seeking help, while Columbus seems to still be in denial. ?

-Jamie Davies O'Leary

Speaking of education unions, here's a peek at what changes could be in store for teachers and school districts in the Buckeye State if the bill passed as-is:

• Health insurance as a subject of collective bargaining would be prohibited; district management would choose health insurance offerings.
• Districts and other public employers would be prohibited from paying more than 80% of health insurance cost for employees.
• State law regarding leave time for teachers would be scrapped; instead, school boards would adopt leave polices describing how leave is accrued, how it can be used, and how it can be carried over or cashed out.
• The step-and-lane salary schedule for teachers would go away, replaced with the requirement that ?each teacher shall be paid a salary based on merit.?
• Teachers would be limited to one-year contracts.
• School districts in a state of fiscal emergency could void collective bargaining agreements.

Several more hearings around the bill will take place in the coming weeks, and the bill is sure to change as it navigates the legislative process. Stay tuned to see how this develops and what the impact will be on K-12 education in Ohio.

-Bianca Speranza

As an alumna of the program and someone who's lived in other states and cities not only amenable to TFA but actually thrilled about it, these conversations among lawmakers continue to shock me. Many lawmakers admitted that prior to last week's testimony (during which bright alums like Abbey Kinson and Jenna Davis wowed them with stories of their kids achieving stellar academic results), they'd never heard of the program. Others illustrated glaring ? if accidental ? misperceptions about the program.

Ohio's battle to bring TFA here is a long one. Attempts to lock them out are probably not unlike what goes on in other states, though the fact that Ohio is one of just a handful of states without the program exemplifies the fact that folks here tend to be insular and grossly unaware of innovative and successful programs that are mainstream in other parts of the country. Ohio also has an over-supply of teachers in many grades and subjects, and consequently TFA represents more of a competitive threat; the traditional education community despises the idea and ? like last night ? will spin the research in whatever way makes TFA teachers sound as ill-prepared as possible.

The misperceptions that came out during last night's debate, as well as arguments against Teach For America (delivered by the dean of University of Dayton's ed school) deserve some clarification, even if the bill ends up making its way toward smooth passage.

Teach For America is not new or untested. As the TFA reps reminded everyone last night, TFA has a 20-year track record and exists in 33 (soon to be 36) states in communities that need them most. Last year alone, 46,000 applicants applied, including 1,500 from Ohio alone. Ninety percent of corps members complete their two-year commitments (that's higher retention that other teachers in similar schools); 60 percent stay after their two-year commitment, and two-thirds of alumni stay involved in education in some capacity. As Rep. Brenner asked, ?Would you be in business in 35 states for 20 years if your model didn't work?? The clear answer is no.

Teach For America is not merely a solution to teacher shortages. Several lawmakers seemed to fixate on the notion that Ohio already has enough teachers. We are an exporter of teachers, so why would the state open alternate pathways except in shortage areas (math, science, special ed., etc.) As Christina Grant from Teach For America clarified, its mission is ?to build a movement of leaders committed to ending inequity,? and with Ohio's brain drain problem, why in the world wouldn't we want to retain top talent in urban and rural classrooms instead of letting other states siphon it away? According to Grant, last year ?Teach For America was the number one employer for the 2010 senior class at Denison University, Kenyon, Oberlin, and College of Wooster.?

The quality of research about Teach For America matters more than the ?pile? of research. Andy Rotherham has a must-read column today in TIME that dispels a lot of common myths about TFA, among them that the research about its effectiveness is ?mixed.? Kevin Kelley, dean of the education school at University of Dayton, argued that TFA teachers are less effective than traditionally-certified ones, especially in reading. Citing figures from a study of New York teachers, he successfully cast doubt in the hearing about TFAers' classroom effectiveness. But lawmakers should be reminded that the quality of research matters tremendously. Rotherham did a great write-up last year cautioning against ?study laundering? and highlighting the studies of TFA with the most rigorous methodology. These are ones Ohio lawmakers should pay careful attention to. You can see a full list of research, including a grading of studies' methodology (according to rigor) by Education Next, on TFA's website. Rotherham sums it up perfectly in his latest column:

Pretty much every article about TFA states the boilerplate assertion that the research about its effectiveness is "mixed" or "inconclusive." Actually, that's only true if you think the best way to consume research is to literally pile all the different studies up and see which pile is higher. Again and again, the most rigorous studies show that TFA's selection process and boot-camp training produce teachers who are as good, and sometimes better, than non-TFA teachers, including those who have been trained in traditional education schools and those who have been teaching for decades. "The weight of the evidence suggests that TFA teachers as a whole are at least as effective as other teachers in the schools they end up in," says University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, one of the nation's leading researchers on teacher effectiveness. Another solid indicator? The marketplace. Superintendents and principals, who are on the hook for results, can't get enough TFA teachers.

Teaching is not a jobs program. Along with wondering why TFA would want to place in non-shortage areas came the assertion (from several lawmakers) that this ?could shortchange Ohio teachers? or be a threat to in-state grads of traditional teacher colleges who are currently facing ?stiff competition.? There is only one way to say this: lawmakers, and the rest of us, should be more concerned with students in low-income communities and their achievement than we are about letting our Ohio grads get teaching jobs. Ohio's unemployment rate could skyrocket to 35 percent and this would still remain true. Putting the most effective teaches in classrooms that need them, not providing jobs for adults, is paramount.

Creating new talent pipelines doesn't have to represent an incrimination of the rest of the education community. Teach For America's representatives did an excellent job explaining that Ohio could always use more great teachers, and bringing in TFA doesn't mean that the ones we currently have aren't sufficient. Though the instinct among the education community is to get defensive and perceive TFA's message as an indictment of them, traditional certification pathways, etc. this is not the case. TFA brings in talented individuals who are committed to teaching in low-income schools where many traditional educators don't want to work. Ohio has committed to turning around the lowest five percent of its schools and should staff them with teachers who are committed to the challenge.

Teach For America produces not just great teachers, but leaders committed to closing achievement gaps ? of which Ohio has plenty. Missing from last night's debate entirely were statistics about Ohio's achievement gap. According to some lawmakers, there are ?plenty? of teachers here already, but the question we should be asking is whether there is a need for groups like Teach For America, whose sole purpose is to close achievement gaps, and not whether there are x number of jobs open for them. Ironically, though the dean of education and UD described the superior training of traditionally-certified teachers, he failed to bring up the fact that Dayton Public Schools are among the worst in the state. Not a single school in DPS is rated Excellent (A).? In terms of achievement gaps, 42 percent of white eighth graders in Ohio scored proficient on the reading portion of NAEP, while just 13 percent of African American students did so. In math, the gap is worse ? a 30-percentage point difference. Teach For America teachers across America are closing such gaps in their classrooms, and with passage of this bill they could be in Ohio doing the same as early as this fall.

In short, Teach For America ? along with hundreds of Ohio college students and alums of the program ? are chomping at the bit to begin working in some of Ohio's toughest schools. It's time that we let them.?

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

As we noted late last year, the dysfunction at Champion is chronic. In 2001, only 23 percent of the school's sixth graders were proficient in reading. A decade later and after multiple turnaround efforts (including new principals and teachers over the years) the figure was just above 26 percent and math scores had actually slid from 33 percent proficient to just 23 percent proficient. These are bleak numbers indeed and they offer a fairly stark indictment of the whole turnaround enterprise.

Yet, as Dillon reported, ???because leading schools out of chronic failure is harder than managing a successful school ??? often requiring more creative problem-solving abilities and stronger leadership, among other skills ??? the supply of principals capable of doing the work is tiny.??? The nation's schools of education have not been generating the talent necessary for turning around the nation's most troubled schools, nor have they even been trying to. ???Only a tiny percentage (of the nation's 1,200 ed schools) really prepare leaders for school turnaround,??? said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia.

Ohio and other states need a new leadership model for school turnaround experts. Some of our most troubled schools might be salvageable if we can bring a new breed of leadership to bear on the turnaround effort. We know from first-hand experience with a school turnaround effort in Fordham's hometown of Dayton that without clear and consistent leadership, the best-planned efforts fall apart quickly. The few efforts showing some success at turnarounds ??? Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia or the University of Virginia's School Turnaround Specialist Program ??? have focused much attention on finding and developing high-quality school leaders and teachers who are trained to work in a school turnaround environment.

This is akin to training nurses and doctors to work triage in big city emergency rooms or in combat zones. These are professionals with special training and temperament. Having a school turnaround plan is important, but more important is having a team in place that can deal with the complexities and uncertainties of a school turnaround. School turnaround leaders have to be masters at overcoming adversity and staying positive when it seems much around them is falling apart. As the Times reported, such turnaround experts are a rare breed.?? As part of their $4 billion school turnaround effort the Obama administration should route some of these dollars to help launch new models of school leadership training ??? not exclusively owned and operated by schools of education.

- Terry Ryan

Such changes would push decision-making processes and resources to the school level and reduce top-heavy administrative procedures (something that Fordham has called for in Ohio for years).?? The initiative is expected to better connect the community, parents and students to their schools.? Even more relevant (to Ohio especially) is that the move could save a lot ? a combined $2.96 million from not having to pay the salaries of the current four administrators.

According to Education Week, the proposal is currently in preliminary stages, and was designed to test the Innovation Schools Act which aims to reduce bureaucracy rules and regulations.? Districts are eligible to waive from collective bargaining and state laws if proposed changes have support from sixty percent of teachers.?

Ohio legislators and Governor Kasich should follow what happens in Colorado's Falcon 49 School District.? Kasich made a pledge to Ohioans during his campaign that he would reduce administration costs and bureaucracy to help get money and resources into the classroom.? The Innovation Schools Act in Colorado provides a framework for these changes and Ohio should?stay abreast of what's happening in the Centennial State, and possibly think about similar initiatives here to allow districts ways to reduce their administrative overhead.?

- Andrew Proctor, Policy & Research Intern in Fordham's Columbus office

Many are calling it a ???Rosa Parks moment for education.??? Civil rights and political activists are pleading with the governor to pardon Williams-Bolar (and he has asked the Ohio Parole Board to review the case). Kevin Huffman noted in the Washington Post, ???She looked at her options, she looked at the law, she looked at her kids. And she made a choice.???

But did she really look at all of her options? Lost among the clarion calls for expanding school choice to help parents like Ms. Williams-Bolar are key questions. Besides falsifying documents to send her kids outside of Akron Public Schools, did Williams-Bolar have other options? If so, why didn't she use them?

In fact, Williams-Bolar did have legal school-choice options, more than most Ohio families, including:

Intra-district transfer. The Akron Public Schools allows students to attend a school other than their local neighborhood school provided a seat is available. There are several high-performing schools in Akron, one of which we featured in our Needles in a Haystack report last spring (King Elementary, which drew a hefty percentage of its students from outside its attendance zone), that her kids might have attended. There are also two very good magnet schools in Akron: the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, Center for STEM and Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts.

Charter schools. Akron is not the hot-bed of charters that other Ohio cities are, nor are its charter schools (there are eleven of them) as high-performing as ones found in Cleveland and Columbus. But Williams-Bolar had the option to send her children to charter schools, including two of the better ones, Schnee Learning Center and Hope Academy Brown Street Campus ??? both rated ???B??? by the state.

Inter-district open enrollment. Ohio requires each school district to adopt an out-of-district open enrollment policy that details whether a district will accept students tuition-free who live outside its borders. In Summit County, where Akron is located, eleven districts outside of the Akron Public Schools would have accepted Williams-Bolar's children via tuition-free open enrollment. This includes eight that have high academic ratings.

EdChoice Scholarship (voucher). The Akron district schools that Williams-Bolar's children were assigned to had been poor-performing long enough that for at least half of the period during which she sent her children to the suburban school illegally, they were eligible to apply for the EdChoice Scholarship program to attend a private school in the Akron area.

[pullquote]Simply creating more choice pathways alone isn't enough, and the failure of commentators, politicians, and education reformers to acknowledge this reality when discussing Williams-Bolar's case is disingenuous.[/pullquote]

Of course all of these choices are imperfect. For example, most EdChoice recipient schools are non-secular schools, and perhaps Williams-Bolar wanted her children to attend school in a secular institution. And enrolling in choice programs ??? whether charter, district magnet, or voucher ??? takes hard work, patience, and possibly endurance (if there are waiting lists at the receiving schools).

Certainly it's a call to arms when low-income families have to work harder than the rest of us in order to secure excellent education options for their kids. But simply creating more choice pathways alone isn't enough, and the failure of commentators, politicians, and education reformers to acknowledge this reality when discussing Williams-Bolar's case is disingenuous.

Williams-Bolar had legal school options for her kids, but she chose not to use them, either because she wasn't aware of them or simply didn't prefer them. Even more discouraging is the fact that academic performance was not the primary reason she pulled her kids from the Akron Public Schools. Her primary concern was safety. While she has become a poster child for school choice and the plight of urban families trapped in chronically failing schools, Williams-Bolar herself wasn't fleeing her home district because of its weak academic performance.

Fordham has long been an advocate for school choice options for all families ??? especially those trapped in failing schools. But as Checker, Terry, and Mike Lafferty chronicled in book form last summer, school choice theory is imperfect. Parents lack full information and often don't exercise their ability to choose, and even when they do make a conscious choice to switch schools ??? they often do it without regard to academics.

Williams-Bolar's situation alone doesn't show the need for expanding school choice in Ohio. Rather, her case shows the need to better educate parents and families about their educational options (much like what School Choice Ohio does in spreading the word about Ohio's EdChoice Scholarship and other choice programs); to help parents understand the vital importance of making schooling decisions based at least in large part on academics; and to maintain and strengthen accountability systems that will ensure that all available school choice options are decent ones.

As we've noted before, this bill is a new iteration of Senate Bill 180 from the fall of 2009, for which Terry testified back then. What's different this time around, however, is that a GOP-controlled House is likely to go further than the Democratic-controlled House of a year-and-a-half ago, and push for bolder changes in each of these areas (and others). While Fordham supports the provisions of HB 21, the legislature can, and should, go further that merely granting licensure to TFA alums, lifting e-school caps, and requiring value-added data. As Terry said:

?much has changed just in the last year and change is happening fast in states across the country. The reality is that Ohio risks being leapfrogged by dozens of states in many crucial areas of education reform?. Thus, while I support House Bill 21 and its passage, I encourage this legislature to think more boldly. While the bill is a good start, it does not go far enough toward enacting the education reforms Ohio needs

Terry then went on to describe a complete overhaul of teacher personnel policies that would include changing the way we recruit, reward, evaluate, and dismiss teachers ? and getting rid of seniority-based layoffs.

If anyone on the committee had doubts about the importance of teacher effectiveness, whether or not it's possible to differentiate for it, and whether Ohio should rethink its treatment of Teach For America graduates, Abbey Kinson's and Jenna Davis's testimonies powerfully dispelled them.??

Kinson, contrasting her first experience getting ?evaluated? (by a principal on her cell phone for about 15 minutes) in a DC Public School classroom with the way she evaluates teachers at Columbus Collegiate Academy, illustrated that distinguishing highly effective teachers from the rest really isn't elusive if the right systems and metrics are in place. And Kinson is one to talk about teacher quality: she more than doubled her students' proficiency in math last year and 100 percent of her seventh graders were proficient on Ohio's math test. Despite this, Kinson laments:

I've proven that I know the best practices and have the skills to inspire kids to reach their potential. Yet, according to the Ohio Department of Education, I was not qualified to receive full licensure in middle school mathematics.

My experiences are typical of other Teach For America alums wanting to return to Ohio?. In many cases, great teachers have chosen to leave the profession and move on to higher paying jobs with a lot less red tape. Teach for America alums haven't been welcomed back home to Ohio, but rather, obstacles have been put in our paths.

Davis, despite having a traditional educator's background (in middle childhood education with concentrations in math and science), was still blocked from licensure in Ohio and told she'd be receiving a long-term sub's license, despite the fact that she previously:

?.Led [her] special education students to pass their Biology state test at a higher percentage rate than their counterparts in the state, and? led [her] Physical Science students to outperform their regular education peers on their state examination.????????????

We're hopeful that these testimonies not only compel lawmakers to pass the simple fixes in HB 21 but also to think more broadly and boldly about overall reforms to teacher evaluations, e-schools, and more.

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

According to School Choice Ohio, which works to protect and expand children's educational options in the Buckeye State, 85,453 Ohio students are eligible to apply for the public voucher for the coming school year. However, because of a state-mandated cap on enrollment only 14,000 students are permitted to participate in the program.

To be eligible for one of the coveted vouchers students must attend one of the 197 schools rated academic watch (D) or academic emergency (F) by the state for two of the past three years.? During the 2010-2011 school year the voucher program almost reached the statutory cap of 14,000 students with just a little over 13,000 participating in the program.? Participation in the voucher program has steadily increased since its inception in 2006, and this year's participation will most likely be on the same path. Chad Aldis, Executive Director of School Choice Ohio urges families to ?to act quickly and enroll their children in this transformational program?.

To find out more about which schools are voucher eligible and the private schools participating in the program?check out School Choice Ohio's website.

-Bianca Speranza

Close to 1,000 Ohioans have attended events across the state this week to celebrate.

This week's Cap City event brought together legislators from both parties, education reform leaders from across the state, school principals, public school board members, and skeptics. Featured panelists included Ohio Representative Matt Huffman; Ohio Senator Kris Jordan; School Choice Ohio Executive Director Chad Aldis; Terry Ryan of the Fordham Institute, and others.

Terry highlighted Dayton, Fordham's hometown, as a place where a large percentage of district students have exerted choice and attend area charters, which are performing better academically than their district counterpart schools. Referencing Fordham's on-the-ground work, ?Our experience in Dayton is not a panacea; it's a tool? (Hannah News Service; subscription required).

The discussion, which centered on new ways to expand school options for families while keeping high standards of quality and accountability, was encouraging as Ohio heads into a tough year financially and will have to think innovatively about how best to serve students across the state.

Speaker of the Ohio House, Bill Batchelder, kicked off the event by recounting fondly his role as primary sponsor of the legislation that created the Cleveland voucher in 1995, a program that now serves more than 5,000 students. Now, as we celebrate 15 years of the Cleveland voucher, he vowed ?I'm still at it? and praised Ohioans for recognizing that ?not every child learns in the same way.?

Batchelder's views about choice (as quoted by Hannah News Service ? subscription required), set a positive tone for the state as it heads into a new year fraught with challenges:

It is not only important, but a fundamental right that families are empowered to make the best decisions on the education their child receives, By allowing parents to make these important decisions, we can ensure that their child's best interests are always put first and not ignored by bureaucratic decision makers unaware of each child's individual needs.

Rep. Huffman came out strongly in favor of moving aggressively to expand school choice as broadly as possible, especially for low-income families. His ideas included sliding-scale, means-tested vouchers and the education savings accounts that were floated in Florida earlier this year. And Senator Jordan, who introduced a tax credit scholarship that would help low- and middle-income families, is set to re-introduce it during the new legislative session.

While it's good to hear state representatives and senators advocate for school choice, it's the personal stories that are perhaps most valuable. Shari Perkins, a Columbus mom whose two middle school sons use the EdChoice Scholarship to attend a private school, was the capstone speaker and shared her nail-biting experiences both with the Columbus City Schools lottery and the EdChoice Scholarship lottery.

For those of you who are interested, an event in Toledo will round out the week. School Choice Ohio is hosting a bus tour of Birmingham Elementary (an excellent-rated Toledo Public School), Toledo School for the Arts (an excellent-rated charter school), and Rosary Cathedral (a voucher-accepting private school).

Happy School Choice Week to all. Here in Ohio, it's a great foot to start out on as we head into a new year and new legislative cycle where lots of educational choice bills are likely to be introduced.

Guest blogger Sarah Pechan is the Director of Community Programs at School Choice Ohio.

In fact, the details of HB 21 are strongly reminiscent of last fall's SB 180, for which Terry and teachers from a Fordham-sponsored charter school provided testimony.

We thought SB 180's provision to grant professional licensure to TFA alums who had a track record of excellence serving poor students (but in another state) was an excellent idea then, and we think it's a good idea now. HB 21 would open up a pathway for TFA alums struggling to get licensed in Ohio to be put directly on the path to licensure; they would no longer be placed on long-term substitute licenses and fight with rigid licensure requirements just to teach in the Buckeye State. This is a promising way to keep TFA alums?from going the way of Ohio's insidious?brain drain?(many leave, expressing frustration that the state doesn't want them here).

The new legislative cycle for Ohio's 129^th General Assembly has barely started, and as far as alternative teacher preparation programs such as TFA go ? this is a promising beginning. Here's to hoping that 2011 is not only the year for alums to get licensed, but for the Teach For America program itself to finally come to the Buckeye State!

- Jamie Davies O'Leary