Steve Farkas of the FDR Group led off the event with a presentation of the findings the survey of 344 of the state's 614 superintendents. The survey found varied opinion from school leaders for the Buckeye State’s recent reforms. Among the seven reforms we inquired about, superintendents strongly support the Common Core and individualized learning. District superintendents, however, are far less enamored with the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and school choice options (vouchers and charter schools).

A panel discussion followed with Fordham’s Terry Ryan moderating and Senator Peggy Lehner, Kirk Hamilton, and Steve Dackin participating on the panel. Senator Lehner is the chair of the Senate Education Committee, Kirk Hamilton is the executive director of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators (BASA), and Dackin is the superintendent of Reynoldsburg City Schools near Columbus.

Panelists (from left to right): State superintendent Dick Ross, Steve Farkas of the FDR Group, Kirk Hamilton of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, Steve Dackin of Reynoldsburg City Schools

The first topic of discussion was the Common Core. The panelists agreed that the Common Core has considerable potential to improve education for Ohio’s youngsters. Lehner remarked that educator support for the Common Core has helped Ohio’s lawmakers “weather the storm” of recent anti-Common Core agitation. Also agreed upon was that K-12 education must push ahead by integrating technology into classrooms and individualizing learning. Both, the panelists thought, can better inspire and engage children in their education.

Less common ground was found when it came to the Third Grade Reading Guarantee—Ohio’s recent law requiring third graders to demonstrate proficiency in reading before entering fourth grade. Dackin reported that, for the most part, his district has been pushing hard in primary education even before the law. Meanwhile, Lehner maintained that the policy is the right policy—Ohio has far too many kids who can’t read—and a state law, on the books, will push districts harder to prioritize the basics of early education.

Finally, the panelists found the least consensus when it came to school governance: Specifically, what role should local communities have (which as Hamilton pointed out, vary widely in culture and values) and what role should the state of Ohio play in students’ education? A brief exchange between Lehner and Hamilton sums up the complexity of governance—public education is akin to a marriage: It takes hard work to get it right—and sometimes there are arguments and sometimes there’s dysfunction.

Implementing education policy remains complex, the panelists seemed to agree. And, all this brings us full-circle to Dick Ross’ statement.  Implementing serious—and often complex—education reform for the betterment of Ohio’s 1.8 million school-aged children is “all about leadership.” Are superintendents willing and able to faithfully lead the implementation of these changes?  Time will tell, and here’s hoping.

To read the full findings of Fordham’s survey of Ohio superintendents, please click here. For more reaction to the report, please visit the Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio.

DECA delivers and Dayton knows it. The numbers help tell the story:

*390 Enrollment

*78.4 Percent economically disadvantaged

*87.9 Percent non-white

*100 Percent of students Percent in Math and Reading on the 10^th grade Ohio Graduation Test.

*100 Percent of its graduates (and graduation rate is over 95 percent) are admitted to college and 87 percent make it to their sophomore year.

DECA is a Bronze Medal winner from U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of America's Best High Schools in 2012 and 2009. And has been studied widely by, among others, Fordham, Harvard, Great City Colleges of Education, the Gates Foundation and the Center for Secondary School Redesign.

But despite all this success in a city where far too many kids fail academically, DECA’s success is being trashed by the organized-labor funded Join the Future in Columbus because the school requires students to go through an application process for enrollment. This, Join the Future argues, results in DECA creaming kids and thus diminishing the school’s now decade long track-record of excellence serving some of the city’s most high-need students. Some of whom are actually homeless and most of whom receive free and reduced price lunch.

It is clear no one from Join the Future has ever visited DECA, spoken to its students and families, or even bothered to actually read all that has been written about this award winning school. It is also clear that Join the Future is clueless about how public high schools across the state enroll students. For example, in our recent report Needles in a Haystack: Lessons from Ohio’s high-performing urban high schools we reported on some of the state’s top high-poverty, high-performing urban high schools. All the schools we reported on were fantastic and their students and parents couldn’t say enough about how these schools saved lives and gave students opportunities too often afforded only to their richer suburban peers. But, these schools (all public district high schools) also had entry requirements for their students.

For example, Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton requires “an audition entry bar; singing and dancing counts.” At John Hay Early College High School in Cleveland “admission is based on seventh-grade Ohio Achievement Assessments (OAA) scores in reading and math, teacher recommendations, a math entrance exam, and an interview.” Cleveland School of the Arts is a “selective-admissions school; to gain entry students must first audition in one of the art forms – dance, drama, visual arts, band, strings, vocal, creative writing, photography, or graphic design – then pass a series of interviews and other assessments.”

Such schools, like DECA, deliver for their kids and rather than trash them for their success with kids who need the help, we argue, Ohio should figure out how to better support such schools, help them expand what they do, and figure out how to add more of them to the mix. If we do, families and children in places like Dayton will be the beneficiaries. That's the sort of future I want to join.  

From left: Greg Harris, Robert Kilo, Judy Hennessey and Terry Ryan

A coalition that included high performing charter schools from Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee’s Education Subcommittee on May 7th. Following introductions from Fordham’s Terry Ryan, Dayton Early College Academy’s Superintendent Judy Hennessey began to speak in front of the Subcommittee only to be interrupted by Committee Chair Senator Randy Gardner, “Senator [Peggy] Lehner has just commented you lead one of the best schools in the country.”

Jokingly Judy Hennessey nodded and said, “Now we are striving for world class.”

The coalition of high performing charter schools included school leaders and policy advocates from KIPP Central Ohio, United Students Network, Breakthrough Schools, Dayton Early College Academy, and Students First Ohio who gathered to urge Senators to enact policies that would help facilitate the growth of high performing charter schools in the state. Among the policies discussed, the coalition asked the subcommittee to consider the reinstatement of funding for the Straight-A Fund (from $150 million to $300 million), increasing the per pupil facilities funding to charter schools (from a proposed $100 to $300 a student), and strengthening accountability for the state’s lowest performing charters. 

Introduced by Governor Kasich at the outset of the budget cycle in February, the Straight-A Fund would support the growth and replication of innovations in the school system. The coalition wholly supported the implementation of the fund. “We applaud the governor and his team for including the Straight-A Fund as a significant piece of the overall budget,” said Robert Kilo the director of advocacy and major gifts for Breakthrough Schools. The Straight-A Fund, however, was decreased by half as it passed through the House. Kilo continued: “We would like to see the original appropriation for the Straight-A Fund restored to $300 million. This would help schools like ours and other successful and innovative schools to compete and make sure the Governor’s goal of spreading “Achievement Everywhere” is accomplished in an accelerated manner.”

As the budget bill arrives at the Senate, charter schools are looking to gain $100 per pupil to offset facility expenses – which has been a serious impediment to the growth of strong charters in many parts of Ohio. While this marks the first time charter schools can expect facility funds, the coalition urged the legislators to consider increasing the allotment. “We are challenged to secure the funding necessary to remodel existing structures; building new schools is clearly out of our financial reach,” said Judy Hennessey. Fordham’s Terry Ryan and Ohio’s Directors StudentsFirst Greg Harris both echoed this sentiment but with the condition that addition funding would only be given to charters that have proven track records of academic success. 

Members of the coalition asserted that, in order to advance the growth of high performing schools, poor performing charters had to be closed. “We believe in the expansion of schools choice but we also believe in greater accountability,” said Terry Ryan. Currently, charter schools in Ohio are not facing strict enough laws that lead to the timely closure of poor performing schools and some sponsors are not taking the necessary steps to hold their schools accountable.

Senator Nina Turner concurred with the coalition. “It is definitely a touchy subject that we have been dealing with,” she told the group, “but I agree with your assertions.” Terry further discussed the implications of not closing bad charters with the subcommittee stating, “Having bad charters ‘blow up’ harms good charters.”

The subcommittee was poised to listen to the assertions made by the coalition, hoping that they could in part some lessons to duplicate their charter’s academic successes through the state of Ohio. Capturing the sentiment of the discussion, Senator Nina Turner shared, “There exists a plethora of schools options but, regardless, every student should be given the highest quality education.”

She also praised the model of cooperation of quality charters and the school district which exists in her hometown of Cleveland, closing the hearing with the apt observation: “We are better together.”

But while other suburban school districts succumbed to hand-wringing at such moments of despair, Reynoldsburg responded with innovation. It slashed central office staff and sent more resources to individual schools, empowering principals with key decision-making authority. It developed “themes” at schools with a particular focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and it established more charter schools and enhanced school choice throughout the district. Most unusually, it bartered with a community college, a hospital, a preschool, and a dance company to utilize its extra space in ways that benefitted its own students.

But perhaps most important, write Ellen Belcher and Terry Ryan in their informative profile of the district for the Fordham Institute, Limitless, Education, the Reynoldsburg Way, is the approach the 6,300-student district has taken to school leadership and administration—that of portfolio management. Principals have the authority to design unique academic programs, and they get to make the calls and employ the people that are the right fit for their schools. The superintendent acts as portfolio manager, adding and enhancing programs that work and dropping those that don’t.

While large urban districts such as Denver, New York, and New Orleans get attention for the portfolio strategies they have developed, Reynoldsburg has emerged as a sleeper in the movement and a leader among suburban districts that have tried the approach. Paul Hill, who has analyzed portfolio districts for the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, told Belcher and Ryan that Reynoldsburg “is the leader in a new trend—innovative suburban districts taking advantage of all the talent available in a metro area, but avoiding big-city gridlock.”

There’s a reason such an approach has caught on with reform-minded districts: it’s attractive to families. Parents are not a monolithic bunch, and districts such as New York and Baltimore especially have created networks of autonomous and programmatically diverse schools because they have recognized that schools can’t be all things to all children. But in a time of tight budgets, that means that school leaders have to make trade-offs. What’s attractive to families and teachers at one school is unattractive at another. Reynoldsburg may have only one high school, but that school is organized around four very different academies—one a STEM school, another focused on art and design; another immersed in business, leadership, and law, and still another organized around health science and human services.

It’s a credit—and a leap of faith—to the school board in Reynoldsburg to empower its superintendent to pursue such a strategy. It got nowhere by asking voters to ante up for a school system that was driving away families. Now, after the district has transformed the way it delivers a public education, it has reversed its enrollment slide and this year attracted 180 students from neighboring districts via open enrollment. And the state has rated Reynoldsburg “Excellent with Distinction.”

How it got there is the subject of the feature written by Belcher, a former editorial page editor for the Dayton Daily News, and Ryan, Fordham’s vice president for Ohio programs and policy. They take the reader on a candid tour of many of the district’s fourteen schools and reveal some complications that ought to be expected. But most importantly, the pair has given us an excellent case study for the portfolio approach, writ small.

As a step in accomplishing this goal, Fordham’s own Terry Ryan has helped form a coalition of high performing charter schools to testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee’s Education Subcommittee. The schools in which these leaders work represent some of the best public schools that Ohio has to offer. While each leader is advocating for their school and telling the story of what success looks like in their cities, they also provide overarching policy recommendations that could help forward the expansion and replication of successful charters including:

• Supporting the implementation of the Straight-A-Fund
• Increasing the per pupil facilities funding to charter schools
• Implementing tougher laws that would lead to the closure of failing charter schools

Below you will find links to the testimonies this coalition have turned in to the Subcommittee.

Andrew Boy, Founder & Executive Director at United Schools Network (USN)

School Profile: USN is a network of schools that currently serves students in Columbus through Columbus Collegiate Academy and Columbus Collegiate Academy West. In 2012, Columbus Collegiate Academy received an excellent rating from the state, making it only one of five schools to receive that distinction in the Columbus City Schools area.

School Leader: Andrew Boy is the founder and executive director of the United Schools Network where he hopes his schools can serve 1,200 students by 2018.

(Please click here to download Andrew Boy’s testimony)

Christopher O’Brien, Head of School at E Prep- Woodland Hills Campus

School Profile: E Prep- Woodland Hills Campus is a member of the Breakthrough Schools charter network. Serving K-3 and 5th-8th grade students, the schools was given an excellent rating by the Ohio Department of Education.

School Leader: Christopher O’Brien serves as the head of school at E Prep- Woodland Hills Campus. Before taking this position, Christopher O’Brien served as a 6th grade math teacher for Breakthrough’s flagship school E Prep-Cliffs.

(Please click here to download Christopher O’Brien’s testimony)

Judy Hennessey, Superintendent & CEO at Dayton Early College Academy (DECA)

School Profile: DECA is Ohio’s oldest early college high school which has expanded to serve students in 7th and 8th grade. Currently rated effective by the Ohio Department of Education, DECA was been named one of the five most innovative schools in the country by WestEd.

School Leader: Judy Hennessey is the superintendent and CEO of DECA. Prior to working at DECA, she was the superintendent at Oakwood City Schools for seven years.

(Please click here to download Judy Hennessey’s testimony)

Robert Kilo, Director of Advocacy and Major Gifts at Breakthrough Schools

School Profile: In a recent study by the Stanford University, Breakthrough Schools was ranked 1st among urban charter school networks in the nation for student growth in reading and 4th in growth in math. The network serves 97% minority students and 82% who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

School Leader: Robert Kilo is the director of advocacy and major gifts at Breakthrough Schools, advancing the discussion on education policy on the behalf of Breakthrough Schools.

(Please click here to download Robert Kilo’s testimony)

Hannah Powell, Executive Director at KIPP Central Ohio

School Profile: KIPP Central Ohio currently operates KIPP Journey Academy (KJA) in Columbus Ohio. Serving 90% of economically disadvantaged households, KJA has received an effective rating while outperforming Columbus City Schools. KJA has also been nationally recognized as an EPIC Award Winning Schools for its gains in urban education.

School Leader Bio: Hannah Powell is the executive director of KIPP Central Ohio where she is currently spearheading the expansion of KIPP schools in the region. Before leading KIPP Central Ohio, she served as the founding school leader for KJA.

(Please click here to download Hannah Powell’s testimony)

Greg Harris, Ohio Director at StudentsFirst

Joining this group in testimony is Greg Harris who serves as the Ohio Director for StudentsFirst, a national organization with nearly 70,000 members in Ohio. StudentsFirst stands with this coalition of high performing charter schools because they believe that quality choice options with strong accountability measures equals parent empowerment and a path to student achievement for the most vulnerable young people.

 (Please click here to download Greg Harris’s testimony)

The research bears out the wary comments above. Two recent PD studies, conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), found no effect in student achievement when teachers participate in PD. The first, a middle school math study, administered two years of PD to 92 teachers, and found no effect on teachers’ knowledge or student achievement. The second, an elementary reading study, administered PD to 270 teachers for one year. The study found no effect on student achievement, either at the end of the year-long PD program or the year after.

So, PD is ineffective. What, then, of the cost?

The cost of PD has ballooned in the past two decades, such that today, Ohio spends upwards of $400 million per year on PD. The chart below shows the average per-pupil PD expenditure for Ohio’s traditional public schools—the black dashed line—and the average expenditures for three groups of schools. (There’s considerable variation in districts’ PD expenditures—major urban districts spend the most; rural districts the least).[1] To get a taste of the variation, I display three groups: (1) Major Urban – the “Ohio Eight”; (2) Major Suburban – the state’s eight largest suburban districts by FY2012 enrollment; (3) Rural Farmland – Ridgemont Local (Hardin County) and its seven most similar districts.

The chart shows that from 1995 to 2012, the district average per-pupil PD expenditure has increased:

• Statewide, from $50 to $278 (up 456 percent);
• Urban, from $244 to $870 (up 257 percent);
• Suburban, from $97 to $498 (up 413 percent);
• Rural, from $36 to $178 (up 394 percent).

Thus, the average Ohio teacher, assuming a class of 20 students, receives somewhere around $5,000 a year for PD.

Chart: Average per-pupil PD expenditures, statewide and three district types, 1994-95 to 2011-12

SOURCE: Ohio Department of Education. NOTE: Expenditures adjusted for inflation by GDP deflator. Fiscal year 2012 data are preliminary.

How to stop the rising cost of teacher PD? One increasingly feasible solution is to provide PD via MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), free online courses taught by instructors at the nation’s finest universities. MOOCs have caught fire; for example, Case Western recently saw 80,000 people sign up for its MOOCs, according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. To boost their content knowledge, teachers could take MOOCs in their area of instruction. And, Coursera—founded by Stanford University professors—recently announced a partnership with seven schools of education to provide teacher PD courses, including several that will help teachers transition to the Common Core.

True, MOOC-delivered PD may not move the needle on student achievement any better than traditionally-delivered PD (typically through workshops, webinars, week-long trainings). But, at least MOOC-delivered PD won’t break the banks of school districts. If utilized, MOOCs—again, they’re free—could stanch the rising cost of teacher PD in Ohio’s schools, freeing them to spend scarce resources on staff and programs that actually help kids achieve. And, who knows, maybe MOOCs will be effective, unlike the many forms of PD that’s out there now.

What’s your experience been with teacher PD? Is it worth the cost? Does MOOC-delivered teacher PD have potential? The comments are open, or tweet me at @a_churchill22.

These critics contend, inter alia, that the Common Core:

• is a national curriculum (critics of the Common Core confuse standards with curriculum);
• is a takeover of education by the federal government and the beginning of the end of state/local control;
• requires the mandatory collection of intrusive personal data about kids (including possible retina scans);
• de-emphasizes handwriting skills;
• favors “repair manuals” over classic literature; and
• isn’t nearly as rigorous as current state standards.

Every single one of which assertions is flat wrong. To read more about these debates see here, here and here.

The most peculiar thing about these conversations, however, is Diane Ravitch’s emergence as a darling of the conservative right.  She is quoted and cited with affection and approbation by all manner of Common Core antagonists. A recent blog post from a group in New Jersey, for example, exclaimed, “Whoa! Beck, Malkin, Schlafley and Ravitch. Talk about your dream team.”

I first learned about academic standards, what they are and why they’re needed back in the 1980s and 1990s  from books written by Diane Ravitch like National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide  and What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?.

Fast forward to the present, and now my Fordham colleagues and I find ourselves struggling against groups that oppose not only the Common Core, but academic standards more generally. These groups use Ravitch quotes to support their cause. Meanwhile, Fordham has rated Ohio’s current academic standards in both English and math as a mediocre “C.” We rated the Common Core ELA standards a “B+” and the math standards an “A-.”

Who’d have thought it would be so hard to push for higher academic standards, or that long time advocates for higher standards would now fight their implementation? All of this makes my head hurt.

Recovery school districts, simply put, are state-created entities that take responsibility for running—and turning around—individual schools that have languished academically for years while under district control. Fordham, as part of its series on school-governance alternatives and reforms, is issuing a three-part series focused on recovery school districts. The first report is on the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD), which was seeded as part of Tennessee’s winning Race to the Top (RttT) application in January 2010.

Nelson Smith, former head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and long-time school-reform leader, was the perfect person to report on the history, challenges, and early successes of the Tennessee ASD. According to Smith, Tennessee’s RttT application committed the state to turning around the “bottom 5 percent” of schools, and Tennessee allocated $22 million of its $500 million RttT award to launching the Achievement School District. Support for this effort was bipartisan, and strong leadership has been key to moving it ahead. Former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen led the charge for the RttT grant, while his Republican successor Governor Bill Haslam took ownership of the effort after his election in 2010.

Two months after taking office, according to Smith, “Haslam made the surprising choice of Kevin Huffman as the state’s new school superintendent. A top executive of Teach for America (TFA), Huffman was the first TFA alum to serve as state chief.” This bold pick of Huffman as state chief was matched by the equally bold selection of Chris Barbic as the ASD’s inaugural superintendent. Barbic had gained a national reputation as a top school fixer while leading Houston’s YES! Prep program, initially a charter-led turnaround at one site that by 2011 had grown to eleven schools serving some 7,000 students.

Barbic, according to Smith’s telling, inherited a well-defined strategy from Tennessee’s successful RttT application that included seven strands (a “how-to” RSD guide of sorts):

1.   Eligibility: A school would be a candidate for the ASD if it were either in the bottom 5 percent of Title 1 schools statewide on combined math and reading/language arts achievement or a Title 1 high school with a graduation rate of less than 60 percent.

2.   Governance: Eligible schools would be pulled out of their home districts and placed under ASD authority. Barbic’s office would have “complete decision-making authority,” and targeted schools would remain in the ASD for at least five years.

3.   Teachers and staff: Educators working under ASD authority would relinquish prior contract rights, be part of a new contract with the ASD, and become state employees. The plan called for only “the best teachers” in these schools to continue working in them, and many would be replaced.

4.   Partners: New talent pipelines would be created to recruit, train, and place top teaching and leadership talent into the ASD and other high-need schools. The state would also create an investment fund that could be used to incubate or scale up high-performing charter schools.

5.   Timing: The ASD officially launched in August 2011, and the first schools slated for ASD takeover were announced in February 2012 and opened in August 2012. Six schools in total are under ASD control: Three are managed directly by the ASD and three by charter operators.

6.   Models: The ASD could select among four options for schools under its jurisdiction:

• Turnaround: new leader, new staff, and new programs;
• Restart: reopen as an ASD authorized charter school;
• Closure; and
• Transformation: like a turnaround, but schools partner with outside groups.

7.   Exit Strategy: Schools that improved could, over five years, exit the ASD as an independent charter school or even return to their original school district. According to Smith, what happens to the schools that return to the district is still not clear, nor is it clear if the teachers hired for the schools under the ASD would still be the teachers under home district control.

Redefining the School District in Tennessee is must read. It offers important insights for states—Ohio included—on how it is possible to fix troubled schools and districts that have long proven incapable of fixing themselves due to broken governance and failed systems of management and operations.

We have an internal saying within our charter school authorizing operation: “As the board goes, so goes the school.”

More often than not this proves to be the case, which is why board capacity – and by that I mean the collective strength of the school’s board to govern a fiscally, organizationally and academically healthy school that is achieving its goals for students - is critical.

Have a high performing charter school? Chances are it’s got a savvy board whose membership consists of mission-aligned individuals with diverse professional expertise and experience that is leveraged to advance a strategic and defined vision, and achieve a specific set of goals.

As the board goes, so goes the school

School not doing so well? Probably the issues start and end with the board, and will fester as long as the board lets them.

Adam touches on this issue by pointing out that education management companies and other service providers sometimes control charter school boards (as opposed to the board controlling the vendor). He’s absolutely right; this happens and it shouldn’t. However, to place the blame squarely on the vendors who contractually formalize (sometimes egregious) arrangements advantageous to the vendor with charter school governing boards misses the point. The school boards who agree to these terms are just as much at fault, and authorizers that acquiesce (or grant a charter without even looking at the management agreement) bear some responsibility, too.

Capacity is something that requires ongoing maintenance and at least an annual critique

Capacity is something that requires ongoing maintenance and at least an annual critique. Strong boards recognize and acknowledge their weaknesses and take action to address the issues; weak boards often tinker at the edges, thereby contributing to organizational malaise, which often tacitly exacerbates the problem(s).

So what’s the solution? For authorizers, try to catch the issues up front, before granting a charter. For fledgling boards new to the charter school world (and ideally in the concept phase), read everything and be able to tap the expertise of a financial analyst and a lawyer before signing anything. And, contact schools that a vendor you’re considering works with and find out what their experience has been. For existing boards, analyze your performance at least once a year: are you meeting your goals as a board and as a school? Most importantly, are students and taxpayers getting a return on their investment in you?  

These are staggering numbers, with massive implications for students and taxpayers. For students who take a remedial course, Complete College America found that only 35 percent graduate in six years. This compares to 56 percent of all students. Similarly, the Ohio State University found that students who took remedial coursework graduated at a rate 30 points lower than their non-remedial peers. With these dismal results in mind, remedial coursework largely wastes the $130 million per year Ohio spends to support remedial education.

The chart below takes a closer look at the remediation rates for incoming freshman who attend an Ohio public college or university, by the public high school from which they graduated. The performance index generally indicates the quality of the high school. The chart shows three things:

• As expected, higher-performing schools tend to have lower remediation rates;
• A small portion of Ohio high schools have remarkably high remediation rates—above 70 and 80 percent—and four schools break the 90 percent mark;
• A modest-sized section of high-performing high schools also have high remediation rates. This is unexpected—and indicates that remediation is a problem for students who graduated some of the state’s highest-performing high schools. (These are the points circled in the top right part of the graph.)

SOURCE: Ohio Board of Regents, NOTE: Correlation = -.61. Public high schools with less than 10 of its students attending an Ohio public college university were excluded. Chart was inspired by Chad Aldeman, College- and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success (Washington DC: Education Sector, 2010).

So, Ohio has a remediation crisis—and one that permeates a fair number of its best high schools. And Ohioans are right to ask what can be done to solve this crisis. But, in fact, Ohio’s policy makers and school leaders are taking steps to address it.

First, Ohio’s schools are implementing of the Common Core academic standards in math and English language arts. The Common Core are rigorous and college-ready standards. If faithfully implemented, they will strengthen the link between high school and college—which is weak according to a recent ACT report—and better ensure that incoming freshman come prepared for college.

Second, the Buckeye State is transitioning to new school report cards. These will include information—not previously included—about how well high schools prepare their students for college. One component of the new report card will include the percentage of students who attain a designated score on their ACT/SAT exam, whereupon the college can deem the student to be “remediation-free.” High schools, then, will be held accountable for making sure their students can jump right into college coursework, rather than allowing their upper classmen to coast to graduation.

Both measures—the Common Core and the state’s new report cards—will come online for Ohio public schools in 2014-15. And Ohio’s leaders, educators, and general public should support the Common Core and the state’s new accountability system, as policies intended to reduce the chasm between high school and college

Since 1986, over 557 school districts throughout Ohio have taken advantage of a very generous program, courtesy of taxpayers, that allows school districts to pay for capital improvements done to their facilities.  According to the Ohio School Facilities Commission, this program has funded over 952 projects, involving over 6,089 buildings, at a cost of over $1.25 billion, while saving taxpayers over $115 million.  However, this privilege is open to district schools and their buildings only, and denied to charter schools. 

The program, formally known as the Ohio School Facilities Commission Energy Conservation Program or the House Bill 264 Program, enables school districts to make energy-related improvements to district buildings that in theory would generate enough energy savings to eventually pay off the improvement bond from which the capital originated from its issuance, along with the cost of financing.  The cost savings over 15 years for energy, operational, and maintenance must equal or exceed the cost of implementing the measures.  The program allows energy-related improvements, as opposed to merely repairs.  This may seem like semantics until the discussion turns on how exactly projects are paid for. 

In Ohio, tax levies are typically raised in order to fund capital projects, including improvements to school buildings.  Ohio law requires that such levies must be submitted to the voters of the school district for approval.  Under HB 264, however, school districts can bypass this process of accountability by invoking the desired project as a qualified, energy-related, permanent improvement.

Once could argue that HB 264 is a subtle loophole, where public debt is incurred without the explicit consent of the taxpayer, and all in the name of energy conservation.  Further many district schools have received taxpayer-sponsored loans that have gone above and beyond the anticipated payback period of fifteen years. No doubt, HB 264 is a great deal for district schools. 

The argument here is not to dispute that energy conservation is not a meaningful public policy objective or even that HB 264’s ability to evade a levy vote by taxpayers is disingenuous.  Rather, these same benefits should accrue to charter schools, and not just traditional district schools.  For energy-conservation (and the cost-savings associated with it) should be addressed in all Ohio schools.  A building, regardless of ownership, is either energy-efficient or inefficient.  Making all schools energy efficient benefits the entire community, and the more vested parties in the program, the better.  

Participation for energy conservation should cover the widest spectrum, in order to get the maximum result for the entire community.  Therefore, lawmakers should amend HB 264 to include charter school facilities.  The costs of this initiative are being picked up, after all, by every taxpayer in the community.  It is only just that in a democracy, all vested parties who share in the costs should also share in the resulting benefits.    

It is well known that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been a long-time champion of high academic standards and aligned assessments. We are also supporters of the Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics, mainly because they are superior to what Ohio and most other states currently have in place for their schools.

There is no doubt that the Common Core and the PARCC assessments aligned to them will face challenges in the coming months and years ( e.g. preparing all teachers, getting the necessary technology in place, developing pacing guides). But, despite the challenges superintendents, school principals, and teachers are remarkably supportive of the Common Core in Ohio and across the country. For example, Fordham recently surveyed Ohio’s superintendents (344 of the state’s 614 superintendents – a 56 percent response rate), and discovered that 81 percent of the respondents believe that five years from now the Common Core standards “will be widely and routinely in use in Ohio.” Only one in ten say it “will have faded away by then.” Ohio’s educators have bought into the Common Core despite concerns about implementation challenges.

But, there are others who want to scuttle the implementation of the Common Core for either ideological reasons or simply because they fear change or misunderstand it. It is these critics the following tries to address.

Fabrication #1: The Common Core is an assault by the Obama Administration on local control of education

The Common Core academic standards are a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The effort started in 2008 and was formally launched in spring 2009. And, 45 states have adopted the Common Core, many of which are run by Republican governors and legislatures. The Ohio State Board of Education formally adopted the Common Core in June 2010.

There’s no denying, however, that the federal government has helped implement the Common Core. Ohio school districts received $204 million in federal Race to the Top grants, in part, to prepare educators for the new standards. But, anti-Common Core critics erroneously—and misleadingly—consider the Common Core to be a federal takeover of local education, even linking the Common Core to Obama’s health care plan. This comes from the Ohioans Against the Common Core: “It [The PARCC Assessment] is equivalent to Medicaid expansion implementing Obamacare (sic).” And, this from John Griffing of the National Review Online: “Common Core is Obamacare applied to our children’s education.”

The fact is that the Common Core effort emerged from the states themselves and was developed using expertise and input of a wide variety of education stakeholders and content experts. All of this began during George W. Bush’s second term as President. Moreover, conservative governors, from Mitch Daniels to Chris Christie to Bobby Jindal have each openly supported the Common Core. Further, no state has been required to join the Common Core and nothing prevents a state from deciding to leave the Common Core at any point. In short, the Common Core is a voluntary association of states committed to improving the rigor of education provided to their states’ children, and mostly this has been a bipartisan affair with Republicans and Democrats supporting the effort.

All that said, President Obama has been all too eager to take credit for the Common Core, and to politicize the effort on the campaign trail. He deserves to be shamed for that—but our kids should not suffer because of his crass partisanship. In the end, Common Core standards are good for Ohio’s children.

Fabrication #2: The Common Core will lead to Mediocrity

Education in America is already plagued by mediocrity. Consider the achievement results from Ohio. In 2011, only 37 percent of Ohio 8th graders were proficient in reading and while 39 percent were considered proficient in math according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” Despite such bleak statistics, skeptics worry that the Common Core might make things worse. In its criticism of the academic rigor of the Common Core, The American Principles Project writes “CC has been described as a ‘race to the middle’” And the Republican National Committee’s draft resolution regards the Common Core as “a one-sized fits all approach.”

Current state standards are largely mediocre to weak. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2010 rated the states’ academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and math, and discovered that the Common Core State Standards were clearer and more rigorous than ELA standards in 37 states and math standards in 39 states. In 33 of those states, the Common Core bested both ELA and math standards. In Ohio, The State of the State Standards research found the Common Core’s math and ELA standards to be “significantly superior” to Ohio’s current standards. (And Fordham is not known to be easy graders.)

Second, under Ohio’s current standards, far too many of our young people are not receiving the education they need for success in work and life. Consider the following data points:

• The Ohio Board of Regents reports that 40 percent of entering college freshman must take a remedial (non-credit bearing) math or English course;
• The Ohio Department of Education reports that 20 percent of third graders failed the state reading exam (recall, to pass requires getting less than 50 percent of the questions right);
• ACT reports that just 28 percent of Ohio high schoolers met all four ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores in English, math, reading, and science.

The Common Core purposefully seeks to rectify the academic challenges facing many Ohio students by raising the expectations of what they need to know and complete during their K-12 experience.

Fabrication #3: The Common Core strips local school boards of their authority over curriculum

Ohio Revised Code has long-stated that, “The board of education of each city and exempted village school district, the governing board of each educational service center, and the board of each cooperative education school district established pursuant to section 3311.521 of the Revised Code shall prescribe a curriculum for all schools under their control.” (ORC 3313.60). This was the case 25-years ago, before Ohio adopted its own academic content standards and has been the case since 2003, when Ohio’s current academic standards were rolled out.

Senate Bill 1 (ORC Sec. 3301.079) in 2001, under then-Governor Taft, Speaker Householder, and Senate President Finan, required the State Board of Education to set and subsequently update academic content standards. The State Board is also required by law to adopt a model curriculum based on the standards, but the same section of code states that “Nothing in this section requires any school district to utilize all or any part of a model curriculum developed under this section.”

With the adoption of the Common Core, local school boards, superintendents, and school leaders lose no control over the curriculum taught in their schools. No legislation has been introduced or even discussed in Ohio to suggest that, and schools and school districts control their curricular decisions.

Fabrication #4: The Common Core standards are squishy, liberal, and will have no relevance to the careers of the future

Anti-Common Core critics suggest that the standards are squishy, liberally-biased, and promote “anti-knowledge.” In a December 2013 policy brief, Joy Pullmann of The Heartland Institute predicts that the Common Core’s content and testing “moves education from the pursuit of knowledge to social engineering.”

And again, Pullmann accuses the Common Core of being squishy: “Then, as now, tests were to shift from measuring students’ ability to correctly answer grade-level knowledge questions to measuring students’ feelings, performance, and beliefs.”

Pullmann is wrong. The Common Core has nothing to do with social engineering and is focused on the practical issue of linking K-12 education with the academic knowledge and skills students actually need to get jobs, get into college, or enter the military—and to succeed personally in life.

First, some of the nation’s strongest companies have openly supported the Common Core, understanding that a knowledge-based economy will require a literate workforce. General Electric, hardly a business weakling, supports—and has helped fund—the implementation of Common Core. Other top-notch employers—with no overt interest in the Common Core other than improving the quality of America’s future workforce—have officially supported the Common Core. These businesses include Accenture, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Intel, among others. It’s dubious, then, to claim that American businesses, concerned about the nation’s ability to compete globally, would support nothing less than world-class, content-rich standards.

Second, the assessments will require substantive content knowledge and the ability to apply it. For example: sample PARCC test questions call on high school students to use spreadsheets to calculate how long it will take someone to pay off a $300 credit card debt if they pay $40 per month, taking interest charged each month into account. Another item asks students to determine the formula for calculating the rate at which the number of cells will increase during a science experiment. 

These are academically rigorous questions that mirror the skills students need to succeed in the workplace and in life – to use math to solve real world problems, and to read carefully and to make logical arguments based on evidence. There’s nothing “squishy” or “liberal” about them. And if Ohio students can answer these kinds of questions, they will be better prepared for careers and college than they are now.

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting today that Gahanna-Jefferson Public Schools will be discontinuing their experiment with charter school creation at the end of this school year. The school of 110 students in grades 9-12 will be absorbed into the district. The main reason cited: once start-up funds ran out ($450,000 from the federal government’s Public Charter School Program), Gahanna Community School’s board and staff were unable to maintain operations with the fractional per-pupil funding provided monthly by the state to all charter schools. Upper Arlington closed a charter school for similar reasons last year.

While it is tempting for me to snark about “unscrupulous charter operators” (believe me, I wrote that blog post and it was really funny) and to rage that the federal government should get its start-up money back from Gahanna-Jefferson and Upper Arlington too, I think it is more important to talk about the object lesson that this situation presents.

The fiscal picture painted by the board and staff of GSC is the daily reality of almost all charter schools across the state: once the start-up funds are spent, the per pupil funding provided for school operations by the state – with no local funds and no facility dollars – is at least a third less than what is available to even the poorest of public districts in Ohio. Gahanna cites the savings that will be had by not having to pay $85,000 for filing separate state data and paying for separate financial services between the community school and the district. And this was with the district Treasurer doing the work!

Charter schools have to report data to the state monthly while districts only have to do it twice a year (something that the current state budget will hopefully change), and well run charters often bid out their work to get the best price, share services with other schools, and even train some staff do double duty. Thus keeping costs down. All hands on deck, for certain.

GSC has been housed within Gahanna Lincoln High School since its inception, Wickliffe in Upper Arlington was within a building the district already owned, so neither school ever had to worry about paying rent or figuring out where to hold classes.  That is not the reality of charter start-ups who have to identify facilities and then pay rent and often times repair costs to get the buildings up to code.

So, when you see Columbus Collegiate Academy, DECA Prep, KIPP Journey Academy, or Breakthrough Schools (among others across the state) providing high-quality education to their students, know that they are succeeding where Gahanna and Upper Arlington could not.

But we can’t applaud the failure of these experiments in Gahanna and Upper Arlington, because what is really lost is innovation and creativity and efforts to find new and better ways to educate children. Other school districts are finding a way. Reynoldsburg City Schools authorizes five charters that do very well by their students; Cleveland has a growing portfolio of high-performing charters (including Breakthrough Schools); while Dayton Public Schools authorizes the high-performing Dayton Early College Academy. Wickliffe was an important attempt by Upper Arlington to create a different learning environment in what is sometimes seen as a starched and stayed “well-heeled” district in central Ohio. The board and staff of Gahanna Community School say that the school will remain the same as it is absorbed into the district, but the space for innovation will be a lot narrower as a district program.

While the students in Upper Arlington and Gahanna have decent district schools to fall back on, these “failed start-ups” could have ripple effects into the larger charter community. Specifically, the federal government no longer provides start-up dollars for new charters in Ohio because the state has seen too many of its start-ups, many district sponsored, not deliver. But just because two of the highest performing districts in central Ohio didn’t count on the harshness of life after the start-up phase doesn’t mean that others can’t – even those dealing with harsher realities than ever materialized in Gahanna or Upper Arlington.

We know this because there are charter schools doing it right every day and some of these have been started by school districts. We applaud those schools doing more with less, providing families in Columbus and Dayton and Cleveland and southern Ohio with quality school options while dealing with harsher realities than many realize.

During construction of the continental railroads in the 1860s, workers dug from both ends to tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. When they met in the middle, the tunnel was finished and the trains could roll. This is how America became a great continental power. This image of the tunnel bored from two directions is an apt metaphor for what needs to happen with Governor Kasich’s biennial budget proposal (House Bill 59) and the very different plan emerging from the Ohio House this week.

Governor Kasich’s “Achievement Everywhere” plan has three main things going for it. First, it actually tries to target children and the schools they actually attend as the loci of public funding, as opposed to just spreading money across school districts. Traditionally, school funding has been about simply spreading the money around so far more districts feel like winners than losers. The House version does this by reducing the number of districts receiving no new money from nearly 400 to 175. But in doing so the House version loses some of the worthy Kasich reforms. 

Specifically, Kasich’s plan proposed reducing one-size fits all spending restrictions by removing a number of minimum operating standards.  This would free up educators but the House puts those standards back in place. They mandate practices like assignment of personnel and the use of specific instructional materials (especially odd considering the speed at which blended learning is spreading across the state). The House version also requires fixed staffing ratios for both speech pathologists and school psychologists when there is little evidence that such ratios result in kids actually getting the services they need (it does bump up spending however).

Governor Kasich’s plan offers incentives for innovation through the Straight A grant program. The idea here is simple: innovation costs money. Rather than trying to mandate it across schools and districts, encourage it through flexible competitive grants dollars, Kasich’s plan offered substantial dollars ($100 million in FY14 and $200 million in FY15) along with wide latitude in the reforms these dollars could support and in what types of organization do the work. The House would shrink the Straight A fund by half ($50 million in FY14 and $100 million in FY15) while restricting how and for what these dollars can be used and for what purposes. Again, this limits options for innovation and partnerships.

Third, Kasich’s Achievement Everywhere plan proposed some modest reforms to encourage efficiency and better use of tax dollars. Specifically, it would spur consolidation of services and cost savings by creating competitive funding and governance structures for the state’s 55 county-level education service centers. Unfortunately, the House version of the budget would bump up funding for all ESCs, thus protecting the weak ones from competition while reducing the ability of strong performers to expand their markets and services. Worse, low performers will be subsidized and have no incentive to improve or customize their services where there is the greatest demand. This drives up costs for schools, reduces quality, and discourages innovation.

Meanwhile, however, tunneling from the other direction the House developed some promising policy ideas of its own, including:

• Requiring school districts to report their student counts monthly (as charters do) and basing funding on these more-frequent counts,
• Providing creative busing alternatives for charters and private schools,
• Increasing the dollar amount for Cleveland students using vouchers to attend a private school, and
• Removing the gimmicky “parent trigger” mechanism.

Both sides, agreed to removing provisions requiring minimum salary steps for teachers. Thus, the House and Governor have already converged on one important reform; now they need to converge on more.

The House plan also bumps up overall funding for schools by $400 million in FY14 and $500 million in FY15. Properly used, those added resources will help educators to improve their schools and start working toward higher academic standards.  But the House version by itself does not move Ohio forward. What’s needed is a joining of the best of the House plan with the best of the Governor’s plan. If the Senate can help bring the best of the two parts together then Ohio education should, just like transcontinental travel in the 19th century, take off to a whole new level.

This letter is written in response to the Letter to the Editor you wrote that appeared in the Columbus Dispatch on Saturday, April 6, 2013. My sincere hope is that you read this letter with an open mind and seriously consider a viewpoint different from your own on the topic of charter schools.

I believe we could learn a lot from each other, and I would be more than willing to sit down over coffee to discuss the contents of this letter. I am also extending an open invitation to you to visit Columbus Collegiate Academy, a high-performing, high poverty charter school on the Near East Side of Columbus, where I serve as the School Director.

In 2005, after teaching fifth grade in Atlanta Public Schools and returning to Ohio to earn my Master of Education degree, I took a job with a charter school in Denver, Colorado. My mom, who worked as a special education teacher before raising six boys, was currently serving on the Board of Education in the small, Ohio town where I grew up. She bluntly asked, “Why would you want to work in a charter school?” At the time, I didn’t have a well-thought out answer.

Over the last seven years, however, I have come to see school choice as a key component in the civil rights issue of our time- access to a high-quality education. Unfortunately, 59 years after Brown vs. Board of Education declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional, many low income students of color are still denied this most basic of rights.

The laws have changed, but far too many students do not have access to high-quality schools. In fact, right here in the city of Columbus, nearly 30,000 students attend a school building that is rated in Academic Emergency or Academic Watch. Because the school you attend is most often tied to the zip code in which you live, many of these students have no other choice but to attend failing schools. Their families do not have the resources to pick up and move or send their children to expensive private schools.

Charter schools exist for this reason. In areas where the only option is a failing neighborhood school, charter schools can provide hope to parents desperate for something better. Columbus Collegiate Academy is one of these schools. Despite serving a challenging student demographic, we are an Excellent-rated school. Our staff works tirelessly to ensure that our students receive an education that will put them squarely on a college and career-ready track.

Nearly 90% of our students qualify for the Federal Free/Reduced Lunch program, and most come to us in sixth grade (we are a 6th-8th middle school) at least one year below grade level in reading and math. In fact, almost half of our students are three or more years behind in reading, and more than a quarter are three or more years behind in math. The vast majority of our students attended elementary school in the Columbus City school district.

After I read your letter, I have to admit that I was more than a little upset. While I am sure you did your research, and could produce the sources for the data you included, I feel that at the very least there is a misrepresentation of the facts throughout. As I stated above, my hope is that you seriously consider the data that I present in the rest of this letter in response to your points.

To read the rest of the letter click here.

This article originally appeared in Carnegie Mellon Today. It is reprinted with permission. 

Profound speech in hand, Samuel Franklin walked into his classroom of underprivileged sixth-graders for his first day in Teach for America. He planned to emphasize how they would team up to beat the odds, proving their critics wrong. But as the words came out of his mouth, he realized how silly he sounded. The students were waiting for him to start teaching.

Franklin, who had noticed inequalities in the public education system throughout his own time in school, had no doubt in his mind that he wanted to join Teach for America after finishing his undergraduate studies at Ohio’s Kenyon College. Teach for America recruits graduates to teach for two years in underprivileged public schools.

Franklin began his assignment in the Oakland, California school believing that with proper support and motivation, every student can succeed. His school’s student population was made up entirely of minority students from low-income families. After that first day, Franklin always went into his classroom, filled with students, and shut the door, effectively making his own one-room schoolhouse. He also teamed up with colleagues to create engaging lessons. The sixth-graders learning math from him thrived. But outside of his classroom walls, he saw huge variations in the quality of teachers, noticing that the other good teachers, like him, were taking personal responsibility for everything that happened in their classrooms.

As his tenure with Teach for America came to a close, he knew he wanted to continue working for equality in education. He applied to Carnegie Mellon’s public policy graduate program in Heinz College. He was accepted and received a fellowship offered to students committed to issues of racial equity and social justice, which sold him on the school.

During his first year, the superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools, Mark Roosevelt, gave a guest lecture about the region’s school system. The district had just finished closing a record number of public schools after a drop in population. Some of the remaining public schools weren’t doing well. It was time to step up their game to make Pittsburgh a top city for education.

Roosevelt’s lecture gave Franklin an idea. “All students at Heinz have to do a consulting systems project with a team in order to graduate. It’s one of the great things about the Heinz program. The lecture sparked an idea to work directly with the Pittsburgh school district.”

Subsequently, he and a team of classmates embarked on a real-world consulting project for the school district. As project manager, he spent the year with his team doing research into what makes a school work. They organized an advisory committee of experts in Pittsburgh and visited schools in other cities for more ideas. Their goal was to design a school capable of accepting students at many different academic levels and providing all of them with the necessary amount of support to succeed.

The team examined every detail of what goes into a school and considered how it could be improved, covering their project room with Post-it notes representing every possible variable in an educational system. Much of their attention went into the schedule of the school day, which Franklin describes as the backbone linking all aspects of a school. If you want something to happen, you have to incorporate it into the schedule, he says. Their planned schedule looked very different from traditional schedules. It included a mid-day activity period for club activities that usually got stuck at the end of the day, when many students didn’t want to hang around. Other schedule nuances involved courses offered for different lengths of time, ranging from a quarter- year to a full year; and students could choose a specialized field of science to study in depth.

By the end of the year, the team—collaborating with their committee of community advisors— had made substantial progress in developing an innovative model for a school. Superintendent Roosevelt wanted to make the project a reality. The district hired Franklin for two years after his 2007 graduation to oversee the project through to completion. He worked on every aspect of policy-making and reform, including curriculum development and hiring and training of teachers.

He was also in charge of student recruitment. Rather than selecting “top students” to attend the school, he put in place a selection process that favored students based on demonstration of interest and motivation and a lack of otherwise available opportunities. With good teachers and support, Franklin says, motivation is all a student needs to succeed.

He served as project manager for the school until the doors opened for what is now called the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy. He then handed the reins over to the specially selected teachers and faculty, leaving them to make the most of the systems he and his team put in place. Today, the academy has an enrollment of nearly 500 students in grades 6-12 and initial results are “very encouraging.”

Franklin is now taking his philosophies on teaching to a broader scale by leading the district’s Office of Teacher Effectivenes with grant support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ideally, he says, the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy will be a model for other schools.

Carnegie Mellon recognized his accomplishment by giving him one of the university’s prestigious alumni awards last fall. Upon acceptance as a Recent Alumni honoree, he says he knew better than to give a profound speech.
    
Olivia London (DC’13) is a senior English major at Carnegie Mellon and has been a regular contributor to the magazine since her junior year.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan and Michael Lafferty, Ohio Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the frontlines, 2010

The following quote summed up a key lesson learned from the charter school experience in Ohio over the first decade of its controversial life. Three years later, the lesson still rings true. And no doubt the long political struggle around charter schools has hurt the state’s overall charter school quality (great operators have far friendlier states to choose from), made it difficult for Ohio to improve its charter law (this struggle has been characterized by zero-sum battles at the state house), and retarded the power of charter schools to fulfill their potential (hard to thrive in hostile environments).

We’ve not shied away from taking on radicals on either side of the debate. Many in the charter community dislike us because we think accountability for school performance as measured by standardized tests is as important as school choice itself. Meanwhile those on other side don’t like us because we support school choice and indeed authorize 11 charters in Ohio.

We’ve not shied away from taking on radicals on either side of the debate.

In recent weeks, however, the anti-charter crowd has been working the state’s newspapers to spread half-truths and canards about Ohio’s charter school program. The Akron Beacon Journal ran a slanted piece on “Academic ratings for Ohio charter schools likely to tank in new scoring system,” and the Columbus Dispatch ran a piece by jilted Ohio House candidate Maureen Reedy entitled “Charters don’t deserve state windfall.” Both stories compared charter school performance to that of district performance across the state. This is like comparing the ACT scores of students attending Cuyahoga County Community College (CCCC) to those students attending Case Western, and saying CCCC is failing because its students don’t score as high as Case students.

Charter schools in Ohio serve a disproportionate number of needy children because under state law charters have traditionally been allowed to open only in districts deemed Academic Emergency (F) or Academic Watch (D). Thus, charters draw their students from the most troubled district schools and as such these kids are behind at the starting gate.

The following are three canards that have been repeated in these stories, and over and over by anti-charter folks in Ohio:

Canard #1: District students who transfer to charters go to worse schools

A popular myth spread by anti-charter voices in Ohio is that charters perform worse than their district peers. And, as a result, students who transfer to charters inevitably attend a lower performing school. The recent Akron Beacon Journal article feeds into this figment by making the following claim based on its analysis of the 56,987 students who left an Ohio Big 8 district for a charter school:

“82 percent of those students enrolled in a charter school that performed worse than the public school they left.”

But, according to our Student Nomads report, which examined the Ohio Department of Education’s student-level database and over 5.2 million student moves between October 2009 and May 2011, 82 percent is flat wrong.

Consider chart 1, which shows the total number of student moves—from a traditional district school building to a charter school—for five of the Big 8 Ohio cities: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, and Toledo.

The chart shows that district to charter moves are relatively even distributed across students who move up to higher-rated charters, move down, or go sideways. In fact, 65 percent of students who moved went to a charter school rated the same or above the district school building they left.  This is nowhere near the 82 percent “moving down” rate claimed by the Beacon Journal.

SOURCE: Community Research Partners’ analysis of Ohio Department of Education data, available at Student Nomads: Mobility in Ohio’s Schools. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo Area Profiles, Table 22. Number of moves = 13,612. NOTE: The chart divides district[1] -> charter moves into three segments: (1) district students who move to a higher-rated charter, “moving up”; (2) district students who move to a lower-rated charter, “moving down”; and (3) district students who move to an equally-rated charter, “same.”

Canard #2: Charter schools are the worst-rated schools in the state
Fingers are being pointed at charter schools for scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of academic performance. Maureen Reedy in her Dispatch piece offers this whopper (in bold – emphasis ours):

“So 77 percent of Ohio’s public schools are receiving A’s, B’s and C’s while 77 percent of Ohio’s charter schools are receiving D’s and F’s. And the bottom 111 performing schools last year? All were charter schools.”

Chart 2 shows that the most troubled schools in Ohio last year were a mix of both charter and district schools, and neither sector should be pointing fingers at the other. There are way too many underperformers in both sectors, and as a result way too many kids facing bleak futures.  The chart shows that a nearly equal number of charters reside in the state’s bottom 111 schools.  We use building-level performance—a fairer apples-to-apples comparison than comparing entire districts to charter schools—as the level of analysis for this chart. What we observe is that 55 out of the 111 bottom schools are traditional district buildings.

So, traditional districts and charter schools are both equally culpable and capable of poor-performance. And again, far too many kids in each type of school are languishing and are in need of better school options.

SOURCE: Ohio Department of Education, Performance index ranking.

Canard #3: All or most charters are operated by big businesses that rob taxpayers, dupe parents, and bleed innocent districts

Ms. Reedy’s letter to the editor also suggests that all of Ohio’s charter schools are (1) for-profit and (2) taking substantial money away from innocent traditional districts. Reedy writes:

“History seems to be repeating itself in the Statehouse. Once again, legislators are poised to pass a state budget bill that continues to take billions of our tax dollars out of traditional public schools to fund for-profit charters that have produced dismal results after two decades of experimentation in our state.”

Yes, there are some big-time for-profit operators in Ohio, and too many of them have not performed well (including a for-profit operator that we, as a sponsor, helped out the door for poor performance). Further, some of these operators have fought to keep their spending of public dollars free from public inspection. White Hat, for example, has lost its argument in both trial court and the 10th Appellate District court that their school model is proprietary and as such should not have to release how public dollars are spent. On March 12th of this year, the 10th Appellate District court ruled that a charter school is a “public official” and as such must be reported as public funds. Thus, the courts in Ohio are saying that all charters must publicly account for how they spend public dollars, and the fact is that the majority of charter schools have already been doing so anyway.

Despite the high-profile foibles of big-business operators such as White Hat, most of Ohio’s charter schools are actually operated by non-profit organizations. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), roughly 30 percent of Ohio’s charters were operated by for-profit Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) in 2010-11—the last year NAPCS reported data by management organization. The remaining 70 percent Ohio’s charters were either managed by non-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) or were freestanding charters (“mom-and-pop” charters). In fact, some of the state’s highest-performing charters are run by non-profit organizations, such as KIPP and the Breakthrough Network.

Despite the high-profile foibles of big-business operators such as White Hat, most of Ohio’s charter schools are actually operated by non-profit organizations.

Second, it is misleading, as Reedy does, to imply that charter schools are robbing taxpayers, while simultaneously leeching innocent districts of their funding. The fact of the matter is that taxpayers spend less on each child in a charter school then is spent on their district peers. The largest study of charter school spending in the United States found that charter schools in Ohio on average receive 16.2% percent less in public funding than district schools. Further, while the state has spent over $10 billion in new school construction over the last decade not one penny of this went to help charter schools or the 100,000 plus school age Ohio children attending these schools.

True, as district schools lose students to charters the state and federal dollars for their education follow them out the door. This reality has had a profound impact on the school districts across the state that lose 10, 20 and nearly 30 percent of their students to charter schools. Yet, the school districts that experience the pain of diminishing revenue are also largely the state’s lowest performing districts. According to the Ohio Department of Education’s 2011-12 Report Card ratings and NAPCS’ charter enrollment statistics:

• Cleveland Metropolitan School District, rated “Academic Emergency” (F), loses 28 percent of its students to charters;
• Dayton Public Schools, rated “Academic Watch” (D), loses 26 percent;
• Toledo Public Schools, rated “Academic Watch” (D), loses 25 percent;
• Youngstown City Schools, rated “Academic Watch” (D), loses 25 percent;
• Columbus City Schools, rated “Continuous Improvement” (C) and under investigation for data manipulation, loses 21 percent.

Given these woeful academic ratings, is it any wonder that parents in these districts actively seek better educational alternatives in charter schools? And, of course, none of these parents have been forced to enroll their child into a charter, nor are they forced to stay in one. It is a mistake – as the Beacon Journal and Ms. Reedy both do – to assume that the thousands of parents and guardians of children enrolled in charters have all been duped or don’t know what is best for their children. 

In the end, the truth is this: Ohio has too many low performing schools, both district and charter—and that too many of these low performing schools are found in Ohio’s inner-cities. This is quite simply the “achievement gap” between Ohio’s disadvantaged and advantaged students. Some schools, both district and charter, are resolving the achievement gap, but many more are failing. Accepting this reality—and neither sugarcoating nor misrepresenting the performance of either charter or district schools—is the first step toward engineering better public policies that improve public education for all of Ohio’s students.

Superintendent Clifford, Ohio’s 2013 superintendent of the year, acknowledged the decision to become an open enrollment district was driven by economics. “Our enrollment numbers right now are flat to slightly declining,” Clifford told the Dayton Daily News. District enrollment has declined about 13 percent since 1999 and Clifford argues, “In order to keep all of the great staff we have right now, we need to grow our student base. As we keep students, we can keep staff.” Each student that enrolls in West Carrollton from another district brings about $5,700 with him or her.

The Ohio Legislature approved an open enrollment policy in 1989, and under state law school boards are able to decide among three options:

• Accept only students who are residents of the district;
• Extend enrollment eligibility to students living in adjacent districts;
• Open enrollment eligibility to any student in Ohio.

According to the Ohio Department of Education, about 430 of the state’s 611 school districts now have open enrollment policies in place. Based on data from Fordham’s recent statewide study on student mobility, as of 2011 (last year for data) more than 61,000 students attended a public school outside of their home district. There are 29 districts in the state with 20 percent or more of their students as open enrollees, and 12 districts have more than 30 percent of their students enrolled in another school district. Since the fiscal crisis of 2008 more and more Ohio districts have embraced open enrollment policies.

430 of Ohio's 611 school districts now have open enrollment policies

Cincinnati Public Schools approved an open enrollment policy in January of this year and Superintendent Mary Ronan explained the logic in her comments to the Cincinnati Enquirer at the time thusly, “We push out of the district over 100 students per year because they’ve moved and can’t afford the tuition…It really is heartbreaking. We’ve seen the letters and take the phone calls.” Superintendents across the state largely support open-enrollment policies. A new survey on the attitudes of Ohio’s superintendents that the FDR Group has conducted for Fordham (to be released in May), found that 65 percent of the state’s superintendents think open enrollment is “a policy worth keeping or pursuing.”

For some school districts, open enrollment is a strategy key to their survival. Perry school district in Allen County, for example, garners 44.8 percent of its 882 students through open-enrollment. “At one time we had 900 regular students,” Perry Superintendent Omer Schroeder told the Lima News in November, “Our district has become smaller and smaller and it is no secret that open enrollment is our lifeblood.”

"Open enrollment is our lifeblood," said one district superintendent

But, obviously, not all school districts benefit from open-enrollment. Some see net gains of students, while others lose out. It is also worth pointing out that some districts have significant numbers of students going both ways – into the district through open enrollment and out. Akron, for example, saw 1,698 students from its jurisdiction attend other district schools through open enrollment (5.9 percent of its total enrollment), but also saw 544 students come to its schools from other districts (2.3 percent of its total enrollment). New Boston in Scioto County is an even more dramatic example in terms of percentage of kids coming and going through open enrollment. The district saw 19.9 percent of its students (those living within its boundaries) attend other district schools through open enrollment, but it gained 43.5 percent of its total enrollment from other districts.

Despite the growth in open enrollment, and the apparent support for it among superintendents, there has been talk in recent years of curtailing or even doing away with open-enrollment policies. Last year State Senator Tom Sawyer, a Democrat from Akron, proposed Senate Bill 220. The bill called for the Ohio Department of Education to study the impact of open enrollment, and require lawmakers to either renew the policy or repeal it in 2015. Senator Sawyer’s bill hasn’t moved out of the Senate.

But more and more students are moving across district lines through their district open enrollment policies. This doesn’t look to be a trend that will end anytime soon if parents and students have a choice in the matter.

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has published manuals for evaluating teachers of these hard-to-measure subjects. But, as Terry Ryan recently reported—some of these guidelines border on the absurd.

Even the august champion of teacher evaluations, Bill Gates, worried about “hastily contrived” teacher evaluations. He writes in the Washington Post:

Efforts are being made to define effective teaching and give teachers the support they need to be as effective as possible. But as states and districts rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems, there is a risk they’ll use hastily contrived, unproven measures. One glaring example is the rush to develop new assessments in grades and subjects not currently covered by state tests. Some states and districts are talking about developing tests for all subjects, including choir and gym, just so they have something to measure.

Mr. Gates reiterated his point by citing Ohio’s recent gym teacher evaluation manual as an example. Gates’ commentary provoked responses, from Anthony Cody in Education Week and Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post.

Gates is right to point out the challenges in assessing the effectiveness of teachers of some subject-areas. All shouldn’t be lost though, even in a subject like gym class: As Terry observed, physical fitness is important for youngsters’ cognitive development. So, there’s nothing ipso facto wrong in demanding the best from our gym teachers—just as with our math, English, and history teachers.

If what ODE has published sounds goofy and as such should be scrapped, the question still remains: How should physical education teachers—and art and music teachers for that matter—be held accountable? Or, should teachers in these subjects get a free pass, while their colleagues are faced with a rigorous evaluation system? The comment box is open!

The other outcomes part of the report, however, deserves its share of attention—especially, the report’s analysis of what school-based factors explain KIPP’s success. This analysis is intended to pinpoint one, perhaps multiple, reasons why KIPP charter schools work for their students.

To answer why, the researchers link individual KIPP school’s impact estimates, which vary among the schools, with a set of 14 school-based explanatory factors. Here are some of the more interesting findings:

•Length of school day: Especially long school days are associated with lower student achievement. But, the KIPP schools with especially long school days also tend to spend more time in non-core subjects, which leads to point two—

•Instructional time: More time spent in the core subjects (math, language arts, science, and history) relates to higher math and reading scores. And conversely, more time in non-core subjects relates negatively to achievement scores. The upshot of this and the bullet above: A longer school day that’s loaded with non-core subject instruction is likely to disappoint, at least with respect to achievement scores.

•Student behavior: A school-wide behavior system relates to higher student achievement. A school-wide behavior system has three elements: First, consistently enforced behavioral standards and discipline policies; second, a behavior code that rewards good behavior; third, a code that sanctions students who violate the rules. KIPP principals who more strongly agreed that these elements were in place were more likely to lead schools with higher results.

•Staff and teacher characteristics: The researchers found no relationship between teacher experience, professional development, and turnover and student achievement. With respect to principals, the study found only slight evidence that principal experience impacts student achievement.

In the end, the researchers concede that they haven’t found the magic formula that makes KIPP schools tick—for various reasons, they couldn’t make conclusive or causal claims. Their findings, however, are certainly idea-fodder for school building leaders sorting through ways to improve their school, whether a KIPP school or otherwise.

Though it’s a small honor—and yes, it’s buried on page 117 of a document that few people will lay eyes upon—Dublin City properly celebrates the hard work and smarts of these students. And, perhaps other schools could follow the lead of Dublin, and find ways to recognize the accomplishments of their high-achievers, even in official reports. For, it’s a powerful reminder to readers, amidst the tedium of governmental reporting, of the purpose of education in the first place—to give kids the opportunity to reach their full potential.   

As an authorizer of charter schools in diverse communities across Ohio, we want to hear from our school leaders – to inform and educate us on what is happening in their schools and in their classrooms in regard to the Common Core and PARCC assessments.  Over the next several weeks, we will be reporting back on the following questions:

1. What's your biggest worry? 

2. What do you need to put in place before this all starts?

3. Do you have all the technology needed for testing?

4. What skills do your teachers have that will make this easier?

5. What could ODE do to make sure things go as smoothly as possible?

6. What do you want your parents to know about CC?

We will be posing these questions to the following leaders in Fordham’s portfolio of sponsored schools:

1. Foresta Shope, principal of Sciotoville Elementary Academy

2. Dustin Wood, principal of KIPP:Journey Academy

3. Dr. TJ Wallace, Executive Director of Dayton Leadership Academies

4. Dr. Glenda Brown, superintendent of the Phoenix Community Learning Center

5. Chad Webb, head of school Village Preparatory Academy

6. John Dues, School Director of Columbus Collegiate Academy Main Street Campus

What do we think we might hear?

1. Biggest worry - Not having complete resources across all grade levels.

2. What needs to be put in place before this starts - Matching assessments to interventions.

3. Do you have all the technology needed for testing – No, and we’ll need help to get there.

4. What skills do your teachers have to make it easier – Content knowledge and how to use data analysis.

5.  What can ODE do – Provide regional support to assist with training and having answers to questions; from professional development to what interventions work best.

6. What do you want parents to know - It will not make school more difficult for their child(ren).

These are 6 different schools in some very different communities -we’ll see what they have in common.

In the Buckeye State, the Ohio Board of Regents’ data corroborate McKinsey’s finding that neither the best nor brightest are entering Ohio’s classrooms as teachers. According to the Regents, the average composite ACT of an incoming teacher-prep candidate was 22.75, below the average ACT score of the overall incoming freshman class for relatively selective universities. The middle 50 percent of incoming freshman to the Ohio State University, for example, had composite ACT scores between 26 and 30.  

What deters the best and brightest from entering (and staying) in our classrooms is, of course, a complicated issue with many hypotheses: low pay, stressful working conditions, rigid  certification requirements, lack of prestige, and archaic remuneration systems that fail to reward high-performing teachers and backloads benefits are all plausible explanations.

Since 1989 Teach For America (TFA) has worked to improve this bleak human capital situation, and has brought the nation’s top college graduates into a small, but increasing slice of America’s highest need classrooms. In 2012-13, more than 10,000 young men and women are teaching in 36 states through TFA. These are graduates of the nation’s finest universities, including the Ohio State University with 55 alumni and Denison University with 18 participating in TFA this year. TFA members are generally these schools cream-of-the-crop—the average GPA of an incoming TFA member is over 3.5-and these young people have rigorous academic degrees ranging from economics to engineering to history.

This marks the first year TFA has been in Ohio. Fifty TFA members are teaching in the Cleveland region and 30 more work in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas (five work in Fordham sponsored schools and we proudly help fund their Dayton efforts). Thus far, in Dayton, TFA corps members have only entered charter school classrooms, but this is starting to change. In February, Dayton Public Schools (DPS) approved hiring eight TFA teachers to work in their schools in 2013-14. This personnel decision, recommended by Dayton Superintendent Lori Ward and approved by the Dayton Board of Education, occurred as some 200 DPS teachers are expected to retire between now and the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Thus far, in Dayton, TFA corps members have only entered charter school classrooms, but this is starting to change.

Despite the stellar academic qualifications of TFA members, skeptics worry about whether these teachers will be effective in the classroom. In a recent Dayton Daily News story, Dave Romick of the Dayton Education Association was cool to the idea, questioning whether TFA teachers will be effective, and whether TFA is a long-term solution to DPS’ staffing woes.

The research evidence on effectiveness suggests Mr. Romick shouldn’t worry, and in fact should work with the district to increase the number of TFA corps members. TFA members, on average, impact student achievement just as well, and often more than, teachers who have completed a traditional teacher-prep program—sometimes even veteran teachers. For the mounting evidence, consider studies conducted by the Urban Institute, Mathematica for math achievement in particular, the University of North Carolina, and the Tennessee State Board of Education, which have each found TFA members to outperform their traditional peers. For example, the University of North Carolina study, published in 2012, found that, compared to new, traditionally-prepared teachers, TFA members have significantly stronger impacts on student achievement.

While the academic qualifications of TFA members are equal to and sometimes superior to traditional education school graduates and the evaluative research is positive toward TFA and its impact on student achievement, there remains justifiable concern about whether TFA members will stay or leave when their two-year teaching terms end. A 2011 Phi Delta Kappan survey found that 61 percent of TFAers continued as public school teachers and that 44 percent stay at their initial site placement immediately after year two. However, by year five, only 15 percent remain as a teacher at their initial site.

This statistic should prompt Dayton’s district and community leaders to develop a strategic plan to retain and nurture the talents of TFA members—whether in a classroom capacity or in other leadership positions—for the long-haul. Several TFA alumni have built on their classroom experiences and have launched some of the most effective educational organizations in the nation. For example, David Levin and Mike Feinberg, the co-founders of the successful KIPP charter schools, are TFA alum; as is Sarah Usdin, the founder of New Schools for New Orleans, a non-profit that invests in high-performing charters schools in the Bayou State. These are organizations that have improved the educational opportunities of high-need youth and are closing achievement gaps.

Dayton is a city badly in need of an infusion of smart, hard-working young people—in its public school system in particular.

Dayton is a city badly in need of an infusion of smart, hard-working young people—in its public school system in particular. Eight TFA teachers in Dayton Public Schools is a modest investment in human capital.  Instructing 150 students or so, won’t lead the entirety of Dayton Public Schools to the land of milk and honey, next year or even the year after. But, why deny these 150 students the opportunity to learn under a talented, hard-working top college graduate? Why not try to keep these original eight in their schools for the long-term or find them leadership roles in Dayton’s education sector and beyond?

And, why not aim to increase the size of TFA incrementally over time—so long as it’s a program that proves itself worthy of the students of Dayton? Increasing the supply of intelligent, highly-motivated teachers in high-poverty areas is one piece of the education reform puzzle, and a large one at that. Teach For America helps greatly, and as such, deserves the full support of Dayton Public Schools’ administration and educator community.  

Correction (4/1/13): A previous version of this post remarked that TFA was only in charter schools, throughout all Ohio. Cincinnati Public Schools, however, is working with TFA and the post has been revised to reflect this correction.

Consider a few recent examples of how schools are improving their technological infrastructure in advance of the Common Core and the PARCC exams:

• The Akron Beacon Journal reported that the Akron Public Schools recently approved $300,000 plus in spending to upgrade its computer software and Internet bandwidth. These improvements will ensure that its students are able to take the online PARCC exams.
• Meanwhile on the other side of the Buckeye State, The Lima News reported that Delphos and Ottawa-Glandorf school districts, both located in rural Northwest Ohio, have purchased new computers to ensure that their students will be able to take the PARCC exams.
• Finally, in rural Southeast Ohio, The Marietta Times reported that Morgan Local School District has been piloting Thinkgate. Teachers at Morgan Local will use this digital instructional system to provide real-time feedback to students about how well they are progressing toward meeting the learning expectations of the Common Core.  

In addition to these local efforts, the governor’s budget proposal (see page D-180) also takes steps to improve technology as schools transition to the Common Core and the PARCC exams. In the state’s student assessment line-item, the governor proposes a $20 million (38 percent) increase from FY 2013 to FY 2015. In addition, the Kasich budget proposal includes a one-time $10 million investment in FY 2014 to help schools improve their Internet connectivity and broadband, so that students can take the online PARCC exams. Finally, the Kasich budget proposal includes a $300 million Innovation Fund, competitive grants that could be used to improve school technology.

Yes, the changes related to the Common Core are costly and, as the Cincinnati Enquirer has reported, several school leaders have lamented this fact. But, Ohio mustn’t neglect nor penny-pinch its way toward a twenty-first century educational system. (Though, if done smartly, local and state leaders can successfully implement these changes, while holding the line on spending.) Moreover, as time passes, the long-term benefits of this system-wide overhaul in academic standards and classroom technology should eventually surpass these start-up costs. And, of course, the cost of transitioning to the Common Core is surely less than doing nothing at all. For, as a state, Ohio can’t afford to give its youngsters any more opportunities to languish beneath low academic expectations and outdated technology. 

Fordham’s new policy brief by Adam Emerson, “Governance in the Charter School Sector: Time for a Reboot,” tackles the governance issue head-on. One section in particular is especially interesting to me because of our role as a charter school authorizer in the Buckeye State. Ohio, and other states with strong charter school networks (both non-profit CMOs and for-profit EMOs), has struggled to balance the power and influence of school operators with that of their non-profit governing board. Too often boards are seen as little more than a necessary evil while operators run the show. It is not at all uncommon for charter school operators in Ohio to “hire” board members, and then use them as a rubber stamp for all school operations.  

As a state approved charter school authorizer in Ohio we have always held a different view. Our position has been that the non-profit governing boards are independent, and clearly in charge of, any outside organization that they engage to run their education programs. It has been our position that the non-profit governing board in fact owns the school and can fire its operator if they feel they are not receiving the services they need for their school(s) and students.

We, in fact, ran into this exact situation recently in Dayton when the national charter school operator EdisonLearning, and the local governing board had differing views about the future of two schools moving forward (see below). We supported the decision of the governing board to move on without Edison after the board’s contracts expired with Edison. In that particular case, it was clear to the governing board and the authorizer (Fordham) that ultimate responsibility for the schools rested with the governing board and not with the operator.   

However, this position is not well established in state law, and is not the accepted view of many in Ohio’s charter program. Under state law a school operator, with the approval of either the sponsor or state board of education, can in fact “remove the existing governing authority and the operator shall appoint a new governing authority for the school. The new governing authority shall assume responsibility for the school…” Charter operators in Ohio can fire their governing boards, which turns the charter school accountability compact on its head.

Further, there have been political efforts over the years to further diminish the oversight power of both governing authorities and authorizers. In 2011, for example, legislative language passed the Ohio House, but was later rejected by the Senate, that would have:

•Permitted for-profit corporations or individuals to start and run charter schools, and take away a requirement that they must be monitored by an authorizer;

•Permitted a charter school’s governing authority to give up all its rights and responsibilities to an operator; and

•Supported the operator’s right to sue if the charter school governing authority tried to terminate its contract.

The charter deal of “freedom for accountability” is a work in progress, and there are some powerful voices in the charter universe who would like to rewrite the deal entirely. Rather than “freedom for accountability” there is a strong undercurrent of “let the market reign supreme.” In this view, operators should be free of all external accountability beyond market demand. If the kids show up, that is all that matters. Emerson’s “Governance in the Charter School Sector: Time for a Reboot” makes clear why such laissez faire notions of charter school accountability miss the mark. Parent demand for schools is very important for obvious reasons, but so is evidence that the kids are actually learning something.  

But, in Ohio – and probably in other states – the desire to evaluate teachers has likely gone too far when we try to hold Physical Ed teachers accountable for teaching students to meet state defined targets like:

*Consistently demonstrating correct skipping technique with a smooth and effortless rhythm;

*Demonstrates correct technique, the ball flies upward at approximately a 45-degree angle and over a distance of 30 feet or great;

*Consistently demonstrates good rhythm by following a sequence of dance steps in time and with music;

*Able to throw consistently a ball underhand with good accuracy and technique to a target (or person) with varying distances; or

*Able to strike consistently a ball with a paddle to a target area with accuracy and good technique.

The Ohio Department of Education has, as mandated by state law, put together a 165 page “Physical Education Evaluation System” that is now being used across the state to measure the effectiveness of PE teachers. The document not only spells out the standards students are to meet in gym class, but also has a number of suggested written items for students to pass. These items for K-2 students (five to eight year olds) include questions like:

To throw a ball overhand with your right hand, you should step forward with your left foot.

A. True B. False

For a good overhand throw, you should bend the elbow in the shape of an “L” behind the head before throwing.

A. True B. False

*When you roll or toss a ball underhand, you step forward with the same foot as your tossing arm.

A. True B. False

*When throwing to a target you should follow through toward the target after letting go of the ball.

A. True B. False

Not surprisingly, this entire process is being met by the derision of not only PE teachers but school and district leaders who are supposed to implement these standards and evaluations. No doubt parents will also raise objections when they learn that PE is going to be as much about written tests as it is about playing soccer or basketball.

Most educators I know agree that students need physical exercise, and benefit from it. There is even scientific evidence that exercise helps children’s mental functioning and cognitive development. Most teachers and parents I know also think PE is a part of school where kids should actually have fun. But, if PE teachers are to actually meet the voluminous state PE standards, and be evaluated by their schools for making sure all their students meet these standards gym class it going to be a whole lot less fun. Teachers are going to have to spend far more time evaluating students hopping and jumping skills, and issuing paper and pencil tests than actually engaging kids in exercise, games and sport. Sometimes good ideas can go too far, and this seems like one of those times.  

But, no city in Ohio displays better the dysfunctionality of big city elected school boards than does Columbus. Columbus City Schools is a district in turmoil. Mayor Michael Coleman spelled out the challenges in a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed thusly:

“The children of Columbus City Schools need our help. Forty-seven percent of kids enrolled in the district attend schools receiving a D or F grade by the Ohio Department of Education, while just 21 percent go to A or B schools. The district ranks near the very bottom statewide in terms of how much a student learns in a given year.

State and federal investigations into allegations of student-data manipulation hang like a black cloud over the district. The results threaten to further lower the academic-performance scores of our schools, and administrators could face indictment.

Our schools are at a crossroads. If we continue along our current path, Columbus City Schools could be designated for academic emergency, which would lead to state control of the district.”

To address these stark challenges Mayor Coleman has convened an education commission that includes 25 of the city’s top business, community, labor, education and philanthropic leaders. Their charge has been to help the city develop a community-wide strategy for moving the schools forward and to aid the district in recruiting and hiring a top-flight superintendent to turnaround the troubled district. In response to this offer of assistance, the school board has basically told the Mayor and his commission to stick it. They apparently feel they can handle the challenges facing the district on their own. Yet, there is absolutely nothing in their recent actions that gives anyone hope that they can turnaround the troubled schools, manage their growing legal challenges or attract a fantastic district leader to work with them in running the state’s largest school district.  

Despite the school board’s obstinacy and poor judgment, Mayor Coleman has reiterated his position that “he has no plans to take over the district.” That’s too bad because the city’s children and families would surely benefit from his control of the schools. A just released report by the Center for America Progress on Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement argues persuasively that, “Over the past decade, mayoral-control school districts have generally improved districtwide performance relative to average school district performance statewide.”

The report’s authors, professors Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen, document how mayoral control over 11 districts has had a positive impact on both student achievement and financial performance. The report is a must read for anyone concerned about improving Ohio’s urban school districts, and one of the district’s studied is Cleveland where the mayor has appointed the nine member school board since 1998. Cleveland, it is important to note, is in the midst of the boldest school reform efforts of any large district in Ohio. This has been driven by the personal leadership of the Mayor Frank Jackson.

According to Wong and Shen, mayoral control is not a magic bullet, and in the cities where it has existed the longest it demands a committed mayor who owns the school reform issue and the community knows it (e.g. New York City, Chicago and Boston). More, it requires “reinvention and reinvigoration” over time. Wong and Shen note, “Our study suggests that even if mayoral control is initially successful, that success may be time bound. Reinventing mayoral control – whether through new leadership or new governance practices – seems necessary to reinvigorating student achievement gains.”

Most surprising, and encouraging, is that Wong and Chen report that mayoral control can and does facilitate better relations between labor and management, and this is despite the fact that many of the mayors cited in the report also embrace charter schools as part of their overall reform strategy. Specifically, they write, “mayors are facilitating strategic partnerships among key stakeholders to improve efficient management of school districts. Education mayors seem to have the ability to leverage cooperation – and occasionally even concessions – from school employees’ unions.” As evidence of this, Wong and Chen point to New Haven, Connecticut and the efforts of Mayor John DeStefano and the New Haven Teachers Union to negotiate a 2009 contract agreement that created a teacher evaluation system based on student performance, while raising teacher salaries by as much as 10 percent.

In Columbus, it is worth pointing out, that the president of the Columbus Education Association, Rhonda Johnson, has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mayor Coleman and his education commission. Events in Columbus, and other troubled urban districts in Ohio and beyond, should encourage serious consideration of mayoral control in more cities. Such serious consideration, however, demands a careful read of Wong and Chen’s new report.    

Richard (Dick) Ross was sworn into today by state board of education president Debe Terhar as Ohio’s 37th State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The ceremony took place at the Reynoldsburg City High School (just east of Columbus). Dr. Ross takes over the leadership reigns of the Ohio Department of Education after serving as Governor Kasich’s director of 21st Century Education for the last two years. While in the Governor’s office Ross helped to craft the state’s A-F report card, the 3rd Grade Reading Guarantee, and the new school funding plan being debated in the legislature.

Ross is the fourth state superintendent in two years, and enters the department during a time of change, challenges and opportunity. Ohio is revamping its school funding system, implementing new academic standards through the Common Core in English Language Arts and Mathematics, new standards in science and social studies, and putting into place new assessments through PARCC. Ohio is also a school choice hotbed, and is expected to see continued growth in both charter school students and students receiving public vouchers to attend private schools. These programs are under much scrutiny and could use improvements to their accountability and oversight.

Much of the department’s senior leadership has turned over in recent years and a big part of Ross’ early efforts will need to be around building his senior leadership team. He is the man for the job as his entire professional career has been defined by his service to children. He has done it all. He has been a teacher, a building level leader, a superintendent in three different school districts across the Buckeye State, and an innovator who early on embraced charter schools and on-line learning. Ross has lived and breathed public education, and his experience as a district level doer, reformer and a state education policy leader should bring a steady leadership style to the Department.

In his inauguration speech Ross made clear that his intention is to help make Ohio “a national leader in providing high quality education in every district and every school.” Ross’ professional experience included serving as superintendent of Reynoldsburg School District for 20-years. Many of the school reforms Ross initiated during his time at Reynoldsburg have helped to make that district one of the state’s highest performers academically, while also making it one of them most efficient in use of tax dollars. Most remarkable about the Reynoldsburg story is that as the district has become more diverse and economically challenged its student achievement has steadily improved. This defies trends across the state and the nation, and it is this sort of success Ohio needs Ross to bring to the state department.

In his comments today Ross shared that he has “a passion to serve boys and girls well,” and his experience means he likely will. During his distinguished career in Ohio public education Ross has been an advocate for gifted education, for special education, for school choice, for the redesign of curriculum and in all these efforts he has fought for the educational needs of students. 

Congratulations Dr. Ross and we wish you the very best. The children and families of Ohio need you to be successful.

One plausible theory for Indiana’s dismal AP scores is that a greater proportion of its high school students take the AP exams. This may indicate that more lower-achieving students—students who are less likely to score well on AP exams—may be taking AP exams in Indiana compared to other Midwestern states.

To probe whether this theory holds water, I calculate the percentage of junior and seniors who take the AP exams for Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The charts below show the percentage of juniors and seniors who took at least one AP exam in spring 2012. The table at the end of the post reports the number of public and nonpublic school students in each class as well as the number of test-takers.

Indiana and Illinois lead, Ohio lags – Percentage of juniors and seniors taking at least one AP exam, public and nonpublic students, selected states, 2011-12

Sources: Illinois State Board of Education; Indiana Department of Education; Michigan Department of Education, public and nonpublic enrollment;  Ohio Department of Education; Pennsylvania Department of Education; College Board Summary Reports.

The chart shows that Indiana has a similar percentage of its juniors and seniors taking an AP exam compared to Illinois, and a modestly higher percentage compared to Michigan and Pennsylvania. Compared to Ohio, though, Indiana has a substantially higher percentage of AP test-takers—between 8 (juniors) and 9 (seniors) percentage points. So, the data suggest that Ohio may have an advantage over states like Indiana and Illinois in a cross-state comparison of AP scores. For, it is plausible that the AP test takers from Ohio may be the true cream-of-the crop students. However, Indiana’s low AP scores relative to Illinois cannot be explained away by a greater proportion of its students taking the exams.   

In the end, it’s unclear what’s driving low AP scores in Indiana. True, it looks like Indiana’s low AP scores can be partially attributed to a higher proportion of its juniors and seniors taking the exams—especially, compared to Ohio. But of course, there could be other explanations: Perhaps it was a bad year for Indiana, or maybe Indiana’s test-takers come from poorer and more disadvantaged communities, or perhaps Indiana schools’ AP programs are simply less effective. Or, might it be a little of all of the above?

Table: Number of 11th and 12th graders and AP test-takers, public and nonpublic schools, 2011-12, selected states

Menlo Park Academy, located in Southwest Cleveland, is the Buckeye State’s lone public charter school for the gifted. The school has consistently earned strong academic marks from the state, rated “Excellent” (A) for the past three school years. Menlo Park enrolls over 300 K-8 students, who come from forty plus school districts. The student body is nearly entirely White and Asian (over 90 percent).

Yesterday, at the invitation of school director Mrs. Paige Baublitz-Watkins, Checker Finn presented findings from Fordham’s 2011 study Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? and fielded questions about gifted education from a group of Menlo Park parents and educators. In the High Flyers report, Fordham found that nearly half of America’s top-shelf students “lose altitude”—failing to remain at or above the ninetieth percentile in test scores—from third to eighth grade.

From left to right: Assistant School Director Jim Kennedy, Board Member Michael Love, School Director Paige Baublitz-Watkins, Fordham President Checker Finn

Can opening more schools such as Menlo Park provide an antidote to the declining opportunities that Ohio’s gifted students have to reach their full potential? It very well could. But, of course, it will require concerted efforts from the parents of gifted children to push for, establish, and sustain charters that serve the needs of their kids. (We found that many of Menlo Park’s parents drive a decent distance to get their kids to school, and it’s not uncommon for parents to volunteer and help raise funds for the school.)

Nearly one-third of Ohio’s charters serve primarily at-risk and disabled students—student populations with unique needs. Likewise, gifted students also have unique needs, such as faster-paced and challenging curricula. Given the success of Menlo Park, surely Ohio’s parents of gifted students, and the educators who teach them, can consider ways to grow more schools dedicated to serving gifted and talented students.

Why are so many gifted students in Ohio not receiving education services catered to their needs?  How can we support them to reach their full potential?  These were the questions asked at today’s Educating Our Brightest event, hosted by the Fordham Institute and the Ohio Association for Gifted Children.

Fordham's Checker Finn kicked off the event with a recap of the Institute’s studies of the impact of No Child Left Behind on gifted students (hint: it’s not good).  He then presented findings from his recent book, Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools (of which Ohio has four). He was quick to point out that these students don’t serve a different population of students than their peers, nor do their teachers necessarily have different or higher credentials.

After Checker’s presentation, a panel, moderated by the Columbus Dispatch’s Jennifer Smith Richards, talked about the state of gifted education in Ohio and how to improve it.  Here’s a recap of their comments:

Ann Sheldon, Executive Director, Ohio Association for Gifted Children:  Ann pointed out there has been a tremendous decline in gifted services in Ohio over the past decade.  Currently just 18 percent of gifted students received specialized gifted services in our state. Ohio needs more gifted-specific schools as part of the solution.

Carol Lockhart, Principal, John Hay Early College High School: Carol says her school proves that gifted education can be done well with challenging populations—her student body is virtually 100 percent eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. And the school has incorporated blended learning as a key component of its model.

Bill Hayes, Ohio House of Representatives: He acknowledged that gifted students are underserved, but reiterated that he believes the governor’s budget proposal seeks to improve gifted ed in Ohio through increased funding and accountability. He agrees we need more gifted-specific schools in Ohio but also said it’s tough to get lawmakers interested in supporting issues that don’t impact their districts.

Marty Bowes, Superintendent, Perry Local Schools: Marty was honest that money is a factor: he has more gifted students than special ed students in his district, yet he gets $4 million in special ed funding and just $200,000 in gifted dollars. He says we need to energize our teaching force for gifted students and beyond—imagine the value of getting a 50^th percentile student to the 75^th? And what would happen if his valedictorian had a one-to-one gifted aide, the way that many special education students do?  What could she achieve in that environment?

Checker closed the conversation with his advice about gifted education advocacy in Ohio (and nationally). Ohio is a paradox in that schools are required to identify gifted students but not to serve them—that should have the makings of a political revolution of sorts among parents.  Instead, advocacy is old-fashioned and needs to catch up with more sophisticated political strategies.

Governor Kasich’s budget includes increased funding for gifted education and a bit more accountability for serving those students.  But gifted advocates say the legislation can be improved—stay tuned to the Ohio Gadfly Daily for updates as the bill evolves.

Terry Ryan addresses a gathering of the Ohio League of Women Voters at the Riffe Center on Tuesday, March 19, 2013.

Terry Ryan was a guest of the Ohio League of Women Voters today during their annual Statehouse Day, participating in a panel session on education funding in Ohio with Dr. William Phillis, Executive Director of The Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding.

A standing room only crowd of highly-engaged individuals from across Ohio listened to opening statements that looked back at least as much at the history of education funding in Ohio as they looked to the future of that funding, as proposed in the current state budget, HB 59. Dr. Phillis presented the history of changes in the organization and administration and funding of “the public common school” since 1821, raising alarms over loss of money from existing districts via charter schools and vouchers as well as alarms over the loss of local control of education and the loss of community when schooling is not held in common in a given area of the state. He previewed his public testimony for Wednesday by arguing forcefully for a legislative education commission – of the kind that existed in Ohio off and on from 1913 to the 1980s – to research and inform the General Assembly on matters of public education.

Terry took a similar historical view, but noting how very many things have changed from the early 20^th century to today – technology, demands on parents, requirements on schools and teachers, transportation, and global competition among them. His message was simple: now is not the time to go backward. The ways of the past do not hold up to the requirements of the future. The shape of education funding in the future is a generational issue, he argued, noting that by 2015 Medicaid expenditures are projected to take up to 50% of Ohio GRF dollars while education expenditures will take up 27%.

Terry also sketched in the history of educational choice in Ohio, which he reported from his experience was driven largely from the bottom up: parents not satisfied with the educational outcomes of their children and who wanted a better option. That choice landscape today includes open enrollment, charter schools, vouchers, e-schools, and hybrid learning that takes place both in traditional classrooms and on computer screens in people’s homes.

Questions from the audience were detailed, specific and pointed. They covered the advantages that charter schools may have over traditionally-run district schools, the disappointing lack of data on the performance of students receiving private school vouchers in Ohio, expenses incurred by schools in regard to testing and accountability, and even the definition of school “district”. Terry’s recent editorial in the Columbus Dispatch was dissected by guests, looking for more detail and information from the 750-word review of Governor Kasich’s education budget. Terry drew on his experiences as a teacher, a father, an ed reformer, a school district volunteer, and yes, an amateur historian, to speak to the points raised.

The future is the issue – there is no “magic number” for funding student success; there are too many bad schools in cities and towns across Ohio; more data is needed to find and fund what works; what has been done in the past is less and less relevant. Those who care about the future of education in Ohio – quality education for all children – need to start here.

As a growing program, in Ohio and nationally, AP scores should provide an increasingly accurate picture of the college-readiness of high school students, while also providing a comparison to their peers in other states. So how are students in Ohio measuring up to their counterparts in other states?

Consider the chart below, which shows the 2012 average scores for AP Biology, U.S. History, Calculus AB, and English Literature. Of the AP exam offerings, these four exams are among the most popular exams—both nationally and within each of these states. The results for Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and the United States are displayed. AP exams are scored on a scale of one to five, five being the highest score possible. A score of three or higher is generally considered sufficient to receive college credit (though, university policies on granting AP credit vary considerably).

Chart 1: Ohio’s AP scores mostly above or on par with Midwestern peers, and above national averages - Average AP scores, selected subjects and states, spring 2012

Source: College Board, Summary Reports: 2012. Note: A score of 3 is generally the minimum score required for college credit, though university policies vary—many schools require a score of 4 or above for credit. See table 1 at the end for the averages and number of test-takers.

Ohio’s AP test-takers generally stack up favorably compared to their closest peer states and nationally. (Of course, the comparisons aren’t necessarily apples-to-apples due to the different characteristics of test-takers across the states.)[1]

• Ohio’s average slightly outperforms Michigan and Illinois in all four subjects, with a lone exception—Illinois’ Calculus AB average, which equals Ohio’s;
• Ohio’s students substantially outperform Indiana, whose students score noticeably poorly relative their Midwestern peers and nationally;
• However, Ohio’s average AP scores fall short of Pennsylvania’s in three of the four subjects, and trails noticeable behind the Keystone State’s Calculus AB average score;
• Finally, compared to national averages, Ohio’s students outperform them in all four subjects.

The AP results indicate that Ohio’s K-12 system is creating a relatively strong pipeline of students primed and ready for college. Yet, the test results still show substantial room for improvement, both in Ohio and across the nation. Nationally, the average AP score falls short of the minimum college-credit threshold score of three. And, in Ohio, where the average hovers around three, many of its test-takers are eligible to receive college credit only by the skin of their teeth, if at all. So, can Ohio's top students reach even higher heights—and, can the state do better in preparing more students to take and pass the exams? Yes, for as the AP data show, there's plenty of room for improving the education of Ohio's most intellectually gifted students.

Table 1: Average test scores and number of test-takers, spring 2012, selected states and exams

Searching for Excellence: A Five-City, Cross-State Comparison of Charter School Quality, with research by Lyria Boast, Gillian Locke, and Tom Koester, and foreword and Fordham analysis by Terry Ryan and Aaron Churchill, considered charter schools in Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis—all of which have a decade-long history of charter schools and relatively large market shares of charter school students.

The study shows that the charter school sectors in five cities outperformed their home districts’ schools, which had similar levels of student poverty.

The study points the way to improving the quality of charter schools overall

But within each district, quality varied widely, from very high-performing charter schools to dismal ones.

The study also compared charter performance to average statewide performance—admittedly, a higher bar, as schools statewide had significantly lower levels of poverty than the charters (and their urban districts). Charters in all five cities trailed the state overall—often by a wide margin.

Clearly, something needs to change in cities’ stance toward both their lowest-performing and high-performing charters. And that’s where the study has good news, pointing the way to improving the quality of charter schools overall.

The study ran a simulation to show what could happen when cities:

• Close or replace low-performing schools and
• Expand or replicate high-performing schools.

If the bottom 10 percent of schools were closed in Cleveland, for example, while the top performers significantly expanded, within five years the city could have charter schools substantially outperforming their home district and on par with the state’s results.

This is just an illustration. Real authorizers wouldn't want to simplistically identify the top and bottom 10 percent based just on proficiency levels. Instead, they would need more complex performance frameworks that took into account proficiency, growth in student performance, and other important outcomes.

In some cities, authorizers and charter supporters have begun building the systems needed to replace failing schools and replicate great ones

In some cities, authorizers and charter supporters have begun building the systems needed to replace failing schools and replicate great ones.  In Indianapolis, authorizers including the mayor’s office and the statewide Indiana Charter Schools Board have prioritized scaling up schools that have been successful in Indianapolis and elsewhere, aided by funding from The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator.  At the same time, Ball State University has recently joined the mayor’s office in aggressively closing low-performing schools.  This report makes clear why all authorizers should follow their lead.

Various resources exist to help. Our report Going Exponential offers advice for authorizers, school operators, and policymakers about growing successful charter schools, based on research about how organizations have grown quickly and with quality in other sectors. We have also worked with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to develop an “academic performance framework” authorizers can use to identify high- and low-performing schools based on clear criteria.  And check out NACSA’s publications about closure and replication, including this monograph.

- Bryan C. Hassel is Public Impact's co-director

Of the eleven Buckeye State authorizers whom NASCA surveyed (including Fordham), NACSA found that Ohio’s authorizers scored well according to the index. Authorizers met nine to eleven out of the twelve possible indicators of best practices. NACSA, however, did critique states like Ohio who have implemented laws that do not allow authorizers to institute policies from the index. For example, the current law for charter renewals in Ohio prevents authorizers from issuing new schools a contract longer than the length of the authorizer’s own contract with the Department of Education. This means that an authorizer with two years left in their contract has to review the standing of a new school within those two years. NACSA recommends that new charters should be given a review for renewal after five years. In this report, they also argue that policies like the one implemented in Ohio negatively affect a charter’s autonomy by requiring more reporting and could potentially tempt authorizers to step outside of their established roles, prescribing their schools with explicit directions for improvement.  

Reports like this enable authorizers to have a clearer sense of how to best perform their roles along with gaining a better sense of how the laws of their state are influencing their ability to meet the needs of their charters. Although the report gives a sense of how authorizers are doing as a whole, NACSA does admit that since authorizers self-report they are not being reviewed based on the quality of achieving the items on the index.  To show a more detailed view of how authorizers have progressed this past year, NACSA plans to release a companion report called The State of Charter School Authorizing 2012 which will aggregate the authorizers surveys to show trends in the adoption of best practices, charters that have closed and open, and other indicators of accomplishments.

SOURCE: National Association for Charter School Authorizers. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ Index of Essential Practices 2012 (Washington, D.C.: National Association for Charter School Authorizers, 2013)

In 2014-15, voucher eligibility would extend to all students in grades K-3 in a school building that gets low marks in the early literacy measure on the state’s new report card. The funding for the voucher will not be deducted from a school district’s state aid, but rather be paid out directly by the state. Kasich’s budget allocates $8.5 million in fiscal year 2014 for 2,000 new vouchers and $17 million in 2015 for up to 4,000 new vouchers.

Despite the modest scale of this proposed growth, and the fact the state will cover the voucher amounts, district educators are up in arms about the expansion. Yellow Springs’ Superintendent Mario Basora captured the view of many district officials across the state when he told the Dayton Daily News, “I think it ultimately has the effect of undermining a good quality public education…In an era when we keep being told the funds are low and we continually have to make cuts, I’m concerned we are taking public funds and spreading them around to private schools in this way.”

Basora’s worries echo earlier school choice debates in Ohio. The first voucher program goes back to 1995. Ohio’s lawmakers at the time considered a “pilot” voucher program for Cleveland and other cities. That pilot would have granted vouchers for up to 7,000 students as part of a five-year study to see whether private schools do a better job than public schools, and would have actually included randomized trials to gauge the academic impact of vouchers on poor students in these cities. But, the plan was ultimately scuttled by the teacher unions and traditional education groups. Critics of the day included then state school board president Oliver Ocasek who declared, “This [voucher] plan is the greatest threat to the public schools we have ever faced.”

These are debates Fordham knows well and has been engaged in for years. In 1997, we worked with local allies and national partners to launch a privately funded scholarship program called Parents Advancing Choice in Education (PACE). The idea at the time was to provide privately funded vouchers to low-income Dayton parents so they could afford to move their children into better schools of their choice. It was hoped that the PACE voucher program could: 1) provide a safety valve for kids stuck in long-suffering schools and 2) inject competition into the Dayton Public Schools (DPS), thereby raising the level of teaching and learning across the city.

When the PACE program was announced publicly, then DPS superintendent James Williams called the program a “wake-up call” and warned that the “district would have to cut staff if it lost the $3.6 million in state funding that would be eliminated by the loss of 1,000 Dayton students to private schools.” PACE ultimately provided more than 6,000 scholarships over the last decade valued at about $9 million. Not long after the launch of PACE, Ohio passed a charter school law and in subsequent years passed various laws to expand vouchers. In 2008, the Dayton Daily News referred to Dayton as a nationally recognized school-choice mecca, and noted “PACE was an early catalyst for change.”

School choice, in its now myriad and varied forms, has had a profound impact on Dayton and the Dayton Public Schools. No doubt about that, but it has not meant the demise of the school district or the undermining of public education. In fact, the school district lost more students to the city’s overall decline and family flight from 1990 to 2000 (6,295 students) than it has lost to school choice over the last decade (3,661 students). Graph 1 shows that the Dayton Public Schools have, despite facing stiff competition from 30+ charter schools and various public and private voucher programs, largely held its own per retaining students in recent years. In looking at trends over time, interestingly enough, charter schools in Dayton have lost more students to the voucher programs than has the district.

School choice in Ohio is moving to the suburbs, and like their urban district colleagues of an earlier generation, they are afraid they will see the demise, or at least weakening, of their districts because of the competition. The experience from Dayton, however, makes clear that school districts can compete for kids no matter how fierce the competition.

This story of new public school buildings being built, and closed in just a few years, is important to understanding the logic behind Governor Kasich’s “Achievement Everywhere” school funding plan. His plan is remarkable because it actually tries to target children and their schools as the locus of public funding, as opposed to funding just school districts. The Kasich plan recognizes the fact that more and more of the state’s students attend schools other than their neighborhood district schools. As such, funding for their education should follow them to their respective school or educational program.

To understand what a shift in thinking this represents a little history is necessary. The public conversation around school funding in Ohio for decades has revolved around issues of “equity” and “adequacy;” between “rich” and “poor” school districts. The first “DeRolph” decision in 1997 by the Ohio Supreme Court, for example, ruled that school funding depended overmuch on local property taxes and thereby perpetuated unacceptable inequities across school districts. Since then, consecutive General Assemblies and governors have pumped more money into the state’s neediest districts. State funding for schools has more than doubled since 1997, and this doesn’t include the $10 billion for new buildings. In recognition of these gains, in its 2013 “Quality Counts” report, Education Week gave Ohio a C+ for its equity score, which placed Ohio in the top third of all states.

But, money for equalizing spending across school districts is increasingly yesterday’s fight. When it comes to families and the schools they choose for their children, district lines are blurring and in many instances becoming less and less important. Consider the following numbers for Ohio:

• Open enrollment – more than 61,376 students attend a public school outside of their home district. If these students were all in one district it would be larger than the Columbus City School District. There are 29 districts in the state with 20 percent or more of their students as open enrollees, and 12 districts have more than 30 percent of their students enrolled in another school district.
• Charter schools – almost five percent of all public school students now attend a charter school. Five “Big 8” cities have 20 percent or more of their students enrolled in public charter schools: Cleveland, 28 percent; Dayton, 26 percent; Toledo, 25 percent; Youngstown, 25 percent; and Columbus, 21 percent.
• E-schools – more than 37,500 children attend a full-time on-line school. This is roughly the same number of kids attending public schools in Cincinnati.
• Public voucher programs – more than 22,500 students are using vouchers from one of the state’s four voucher programs to attend a private school. This is equal to the combined total number of students enrolled by the Dayton and Youngstown public school systems.

The genie of school choice, in its myriad and rapidly evolving forms, is not going back into the bottle. Governor Kasich’s school funding plan recognizes this new reality and tries to make money flow to the school students actually attend. It goes further, and actually protects districts that are losing students through “guarantees” that fund districts for students that are no longer in their schools. This is not sustainable over the long haul, and puts off changes that districts need to make to adjust and survive. It is also inefficient in that it means there are fewer dollars for the schools that actually educate the students.   

School districts, however, are constrained in how fast they can adjust to losing students. Their fixed costs are not just in school buildings that go half empty, but also labor. About 70 percent of a school district’s costs goes to paying teachers. Under state law and restrictive collective bargaining agreements it is hard for school administrators to right-size their teaching force to smaller student counts. Most districts, Cleveland being an exception because of recently passed legislation giving them increased flexibility; have to reduce their teaching ranks solely by seniority. This means as districts shrink those teachers left behind are the most senior and costly. This further reduces the ability of districts to adapt.

These are tough realities. Governor Kasich’s Achievement Everywhere plan is controversial in part because it recognizes that some school districts are losing the competition for students. It, rightly, goes further by offering districts more flexibility to adapt, and through the Straight A Program provides grants for districts and their partners to seek out innovations that can help districts become more effective. Governor Kasich’s plan isn’t perfect, but it does move Ohio into the future.   

This article appeared in today's edition of The Columbus Dispatch.

As the newest member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s sponsorship team in Dayton, Ohio, I have been inundated recently with compliance issues and database systems.  The database systems are intended to support timely and voluminous data-gathering and reporting between schools and the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), and to make that data accessible to the public and researchers.  My most recent assimilation did not involve the Borg, but instead involved ODE’s Education Management Information System, or EMIS.

EMIS, established in 1989, is expansive to say the least. It is ODE’s main data collection source for primary and secondary education, including demographic, attendance, course information, financial data, and test results.  EMIS’ collected data falls into four general categories: district level, student, staff, and financial data.  A community school must timely enter and maintain all of this data into their computer, in goal of sharing it with ODE. In practice, however, this is not as simple as a school merely downloading its data directly into an ODE portal each month and calling it a victory.

All states have similar data systems nowadays, but Ohio’s is deficient among its peers in some regards. First, as Auditor Yost has highlighted, Ohio law prevents the state from having personally identifiable student data.  Instead both ODE and schools are dependent on outside contractors and a system of 23 Information Technology Centers, or ITCs.  This is not a model of efficiency and not all ITCs are on equal footing; yet, the ITC remains a crucial cog that allows individual community schools to timely and accurately submit school-level data required by EMIS.

All states have similar data systems nowadays, but Ohio’s is deficient among its peers in some regards.

Second, there are still a handful of schools that do not have high-speed internet lines to adequately transfer data to their ITC, even if such data had already been reported into a software system prior to ITC transmission.  This too-often scenario, unfortunately, results in data errors being transmitted to ODE, which in turn, creates more work later for both ODE and schools, as schools are asked for verification or for correction of errors.

Finally, the software itself needs updated.  ODE’s response to this has been the roll out of the EMIS_R (Redesign) Project.  Emis_R is meant to enhance the data flow from ITC to ODE via its vertical reporting framework or VRF.  It also uses the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) standard, which is a standard that allows data to be exchanged between disparate applications.  By 2015, SIF will be the standard for software vendors who wish to operate in Ohio for EMIS reporting.  Certainly, this new standard will go a long way in better software capabilities, less errors and enhanced reporting experiences for both schools and ODE… but that is still several years away.  As it stands today with EMIS, assimilation of data is still not seamless, even when under the shroud of forced assimilation.

Nationwide, the KIPP network of charters consists of 125 schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia; of those, this report focused on 43 middle schools serving students in grades five through eight. The student population that participated in the study was 96 percent black or Hispanic; 83 percent qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. 

Mathematica found that after three years, KIPP schools produced an additional eleven months of learning growth in math and eight months in reading. The report also dispels the myth that KIPP schools’ positive effects on learning are a function of “teaching to the test”.  Mathematica examined test results from both state assessments and from the nationally norm-referenced test (Terra Nova), for which teachers and students do not prepare, and found consistently positive results for both exams.

Ohio currently has one KIPP school, KIPP: Journey Academy, which serves grades five through eight in Columbus, and is sponsored by Fordham. While Mathematica did not include KIPP: Journey in its study, we do know that state-reported data indicate that KIPP: Journey is effectively educating students. It was rated “Effective” (B) by the Ohio Department of Education in 2012 and had an “Above” rating along the value-added performance indicator. This, while serving 300 students, of which 91 percent were black and 100 percent were economically disadvantaged.

The national results from Mathematica, taken together with local achievement data on KIPP: Journey, suggest that the KIPP charter model should be primed to expand in Ohio. And, in fact, KIPP Central Ohio, the board of KIPP: Journey Academy, has plans to possibly purchase land from Columbus State Community College and expand the number of KIPP schools. This expansion will serve approximately 2,000 low-income students in Columbus over the next several years.  We are particularly excited about and supportive of this effort, because in October 2012 Fordham approved two new KIPP schools in Columbus—including an additional middle school—for sponsorship. Both will open in the fall of 2014.

Mathematica’s findings provide additional evidence that high-quality charter networks such as KIPP change kids’ lives. And Ohio’s policymakers, authorizers, and charter advocates should take note of the evidence and lend their support for the recruitment and expansion of high-quality charter networks, such as KIPP.

Yesterday was the first day of public testimony on Governor Kasich’s budget proposal before the Ohio House Finance Primary and Secondary Education Committee. Terry submitted testimony on behalf of the Fordham Institute, as did Students First and others.  Following is a good recap from Gongwer News Service:

Terry Ryan, vice-president for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, offered support for the budget, saying the funding offered through the formula would outpace that of almost every other comparable state in FY 14. He also offered suggestions for use in the budget or as the subjects of future legislation.

Firstly, he said all dollars should follow students to the schools they actually attend, but funding is still stuck in categorical programs and flows to the district but not necessarily the building attended.

Mr. Ryan also called for annual academic return on investment reporting for all public schools, both districts and charters. "Just as some districts are more productive than others so are some schools and these should be acknowledged and better understood," he said.

More mandates related to regulations, laws and contract should be eliminated if they force funds to be spent in certain ways in all schools regardless of student characteristics. He said the flexibilities of the Cleveland Plan should be expanded to all districts.

Like the administration, Mr. Ryan said the state should move away from hold harmless provisions and guarantees "that provide funding to districts for phantom students."

"An obvious downside to such policies is that they support schools losing students at the expense of those gaining students," he said. "In what other line of business do organizations get funding for customers they no longer have?"

Lastly, Mr. Ryan called for annual student report cards for private schools that receive more than 30% of voucher-bearing students. "Schools that receive publicly funded students need to be ranked by their performance so that both parents and taxpayers know what is working and what isn't."

Greg Harris, StudentsFirst state director for Ohio, said the national school choice advocacy group supports principles in Gov. John Kasich's funding plan including an emphasis on equity, flexibility, and accountability.

The group supports the parent trigger expansion for the lowest 20% performing schools but recommends that the option of reopening the school as a charter be limited to those authorizers with a demonstrated record of success in the state.

As to the administration's plan to provide $100 per charter student for facilities, Mr. Harris said the allocation should be greater. Massachusetts, for example, funds charter students at $1,200 per pupil.

"If we cannot deliver this amount for all charter schools right away, then you might consider providing greater facilities allowances for highly rated charter schools," he said. "This way they can more rapidly replicate their successful educational models and enroll more students who otherwise are forced to attend bad schools."

Rebecca Sibilia, StudentsFirst vice president for fiscal strategy, said the hold harmless and budget inflation cap of 10/25% creates a tension between "districts that have the most to gain and those that have the most to lose."

The governor's proposal indicates any districts that would gain more than a certain threshold of funding through the current formula would be capped in growth, she said. "This means that inequities on a per-student basis may continue to exist in this transition phase. We remain optimistic that the governor and the legislature will commit to rightsizing inequities either in this or the coming fiscal years, so that all students get an equal footing on which to start."

Ms. Sibilia said the governor's plan would provide "regressive" funding for English language learners of $1,500 for their first year in the country with a 25% reduction each year after.

"This assumes that every ELL child will get to grade level English proficiency by their third year of education in the US - regardless of the quality of education that they receive," she said. "We believe there may be implementation challenges and potential inadvertent underfunding of students with English language needs.

StudentsFirst also advocated for an increase in the $500 per pupil for economically disadvantaged students.

Stephen Dyer, education policy fellow for Innovation Ohio, said the Achievement Everywhere plan is "flawed." The proposal's treatment of property value per pupil has almost nothing to do with the true property wealth disparity in the state, he said. For some districts, looking at the per pupil valuation overstates or understates the property wealth.

He also said it is troubling that the administration has said the formula did not try to calculate a per pupil amount that provides for an adequate education. He argued the $5,000 per pupil is in fact that number in the proposal, which is the lowest amount since the 2002-03 school year.

"The governor's office seems to be arguing that they are now trying to equally distribute an inadequate amount of resources," Mr. Dyer said

You can read Terry’s full testimony here, and the budget analysis that informed it (conducted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s Paul Hill) here.

1. Calls for new investments in public schools. In fact, it seeks an increase in K-12 funding of nearly 10 percent over two years. This is generous in tough fiscal times.
2. Recognizes the need for getting at, and reporting on, Academic Return on Investment (ROI).
3. Promotes innovations and innovators through its Straight-A fund.
4. Removes some of the shackles off educators. Specifically, under the proposed “Free to Advance” provisions some regulations will be lifted so districts and schools can make more effective use of state dollars.

In addition, Terry also offered five recommendations to improve the Kasich education plan:

1. Get all dollars to follow kids to the schools they actually attend.
2. Require annual Academic ROI reporting for all public school buildings in the state – district and charters. Just as some districts are more productive than others, so are some schools and these should be acknowledged and better understood.
3. Further eliminate mandates – regulations, laws, contracts – that force funds to be spent in particular ways across all schools regardless of student characteristics.
4. Rapidly move away from “hold harmless” provisions and guarantees that provide funding to districts for phantom students. An obvious downside to such policies is that they support schools losing students at the expense of those gaining students.
5. Require annual student performance report cards for private schools that receive more than 30 percent of voucher bearing students.

In short, Terry argued that Governor Kasich’s education plan has much to like about it—it’s sensible and lives within the means of the state budget constraints. For these reasons, Fordham lends its support to the Kasich plan. And we hope that legislators will consider ways, some of which were suggested in testimony today, to further improve the Kasich plan and even better serve the kids of Ohio.

Consider this example from education policy: Ohio’s State Board of Education adopted the Common Core State Standards in June 2010. Today, two-and-a-half years later, how many of those members still serve on the board? Five. Out of 19. What about the General Assembly? How many of those members were serving during Ohio’s eight-month debate over adopting the Common Core standards? Fifty-two percent (or 69 members).

Since the state adopted the Common Core standards, Fordham-Ohio has produced multiple reports on the topic, convened three major events about the standards, and written more than fifty articles on our blog and in our e-newsletter. (To say nothing of the numerous conversations we have with lawmakers, State Board of Education members, reporters, and business/education/community leaders.) This ongoing and, yes, repetitive work serves a purpose: to help new policymakers, education leaders, and the public engaged in and understanding of important issues facing our state’s schools. As policy advocates we have to keep this in mind, and learn to be okay with sounding like a broken record.

Thank you to my Ohio policy & research intern Angel Gonzalez for compiling these data.

Download the report online here.

Dayton panelists from left: Bob Taft, Rusty Clifford and Lori Ward

The word churn is used within a variety of industries.  Just as customers leave businesses and migrate to competitors for other products or pricing options, students transfer between school districts and buildings. Churn is a reality within Ohio schools.  But what are the reasons for this cycle? School leaders, parents, community members and others gathered yesterday in Dayton and Cincinnati to discuss student churn, what it means for their schools and what might be done about it. A crowd of about 100 gathered for each event.

In November, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Columbus-based Community Research Partners (CRP), and nine other funders released a statewide study of student mobility in Ohio. This substantial report was the basis of the conversations hosted by Learn to Earn in Dayton and The Strive Partnership in Cincinnati. 

“Today’s event in Dayton was very eye opening,” said Chatoya Hayes, an audience member who joined the discussion from the United Way of the Greater Dayton Area.  “I think the issue of student mobility is directly altering student success and is a major factor not usually considered.”  Hayes said she found the comparisons between Dayton and other districts in Ohio to be especially beneficial to the thinking of audience members.  Churn within schools can be associated with a variety of factors, whether academic, family life, or housing situations. At both events panelists and audience members pointed out that tackling challenges of student mobility will require new forms and levels of community partnerships.  

Parent and Cincinnati attendee Ruth Anne Wolfe said, “We can pull together as a community to support children’s success in our schools.  We need to work on the reasons why students might switch schools, from housing to job issues.”  Wolfe said she applauded the school districts and community partners for coming together and sparking a conversation about student mobility. 

Both events featured a presentation about the research by Bobbie Garber, consultant to Community Research Partners and former executive director.  Terry Ryan served as the moderator.  In Dayton, the discussion included panelists Rusty Clifford from West Carrolton Schools, former Ohio Governor Bob Taft and Lori Ward from Dayton Public Schools.  Cincinnati’s event included Superintendent Rob Amodio from Norwood City Schools, Superintendent Mary Ronan from Cincinnati Public Schools, Rolonda Smith from Parents for Public Schools of Greater Cincinnati and Moria Weir from Hamilton County Jobs & Family Services.

As the wheels of student mobility and churn continue to spin, what can parents, school leaders and community members do to help better serve students?  Share your thoughts about our mobility study and comment below! Click here to view media coverage from the Cincinnati event.

My son is a student in the Columbus City School District. Thus, what transpires per education in Ohio’s largest district impacts me personally, not just professionally. Last evening I was pleased on both fronts by Mayor Michael Coleman’s State of the City address. It was his 14th such speech but it was a “first” in one regard: Coleman tackled the issue of improving public schools in his city head-on. This speech comes as the mayor’s education commission is meeting regularly to develop a plan to help right the city’s schools. (Terry and Ethan Gray from CEE-Trust presented to the committee just a few days ago). Terry's presentation can be viewed here and Ethan's can be viewed here.

The entire speech was promising and demonstrated the mayor’s strong intent to provide better education options to his city’s children. Perhaps most striking, though, was his unabashed support for good charter schools (which is rare from an Ohio Democrat—though we’ve seen tides shift among other urban Dems). Here is the charter school portion of the speech:

And finally: Every child deserves to go to a good school, and the schools that consistently fail our children must be replaced.

Unfortunately we don’t have enough good schools in Columbus. When you combine Columbus City Schools and charter schools, only five percent of schools earn an A rating. That means only 2,800 of 65,000 students go to excellent schools. Meanwhile, five times as many students attend failing schools—both district and charter. This is unacceptable and needs to change.

As a community, we should encourage, promote, and replicate the best of what works in education. We must support success and replace failure.

Public charter schools are here to stay, and we must view them as part of our overall public education system. A quarter of all our kids are enrolled in these schools. They’re just as likely to be poor or disadvantaged as those in the Columbus City Schools.

I applaud Dr. Harris for proposing the Columbus Innovation Fund, which would provide additional public funding for the best district and charter schools. This is a first step in the right direction.

Not only should we embrace our high-performing charters, we should also recruit the best charter schools from around the country, just like we recruit businesses to expand and locate to Columbus.

We have too many failed charter schools in Columbus. We must find a way to close them.

I believe that as we embrace the good and shed the bad, we will strengthen public education in Columbus.

Kudos to Mayor Coleman. As an observer of education policy and a mom in your city, I hope you maintain this conviction and philosophy as the district navigates the tough path ahead of it.

SOURCE: Michael Sawyers, “Education Reform Update: Presented to the Senate Education Committee,” PowerPoint presentation, February 20, 2013.

Sawyers explained that changing the language allows the Common Core standards to be “fewer, deeper, and clearer.” By wrapping these standards into clusters, teachers are able to creatively unpack what lessons they can teach their students, bucking the checklist of requirements that they had to consider before the Common Core. The new standards also ask the students to delve deeper into material, providing teachers the opportunity to create instruction that digs into the nuances of academic content.  

Currently, ODE is piloting the new set of standards in a few school districts in the state and providing professional development for teachers and administrators. By the 2013-2014 academic year, ODE plans to have all Ohio schools aligned with the Common Core standards. Sawyers reports that teachers are excited about the potential changes but are weary about having their students tested against the old standards which will phase out in 2013-2014. In response to this concern, ODE is working to ensure that testing next year will be aligned with the impending changes in standards. While the Common Core may cause short term growing pains, the outlook looks bright for teachers seeking to implement creative classroom instruction and the students who will benefit from the changes in their curriculum.

Among the boldest and most exciting reforms the governor proposes, is his overhaul of the state’s school funding formula. The funding proposal the governor has laid forth levels the playing field for all Ohio students. It ensures that youngsters who attend a public school system with less local wealth—measured by property value and income—receive more state aid. For example, according to the governor’s preliminary FY 2014 estimates, the property and income-rich Upper Arlington schools near Columbus would receive no state aid for its regular students. (It would receive aid for its special education, economically disadvantaged, gifted, and English language learner students.) The state assumes, correctly, that Upper Arlington’s local residents can and will raise sufficient revenue to educate their children. This is sensible public finance—furnishing limited state funds to Upper Arlington is like giving Donald Trump social security. They simply don’t need it.

Meanwhile, the governor’s proposal provides generous state aid to students who reside in poorer, hard-scrabble communities such as Lima. Lima doesn’t have five-bedroom homes that generate large amounts of school tax revenue, and additionally, its residents don't have surplus income lying around to pay higher school taxes. Thus, for the 5,000 plus students who attend a charter or district school in Lima, they’ll receive $5,200 in state aid—what the governor terms core and targeted assistance. (Core assistance is based on local property values; targeted assistance on income.) On top of that, special education, economically disadvantaged, gifted, and English language learner students will receive additional funds, just like the students in Upper Arlington. Taking all these elements together, the average per-pupil funding for a Lima public school student is $6,523, compared with $544 for Upper Arlington.

SOURCE: Achievement Everywhere Preliminary Estimates FY 2014 (by district). Per-pupil calculations by author.

True, under Ohio’s current funding formula, wealthy schools already receive less state aid than poor schools. But, the governor’s formula is clearer and simpler to understand than the state’s current, muddled distribution formula. Further, by accounting for local property values and income, the governor’s formula is a fairer method of distribution: Adding income into the mix rightly recognizes that the state must consider both property wealth (the revenue a local levy can generate) and also a community’s ability and willingness to pay higher taxes (and as such, pass a local levy). The governor’s funding proposal is, therefore, fair, simple, and significant step in the right direction—a proposal that should cheer up even Ohio’s saddest city.

Terry Ryan and KidsOhio.com’s Mark Real join Columbus Education Commission members listening to CEE-Trust’s Ethan Gray present at the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Main Branch on February 18, 2013.

Like much of urban America, Columbus urgently needs more high performing schools for its children, especially its poor and minority children. In 2011-12, nearly 30,000 (just under 50 percent) of all Columbus students attended failing schools (D or F on the state rating system). Within the Columbus City Schools, 60 of 117 buildings have been designated by the state as “persistently low-performing” – meaning they had been rated “academic emergency” or “academic watch” for at least two of the last three years. The city’s charter schools are equally troubled with 28 out of 59 being rated D or F by the state in 2012. In contrast, only 3,500 students attended schools with grades of A or A+.

Yet, turning around failed schools is nearly impossible, despite the best of intentions. Both charter and traditional district schools are stubbornly resistant to significant change—the kind that might actually make a difference, which generally entails replacing the entire staff and program. In Fordham’s 2010 report “Are Bad Schools Immortal,” researcher David Stuit identified more than 2,000 low-performing charter and district schools across ten states and tracked them from 2003-04 through 2008-09 to determine how many were turned around, shut down, or remained low-performing. Results were generally dismal. Seventy-two percent of the original low-performing charters remained in operation – and remained low-performing – five years later. So did 80 percent of district schools.

To be sure, closing failed schools is wrenching for all involved, but it is better for children than leaving them in hopeless situations. No child should be stuck without hope or alternative in a failed school Closure, however, should apply equally to both long-suffering district and charter schools.

Smart school closure requires a workable triage strategy for determining which schools are salvageable and which should close, what achievement data will be used to inform those decisions, and what non-achievement variables may also bear on closure decisions (e.g. demographic and enrollment trends). As with federal “base-closings.” Columbus may want to consider empaneling an independent body to recommend—to the mayor, the district, the charter authorizers, even the legislature—which schools must go and why.

In tandem with the strategic closure of long-suffering schools, Columbus should pursue a new schools strategy. This would entail helping current high-performers expand their efforts while also recruiting higher performing models to Columbus from across the country and the state. There are a handful of non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs) running some of the very best and most effective urban schools in the country. This list includes national models like KIPP, Achievement First, Aspire, Green Dot, Uncommon Schools, High Tech High, and Rocketship. Together these CMOs presently operate about 250 schools serving some 85,000 students in 22 states—but only one of these schools is in Ohio (KIPP). Columbus is not starting from zero, however. It has 14 charter schools serving about 4,300 students that are ranked Excellent or Effective. Some of these schools are well positioned to grow and/or replicate.

But the organic growth of these existing Columbus school models alone won’t be enough to meet the needs of 30,000 kids currently enrolled in troubled schools. Providing better opportunities for more of these students demands a larger strategic effort. Specifically, Columbus needs a multi-faceted reform plan that includes significant reforms to the school district, plans to improve pre-K for the city’s neediest children, and a “new schools” strategy that focuses launching new high-performing schools across the K—12 spectrum. These new schools could include schools already operating in Columbus and Ohio as well as national CMOs.

A significant new-schools strategy could be supported and accelerated by Columbus leaders in five ways:

1. Find a way to increase the per pupil funding available to high quality charters. Charters in Ohio, on average, receive about $2,200 less funding per pupil than traditional district schools.[1]  This disparity is due in large part to charter schools’ lack of equitable access to local revenues and facilities funding. This is one of the reasons that highly regarded national CMOs have shied away from Ohio. If Columbus leaders want to get $2,000 more per child into charters, this can happen in three ways or some combination thereof: a) allocate part of a district levy to eligible charters (as is happening in Cleveland); b) get state law changed to allocate more money for charters (perhaps limited to high-performers); and/or c) philanthropy could cover the costs on an ongoing basis. 
2. Charter schools need facilities. Again, several different approaches could be taken. The school district could make buildings available through sale, lease or gift. Alternatively, the city could provide unused or underused facilities of other kinds to charter operators. (Charters don’t have to operate in conventional school buildings.) Other options could include community leaders identifying and making available former private or parochial buildings, buildings on college campuses, malls or residential developments. Imaginative financing arrangements combined with philanthropy can also enable charters to build green-field facilities of their own design. (This has happened in Dayton for example.) Again, all of this support would hinge on the continuing academic success of the partner schools.
3. Charter schools need better and more consistent pupil transportation options. One option would be for the district to commit to a public master transportation plan that would treat charter students as district equals in all decision making and/or outsourcing of all bussing operations to an outside group with the capacity to do it better. Such groups could include an Education Service Center or other public or even private providers. Another option would be to bypass the district altogether. This could be done by seeking changes to state law that would allocate full state dollars for the cost of transporting students to flow to the charters themselves or to a third-party transportation provider (an ESC, a private bussing company or even the local municipal bus system).
4. Demand and support high quality charter school authorizers that focus squarely on holding sponsored schools accountable for their performance, that close troubled schools, and that commits to being persnickety about who is allowed to open schools in the first-place.
5. Create a “new and innovative schools office” dedicated to working with current Columbus charter operators, district innovators committed to growing new schools and programs, and prospective charter operators. The “new and innovative schools office” would work to identify neighborhood needs for schools (K-6 versus middle school, versus 9-12; brick and mortar versus blended learning, etc.), identify and recruit potential operators who could serve the needs of the neighborhood and kids; and help prospective operators raise start-up dollars, identify and recruit board members, find teaching talent, identify community partners, funders and expertise (legal, financial, etc.), navigate bureaucracies and find facilities. Such a “new and innovative schools office” could be housed in the mayor’s office, at a university or be part of an existing organization like the Columbus Chamber of Commerce or the Columbus Partnership.

Great schools demand quality teachers and school leaders. To help improve the talent available to schools, Columbus civic, business and philanthropic leaders should invite Teach for America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (TNTP), the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and other national talent partners to work in Columbus and its neediest schools – district and charter alike. TFA is already established in Ohio (northeast and southwest) and is looking to expand its efforts in the state. Columbus is a natural expansion site. These teacher programs not only place top talent into the neediest classrooms, but serve as an important pipeline for future school leaders and innovators.

Taken together, these steps – strategic school closure, new school development and focused talent recruitment and development – would allow for a significant expansion of high-quality schools in Columbus and provide better opportunities for the nearly 30,000 Columbus students who need them.

The investigation examined student records in 331 school buildings in 137 districts. The auditor’s investigation is complete for all districts except Columbus City Schools, which remains under an ongoing “special audit.” The investigation found iniquities ranging from intentional noncompliance with ODE reporting rules (Cincinnati City), retroactively withdrawing students (Columbus City), and jettisoning students to an online school without parental initiation or approval (Marion City).

In response to these findings, Yost presented thirteen recommendations for reforming Ohio’s system of reporting student enrollment. At his press conference this afternoon, the auditor focused sharply on his first recommendation: Reforming how traditional district’s report student enrollment.

Kids count every day, all year long

Under Ohio’s current law, district schools report their student enrollment once, during “count week” in October (see, October 2012 newsletter). This enrollment figure determines the district’s level of funding for the rest of the school year. Instead of a one-time count, the auditor recommended that traditional districts track student attendance in “more or less real time.” (Ohio requires charter schools to report student enrollment monthly.)

The auditor’s report explains how frequent attendance tracking would dis-incentivize improper enrollment practices:

If State funding is based on yearlong attendance, local schools will be much less willing to break a student’s enrollment to gain some incremental advantage by rolling up that student’s achievement test score to the State. The break in enrollment would mean a loss of money [emphasis mine]. Under the current system, there is no financial meaning to the break in enrollment—as long as the child was in school on Count Week, the later break in enrollment is consequence-free and the dollars continue to roll in (pg. 35).

Most schools play by the rules. But cheating the system (even if only isolated) cannot be tolerated. Reform to Ohio’s archaic reporting system is a first step to ensure that “attendance-gate” doesn’t happen again. We agree with the auditor—especially in changing over to yearlong reporting of student attendance. The change will ensure that, in Yost’s words, “Kids count every day, all year long.”

The Fordham Institute’s national team commissioned David Stuit of Basis Policy Research and his colleague Sy Doan to examine closely thirteen existing voucher and tax credit scholarship programs and describe the nature and extent of their regulations as well as how many private schools participate in them (and how many do not). They also asked them to survey private schools in communities served by four of the country’s most prominent voucher programs (including EdChoice and the Cleveland Scholarship & Tutoring Program) to see how heavily regulations and program requirements weigh in schools’ decision whether to participate.

The result is the new Fordham report School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring. What does it tell us?

Specific to Ohio, Stuit and Doan determined that:

• Ohio’s voucher programs have the second-most extensive testing-and-accountability requirements of all programs in the nation.
• Considering a total of 10 factors, Ohio’s programs are the third-most regulated in the country, behind Indiana’s and Milwaukee's.

Other key findings include:

• “Regulation” is not schools’ foremost concern when deciding whether to participate (lack of voucher-eligible families is).
• Only 25 percent of schools listed state testing requirements as very or extremely important to their decision about whether to participate.
• Just 16 percent said the same about public reporting of test results, but more than half are protective of their admissions criteria and religious practices.
• Fifty-eight percent of non-participating schools cited paperwork burdens and mandatory open-enrollment policies as important factors in their decisions not to sign up.
• Catholic schools are the least likely to have their decisions about participation affected by regulations. (In Ohio, fully 60 percent of EdChoice-participating private schools are Catholic ones and they serve about 70 percent of all EdChoice students.)

Currently twenty-two thousand Ohio students attend a private school using a state-funded voucher. Two years ago lawmakers raised the cap on EdChoice vouchers to 60,000 slots statewide (reserved for kids in low-performing public schools) and launched a new special-needs scholarship. In his recently unveiled FY2014-15 state budget, Governor Kasich has proposed expanding voucher eligibility to children from low-income families and K-3 students in schools that fail to meet a minimum grade on the new early learning report card component. Alongside this growth in publicly funded school choice should come an appropriate increase in accountability of participating schools and whether they are helping students succeed. This report provides evidence that they open to just that.

It was hard to believe that an Ohio governor was actually proposing to create an innovation fund and that it would distribute real money: $100 million in FY2014 and $200 million in FY2015. The idea of an innovation fund for reform in Ohio is something the Fordham Institute, Ohio Grantmakers Forum (OGF),[1] and other reformers have been urging since at least 2008. For example, in the OGF report Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today’s Learners and for Generation of Ohioans to Come[2], issued in early 2009 and the result of months of input from philanthropy around the state, the first recommendation called for creating “Ohio Innovation Zones and an Incentive Fund.” Specifically, the report called for “an Incentive Fund to seed transformative educational innovation, support and scale up of successful educational enterprises, and build a strong culture to support these activities in local communities and throughout the state’s system of public education.”

Further, Beyond Tinkering argued that the purpose of the innovation fund should not be simply incenting new programs, but pushing reforms that ultimately lead to greater efficiencies: “Once these innovations are launched, local communities, schools, districts and the state should find ways to reallocate and repurpose current resources for their continuation.” And, presciently to Governor Kasich’s Straight A Innovation Fund, when it came to governance Beyond Tinkering urged the state to “create an advisory committee made up of both public- and private-sector members to help determine the awarding of the grants (similar to the Third Frontier Advisory Committee).”

Beyond Tinkering went on to say that dollars from an innovation fund could be used to “attract and build on promising school models” such as Early College High Schools, STEM Academies, and high-performing charters. Or, it argued, the innovation dollars could be used to support district-wide innovations, online courses, or creative district-to-district or district-to-charter collaborations.

Fast forward to 2013 and there are even more innovative efforts and ideas that the Straight A Innovation Fund could help seed and expand. For example, Reynoldsburg City Schools just east of Columbus is running a portfolio of high-performing schools (some traditional, some charter, some digital learning, and all high-performing) with a bare-bones central office. Cincinnati Public Schools has embraced two of the nation’s premier school reform models in the SEED Academy boarding school and the blended learning model Carpe Diem.

Springfield City Schools is another example. It is looking to launch its “Global Impact STEM Academy,” which is part of larger and more significant district reform package. Springfield Superintendent David Estrop recently told Business Wire, “We understand that one-size does not fit all with education…Offering an expanded online option to our students and other students throughout Ohio is a natural progression for our school district. We strive to offer as many options as possible for students so their education can be customized to better meet their needs and aspirations while also keeping them on track to graduate.”

But, it isn’t just urban and inner-ring suburban districts that have been bitten by the innovation bug and that can potentially benefit from Straight A Innovation Dollars. Oakwood City Schools, a high-income suburban district outside of Dayton, recently used $500,000 in Race to the Top funds to create and implement a comprehensive performance assessment system for the district superintendent, all administrators, and all teachers. One final example is Northwest Local Schools in Hamilton County near Cincinnati, which recently launched seven blended learning courses for its high school students. The classes handle 50 students each, about twice the size of many high school classes, but they each have one teacher and one instructional assistant. The district’s assistant director of curriculum told the local newspaper, “We’re always looking at how to do things more efficiently…This is a new way of delivering instruction, but we’re still very much in the learning process.”

Governor Kasich’s Straight A Innovation Fund is long overdue for Ohio and its schools. If it makes its way through the General Assembly relatively unscathed it will find a receptive group of educators who are champing at the bit to do more and better things.

[1] Now called Philanthropy Ohio.

[2] The report’s subtitle was “Action Recommendations for the Strickland Administration, 128^th Ohio General Assembly and State Board of Education.”

SAGE Publishing’s recently released reference set  Debating Issues in American Education is a 10-volume deep dive into many of the most salient issues regarding the state of PreK-12 education in the United States today. A stellar roster of contributors appears in each issue, recruited by the editors for their knowledge and insight into the topics at hand.

The ten volumes are:

• Alternative Schooling & School Choice
• Curriculum & Instruction
• Diversity in Schools
• Religion in Schools
• School Discipline & Safety
• School Finance
• School Governance
• School Law
• Standards & Accountability in Schools
• Technology in Schools

Within each volume, a dozen or more specific questions are put forward and argued in point/counterpoint essays by contributing authors. The variety of approaches and areas of focus brought to the series by the wide array of authors is a particular strength of the set. I found myself wondering before I sat down to review a volume if interest could be sustained in the topic overall when there were literally hundreds of pages spent on what seems from the outside to be subtle variations in the questions being debated. I found on more than one occasion that what had been meant to be a review of the essays ended up being an in-depth reading of more than half the volume. It is also rewarding when discussion of one particularly important study or Supreme Court Case is echoed or reinforced in another essay by another contributor. There is a real sense that the volumes are geared to build knowledge over a full reading of their essays. Some topics are broader than others and even eighteen essays are perhaps not enough to fully cover every nuance, but there is never a sense that any topic is being short changed.

The editors of the individual volumes also are diligent in making sure that the various themes and insights are part of a unified whole. Editors provide an introduction to the broad topic for that volume that often explains how individual questions were chosen for each topic as well as using history and context to build a throughline for the variety of essays covering those questions. Each question’s point/counterpoint essays also feature a detailed headnote by the volume editor that takes the same tack with the specific question, providing context for the essays to follow.

Contributing authors come from academia, think tanks, government, schools, and the law. They are all well-versed in their topic areas and seem well-chosen from a point/counterpoint perspective. It is clear that each author has had opportunities to review the other’s essay prior to publication and it is often interesting to see how a supporter of an issue addresses (or chooses not to address) the other’s contentions in his or her own essay. Subtlety often pays off more than direct contention.

And that I think is the main benefit of this, frankly, amazing collection of thought and discourse. Even if the topics are not relevant to you directly, the ways in which these issues are discussed and debated – including historical context and interpretation of studies and court decisions – are interesting in themselves.

We at the Fordham Institute are proud to have three contributors to the volume on Standards & Accountability in Schools, but for this reviewer personally it is the breadth of topics, the depth of knowledge, and the care in presentation of the material that really makes this reference set stand out. These are the topics that are uppermost in the minds of education stakeholders across the spectrum today, which require the deep knowledge and historical context in order to be properly addressed going forward.

A few of the promising elements that may have sparked the interest of Hanushek and others include targeted funding for innovation, a revamped funding formula, and expansions for quality school choice. Specifically, in his plan, the governor has proposed to:

• Establish an innovation fund: Dubbed the “Straight A Fund,” this $300 million pot would provide competitive grants for one-time, innovation projects. As the Governor’s team presented it, these one-time projects may include, for example, retrofitting a school’s technology or establishing more efficient management systems.
• Provide facilities funding for charter schools: Currently, charter schools don’t receive state dollars for facilities, meaning that charters have to pay for facilities out of their operating fund. The governor’s plan provides $100 per-pupil funding to charters for facilities, which would free charters to spend more on classroom instruction.  
• Broaden voucher eligibility to more low-income families: Tuition vouchers to attend private schools are currently only available to students who would otherwise attend a persistently under-performing school. The governor proposes to open vouchers to any kindergartener (and later to first-graders) whose family income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
• Overhaul the distribution formula: Under Ohio’s current school funding plan, only property wealth is accounted for. However, property wealth doesn’t necessarily correlate to income wealth. For example, Cincinnati has high property wealth via commercial buildings, yet its residents are, on average, poor. The governor’s plan would rectify this problem by adding income into the school funding formula. This should increase the flow of state funds to impoverished areas.
• Focus on fiscal stewardship: The Kasich education reform plan includes an emphasis on efficiency. A major pillar of governor’s plan is to compare districts’ fiscal performance, by indicating which schools get the most “bang for their educational buck”—and then learn what practices these districts use to achieve these efficiencies.

The fine print will be released next week. And we’re sure that there will be wrangling about the details: How will these concepts be implemented in practice? How will we know whether the plan—or elements of it—actually work? But, at first blush, the plan looks to be on the right track. First, the Straight A Fund promises to incentivize bold changes, both technological and process innovations. Second, the plan focuses on efficiency. Ohio’s economy remains fragile and local taxpayers are tapped out. Learning from schools that produce great results at minimal costs is an imperative. Finally, from a student-learning perspective, the Kasich plan expands quality school choice options and appears to more fairly distribute funds to Ohio students that need the aid the most.

A charter school authorizer, of which Fordham is one, has four primary responsibilities: (1) review charter applications, (2) contract with the charter school, (3) ensure compliance, and (4) renew or not renew the charter school’s contract based on school performance, especially academic performance. In each area of responsibility, except compliance, CREDO’s findings suggest that charter school authorizers must strengthen its practices to ensure a growing supply of high-quality charters. Three of CREDO’s findings, in particular, have relevance to charter authorizer practices.

First, CREDO found significant variation in the quality of charter school management networks, or CMOs (e.g., KIPP). Authorizers must be persnickety in the educational organizations with whom they contract—there are sour lemons as well as delicious apples in the CMO barrel. CREDO’s analysis discovered that the finest CMO networks (e.g. KIPP and Uncommon Schools) have large positive effects on students’ learning growth, while the lowest performing networks (e.g. White Hat and Responsive Education Solutions) have far less favorable effects on student learning.[1] They also noted that charters that were supported by the Charter School Growth Fund “had significantly higher learning gains than other CMOs or independent charters.”

Second, CREDO found that a fast start is critical for charter schools. If a charter performs well from the start, it’ll likely continue to perform well five years later. Conversely, if a charter performs poorly from the start, it will likely struggle to turn around its performance. In other words, charters typically don’t get better with age, though, CREDO makes a few caveats on this point.[2] Authorizers, then, must insist on high (though reasonable) academic performance from the get-go, while carefully monitoring performance during a charter’s first few years. As CREDO writes: “In all cases, we argue without exception that poor first year performance simply cannot be overlooked or excused.”

Third, CREDO found that quality begets quality (and vice-versa). When CREDO examined charter replications, the quality of the replicated school was typically the same quality as the flagship school. In addition, CREDO found that, when a charter replicates, the flagship school’s quality doesn’t suffer. Charter school authorizers, then, must encourage, support, and approve the replication efforts of high-quality charter schools and networks of charters. 

CREDO’s findings add to the evidence that strong authorizers can and must lead the charge toward quality. Authorizers can do this by rejecting applications from poor-performing charter management organizations, insisting on academic excellence from the start, and encouraging the replication of high-performing charters. These bold and strong steps on the part of authorizers will create more and better charter schools, in Ohio and across the nation.

NAPCS ranks state laws based on two primary factors: 1) the freedoms and flexibilities state laws provide charter operators; and 2) the quality of accountability provisions for both charter school operators and authorizers. There are 20 Essential Components of the NAPCS rankings and these range from freedoms such as “No Caps on Charters,” “Automatic Collective Bargaining Exemptions,” and “Equitable Operational Funding” to accountability measures such as “Authorizer and Overall Program Accountability” and “Clear Processes for Renewal, Nonrenewal and Revocation Decisions.”

Ohio has made some progress – and this is reflected in the NAPCS state rating of Ohio inching up from #28 last year to #27 this year. But, other states are making progress faster. Big charter states, those that have at least 4.5% of their students enrolled in public charter schools, that have made steady progress and improvements to their laws in recent years include number one ranked Minnesota (with 4.7% of students in charters), number four Colorado (with 9.8% of students in charters), number five Florida (with 6.8% of students in charters), number six Louisiana (with 6.4% of students in charters) and number seven California (with 6.7% of students in charters).

These states are serving hundreds of thousands of students under state laws that are superior to Ohio’s in both allowing charter freedoms and ensuring charter performance. Louisiana, for example, jumped from #13 to #6 due to significant enhancements in its laws, such as strengthening the authorizing environment and increasing charter school autonomy. While South Carolina leapt from #25 to #12 because of improved laws related to better authorizing.

The NAPCS rankings make clear that Ohio’s lawmakers can do better by its 113,000 charter school students, while setting the conditions for better charter schools and opportunities for more kids in need of better schools in the future. Specifically, legislative leaders in Ohio can help promote charter school quality by crafting policies that ensure would-be school operators are carefully vetted in advance of opening; that all schools are thoroughly monitored by responsible authorities for their academic performance; and that poor performers exit the market in a timely fashion.

Failed schools should not be able to skirt academic accountability; whether they are traditional district schools, virtual charter schools or charter schools operated either by for-profit management companies or nonprofit ones. But, in return for performance, successful charters should receive equitable funding. Charters in Ohio, on average, receive about $2,200 less funding per pupil than traditional district schools. This disparity is due in large part to charter schools’ lack of access to local revenues and facilities funding. Successful charters should also be able to replicate their successes through innovations like multi-school charter contracts and multi-charter contract boards. If, for example, a high quality charter school board can successfully oversee ten or even 15 great charters in a city there should be no laws preventing this from happening, but there currently is in the Buckeye State.

The states with the best charter schools also have the strongest charter school laws. According to Nina Rees, President and CEO of NAPCS, the national charter school association release their annual rankings so they “can be used by charter school supporters to help them push for laws that support the creation of high-quality public charter schools, particularly those students most in need of a better school option.” Ohio can and should learn from other states when it comes to improving charter school policies and NAPCS makes this easy to do with their rankings and model law. It is smart policy to build on the lessons of higher-performing charter states.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Special Ed Connection.

Charter school operators treasure their autonomy from the regular public school system. Thus, one might suppose that charter school officials in Ohio were glad that the state board of education's new policy on restraint and seclusion does not apply to them.

The policy was adopted January 15 by a vote of 12-4. An accompanying rule is now being reviewed by a legislative committee.

In fact, charter schools didn't ask to be exempted and were surprised the board left them out, according to Stephanie Klupinski, vice president for legislative and legal affairs at the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

"It's not entirely clear to me why charters were not included in the policy," she said. "It could be just an oversight."

Charter schools weren't looking for an out, agreed Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The institute is a supporter of the charter schools movement and a sponsor, i.e., authorizer, of several Ohio charters.

Adopting limits on the use of restraint and seclusion by districts "was the proper and appropriate move for the state board to make," Ryan said, and "as a matter of principle, it should extend to the charter schools."

Any such extension should take into account the particular needs of the charter school community, Ryan said.

For example, it is not clear how such a policy would work at a charter school that serves children at a juvenile justice facility, he said. Such a facility may have to "use some sort of corrective action that could fall under these rules," he said.

But in general, there should be a rule on restraint and seclusion for charter schools, he said. In fact, he said, it may be helpful as a way of reducing uncertainty.

"I have to believe there are liability issues if you have district schools that are under these rules and there are charter schools that are not under these rules," he said. "I've got to think that charter schools, as they think about this, would also see it as in their self-interest to also be under the same rule."

Being explicit

Board President Debe Terhar said she has referred the charter schools issue to the board's Legislative and Budget Committee.

The committee can then solicit input from charter schools to learn whether they use restraint and seclusion, and to see what effect the policy would have on them, she said.

"Does it really make sense for it to apply to them? I don't know the answer to that, right now," she said. "As you're well aware, they're a different animal, and they have different parameters that they work within."

If the board decides the policy should apply to charter schools, however, it will face a procedural question, because charter schools are independent.

Some observers say the board can act unilaterally by tying the policy to one or more of those provisions of state law with which charters must already comply.

For example, the rule could be considered an expansion of parental rights, according to Jennifer Martinez Atzberger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Ohio.

Atzberger cited Section 3314.04 of Ohio law, which says charters schools are "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."

But if that line of argument doesn't prevail, a new law may be needed, she said.

The exemption of charter schools "is troubling to people ... [and] it seemed to me that many of the board members were troubled by it as well," she said. "So I'm hopeful that they will continue to push for clarification and, if necessary, a legislative remedy to it."

Whatever the method, any application of the policy to charters schools should be explicit, according to Klupinski, of the statewide charter schools group.

For example, she said, it would be disingenuous to tie the policy to school safety plans, a section of law with which charters already must comply.

In short, if the board wants the policy to apply to charter schools, it should say so, she said.

"I don't know why they couldn't," she said of the board members. Thus, "if charters are going to fall under this policy, I would just rather it be clearly stated somewhere, rather than it be loosely tied into a safety argument."

There is no harder job than running a successful school building for high-poverty students; nor a more important job. Yet, there are school leaders across the state and the nation who do it day-in and day-out, and too few get recognized for their great work. We are fortunate that some of these leaders work in the charter schools that Fordham sponsors and it is our privilege to tell a little bit of their stories and the impact they are having on students in Ohio. This Q&A with Judy Hennessey, the superintendent of Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) and DECA Prep, is the third of our seven-part series on school leadership. (Please see our previous Q&As with Dr. Glenda Brown and Andy Boy.) Hennessey leads two high-performing charter schools in Dayton, one a high school, the other an elementary school. Together, these schools serve over 600 inner-city students from Dayton. We featured DECA in our high school edition of Needles in a Haystack, released earlier this month.

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There isn’t much Judy Hennessey hasn’t done at Dayton Early College Academy or the newly created DECA Prep elementary school. She is the superintendent and CEO of the two schools, but, in addition, Hennessey currently is the acting principal at DECA Prep. There was no one to step in when the school’s first principal resigned for medical reasons.

On a recent weekend, Hennessey, 60, and husband Mark were at DECA Prep cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming because the custodian was out. “We have to be a full-service operation,” she joked. The Dayton Early College Academy – known just as DECA to its army of local admirers – was Ohio’s first early college high school and the tenth to open in the country. It began in 2003 as a Dayton Public School, but after disagreements about how layoffs would occur in a fiscal crisis, DECA severed its ties with the district and became a charter school in 2007. 

In an effort to create a feeder school and start earlier to improve the academic success of at-risk students, this fall DECA Prep opened its doors to 244 children in grades kindergarten, first, second and sixth grades.

A Dayton native, an alum of Dayton Public Schools and the first in her Appalachian family to graduate from college, Hennessey is the former superintendent of Oakwood City Schools, a wealthy suburb of Dayton.

For the second time, DECA won a bronze medal in 2012 from U.S. News and World Report for being among the country’s best high schools. The school is not eligible for gold or silver medals because it does not offer Advanced Placement classes. Instead, students are required to successfully complete three college courses, most often at Sinclair Community College.

The following are edited excerpts from an interview with Hennessey.

Q: Is DECA Prep really the first early college elementary school in the country?

A: Nowhere have we found a K-12 early college school – that is, a school where the intentional focus is around going to college from the time students come to kindergarten.

Q: What inspires your kids?

A: We appeal to students’ intrinsic desire to be successful, to have people be proud of them. They want to have a better life than their parents. If you have lived with a family member who is abusing alcohol or drugs or who is going to prison, it’s a huge motivator. I credit the teachers with creating a culture where it’s cool to be smart. We celebrate improvement. We celebrate achievement. The status that comes with being in a high-performing school spurs even the reluctant learner.

Q: DECA demands a lot of its teachers. Are you worried that teaching is only for the young?

A: We do have people who have young children, but I think it’s very stressful for them. These jobs are labor-intensive. We’re asking teachers to take on many roles. We’re almost asking them to increase the size of their own families. You live all the ups and downs of our students. The work is more appealing to young folks who are entrepreneurial. I think it becomes somewhat more manageable over time, though.

Q: Can a DECA-like school be replicated in a traditional public school system? Isn’t it hard for “systems” to turn over so much autonomy and latitude?

A: It would be much more difficult. I think it’s better to build it from the ground up rather than to convert a school. Can DECA be replicated? Absolutely. But not without a champion, not without relief from traditional public school contractual obligations, not without being able to go out and get philanthropic support.

Q: What would you say to those who say that DECA has not figured out how to work with the most difficult of difficult students?

A: I would agree them. We are not a comprehensive high school. We are an early college academy. There are kids we’ve not been successful with – homeless children, for example. When they’re moving from shelter to shelter, our work becomes too overwhelming.

There are many challenges yet to figure out.

Q: How many students leave DECA each year?

A: It depends on the cohort group. We’re seeing huge gains in our retention rate. We think it’s because we’re starting earlier, taking students in the 7^th and 8^th grade. There was a point when we were losing 50 percent. We will always lose some 8^th- and 9^th-graders who want to move to a more typical high-school culture.

Q: How are you following up on your students to know that 84 percent have graduated from college or are on track to get a college degree?

A:  We have tracked every graduate to the best of our ability, and we’re especially using social media to keep up with them.

Q: What do your grads tell you that you should do differently to help them succeed at college?

A: The pace of college academics is a struggle. And their grades depend on a mid-term and a final. Moving into a dorm and having that kind of freedom can almost be intoxicating. So they struggle with time management, which is typical. But too much freedom can be devastating for our students because their scholarship may be at risk. They’re also not ready for the rigor of college science and math courses in some majors. Engineering majors, for instance, really struggle with the math that’s required.

Q: Have you ever thought about quitting?

A: A couple weeks into working at DECA, I thought, “What have I done?” The environment was too chaotic for the kids to be successful. Also, when the legislature was doing an overhaul of charter school laws, and when we lost our supplemental funding for early college high schools, that was a tough time.

Q: What do you do to recharge?

A: I have to give a lot of credit to my family. I like to do yoga. I like to shop. I like to cook.

When I step away, I really try to put school out of my mind. My husband Mark calls it my Scarlett O’Hara side. I can worry about some things tomorrow. But I have all the symptoms of a workaholic.

Q: What don’t you want your students to know about you?

A: How much I want to be able to dance like them. But it’s hopeless.

Q: Talk about DECA’s drop on the state report card last year from “Excellent with Distinction” to “Effective.”  You effectively went from an “A+” to a “B.” What happened?

A: There were two factors.

We decided the only way for our students to improve their ACT scores was to get further along in the math curriculum. We want the kids to take algebra in 8^th grade. As a result, we did not have time to review some of the more elementary math operations that come up on the Ohio Achievement Assessment. We anticipated they would not do as well as a result.

We’ve had to run two teaching tracks – one addressing the Ohio Achievement Assessment standards, and one addressing the new Common Core standards. The Common Core standards are a whole different level of difficulty. I expect all districts are going to be wrestling with their grade on the report card over the next couple years.

The second factor was our graduation rate. I don’t know if we will ever pick up that indicator. We are a small school. Every year we have a handful of students who stay a fifth year at DECA.

We have some savvy parents, and they want their kids to stay at DECA and get as many college credits as possible while the students are still in high school. The state counts them as drop-outs.

Q: You took a more than a 50-percent pay cut when you accepted the job at DECA. Have you caught back up?

A: I’m not close to where I was as superintendent in Oakwood nine years go. I have no regrets. I’m not driven by money.

Q: There’s been a lot written about the kids at DECA. Tell me about a parent whom you won’t forget.

A: We had a young man who graduated in 2011 from the University of Dayton in engineering technology. He was in our second DECA class. He was bright and ahead of his peers in elementary school, but he had gotten lazy. When he was starting high school at DECA, his mother had just a lost a child, I think, in a car accident. She never wavered in her support. At one point, she was working three jobs, literally getting by only on a few hours of sleep each night. I didn’t know how it was humanly possible to do what she was doing. When you tire, and then you see that kind of tenacity, how can you give anything less?

Among the data released are admissions data, value-added scores of teachers who graduated, and teacher licensure exam scores. These data vastly improve the information we have about the quality of teacher preparation programs—and the students who attend them.

One indicator of the quality of the preparation program is the average ACT scores of admitted students. A higher average ACT score indicates greater selectivity and, most likely, higher program quality. The chart below ranks the average ACT scores of students who were admitted in fall 2012. I exclude three universities because they have less than ten students in their teacher preparation program. In addition, 16 universities didn’t report an average ACT score and one ACT score appears to be an error. These teacher preparation programs vary in size, enrolling anywhere between 13 and 1,687 students.

Source: Ohio Board of Regents. Note: Public institutions are colored in red; private institutions are colored in blue. The range of ACT scores is 1 (low) and 36 (high). The statewide average ACT composite score for students admitted into a teacher preparation program is 22.75. The overall ACT average for Ohio students was 21.80 in 2012. The median ACT score of an admitted Ohio State University (any major) student is between 26 and 30. The median ACT score of an admitted Case Western Reserve University (any major) student is between 29 and 33. Correction (1/28/2013): The University of Findlay's average ACT score was 22 not 29.

A couple things stand out from this chart. First, private universities have higher quality admits. Capital University, a private university in Columbus, tops the list—a full two points higher than the University of Findlay, another private university. In fact, the top nine universities are private, and 14 of the top 15 are private. Only Miami University cracks the top 15.

Second, and more substantially, the mediocre-quality of students that enter teacher preparation programs stands out. Although average entrants into teacher preparation programs score marginally above the statewide average (23 versus 22 ACT composite), their scores don’t compete with the average Ohio State University entrant and are even less competitive with a prestigious university such as Case Western Reserve University. (Ohio State’s median composite score is 26 to 30; Case Western’s is 29 to 33.) In fact, only a few teacher preparation programs admit students near the caliber of the average Ohio State student.

The middling quality of students entering teacher preparation programs prompts questions: Why is this happening and what can be done to attract more talented teacher candidates? These are important questions, since they relate directly to the quality of Ohio’s future teaching force. Twenty-five or so states have already established fellowship programs aimed at improving the quality of its teaching force. North Carolina, for example, has a teaching fellows program that recruits and provides scholarships to 500 high school students who enroll in an in-state teacher preparation program. These scholarships are awarded based on academic merit. According to evaluative research, this program has successfully attracted higher-achieving students into teaching programs.

The data from the Regents demonstrate the need to attract high-achieving students into teaching. Ohio has slowly embraced Teach For America in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton, and it’s time to expand TFA. In addition, it may be time for Ohio to develop its own teaching fellowship program that attracts high-performing high school students into teaching programs. So, first hats off to the Regents for publishing these data, but now comes the hard part—acting on the data to improve the quality of teachers in the Buckeye State.

Postscript:

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its 2012 State Teacher Policy Yearbook yesterday. This report also indicates the need to raise admission standards to ed schools. Ohio received C- on NCTQ's report card, just above the national average--a dismal D+. NCTQ rates states based on whether they have enacted policies that systematically prepare classroom-ready new teachers. One criteria is ed school admission standards. For press coverage of NCTQ's report, see the Cleveland Plain-Dealer's article.

Earlier this month, Policy Matters Ohio released a short report examining how some charter schools evade Ohio’s academic accountability sanctions.  Ohio has an academic “death penalty” for charter schools – if a school performs too poorly for too long, the state mandates its closure.  The law is heralded as the toughest of its kind in the nation.

Since the law took effect in 2008, twenty charter schools have been subject to automatic closure. Yet, as Avoiding Accountability: How charter operators evade Ohio’s automatic closure law reveals, eight of these schools closed only on paper and soon after merged with other schools or reopened under new names, retaining the same physical address, much of the same staff, and the same operator. Two of the schools were closed for one year before reopening; six closed in May or June, at the end of a school year, and reopened in time for the start of the following school year. The report details the cases of each school’s “closure” and rebirth and provides information about their sponsors, operators, and academic performance.

Charter schools avoiding accountability is absolutely not okay, and Policy Matters is right to shed light on the issue. Many of the report’s recommendations are on the mark, and mirror recommendations Fordham (both as a policy advocate and authorizer of charter schools) has made over the years:

• The state should tighten closure laws so that sponsors, school boards, and operators cannot enter into new contracts to circumvent the law.
• Sponsors should be penalized for allowing schools to avoid accountability sanctions (in four of the eight cases the schools maintained the same sponsor before and after closure).
• The Ohio Department of Education should gain more capacity to oversee the charter sector, especially the closure process of sanctioned schools.
• The state should prohibit sponsors from selling services to schools they authorize, as this practice creates strong financial incentives for a sponsor to keep a failing school in operation.

These are admirable goals for continuing to shore up the quality of Ohio’s charter schools, and Policy Matters’ report illustrates that well.  However, the report’s authors overplay the impact of the issue, condemning charters altogether because of these bad apples.

Specifically, there are three key pieces of information that would help round out and balance the report:

• Yes, 40 percent of schools marked for closure skirted the law, but these eight schools represent just two percent of all charter schools. It’s certainly hyperbole to suggest, as the report does, that that what transpired with these schools is evidence that Ohio’s overall charter law is “ineffective and weak.”
• Eighty-five, or 24 percent, of charter schools currently have a state rating of Excellent or Effective. These strong performers – and their sponsors and operators – should be lauded and certainly not penalized through excessive new regulations because of the actions of few.
• Eight percent of traditional district schools (159 buildings serving 105,000 students) have ratings of Academic Emergency or Academic Watch, the same as the failing charter schools featured in the report.

Academic accountability is an important issue for all public schools, charter and district alike.  Policy Matters deserves credit for highlighting a loophole in the state’s accountability system, and likewise is correct to recommend smart changes to state law.  However it is not accurate to allege that Ohio is not “serious about quality in the charter sector.” Ohio’s automatic closure law – even with its “loopholes” – remains the toughest in the country, and over the past four years state leaders have worked to increase oversight and accountability of charters.

Some 150 or so Daytonians turned out to listen to the school leaders of Stivers and Dayton Early College Academy, who shared their thoughts on what makes their schools great. Both Stivers and Dayton Early College Academy were featured in Fordham’s Needles in a Haystack. Needles schools are high-minority, high-poverty urban public schools that produce uncommon results for their students. The Seedling Foundation helped to organize the event.

Needles panel discussion (from left to right): Dayton Public Schools superintendent Lori Ward, Erin Dooley and Liz Whipps of Stivers School for the Arts, Fordham's Checker Finn and Needles author Peter Meyer, Dave Taylor and Judy Hennessey of Dayton Early College Academy.

According to these school leaders, the recipe for a great urban school goes something like this:

3 cups of sense of purpose; 2 cups of enthusiasm; 1 cup of committed, talented teachers; 1 cup of high expectations; ½ cup of making learning “cool”; a dash of community support and a dash of parental engagement; and finally, a bowlful of “spit”—a “whatever it takes” attitude (in the words of Stivers principal Erin Dooley).

Yet this recipe isn’t mechanically identical for both schools. In fact, there are differences. Stivers, an arts magnet for the Dayton Public Schools, uses the arts to inspire a love of learning among its students. Through the arts, Erin Dooley asserts, students apply academics and make learning real. Meanwhile, DECA, a public charter school, has a laser-like focus on college readiness. When asked about DECA’s educational theme, principal Dave Taylor’s answer was trite and to-the-point: “You’re going to college.”

Despite noticeable differences in educational philosophy and organizational design (DECA is a charter; Stivers, a district school), the recipe—and their achievement results—are strikingly similar. At the core, it’s about culture, attitude, and expectations for these high-performing, urban high schools.

These studies all look at schools serving a large population of economically disadvantaged (ED) students, though the specific metrics vary. Our first Needles report focused on schools in which 75 percent or more of students were ED. ODE and Public Agenda use 40 percent as the threshold. Our new report adds greater precision in defining “high need,” applying additional metrics—three, in fact: 30 percent ED and/or 50 percent ED and/or 30 percent black. Likewise, the studies vary in how they define “high-performing.” Our new Needles report focuses on schools serving poor and black students well, zeroing in on the achievement rates of those subgroups. The other studies use overall achievement of the student body, based on state tests.

These small differences aside, what do the reports’ findings have in common? What have these independent examinations of high-performing Ohio schools found, and what can be done to encourage more such schools to rise up?

Here are the common findings across the reports:

• There are no excuses for failure. None. Zilch.
• Expectations are high, instruction is rigorous. But along with the high bar set for them, students feel supported and respected by their teachers.
• Teamwork and a common mindset prevail. New teachers must buy into the school’s vision and practices. Teachers work together and with students toward success. Everyone is accountable for and takes ownership of results.
• Building leadership matters tremendously. All of these schools have top-notch teaching staff, but their vision and direction are maintained by strong leaders who have the authority to oversee their schools as they see fit. Likewise, administrative churn is discouraged.
• Teachers use, and value data, to help individualize instruction (this is especially true at the elementary and middle school levels).
• Success is celebrated – from small accomplishments to major milestones, yet…
• No one rests on their laurels, not even for a day, because maintaining success requires ongoing effort (for example, Public Agenda reports that of all the schools that have been identified by ODE as Schools of Promise since 2002, three-quarters did not meet the criteria in 2010-11).

Yes, some of these findings seem like plain, old common sense. But the truth is, for too many Ohio schools they aren’t the norm; as a result, too many students aren’t realizing their full potentials. Some of the needed changes in policy and practice will have to happen at the local level, whether building or district. So, local school leaders and superintendents should take heed of the mounting “what works” evidence collected in these reports. But some change can be achieved by changes to state policy. As the General Assembly gears up for the FY2014-15 budget debate, members should look to these reports – and especially to their commonalities – for guidance on developing new state education laws.

Fordham has long-advocated, along with groups like the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, for better cooperation and creative partnerships between school districts and quality charter schools. As far back as 2007, we argued for a “Portfolio Governance Approach to Meeting the Needs of All Dayton Children.”

Great school leaders are high in demand and portfolio districts compete aggressively for them

Unfortunately Dayton couldn’t run with the concept in 2007, but fast forward to 2013, and according to a new book by Paul Hill, Christine Campbell, and Betheny Gross entitled Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools, there are now close to 30 urban school districts across the country pursuing “the portfolio strategy.” According to Hill, Campbell and Gross leading portfolio districts “support existing schools that are succeeding with the children they serve, close unproductive schools, create new ones similar to schools that have already proven effective, and seek even more effective models…Districts pursuing the portfolio strategy are indifferent about who runs a school (whether the district, a charter operator, or some other entity); but they seek continuous improvement, both in individual schools and in the city’s overall supply of public schools.”

Successful portfolio districts focus relentlessly on recruiting and developing new talent, especially school leaders. School leaders are key to the success of portfolio schools because they are empowered – either as charters or freed-up district schools – to manage their own budgets, hire and fire the teachers, and make trade-offs between things like staff salaries and instructional technology or purchased services. School leaders operate as building CEOs in portfolio districts.

Great school leaders are high in demand and portfolio districts compete aggressively for them. In Washington, for example, former Chancellor Michelle Rhee hired “talent managers” that worked to actively poach talent from schools in the wealthier suburbs of Fairfax County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland. Other cities, often with support from state lawmakers and education officials, have not only put the welcome mat out for talent providers like KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, and the Broad Residency, but help raise and allocate significant resources to entice these groups to work in their communities. The MindTrust in Indianapolis is arguably the Gold Standard for groups in the country that are investing substantial resources to recruit top talent to launch new schools. Others working in this space include New Schools for New Orleans, Charter School Partners in Minneapolis, 4.0 Schools in Louisiana and LEAD Public Schools in Tennessee. These efforts build on earlier efforts to recruit Teach for America, The New Teacher Project and other alternative teacher programs to work in their communities.

The Alain Locke Initiative selects and develops top talent to become transformational leaders

Talent begets more talent. An example of this is Memphis where the Alain Locke Initiative announced in December that it would help provide up to 70 school leaders over the next five years to help turn around that city’s bottom five percent of schools. The Alain Locke Initiative was inspired by the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, and the program identifies, selects and develops top talent to become transformational leaders for urban charter schools.

The Locke Initiative is just the latest national talent provider to commit to assisting Memphis in its school improvement efforts. KIPP, Aspire Public Schools, New Leaders for New Schools, Teach for America, and The New Teacher Project are all working as part of a larger portfolio schools strategy to change the human capital available to its schools in dramatic ways.

Cleveland, Columbus, and other districts are embracing bold reform strategies akin to the portfolio strategy described by Paul Hill and his colleagues in Strife and Progress. These efforts are both brave and bold, but for them to ultimately succeed the state needs to develop alternative talent strategies to generate more high-quality leaders to work in high-need schools. Such strategies need money to fly and the Ohio General Assembly could move things forward in 2013 by making resources available for alternative school leadership programs akin to those now working in states like Indiana, Tennessee, Louisiana and New York.

That sentiment is just as true for the high schools we studied in 2012 as it was in 2010 for the grade schools we examined. Yet there are high schools in the BuckeyeState that buck the bleak trends facing too many of our urban students. Such schools show significant achievement for disadvantaged youngsters from depressed inner-city communities. 

Whereas the original version of Needles in a Haystack looked at eight exceptional elementary schools, this report examines six high schools that are making good on promises of academic excellence; specifically, schools that work for low-income and minority students. These high schools make serious efforts not to leave anyone behind. It’s a tall order, as too many urban schools—which we have come to know are those with high numbers of poor and minority students—leave too many children behind. For example: Ohio has 135 high schools that have been identified as “dropout factories”—schools that fail to graduate more than 60 percent of their students on time. They account for roughly 15 percent of the state’s high schools.

Needles schools make serious efforts not to leave anyone behind

All of our Needles high schools—two each in Cleveland, Dayton, and Columbus—have student bodies that are more than 60 percent economically disadvantaged. Five of the six have majority African American enrollment. All but one (DECA) of these Needles schools is a district high school, working within the confines of a district bureaucracy and with labor union rules. Schools with these demographics, in urban settings, are lucky to have 70 percent of their students pass basic state tests and graduate 60 percent of their students. Yet students in these Needles schools score ten, 20, even 30 points higher than their district peers—and over 90 percent of these students graduate, most going on to some form of higher education. In fact, U.S. News ranked three of these Needles schools in the top 101 schools in Ohio; two others earned Bronze Medals from the magazine.

 2012 Needles in a Haystack High Schools

Such high-performing outlier schools have tantalized us since we first noticed them in the state achievement data for schools in Ohio’s big cities, which we analyze and report on every year. We undertook this study of high-performing, high-need high schools in order to understand and spotlight the reasons for their success.

How did we find these “needles in a haystack” high schools?

We started out by looking at enrollment and achievement data for 818 public high schools (Ohio has more than 818 public high schools; we reviewed data for those schools for which three years of data were available: 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11). We wanted to identify those schools that served predominately economically disadvantaged students with a particular focus on those schools that also served a majority of students of color. We then looked for high schools in the data that performed at a relatively high academic level for at least three consecutive years (2008-9 through 2010-11). After applying our performance criteria, 50 schools (just six percent of what we started with) met the cut in terms of both being high-need and high-performing. From these 50 we settled on a sample of six to profile.

These six aren’t the only such high-need, high-performing schools in Ohio. But in order to put limits around our project, we focused on those schools serving the neediest urban high school students, and delivering truly uncommon results over multiple years.

By uncovering the secrets of these schools’ exceptional performance, we suggest district and state policies and practices that will foster more Needles schools

To study these Needles high schools and report on what makes them tick, we called on veteran journalist, and former news editor of Life magazine, Peter Meyer. Peter has vast experience when it comes to covering education, from working with the Fordham Institute and covering the challenges facing America’s schools and their students, to serving as a member of his local board of education. Peter and his research assistants spent several days in each of the schools, clocking more than two hundred hours observing classes and interviewing district administrators, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students. Peter also scoured public sources of information and vetted dozens of documents about each school provided by Fordham.

The resulting report provides important insights into how to improve high schools so they can better serve our neediest kids. In the Afterword of the report we these share six policy lessons that we believe can help us in the ongoing struggle to create and sustain more high-performing urban high schools:

• Significantly increase the number of new high-performing high schools, both district and charter, while closing or substantially restructuring failing schools.
• Encourage school-based principal training programs.
• Adopt a “tight-loose” approach to accountability by setting clear, data-specific goals for schools then directing funds to schools, relaxing mandates, slashing regulations, and cutting strings so that school leaders have the control and operational freedom to meet those goals.
• Discourage administrative churn in high-achieving schools.
• Empower schools to hire and retain the best talent available.
• Engage parents.

Our six Needles high schools prove that it is possible to do right by high-need youngsters within the framework of America public education—and give the lie to defeatists and excusers who claim dropout factories are to be a given until we fix families and their communities.

As with the first Needles report, we hope that by uncovering the secrets of these schools’ exceptional performance we can suggest district and state policies and practices that will foster more such schools—without making it harder on the few we have now. Even if the ingredients of success turn out to be no secrets at all—and in fact many of the ingredients of success for these high schools are similar to what we discovered in the original Needles schools—transforming that understanding into widespread practice remains a challenge for Ohio educators, policymakers and commentators. Because, as we all know, such schools don’t happen by accident. If Ohio wants more of them, the adults have to make it happen.

Please click on the image to download the report

StudentsFirst, a national organization led by former D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee, rates how closely each states’ education policies align with broader education reform goals. This ambitious research project examines whether states’ policies embolden and encourage reform along three dimensions: Quality teaching, parental choice, and school finance. StudentsFirst, for example, looks at whether states have established policies requiring teacher evaluations, teacher tenure based on effectiveness, and clear accountability for school performance—including charter schools.

Deservedly so, Ohio receives high marks in its education reform policies relative other states. In fact, Florida and Louisiana were the only two states that received markedly higher grades in “ed-reformedness.” With a C minus letter grade, Ohio ranks tenth out of the 51 examined jurisdictions. Ohio scores especially high along the parental choice indicator—not surprising given the multitude of school choice options available to parents. These choices include the state’s 350 plus charters, and voucher programs for students in failing schools or parents of students who want to access a special education voucher. StudentsFirst also righty recognizes improvements in Ohio’s accountability laws, most recently through passage of House Bill 555. This legislation establishes a clear, A-F grading system for school accountability, and holds charter schools to a higher accountability standard.

A tough grader, StudentsFirst also indicates that Ohio—and other states—still have miles to go in establishing a completely reformed education system. Part and parcel of Ohio’s C minus letter grade are weaknesses in the Buckeye State’s charter school funding laws (which currently prohibit charters from accessing state facilities financing and funds charters at about a third less than district schools), its still-codified teacher salary schedule, and its class size requirements. These are all reforms that StudentsFirst and other reformers are right to push in upcoming legislative sessions.

For Ohio’s policymakers, StudentsFirst provides a very handy overview and evaluation of how Ohio stacks up to the nation’s top reformers and offers guidance for moving forward in coming months and years. An interactive website nicely supplements the written report, which includes a tool that allows users to compare reform policies across states. One can, therefore, get the long and short of teacher evaluation policies in Ohio versus, say, Alabama. But as policy changes move swiftly, StudentsFirst’s challenge will be to ensure that the information it provides stays fresh and timely. So in the end, we first tip our caps to StudentsFirst for this impressive and useful research, as well as urge Students First to make this report an annual effort.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and AEI will host a conversation about the findings of this report on Wednesday, January 9 at 10:00AM. Please join us live online and on Twitter. For more details, see:

http://www.edexcellence.net/events/state-of-education-state-policy-report-card-2013.html

In the last couple of months I have been asked by reporters about the compensation being paid school administrators in Ohio. In late September, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a series of stories on what superintendents and treasurers in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky were making, while just this past weekend the Dayton Daily News ran a story on the overall compensation paid a charter school administrator and her family to run seven schools in Ohio and three in Florida. I’m also on the business advisory council to my local school district and one of the biggest issues they grapple with is compensation of top school administrators. This is a very sensitive issue politically, especially since the economic downturn of 2008.

My basic view on matters of compensation is pretty straightforward: Highly effective superintendents and charter school operators deserve to be paid well as they work long hours and deal with myriad and complicated human, fiscal, academic, and political issues. Their compensation should be transparent (no hidden benefits or perks); and there should be a marketplace for talent. Let school districts and charter school operators compete openly for talent, and from this competition the market should help set the bar for compensation.

But, when it comes to the compensation and salary of public school officials – be they district or charter – there is also a political dynamic at play that board members and others who set school executive compensation need to understand and appreciate. In short, what will the local community and taxpayers tolerate? ‘How much is too much’ is a question school boards have to grapple with as they also have to help make the case for school levies every couple of years. Voters want to know how much the administration is making and whether they worth it.

Here is what has been reported. In Ohio, the average superintendent’s pay grew 4.5 percent – from $98,637 to $103,093 – between 2008 and 2011. In addition, many superintendents have excellent benefits packages that include generously funded defined benefit pensions, topflight health care benefits for them and their families, and many have car/travel allowances. The Cincinnati Enquirer looked at the salaries of more than 130 superintendents in the Greater Cincinnati area and reported that “many top school executives received perks in compensation packages that most other educators don’t get. Further, as school districts struggle to compete for talent at the top, state salary databases show superintendents and treasurer take-home pay grew during the recession.”  The Enquirer went on to report that in the Cincinnati metro area “superintendents averaged a 5 percent salary gain, from $117,140 for a typical superintendent to $123,008.”

After the Enquirer story came out there was public uproar about the pay and benefits provided local superintendents and top administrators. One blogger captured the reaction of many with his “Piggly Wiggly Oinker School Superintendents Are Getting Rich on Your Dime” post. In November voters in the Cincinnati metro-area rejected half the area school levies on the ballot. Many in public education saw this as yet again further evidence that school districts have to be very sensitive to what they pay their top administrators.

But, it isn’t just traditional school districts that need to be sensitive and thoughtful about what they pay their top administrators. Charter schools also need to be equally aware about what leaders receive in compensation, and how this will be perceived in the larger community, which leads me to the recent story in the Dayton Daily News. That paper ran a story on the compensation paid to a family running a charter management organization that serves about 2,000 kids in seven Ohio charters. The paper reported that “Tax records obtained by the Daily News show CEO Pammer-Satow received a base pay of $168,466 in 2010 along with a $60,000 bonus and other compensation valued at $25,573. Her husband, COO Clinton Satow, received a base pay of$126,000, bonus of $45,000 and $14,000 in other compensation.” Other members of the family are also employed by the management company in various capacities.

The Dayton Daily News reporter called me and asked for my reaction about “a couple making over $400,000 a year” to run seven charter schools? I said, “That’s tough to defend.” I also went on to comment, “at a minimum they are politically tone deaf to the realities of perception out in the community.” My comments have upset some in Ohio’s charter community who argue that as the schools perform decently why should I or anyone else care what the leaders are paid?

My reaction to this question is that charter schools are only viable as long as they receive political support. As such, do stories about families paying themselves more than $400,000 a year in public tax dollars to run a handful of charters hurt support for charter schools? I think they do, but I’d value receiving comments back from readers. Should we care how much money charter leaders make?   

Hanushek, who testified in person (Hess and Roza joined by videoconference), led off the conversation with these lawmakers. He enumerated five principles of a strong school finance and accountability system. (These are described in more detail in his publication, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools.) These principles include:

1. Establishing a set of standards, assessments, and accountability for schools that are strong and transparent.

2. Empowering local districts to allocate funds in ways that meet the needs of their students. State lawmakers shouldn’t dictate, Hanushek insisted, how districts spend their funds.

3. Rewarding successful schools and not directing additional funds to failing schools. State lawmakers need to resist the impulse to distribute more funds to failing districts, as it may incentivize failure.

4. Providing funding for innovation and evaluation. The state should fund innovative educational practices and programs, but any innovative program funded by the state should also be rigorously evaluated. Importantly, Hanushek emphasized that evaluation of innovative programs needs to be done at the inception of the program, not after the program has been implemented.

5. Creating a rational and equitable funding system that acknowledges the disadvantages of some students. Hanushek argued that state funds should follow students, regardless of what school they attend and weighted by their need (weighted student funding).

Roza and Hess made similar suggestions to Ohio House members. Like Hanushek, they also argued for strong accountability, student-centered funding, and funds for innovation. All of these are levers the state can use to improve the performance of Ohio schools—and place its students on the pathway to success in college and career.  

We at Fordham have and continue to support many of the principles and suggestions of those who testified this morning, which include weighted student funding, school efficiency, strong accountability, and educational innovation. We hope that, as the state puts into place a funding plan for schools next spring, the legislature will consider and act upon these principles.

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

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

The Gadfly applauds this choice and salutes Superintendent Clifford's track record of success and excellence in West Carrollton.

As teacher, coach, principal and now Superintendent, Rusty Clifford embodies the highest ideals in education.

Congratulations!

Check out the announcement of Superintendent Clifford's honor in the Dayton Daily News.

But student mobility isn’t only occurring in urban schools; mobility happens frequently in rural schools also. (Our research examines mobility in schools across all of Ohio.)

A roundup of recent newspaper reports underscores the growing need to understand mobility in all areas of Ohio--rural districts included. In addition, these news articles also begin to answer the all-important questions of what’s causing mobility (or conversely, stability) in our schools, and what the effects of mobility are.

The Chillicothe Gazette examines some of the reasons why students move among schools in the rural, blue-collar counties surrounding Columbus. District administrators pointed to the lack of job opportunities in declining rural townships as the trigger for student mobility.

For example, the Crestline Exempted Village (Crawford County) superintendent attributed a large amount of its mobility to the loss of a General Motors plant in their area. A school official at Eastern Local (Pike County) pointed to another cause of mobility, in addition to economic decline: The large number of highly-mobile, foster students living in temporary homes in her district.

The Lima News, which covers several rural counties in northwestern Ohio, focused on student mobility via open enrollment at Perry Local School District (Allen County). Perry is the state’s largest recipient of open enrollees, as a percentage of enrollment. Nearly 50 percent of Perry’s 882 students were open enrollees—students who reside within the attendance area of another district.

Is open enrollment--a type of student mobility--helping or hurting Perry Local?

Perry’s superintendent remarked that it's actually helping the district survive: Open enrollment is the district’s “lifeblood,” as the number of its traditionally-enrolled students has dwindled. When asked whether open enrollment has destabilized Perry’s schools, one elementary principal argued just the opposite: Open enrollment increases stability, since it’s “not an easy process [for parents] . . . [it] makes sure a child gets to school every day.” 

The Zanesville Times-Recorder looks at the challenges that student mobility poses for schools and students in rural eastern Ohio. The Zanesville City (Muskingum County) superintendent, whose district faces high mobility rates, talked about the effect of mobility on student learning. He said that mobility “has an effect on students’ learning ability," because "there’s an adjustment period.”

East Muskingum Local's superintendent echoed her colleague’s view on the adverse effects of mobility, stating that mobility “impacts what happens in the classroom. It doesn’t just hurt the child, but how education is interpreted for all students in that classroom.”

The reports from Ohio’s heartland indicate that student mobility isn’t an issue isolated to inner-city schools. Mobility is an issue for schools all across the Buckeye State—whether it’s student mobility prompted by economic turmoil, by open enrollment, or even by the foster care system. And it’s the schools that manage, and perhaps even embrace, student mobility (think, Perry Local which has embraced open enrollment) that may best ensure that all students—from the mobile to the stable student—have opportunities to thrive.

- Fordham intern Danyell Lewis contributed to this article

“Indifferent and unreceptive environments were frequent in our sample of projects attempted in upper-level schools. . . . Change agent projects that included the higher grade levels experienced severe management and administrative problems as well as teacher resistance. For example, reading projects that spanned all grade levels consistently encountered resistance at the upper-level schools as they attempted to persuade science or history teachers to view themselves as teachers of reading.”

According to the Rand report, high schools exhibited more hostility to change than elementary schools, largely because of teacher resistence. High school teachers, the researchers found, "perceive themselves as having large intellectual and emotional investments in academic purity." As such, high school teachers, who often teach specialized subjects (i.e., biology or U.S. history), have less motivation to work outside their "solid subject" area, try "new ideas," and thus act as "change agents."

In 2014-15, Ohio will fully transition to the Common Core in math and English language arts for all grade levels, K-12. So, changing course from an all-grade-level implementation to a graduated implementation (elementaries first and high schools later) would be nearly impossible. The Rand findings, however, should raise awareness that high schools may strongly resist the Common Core. As a result, Common Core implementers should pay special attention to how the Common Core is implemented in Ohio's high schools.

Terry Ryan, Fordham’s Vice President for Ohio Programs and Policy, penned a thoughtful comparison between the social narrative in which Mike Petrilli’s latest book The Diverse Schools Dilemma belongs and that in which the Ohio team’s new report on Student Nomads: Mobility in Ohio’s Schools fits. The parents who face the diverse schools dilemma are “socially-conscious middle-class parents” who wish for diverse and high-performing schools. The parents of “student nomads,” however, are—first and foremost—“struggling to simply find a permanent place to live.” To read more, click here for Terry Ryan’s post in today’s Flypaper.

Here’s one possible use.

Our research provides educators with information about student mobility networks. This information can help superintendents, principals, and teachers know which schools they are most connected to, by way of student moves.

At a school building level, network data can help educators identify which schools they need to work closely with—perhaps aligning curricular or instructional approaches or making sure their textbooks are the same. At a district-level, network data can help administrators plan facilities or personnel. For example, administrators may find highly-connected schools easier to consolidate, if facility costs are a concern. Similarly, to save on personnel costs, districts could share staff across highly-connected schools. Rather than having a school counselor for each school building, a single counselor may just as effectively serve multiple but highly-connected schools.

To illustrate what a student mobility network looks like (see, D. Kerbow, 1996), I use Bond Hill Elementary School as an example—for no reason other than for illustration. Bond Hill, enrollment 400, is part of Cincinnati Public Schools, 91 percent economically disadvantaged, and nearly 100 percent minority. The school received a C rating (Continuous Improvement) in 2010-11 and in 2011-12.

Bond Hill had an above average one-year churn rate in 2010-11 (32 percent) compared to Cincinnati Public Schools (on average, 16 percent churn). The churn rate measures the amount of student mobility a school experiences during the school year, relative its enrollment size.

The figure below shows the mobility patterns for Bond Hill, the red point on the map. The blue points indicate the public schools that Bond Hill shared 10 or more students with, between October 2009 and May 2011. There were, in total, 17 Cincinnati schools that Bond Hill had more than 10 or more exchanges with: 14 were Cincinnati Public schools and 3 were charter schools.

(For simplicity, I exclude exchanges with district and charter schools outside of Cincinnati, as well as exchanges with Cincinnati schools with whom Bond Hill had less than 10 total exchanges--which are exlcluded in CRP's data set.)

Student mobility patterns for Bond Hill Elementary School (Cincinnati Public Schools), October 2009 to May 2011

Map created through Google Maps. Data can be accessed in spreadsheet format via Community Research Partners. Analysis excludes non-Cincinnati schools and Cincinnati schools that had less than 10 incidents of mobility with Bond Hill. Red lines indicate highly-connected schools; black lines indicate medium-connected schools; no line (but with school marker) indicates low-connected school.

To establish which schools Bond Hill had stronger connection with, I calculate the number of moves into and out of Bond Hill and its exchanging school, as a percentage of all student moves into and out of Bond Hill (again, with the noted exclusions).

For example, there were 19 moves out of Bond Hill into Roselawn. And there were 108 total moves out of Bond Hill. So, 17.6 percent of moves out of Bond Hill were to Roselawn (19/108).

The direction of the arrow indicates whether the movement was out of or into Bond Hill. The lines, or lack thereof, on the map describe whether the magnitude of movement of students was high, medium, or low:

• Highly-connected schools are indicated by thick, dark red lines. The percentage of moves from or to Bond Hill to school y was greater than 10 percent of all from or to moves.
• Medium-connected schools are indicated by black lines. The percentage of moves was between 5 percent and 10 percent.
• Low-connected schools are indicated with no line, but there is a marker for the school (not all Cincinnati Public school buildings are shown). The percentage of moves was less than 5 percent.

The map shows that the strongest two-way exchange patterns were between:

• Bond Hill and Roselawn
• Bond Hill and S. Avondale
• Bond Hill and Frederick Douglass
• Bond Hill and Pleasant Hill

The map also indicates that Bond Hill receives a large proportion of students (greater than 10 percent) from Alliance Academy charter school and sends a large proportion of its students to Parker. Interestingly for both Alliance Academy and Parker, the relationship wasn’t a strong two-way migratory pattern.

Maps and tables like these can be a very useful data tool for educators (see table with underlying data at the end of this article). Knowing where students are coming from and where they’re going can help create and improve communication channels and facilitate planning across school building lines, and even across traditional district and charter school lines.

An analysis like this one, for example, could alert the Bond Hill Elementary School principal that he or she has to work closely with the Roselawn principal, perhaps coordinating curricula, sharing student records, or simply knowing the culture of each other’s school. Any one of these types of collaborative efforts could help improve our schools, and in so doing, mitigate the negative effects of mobility for students who are on the go.

Bond Hill Elementary School, exchanges to and from other Cincinnati schools, October 2009 to May 2011

For several years, in our role as charter school authorizer, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has worked closely and collaboratively with the governing authority (Alliance Community Schools) of the Dayton View and Dayton Liberty charter schools to encourage better results. After more than a decade of working together, the governing board fired the school’s operator, Edison Learning, at the end of the 2011-12 school year. At the start of this school year the management responsibilities for both buildings were turned over to a veteran Dayton educator and his management team. 

Because we believe there are many lessons to be drawn from this experience, we engaged veteran journalist Ellen Belcher to tell the story of these two schools and ongoing efforts to improve the education they provide some of Dayton’s neediest children. Ellen is an award-winning journalist and former editorial page editor of the Dayton Daily News, where she frequently wrote about education issues including those around charter schools.

Our task to Ellen was straightforward – talk to the board members (current and former), administrators, teachers, and parents involved in the two schools and find out their stories. Why, in their words, haven’t the schools lived up to their promise? She also reached out to current and former officials from the schools’ former operator, Edison Learning, to get their perspectives on these issues, and she spoke with Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr. for his take as well. 

Ellen tackled the assignment with her usual curiosity, skepticism, and reporter’s acumen. She not only worked to provide a history of what has happened in the schools over the last decade, but also sought to uncover why we (the authorizer, the board, and the larger community) should continue to hold out hope that the schools can in fact become high-performing academic centers of excellence after more than a decade of less than stellar results. Her reporting is impeccable and we share it in the hopes that others will find it instructive and helpful in their ongoing efforts – as authorizers, as school operators, as policy makers, and as educators – to help improve schools.

- Terry Ryan and Kathryn Mullen Upton

Introduction

Edison Schools, Inc. had everything going for it when it opened a charter school in Dayton, Ohio, in 1999.

It was competing for students in a city where the public schools were objectively failing. Parents were hungry for other choices. The number of charter schools in Dayton had not yet exploded, so Edison had a chance to own the market.

Then the country’s largest operator of for-profit schools, it welcomed its students to a modern new building in a city where public and many parochial schools were old and tired. The school was large enough that enrollment could grow to more than 1,000 students, and a second Edison school was scheduled to open the following year.

Led by the effervescent Chris Whittle, Edison was hot in national education reform circles, and the company was gearing up to go public. It had every reason to make Dayton one of its showcases for the contention that entrepreneurs driven by good intentions and profit could succeed where public bureaucracies with a virtual lock on students had failed.

The promise, energy and passion Edison brought to Dayton was intoxicating to the city’s business leaders, who had recruited Edison. They were at a loss about how to improve the region’s largest school district, and they were adamant about the need to try.

The promise, energy, and passion Edison brought to Dayton was intoxicating to the city's business leaders

Twelve years later – and 20 years after the national Edison experiment began – the company was fired in Dayton. There was none of the fanfare and public notice that accompanied Edison’s entry. In that sense, Edison’s experience in Dayton ended better than it did in other places, where there have been heated public meetings and recriminations.

But the rationale for the firing was not a new one: the company, now known as EdisonLearning, never delivered.

In the wake of disappointments like what has happened in Dayton, the company has backed away from running schools. Success as measured by test scores has proven hard to achieve, let alone replicate. Instead, EdisonLearning is now focusing on drop-out recovery initiatives (including in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati) and selling services to schools.

What does Edison’s exit mean in Dayton?

The need to provide a quality alternative to Dayton public schools in high-poverty neighborhoods hasn’t gone away. But the naïve or heady or uninformed notion – pick your adjective – that stubbornly poor test scores can be dramatically improved if only business acumen is thrown at the problem has been painfully discredited.

In place of that strategy, the former Edison schools’ board of directors is putting its hopes in a seasoned, 58-year-old former Catholic high school principal. For two years as an Edison principal in Dayton, T. J. Wallace saw what was not working. His job now is to do what his former out-of-town bosses could never figure out.

As executive director of the Dayton Leadership Academies, Wallace has two years to turn around the former Edison schools. If he and his teachers, who have not had a raise in four years, fail, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation – the schools’ “authorizer” under Ohio’s charter school law – can shut them down for poor performance.

Dayton Liberty (left) and Dayton View (right) campuses

That possibility is never far from Wallace’s mind or his board’s. They see it not as a threat, but as a reform imperative, one that’s central to the charter school movement that they’ve championed even in the face of Edison’s failure. If they can’t do the job, then they deserve to be fired as well.

Business Can Do It Better

Allen M. Hill was on the school board known as Alliance for Community Schools that first hired Edison. The president and chief executive officer of Dayton Power & Light, Hill was part of the cadre of 18 high-level executives who were drilling into public education because they believed that Dayton schools’ poor test scores were damaging the region’s reputation.

The Dayton Business Committee initially wanted Edison, Inc. to take over five of Dayton’s most troubled schools under contract with the district, a move the school superintendent agreed to. But the teachers’ union vetoed that plan.

Unbowed, the business leaders responded by opening two new charter schools in back-to-back years, with plans for more, and they hired Edison to manage them. They put up $500,000 for one of the new buildings and effectively guaranteed the mortgage for it. They went into debt with Edison for the other.

“These are business people,” Hill said. “When one approach failed, they went with a different one.… No one believed charter schools were an answer to (failing) public education,” he said. The goal was to create competition, not create a replacement or “a parallel system.”

Hill said that before hiring Edison, the Dayton Business Committee vetted multiple educational management companies. In choosing Edison, the executives believed they had gone with the gold standard.

“We thought we had it all: brand new facilities, the best management company,” said Doug Mangen, who was executive director of the Dayton Business Committee when Edison was hired.

Mangen, who today owns a school management company and was a board member for the Edison schools from 2009 until July 2012, said he and others “got sucked into the sales pitch.” In hindsight, they were too impressed, he said, by Edison’s “$50 million in research on urban education” and the belief that “Dayton was going to be at the forefront” of education reform.

Mangen said that when he joined the board seven years after he had been involved in helping select Edison, the company had changed. The goal was no longer reinventing urban education “but how do we maximize profit.”

“The whole mindset of ‘whatever it takes’ wasn’t there anymore,” Mangen said.

Edison Fizzles

Edison officials declined to be interviewed for this article. Michael E. Serpe, a spokesman for EdisonLearning, provided a written statement saying that the company “agrees with and supports” the school board’s decision to run the two schools.

It continued: Edison is “proud of the role we have been able to play to help both schools develop the capacity to operate on their own.” The schools “have consistently outperformed other public schools in Dayton on a majority of the indicators” that Ohio uses to rate public schools, the statement said.

John Chubb, who was senior executive vice president of Edison until February 2010, said the “biggest challenge” in Dayton was hiring good people. Edison struggled to recruit principals and teachers to come to Dayton. The company, he said, offered signing bonuses to prospective employees and hired Teach For America leaders, hoping they could connect with eager, young teachers.

The 'biggest challenge' in Dayton was hiring good people. Edison struggled to recruit principals and teachers to come to Dayton

Chubb said he frequently came to board meetings in Dayton and that despite a “strong partnership,” the schools “never lived up to Edison’s expectations or the board’s.”

Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, whose sister organization sponsors the two schools overseen by the Alliance for Community Schools board, is among the most disillusioned about Edison’s effort in Dayton. Finn was at the table with Whittle and Chubb when Edison was conceived, and he was an early proponent of its education model. He said that the company’s “horror show” in his hometown is a special embarrassment.

“They did an abysmal job in Dayton,” Finn said. “I think it was an implementation and an accountability failure.”

An assistant secretary of education under former President Ronald Reagan, Finn said he has become “cynical” about the for-profit model in education. “Shareholder return ends up trumping the best interests of students,” he said. Having watched education management companies for 20 years, “Most of the models I admire today are run by non-profit groups.”

The Rev. Vanessa Ward said she “had stars in my eyes” when she came on the Edison schools’ board three years ago. But she quickly realized that conditions were “not as rosy as I thought.” Attempts to bring up tests scores resulted in “disappointment after disappointment,” she said.

In 2003, Edison’s Dayton Liberty campus received a “grade” from the state that is the equivalent of an “F” and then a “C” for the following three years. The school dropped to a “D” for the next three years, followed by an “F” in 2010. It bounced up to a “C” in 2011.

During the same time, the Dayton View campus earned an “F” in 2003, then a “C,” then an “F,” followed by three years of “Ds” and three years of “Cs.” Graphs 1-4 show the struggles of students to make proficiency in fourth and eighth grade reading and math over time in these schools.

Dayton Leadership Academies' academic performance, 2002 to 2012

Some board members and teachers believe that the Dayton View campus’ “C” in 2011 is questionable. An investigation was launched after a teacher called Fordham during the testing period to say students were being given extra time and that state testing protocols weren’t being followed. A review by Fordham staff and its attorney did not confirm cheating had occurred, but suspicions remain.

“There was lots of sloppiness that year,” said Ellen Ireland, the chair of the schools’ board.

In 2012, Dayton View’s rating, to no one’s surprise, dropped to Academic Emergency; while Dayton Liberty was again rated Academic Watch.

Former DP&L executive Hill said he thinks part of the explanation for Edison’s poor showing in Dayton is the company never got a foothold in the state. The national “expansion plan worked against us,” Hill said. “I think the key take-away was that we were (only) two schools in Ohio.”

Ireland, who came on the board in 2007, said Edison kept coming up with new strategies to bring up test scores. “It continuously looked like we were ramping up for success. … After a while, you got wiser.”

The Teacher Perspective

Teachers’ frustrations are more micro. Several complained that Edison demanded “fidelity to the (Edison) program,” forcing them to move ahead in their time-limited lessons even if students were not grasping concepts. They also said Edison’s assessments of students’ learning did not match up with the state’s achievement tests.

That misalignment, some people said, would have been less likely if Edison had operated more schools in Ohio, which was the company’s goal initially.

Wallace, who credited Edison with hiring “high caliber” corporate administrators, said problems arose and were missed because managers were “too far away” to really know what was going on in Dayton. He said that when he became a principal two years ago, he was incredulous that Edison had at least nine people cleaning the schools.

Dayton Leadership Academies principal T.J. Wallace

While expenses were high, the schools’ enrollment had tanked. Buildings built for 1,000 kids were holding half that many, Wallace said. The small enrollment meant Edison wasn’t getting the per-student state funding it was banking on, thereby severely dragging down revenue.

One eighth-grade class last year had 42 students, Wallace said, and some kindergarten classes had more than 30.

Brandie Larsen, whose third graders were discussing the differences between “expository non-fiction” and “realistic fiction” on an afternoon in September, said that “there was very little room for re-teaching” under the Edison model.

“They said we could use our ‘center time’ to re-teach in a small group,” Larsen, 32, said. “But if you could see that an entire class or the majority were not grasping a certain topic, that would not be appropriate.”

“We were told to set your timer and that when it went off, you were done,” Larsen explained. “I thought that was ludicrous.”

Laura Sturey, a second-grade teacher who is in her fifth year at the former Edison schools, said, “I liked the data we used to drive our instruction.” She worried, though, about how her students were responding to their low scores on the monthly benchmark tests that assessed what they were to have mastered by the end of the year. Even when some students got a 33 on their first test, “They handled it well,” she said.

Some years she considered quitting in frustration, she said, but “I saw abandonment all around me. … These kids need people who are going to stay in their lives.”

Both Sturey and Larsen are critical of Edison’s professional development, calling it a “waste of time” and “pointless.” They both praised Edison’s “core values” curriculum that emphasized good behavior.

Edison administrators had a 'one-size-fits-all' management approach

Channey Goode, who is in his first year as a principal and was hired as a language arts teacher in 2004, said that Edison administrators had a “one-size-fits-all” management approach. They agreed the schools were not performing well, but “they couldn’t pinpoint why it was happening,” he said.

Edison’s Last Go at Turning Things Around

Hill said that Edison – and he – didn’t know how to cope with the unrelenting transience of the students.

“I had no appreciation of the mobility,” Hill said, noting that teachers often didn’t have the records they needed on students’ achievement or about their often chaotic home lives. The turnover meant that kids fell behind or teachers were forced to constantly backtrack.

He and others also complained that attendance was a problem, in part, because Dayton Public Schools were slow to cooperate and even hostile about reliably transporting students to their competition.

Edison continued to spend money in Dayton, even in the face of stunning enrollment declines. The high water year was 2004, when more than 2,500 students attended the two schools. By 2011, that number had dropped to 1,002. This year the schools have a budget based on a combined enrollment of just 746 children, and while the number of students in the Dayton Public Schools has declined over the last decade (from 20,000 students in 2002 to about 14,000 in 2012), the losses at Dayton Liberty and Dayton View have been even more dramatic.

Dayton Leadership Academies' enrollment, 2002 to 2012

One particularly expensive Edison initiative aimed at increasing student achievement was E².  Dayton was one of three sites where the “blended learning” program that marries teachers and technology in the classroom was tested, according to Chubb, the former Edison executive.

Implementing it required new labs with more than 100 computers in each, Goode said. Students spent long periods in the labs and, according to Goode and others, the effort “flopped.” E² was abandoned after two years.

Dick Penry, a respected former Dayton Public Schools principal who was hired to be the school board’s liaison to Edison, said the complicated program should have been introduced incrementally and that teachers were not trained well.

“There was nothing wrong with the Edison design,” he said. “It was how it was implemented.”

Chubb defended E², saying it has been particularly effective at other schools.

Ireland said she doesn’t believe Edison shortchanged its Dayton schools financially until the “last 18 months,” when the board let it be known that it was out of patience.

Penry, the former Dayton Public Schools principal, has a different take. He said he reviewed spread sheets provided by Edison showing that as much as $600,000 went to the “mother ship” just in the 2011-12 school year, even though enrollment was terrible. “You can only speculate what they were taking when they had 2,000 kids,” he said.

Penry conceded, however, that he has no way of knowing how much of that money was profit and how much was for legitimate indirect overhead costs.

Dayton Leadership Academies board member, Dick Penry

Under state law, however, charter management companies only have to provide minimal accounting information to both the school’s governing board and its authorizer.

Ireland, the board chair, said that in the last two and a half years board members used their authority to push more aggressively about insisting on access to financial data, especially when class sizes started ballooning.

Going it Alone

Why are the local school board and Fordham hopeful that Edison’s former schools can be turned around? What’s different today? What are the lessons of the Edison experiment in Dayton?

Ireland, the board chair, said, teachers have new authority about how the schools are run and that there’s a laser-like focus on individual student performance. She points to what are called the “data rooms” where each student’s academic strengths and weaknesses are displayed for teachers.

“It’s very powerful,” Ireland said.

The Rev. Ward has seen charter school failure up close twice now. In 2000, she opened and led the Omega School of Excellence, a charter school that shut down in 2008 after a run of poor test scores. When her husband became seriously ill, she gave up her hands-on leadership role, and the school floundered. She said she worked with Fordham – the school’s authorizer – to close the school.

But the African-American minister is staying involved with the former Edison schools, because there still “doesn’t seem to be a lot of options for our kids.”

“I think I’m hopeful,” she said, “because the decisions are now centralized and local. … I feel positive, (but) I am cautious.”

She credits Wallace, with managing a difficult transition away from Edison. “It’s a team, and it’s a community,” she said.

David Greer, a Dayton neighborhood activist who has been on the schools’ board from the outset, explains that he’s not quitting because, “The last thing we want to do is shut down, go away. We have families who depend on us.”

Referring to Fordham, Greer said he’s more than aware that “if we don’t improve, we’re going to lose a sponsor.”

Asked why he believed the schools can yet succeed, Fordham’s Finn quipped, “As far as I know, T.J. (the schools’ director) does not walk on water.” But he added that there is ample evidence in Ohio and elsewhere that high-poverty schools can produce excellent results when the right school leader and teachers are hired.

There is ample evidence in Ohio and elsewhere that high-poverty schools can produce excellent results when the right school leader and teachers are hired

Wallace said his strategy is “working the plan”: hiring exceptional people and involving them in important decisions. Teachers say that they appreciate being empowered to choose the schools’ curricula – which includes sticking with some Edison choices and bringing in different ones.

Wallace has also eagerly hired six teachers from Teach For America. 

After 10 days on the job, Tyler Stanley, a Teach For America special education co-teacher, said he immediately felt a “sense of community” at the Dayton View campus. He said the environment is “high stress,” but “you know where you’ve got to go.”

Fred Conner, who sends his two children and his two nieces to the Dayton Liberty campus, said that Edison’s leaving “seems to be a good thing.” “Teachers don’t feel like they’re being micromanaged,” he said.

Conner said he drives his children from the suburb of West Carrollton, a 30-minute, one-way commute, in “rain, sleet, or snow.” He was aware of the school’s 2011 “C” ranking, but said, “I believe we’re not going anywhere but up.”

Michele Miller’s son was part of the first class to attend classes at the Dayton Liberty campus, and she has since sent three other children to the school. She “had no idea” that Edison is no longer managing the schools. She said Dayton Liberty prepared her two eldest boys well for high school, but she complained that she doesn’t have the rapport with the junior academy teachers that she had with teachers in the younger grades. She also said she preferred when the school day lasted until 4 p.m., an Edison hallmark.

This year classes end at 3 p.m., a move that several teachers said they welcome. Eight hours with students was exhausting, they said. Using that hour after school to discuss problem students and for professional development has been valuable, they said.

Said Larsen, the third-grade teacher, “I don’t know if there’s a secret sauce, but everybody has to be committed. It’s the level of commitment you have with your entire staff.”

The Rev. Ward, who, when she was at Omega, felt the same pressure that’s on Wallace, said, “It’s so fragile. If you don’t have a school leader, you’re doomed. If you don’t have a strong vision, you’re doomed.”

Penry, formerly the liaison to Edison, said, “Now, of course, there are no excuses. We can’t blame Edison if we’re not successful.”

Despite these figures and the ever-tightening fiscal climate, Tuesday spelled victory for several districts asking for new levies. For example, Cleveland voters approved a $15 million levy. Cleveland Municipal will be able to reinstate regular school days and gym and music classes, which were previously cut. Akron City Schools also has cause for celebration with the support of its $7.9 million levy. To find out how your district’s levy did, see the Ohio School Boards Association’s webpage.

In attendance this morning were senior staff members from Columbus City Schools, the Ohio Department of Education, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services, The Ohio State University, Columbus’ largest charitable foundations, members of the press corps, and education policy and youth program organizations. The Columbus Foundation hosted the event.

Roberta Garber of CRP opened the event with an overview of the research findings for the Columbus metropolitan area. The findings were striking: There’s a lot of student movement—perhaps more than generally appreciated—occurring within school districts, between districts, and between charter schools and traditional districts. To measure student mobility in Columbus' schools and schools across Ohio, Garber reported that CRP analyzed approximately 6 million student records. The research found that some schools had churn rates upwards of 50 percent—a statistic that indicates a significant amount of mobility, by way of student admits or withdrawals.

After the presentation of the data, Mark Real of KidsOhio.org moderated a panel discussion to reflect on the research findings. The panel included Matt Cohen of the Department of Education, Nancy Van Meter of the American Federation of Teachers, Steve Dackin of Reynoldsburg School District, and Terry Ryan of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Photo courtesy of The Columbus Foundation. From left to right: Moderator Mark Real of KidsOhio.org; Panelists Matt Cohen of the Ohio Department of Education, Nancy Van Meter of the American Federation of Teachers, Steve Dackin of Reynoldsburg School District, and Terry Ryan of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The panelist made several key points:

• The need for additional research on mobility that can disentangle the causes and consequences of student moves.
• The need to work collaboratively across traditional boundaries—whether geographic or institutional—to mitigate negative effect of mobility on students.
• The need to consider the impact of mobility on educational systems, from teacher evaluations to accountability to school funding.
• The need to ask what makes some schools “sticky”—that is, keep more of their kids—and why some schools have more churn in their student population.

All told, based on the discussion between the panelists and the ensuing Q&A with all attendees, at least one consensus emerged: The student mobility research opens just about as many questions as it answers. And those in attendance seemed willing to roll up their sleeves, dig more into the issue, search for answers, and ultimately come up with solutions on how to manage student mobility more effectively--at a state policy, local district, classroom, and even family level.

Introduction

Imagine for a moment you’re a school teacher. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you teach at Southmoor Middle School, located on the south side of Columbus.  To start your year, you have 25 of Columbus’ most eager, bright-eyed sixth graders in your classroom. Their enthusiasm is fresh like a new textbook and bubbles like a science fair volcano.

Fast forward to May and your classroom has changed considerably. During the school year (you have an average Southmoor classroom) five new students came to your class while eight students departed at some point for another school. For incoming students, you had to make mid-year assessments of those students’ learning levels and quickly integrate them into your lesson plans and classroom culture. You likely did all this without the assistance of a student record (as those can take months to find their way to you), while also maintaining the pace of learning for those students who have been with you all year.  Student mobility complicates things.

Pioneering Research

The nomadic-like nature of the Southmoor Middle School student body is not an outlier when it comes to student mobility. In fact, it’s one of many schools in Ohio—and across the nation—that copes with a revolving door of students—students who enter and leave a school during the year. 

Student mobility complicates things

Yet, despite the scale and scope of student mobility, the research on it is slim; as far as we could tell, no research has systematically examined the scale of student mobility across an entire state.

Recognizing the cavernous void in student mobility research, along with hearing anecdotes about mobility’s significant impact on some Ohio schools, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute gained an interest in documenting and understanding the scale and impact of mobility. We made our first forays into student mobility in 2010 by partnering with a University of Dayton economist to study mobility in the Dayton area using data provided by the Ohio Department of Education. The findings from that county-wide study were astonishing, showing the magnitude of mobility within Dayton Public Schools, across district and charter schools, and across district lines.

From this limited study we decided that conducting a statewide analysis of student mobility had a lot of merit, but finding an organization that could manage such a massive research project was not an easy thing to do. Serendipitously and out of the blue, we received a phone call from Roberta Garber at Community Research Partners (CRP) expressing interest in working together on some sort of mobility project. CRP had conducted a mobility study for the Columbus City School district in 2003, and had the analytical capacity to do a statewide mobility study. It was a natural partnership.  

Thus, the Fordham Institute, Community Research Partners, and ten other funding partners joined together to launch this groundbreaking research project that uses student-level data (over 6 million student records) to gauge the mobility of students across all of Ohio’s 3,500 plus public (district and charter) school buildings and e-schools. Relying on the state department’s Education Management Information System (EMIS) database from two school years (October 2009 to May 2011) we looked at every K-12 school move across the Buckeye State. But, CRP went further, and did a deep dive in five metro areas – Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, and Toledo, as well as into the state’s major e-schools. The results of this year-long study are significant, wide-ranging, and absolutely foundational for a better understanding of how Ohio’s educational system functions (or dis-functions) in the face of significant numbers of student moves and movers.

Measuring Mobility

School moves for students have many causes. Some are bad – family turmoil, home foreclosure, apartment eviction. Others are good – search for a higher performing school or a school better suited to the needs of a child, a new home in a better neighborhood, or a better job for a parent. Research so far, and this includes the CRP work, cannot easily distinguish the cause of a student move. We can, however, identify those schools that have more coming and going of students. Two indicators measure a district’s or building’s mobility: The two-year stability rate and the one-year churn rate.

For some schools, only 1 in 2 students stay in the same school over two years

• Stability rate – indicates the percentage of a school’s students that stayed in a school from October 2009 to May 2011.
• Churn rate – indicates the incidence of mobility (the number of student admits plus withdrawals), relative the enrollment size of a school, over a single school year (October 2010 to May 2011).

Prevalence of Student Mobility

The statewide research conducted by CRP found that the prevalence of student mobility is considerably greater than most of us appreciate or fully understand. Student mobility verges on the epidemic in inner-city schools; but, it is also common in suburbs and rural schools.  Figure 1 depicts the stability and churn rates of a few select school buildings in the Columbus region (suburban and urban), including Southmoor Middle School, which led our discussion.

Figure 1: Stability and churn rates for select sample of Columbus-area schools

(A) Stability rate: One quarter (Griffith) to one half of students (Southmoor) leave their original school over two year period. (B) Churn rate: Average class of 25 students would expect to have between 4 (Griffith, 25*.15) and 13 (Southmoor, 25*.52) incidents of mobility in one school year.

Source: Ohio Department of Education, EMIS database, and CRP analysis. Note: Letters in parentheses represent school building rating, school year 2010-11. Griffith Thomas is part of Dublin School District (suburban, high-income); Groveport Madison Middle is part of Groveport Madison School District (suburban, middle-income); Southmoor Middle is part of Columbus City Schools (urban, low-income); KIPP: Journey Academy is a charter school (urban, low-income).

A higher stability rate means that more students stay at the school over time—hence, we’d consider Griffith Thomas, a high-wealth suburban school, to be more stable than Southmoor Middle, though even Griffith lost nearly one quarter of its students over two years. A Southmoor Middle School student experiences more movement of peers, with only one in two students staying in the school over a two year period.

A higher churn rate means that there is a greater flow of students moving into and out of the school. To interpret the churn percentage, we could think of it this way (as we do in our article’s opening paragraph): For a 25-student Southmoor Middle classroom, the average teacher would have had to cope with 13 student arrivals or departures during the 2010-11 school year.

The Impact of Student Mobility on Academic Performance

Persistently mobile students do less well in school than their non-moving peers. We asked CRP to document this for us by connecting mobility history to student test scores. CRP found that frequent school movers face a general downward trend in average test scores and passage rates. For example, Figure 2 depicts the impact of moves for 3^rd and 8^th graders in Columbus City Schools on both reading and mathematics tests. All lines trend downward.

Figure 2: Columbus City Schools: Average scores on spring 2011 OAA tests by two-year mobility history

Source: CRP and OSU-Center for Statistical Consulting analysis of ODE enrollment records. Note: Third grade is abbreviated by G3, Eighth grade is abbreviated by G8.

Serially mobile students do less well than their peers, and there is a relationship between mobility rates, student demographics and test scores.

Highly mobile students tend to have lower test scores

Figure 3 depicts the average scores on the spring 2011 third grade math test for selected student groups from Columbus City Schools. Scores were lowest for the economically disadvantaged, Blacks, and multiple movers.

Figure 3: Average scores on third-grade math test by CCS students, spring 2011

Source: CRP and OSU-Center for Statistical Consulting analysis of ODE enrollment records

A disproportionate number of multiple movers were also economically disadvantaged and black. These three characteristics in tandem serve as a sort of perfect demographic trifecta for gauging a life-time of school failure by the time a student leaves third grade.

But Not All is Gloomy

Despite the negative impact on student achievement for serial movers, there is a second type of student mobility that benefits students. This happens when a student moves from a failing school to a higher performing school. When students move to a better school it offers them a better chance at academic success if they stay there. Consider the boost a student gets when they move from an F-rated school to an A-rated school. They are apt to receive better instruction, learn in a more secure and healthier school environment, and attend classes with more motivated peers. Any or all of these school-based factors can help drive up the success rates of disadvantaged students.

The silver lining: Some students move to higher rated schools

This mobility study indicates that there is a considerable amount of upward student mobility in the Buckeye State. Consider, for example, the number per students moving from failing urban public schools (D or F rated) to more successful suburban schools (A or B rated schools) in metro Columbus. Of the 5,473 students over two years who exited Columbus City Schools (CCS) for another district, 52 percent moved to a school with a performance rating at least two ratings higher than their CCS school of origin. The percentages where similar for Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo and it shows us that many kids across the state are moving to a better situation when they change schools.

Conclusion: Coping with Mobility

We’ve found that student mobility is a near-everyday reality for schools in many parts of the state: Rural, suburban, and urban schools. The CRP research is largely descriptive, and only lightly touches on issues of mobility’s causes and consequences. Let alone the costs or possible advantages of certain types of student mobility. Thus, the findings from CRP, first and foremost, call for more study, public discussion, and debate on all the aspects of student mobility and its impact. Expect more from us on this topic in the coming weeks, months and years as this is an issue that deserves far more study and attention from everyone concerned about Ohio’s children and their schooling.  

As Fordham’s Ohio VP Terry Ryan wrote on this very blog back in February, this effort to make Cleveland one of the nation's school-reform leaders – with its sights fixed firmly on finding, funding, and nurturing what works in education for the sake of the students themselves—is a significant step forward for all Cleveland families. And on this morning of November 7, implementation is now at hand.

All involved with that implementation must be mindful of what was promised and what must be delivered:

• Increasing the number of high-performing schools, both district and charter, while closing failing schools;


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


• 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;


• Seeking (and finding) flexibility in the hiring, retention, and remuneration of teachers; and


• Sustaining both district and public charter transformation schools.

We applaud the work done to create and to pass the plan and look forward to assisting in any way possible its effective and successful implementation. The kids of Cleveland need the plan to work.

- The Ohio Gadfly

Digging in at a more local level, let’s consider the story of the City of Springfield, population 60,000, located an hour outside of Columbus. Springfield is a city in decline: Since 1960, Springfield has lost 25 percent of its population and its median household income is $34,000 per year, below the state average. The city is mostly White (75 percent). Springfield has 3 charter schools and 1 traditional school district.

Now, let’s consider three of Springfield’s schools: Springfield Academy of Excellence (SAE), a Fordham-sponsored charter school, Fulton Elementary School, and Perrin Woods Elementary School. Springfield City School District (a traditional public school) operates Fulton and Perrin Woods. I’ve selected these schools because of their similar demographics and academic performance (table 1).

Table 1: Demographic and academic performance data for selected Springfield school buildings, 2011-12.

Source: Ohio Department of Education, 2011-12 Preliminary Data

Pretty similar: SAE, Fulton, and Perrin Woods all have a majority Black and Hispanic students in their school. (These represent 3 of the 4 elementary schools in Springfield that have a majority minority population.) In addition, table 1 indicates that they had nearly indistinguishable academic results for the 2011-12 school year. All received an “Academic Watch” rating from the state and they all had performance index scores—a weighted proficiency rate—between 77 and 80 (the state goal is 100).

Where the big difference lies—and where teacher unions come in—is with teacher salaries. SAE has non-unionized teachers, while Fulton and Perrin Woods have unionized teachers. The Springfield Education Association represents district teachers for collective bargaining purposes.[1]

Consider figure 1, which shows the salaries of all teachers in SAE, Fulton, and Perrin Woods as vertical columns. SAE’s teacher salaries are shown in blue, Fulton’s in red, and Perrin Woods’ in black. I also indicate the median income of Springfield ($34,000) with a red line.

Figure 1: Annual teacher salaries in three similar Springfield schools (Clark County, OH), 2010-11

Source: Ohio Treasurer’s Office, Treasurer’s Transparency Project, http://www.tos.ohio.gov/teacher_salary. U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3974118.html. The average salaries for these three schools are: SAE (non-union) = $32,010; Fulton (union) = $49,750; Perrin Woods (union) = $60,094.

The chart itself is striking in two ways, and combined with the achievement data in figure 1, is remarkable in a third way.

First, I’m struck by the considerably higher salaries of Fulton and Perrin Woods’ teachers compared to SAE salaries. Notice how Fulton and Perrin Woods’ teacher salaries completely dominate the right-hand side of the chart, where the higher salaried teachers reside. In terms of averages, the Fulton teacher makes 55 percent more, on average, than the SAE teacher; the Perrin Woods teacher makes, on average, 88 percent more than the non-unionized SAE teacher. This is the wage premium that unionized labor extracts from employers—a wage premium that for Fulton and Perrin Woods’ teachers far exceeds the national norm.[2]

Second, I’m struck by the considerably higher salaries of Fulton and Perrin Woods’ teachers relative the local median income. 22 out of 24 of Perrin Woods’ teachers make more than 1.5 times the local median; and 13 out of 23 of Fulton’s teachers make more than 1.5 times the local median. Zero of SAE’s teachers make that much. So, while SAE teacher salaries remain pitifully low relative their unionized peers, their salaries are actually more comparable to, and in some cases above, the local median income.

Finally, I’m struck by the lack of impact that the unionized teacher forces in Fulton and Perrin Woods have on student achievement, given the similar demographics of the three schools. As mentioned above and shown in table 1, all three schools have the same academic rating and have nearly identical performance index scores. A unionized teacher force could be justified if it were to produce better student results, yet there’s no evidence among these Springfield schools to prove they do. (And there’s little evidence on a larger scale to suggest that unionized teachers help overall student achievement; cf. Randall Eberts’ review in Princeton University-The Brookings Institution’s The Future of Children journal.)

Yes, this is only one example of how teacher unions affect salaries and student achievement. But it’s a particularly striking one at that, one that shows the gaping salary gap between unionized and non-unionized teachers, and between unionized teachers and those who live in their community. This wage premium is nice for unionized teachers, but not so nice for the district they work in—or for the students they (purportedly) educate. In the case examined here, Springfield’s unionized labor has produced neither higher academic performance nor fiscal stability. In fact, it’s no surprise that Springfield City Schools, which is just crawling out from four years in “Fiscal Emergency” (i.e., bankruptcy from 2005 to 2009), forecasts a $10 million operating loss by 2016.

With the facts from Springfield fresh in mind, we can thank teachers unions for creating wealth for your members, benefitting students in no discernible way, and creating fiscal emergencies in our school districts.

Every child has a window of opportunity in the critical early years. It’s not impossible to learn to read once aging out of this window any more than it is impossible for you to become fluent in a foreign language as an adult, but it becomes increasingly difficult as you get older.

For too long, and despite earlier efforts to provide a third-grade reading guarantee, the state’s children simply get passed on to the next grade. Each year, the curriculum becomes more challenging, but students lack the skills to rise with it. Children going through this cruel farce will describe themselves as bored, and they often become disruptive. They know they will never be going to college, and they inevitably start to wonder why they go to school at all.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently released a study that tracked a cohort of students through their entire K-12 careers. The study found that 88 percent of 19-year-old dropouts had failed to score as proficient readers as third graders. Ohio schools don’t just suffer from a dropout problem; they all too often manufacture dropouts starting in Kindergarten.

The Nation’s Report Card reveals how many students Ohio schools currently have on their dropout assembly line. In 2011, 29 percent of Ohio children scored Below Basic, 37 percent scored Basic (signifying partial mastery of grade level reading skills), and 34 percent scored Proficient or Better.

Ohio had almost two-hundred thousand fourth graders enrolled in 2011. Of those, roughly 58,000 are almost certainly in Ohio’s dropout pipeline (those scoring Below Basic) absent a difficult and rare intervention in their educations. Another 75,000 students in the cohort with partial reading mastery could go either way. Only the remaining students have cleared this hurdle.

In 2001, Florida policymakers took dramatic action to address their literacy crisis with a comprehensive plan. The Florida strategy included early screening of student literacy skills, improved teacher training, parental notification, and the drawing up of individual reading intervention plans. Lawmakers included a provision to hold students, families, and schools accountable by creating a minimal literacy bar for students to surmount before advancing to fourth grade.

The Florida policy helped to inform the policy now in Ohio law. Both states give multiple chances to students to pass the third-grade reading test and both include reasonable exceptions. The policy however makes the default for a third-grade student needing extra literacy help to repeat the third grade with an escalated set of academic interventions. 

Some claim that the strategy being pursued by states like Florida and Ohio is cruel, but they are entirely mistaken. Nothing is crueler than sending students into grades for which they are unprepared, with textbooks they literally cannot read.

Florida retentions have dropped in half since the start of the program over a decade ago for exactly the right reason – because more students are learning how to read during their optimum window of opportunity. Today Florida middle school teachers receive far more students prepared to learn.

Sadly, the president-elect of the Ohio School Boards Association opposes the new Ohio strategy. The Florida experience clearly demonstrates however that retention leveraged as a part of a comprehensive plan to improve early childhood literacy has increased high-school graduation and college attendance while lowering the dropout rate.

School districts and organizations like the Ohio School Boards Association have had decades to address Ohio’s literacy crisis. Like the rest of us, they have failed to do so. If you were an elementary student who was struggling with learning to read, would you want to your schools to simply pass you on to the next grade and hope for the best? Or would you prefer to have a system that viewed literacy acquisition as a “failure is not an option” priority for families and schools?

If you chose option B then the third-grade reading guarantee policy needs and deserves your support.

Signed by,

Mathew Ladner, Senior Advisor for Policy and Research, the Foundation for Excellence in Education

Tracie Craft, Deputy Director of Advocacy, Black Alliance for Educational Options

Terry Ryan, Vice President for Ohio Programs and Policy, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Like Hillary and Norgay in the spring of 1953, Cleveland's schools face a long, uphill climb to reach the summit of educational excellence. Is the summit unattainable? It'll be hard at least. Consider Cleveland's 2010-11 academic performance data: Approximately one in two of Cleveland’s students failed their math exam and two in five failed their reading exam. More than 35,000 public school students, or 60 percent of all of Cleveland's public school students, attended a failing district or charter school.

Mount Everest: The mountain Cleveland's schools face

Source: Wikipedia

Despite the glum achievement results, there are a few rays of hope for Cleveland. The city has 16 district and charter school buildings rated A or A+ by the state. These include the high-flying John Hay high schools (part of Cleveland Municipal School District) and the Constellation group of charter schools. But high-quality schools are in short supply: In 2011-12, only 7 percent of Cleveland’s public school students attended one of these highly-rated district or charter school buildings.

The following report shows the data on Cleveland's charter and district school performance for the past school year. In addition, we also project how the Common Core will affect academic performance results in 2014-15. We predict that the PARCC exams—tests aligned to the Common Core and to the rigor of college coursework—will be harder and will have higher performance standards. As a result, even fewer of Cleveland's students (and students in surrounding communities) will pass these exams.

The past year’s data and the projection of future student achievement results remind us again that Cleveland’s schools face a high mountain to climb. But as Hillary and Norgay prove, scaling the highest heights can be done. But it'll take grit, determination, and a sense of purpose for Cleveland to conquer it.

Download: Cleveland district and charter schools: Report Card Analysis, 2011-12.

Note on data for this report: On October 17 the Ohio Department of Education released "preliminary" school district data for 2011-12 that included all major achievement data components for a district. This is the most complete release of 2011-12 school data to date. However, the data remain "preliminary" until the State Auditor completes his investigation of districts and school buildings who are suspected of tampering with student attendance records. When the investigation is complete, ODE will issue official Report Cards for each distirct.

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

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

The jobs of Dayton's past: The National Cash Register assembly line

Source: http://historicalphotosblog.com/category/states/ohio/

In a true Midwestern can-do spirit, a coalition of business leaders, higher education institutions, non-profits, K-12 institutions, local governments and Wright Patterson Air Force Base (the Dayton area’s largest employer) have mobilized to help the area’s citizens transition to the jobs and opportunities of the twenty-first century. Until recently, jobs and education opportunities in Dayton – and many other cities in the Midwest –were bifurcated. A small percentage of Ohio students would go to 4-year colleges and beyond (often leaving the state); while most area high school graduates would move onto a well-paying factory job or an ancillary service sector job.

But, the world has changed. Lumina reports, “The widely held, almost reflexive definition of college – four-year, on campus, residential experience leading to a bachelor’s degree – is no longer sufficient. It’s not broad enough, not flexible enough, just not good enough to work for millions of people, or for the nation as a whole.”

According to Tom Lasley, former Dean of Education at the University of Dayton and now head of Dayton’s Learn to Earn program (the umbrella organization coordinating the effort to move education towards meeting the economic realities buffeting Dayton’s citizens), “new pathways are a necessary alternative to the all-or-nothing thinking that has persistently defined postsecondary success as bachelor’s attainment.”

The anchor organization leading the movement towards a more targeted and work-based education in Dayton is Sinclair Community College. Sinclair enrolls more than 22,000 students and is the state’s largest community college. More than half of all adults in the Dayton area have enrolled at Sinclair at some point in their lives. Sinclair’s president Steven Johnson argues that “Society has been calling for modularization education for a couple of decades…That’s what certificates are.”

As reported by Lumina, Sinclair awarded about 4,300 degrees and certificates in 2011-12, and it offers 172 different degree and certificate programs. Sinclair adjusts its offerings to the needs of the local economy, so its students can find meaningful work, raise families and pay taxes. Just this week Sinclair, and two partner colleges, were awarded a $12 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to “create a revolutionary change in how information technology training is conducted.”

The jobs of Dayton's future: The floor of a computerized advanced manufacturing plant

Source: Sinclair Community College

The president and chief executive officer of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce , Phil Parker, shared with Lumina how businesses see education. “To business leaders, education is a means to an end,” Parker explains. “It provides a capable, qualified workforce. Ultimately, it’s about people getting a job, being successful and having a great quality of life they can share with their family…That’s a different mindset from education being the end product.”

Dayton has been knocked down, but it is certainly not out. It is a community undergoing a revitalization. This is a revitalization driven by a reconceptualization of what it means to be educated.  Dayton’s efforts are worthy of the Lumina Foundation’s attention, and efforts here are something the rest of the country should be paying attention to as well.

In this post, and in forthcoming posts, we'll take a look at the ODE data for Ohio's three largest districts: Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, and for Dayton--Fordham's hometown. We assume that the preliminary data (the release of unofficial, unverified data in June, the September release, and the October release) are sufficiently reliable for an analysis of public schools' data. In addition to an analysis of the 2011-12 data, we also provide a forecast of what proficiency rates for school districts will be when Ohio transitions to the Common Core and its aligned assessment, the PARCC exams, for English language arts and math in 2014-15.

In Columbus, good, bad, and worse news can be found in its district and charter schools’ academic results for 2011-12. 

The good news first: As a group, charter school proficiency rates continued their steady climb upwards. Fourth and sixth grade math proficiency rates, for example, gained nearly 10 points compared to the year prior—and this year’s charter proficiency rates a significant improvement over rates from 5 to 10 years ago. Today, it’s fair to say, based on the data, that Columbus’ 14,000 charter students slightly outperform their peers in Columbus City Schools (CCS).

The bad news: Most of Columbus’ students—charter and CCS—still fail to meet the statewide standard for proficiency. In addition, nearly 30,000 (just under 50 percent) of Columbus’ students attended a failing (D or F rated) school building. In contrast, only 3,500 of Columbus’ students attended an A or A+ rated school in 2011-12.

The worse news: When the Common Core arrives in 2014-15, there will likely be a massive fall in the percentage of Columbus’ students (and students in surrounding districts), who can pass the standardized exams. The PARCC exams—tests aligned to the Common Core—will likely be harder and likely have a higher performance standard. Results from these exams will honestly and bluntly report how many students are actually on the pathway toward success in college and career. How many youngsters will pass these more rigorous exams? Not many. Turn to our PARCC projection in section 7 of this report to see for yourself just how far proficiency rates may plummet.

Download: Columbus district and charter schools: Report Card analysis, 2011-12. Plus a forecast of proficiency rates under the Common Core and its aligned assessments

Update (October 24, 2012): There was a correction made to the 2011-12 aggregate charter proficiency rate that affected figure 8.3 and table 8.4. See the corrected version below.

Download: Columbus district and charter schools: Report Card analysis, 2011-12. Plus a forecast of proficiency rates under the Common Core and its aligned assessments (corrected version)

In this post, and in forthcoming posts, we'll take a look at the ODE data for Ohio's three largest districts: Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, and for Dayton--Fordham's hometown. We assume that the preliminary data (the release of unofficial, unverified data in June, the September release, and the October release) are sufficiently reliable for a city-level analysis of public schools. In addition to an analysis of the 2011-12 data, we also provide a forecast of what proficiency rates for school districts will be when Ohio transitions to the Common Core and its aligned assessment, the PARCC exams, for English language arts and math in 2014-15. 

Dayton Public Schools (DPS) and Dayton’s charter schools continued their long run of mediocre performance in the 2011-12 school year. Anywhere from one-third to over one-half of DPS students failed Ohio’s standardized exam, depending on the grade and subject. In Dayton’s charter schools, the failure rate was slightly less, but still no less troubling. By sixth grade, many Dayton students are well on the pathway toward adult illiteracy: 39 percent of DPS students and 27 percent of Dayton charter students failed to pass the sixth grade reading exam (i.e., scored below “proficient”). Math test scores are even worse than reading.

A few statistics that indicate the struggles of Dayton's traditional district and charter schools include:

• 55 percent of Dayton Public School students and more than 35 percent of Dayton’s charter school students failed the state’s fourth and sixth grade math exams in 2011-12.
• 1 out 54 school buildings, charter and district, met the statewide goal of having a performance index score of 100 or better.
• 0 Dayton Public School buildings and 3 out of 13 charter schools received an “above” value-added rating.
• A majority of Dayton public school students, nearly 12,000 students (58 percent), attended a school building rated in academic watch (D) or academic emergency (F).

Gainful employment in a twenty-first century economy will demand strong literacy skills and the ability to solve complex math problems, and most of Dayton’s students are simply not equipped for these types of careers. When Ohio moves to the Common Core State Standards in 2014-15, the lack of college and career preparedness will become even more evident. The Common Core is a set of rigorous academic standards in English language arts and math, and aligned to the skills needed for the careers of the future.

How will Dayton’s students perform when these new standards are implemented? Not well, if current academic performance is an indicator. The forthcoming PARCC exams—exams aligned to the Common Core—will challenge students with harder test content and questions; and the standard for passing the test will likely increase also. When these new exams are implemented in 2014-15, we expect a massive fall in the percentage Dayton’s students (and students in surrounding districts), who will be able to pass the PARCC exams. 

Please turn to Section 7 of the accompanying report, where we forecast what proficiency rates will be under the Common Core—for DPS, a few of Dayton’s charters, and some additional traditional public districts in Montgomery County. The results are stark for those concerned with the future of Dayton.

Download: Dayton district and charter schools, Report Card analysis, 2011-12. Plus, a forecast of proficiency rates under the Common Core and its aligned assessments

Update (October 24, 2012): There was a correction made to the 2011-12 aggregate charter proficiency rate that affected figure 9.3 and table 9.4. See below for the corrected version.

Download: Dayton district and charter schools, Report Card analysis, 2011-12. Plus, a forecast of proficiency rates under the Common Core and its aligned assessments (corrected version)

Dr. Diane Ravitch – a founding Board member of the modern Thomas B. Fordham Foundation – came to Columbus yesterday morning to speak passionately about her belief in the public school system. Reading from her 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Dr. Ravitch called herself a reluctant crusader. But her belief in public schools as the “entry point to the American Dream” and her belief that public schools are under attack by the “reform agenda” which makes the system “ripe for privatization and private exploitation” compel her to speak out again and again.

She laid out her beliefs that charter schools don’t work, that high-stakes testing creates a negative impact on public schools, and that teachers are being systematically demoralized nationwide. The political and financial motivations of reformers are clear to her and she was adamant that those interests cannot be allowed to defeat the true purposes of education: “showing children that they have talents and abilities” and “to develop citizens”.

As quickly as Dr. Ravitch arrived, however, she was gone, leaving the rest of the 400+ attendees at the Public Common School Preservation Conference to take her words of grandmotherly wisdom borne of decades of hands-on experience…and turn it into war.

Yes, it’s war folks. Plain and simple. The public schools vs. “the privatizers”. The common good vs. “the pirates”. Money is hemorrhaging from public schools right into the hands of Captain Jack Sparrow. Home schoolers, charter school operators, Catholic schools, in league with legislators bound and determined to siphon every last possible nickel from the hardworking taxpayers of Ohio.

Conference organizer The Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding had a good audience for their message but the constant drumbeat of us vs. them and the relentless focus on what was happening to “their money” left very little room for kids or parents.

I feel sorry for the poor “devil’s advocate” superintendent who made the mistake of asking about how open enrollment – freely practiced in many corners of Ohio far from the urban 8 – differs at all from student movement from districts to charters. Answer: it doesn’t, but it’s more about varsity sports than anything so shouldn’t really be a matter of concern.

I feel sorry for the district honcho who expressed open grief that “his money” is now being used to fund a nearby Catholic football powerhouse. Never mind that it’s the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship money that he’s talking about. That would be a “miracle school” worth talking about.

I feel sorry for the teacher who expressed that perhaps "accountability" isn't an entirely dirty word, especially when the same test scores being used to vilify charters are the ones being vilified themselves as unrepresentative of what goes on in district schools. She didn't speak again after that.

I also feel sorry for the teachers and administrators who want very much to highlight all the good that is going on in their schools in order to change public opinion about those schools. Because if they believe that the parents who’ve left don’t know exactly what’s going on in those schools, they’re going to be mighty surprised if they ever get that “exit survey” they talked about.

I truly wish that Dr. Ravitch would have been able to stick around past her brief Q&A (hijacked by a candidate for the state legislator for an impromptu stump speech) to hear about the new “movement” being launched in Ohio after the upcoming election in order to fight the war against “the privatizers”. With the power of last decade’s technology – Twitter!, YouTube!, Facebook!, PDF’s! – the home schoolers and the reformers will be targeted by a mass of administrators and teachers and union operatives (and parents too, I think) with one mighty message: STOP!

In the end, the rhetoric got downright violent, one fellow likening it to a train slamming into a bus. I can only hope that I was not alone in shivering at that image. A train full of PDFs and text messages slamming into my bus full of skeleton pirates is no laughing matter.

Hurry back, Dr. Ravitch. The movement needs you.

The most recent data shows that the state of Ohio spends more than $23 billion annually on education, but Ohio students are still struggling academically, with 67% of fourth graders and 64% of eighth graders reading below proficiency[1]. It’s clear that Ohio is investing in its education programs, but it’s not clear whether these resources are being used in the most effective manner.

As I recently wrote, Ohio would greatly benefit from a school letter grading system, which holds schools accountable, empowers parents with information and choices, and improves student outcomes. To maximize the full impact of a school grading system, however, Ohio must pair this information with a strong fiscal transparency and accountability system so that policymakers and the public can understand the impact of their spending decisions.  By developing a statewide, five-star rating system that links resources and investment decisions with student and school outcomes, policymakers can make better decisions regarding school funding.

However, transparency and ratings mean little without accountability. Strong but measured interventions, such as changing who makes resource decisions, must be permitted for schools and districts found to be chronic underperformers. Over time, a robust fiscal transparency and accountability system will lead to improved spending practices, which in turn will lead to increased student achievement and, in times of financial decline, will allow administrators and policymakers to make informed spending cuts.

A meaningful five-star fiscal rating would address both traditional measures of fiscal health and incentivize schools to invest in programs and practices that provide a measurable benefit to students enrolled. Preferably, the rating system would issue:

• A maximum of two stars for the overall financial health of the school or district, measured using best practices related to financial responsibility such as unqualified audit opinions, etc.; and

• A maximum of three stars for predetermined outcomes measures related to programmatic interventions, the impact of professional development programs, and other elements deemed relevant by the state.

A strong fiscal transparency model also establishes “cost peers” – another school or district with similar socio-economic factors, geography, size, and student populations – that enable policymakers to make adept comparisons to identify schools and districts that are implementing financial practices that contribute to high academic achievement.  Cost peers place fiscal ratings in the appropriate context. Depending on their location, schools will have different, but legitimate, cost drivers.  For example, rural schools will have higher transportation costs than say an urban or suburban area. A good rating system will take these kinds of factors into consideration.

As mentioned above, it’s critical that the fiscal rating system include strong but measured interventions to support underperforming schools. In the first year, low-performing districts should receive technical assistance from higher-performing cost peers. In the second year, the state education agency (SEA) should be given the authority to review and approve budgets and spending plans. If fiscal issues still exist for a third consecutive year and beyond, the state department of education should be empowered to appoint a financial receiver with independent fiscal powers until the district has earned a three-star rating or higher for two consecutive years.

Fiscal transparency focuses policymakers where they should be focused. We know that not all students learn the same way, and not all schools offer the same services. Therefore, rather than prescribing what schools should fund, state policymakers should promote spending flexibility, while implementing a fiscal rating system that holds school administrators accountable for the spending decisions they make. By tracking how schools and districts are using their money, we can begin to shift the education funding focus from an “inputs”-based model to one focused on “outputs,” allocating funding based on the academic needs of schools and districts. Simultaneously, this type of system would allow districts to identify and implement smart business practices that enable schools to be more successful.

Just as school letter grades are made available to the public, it’s crucial that the fiscal ratings also be made available to parents through a report card that is sent home and posted online for all of the community to see. Increased transparency supports better decision-making and empowers citizens to understand district and school performance. It also gives voters the opportunity to monitor policymakers and public officials and promote better outcomes. Without linking financial and student achievement data in a thoughtful manner, policymakers and administrators cannot make well-informed financial decisions. These leaders – along with parents and community members – must be empowered with meaningful, accurate and compelling information in order to make the best possible decisions for Ohio students.

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

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

• EPE is a weighted per-pupil expenditure that accounts for the higher cost of educating poor, English language learning, and special needs students. ODE reports official EPE data for traditional districts (there is not official, publically-accessible data for charter schools, so they are excluded from this analysis). 
• PI is a weighted proficiency average, with greater weight given to students who score at higher levels of achievement on the state’s standardized exams.

For the sake of simplicity, this analysis is a bird’s-eye view with limitations, some of which are included in the following footnote.[1] Figure 1 below shows each of Ohio’s traditional school districts   as a point on the chart, indicating the intersection of EPE and PI for each district in the 2009-10 fiscal year and  school year, the last year that EPE data is available on ODE’s website. The chart shows two things that help us understand district efficiency: (1) the efficiency frontier, which is marked in the thick dashed red line and (2) four quadrants that are descriptively labeled by expenditure and academic performance (e.g., low expend, high perform), relative the state averages for PI and EPE. The averages are marked-off by the thin dashed red lines.

Figure 1: Estimation of school district efficiency, performance index versus expenditure per equivalent, 2009-10, Ohio traditional public school districts

Source: Ohio Department of Education, Education Fiscal Data Project

First, the efficiency frontier, a term used by economists: The districts along the frontier indicate the most efficient schools, using the metrics chosen here. (The curve is eyeballed, not mathematically derived.) Districts on the interior of the frontier are less efficient than those on the frontier. For instance, consider Fort Laramie Local, which resides on the frontier. It gets more PI out of the same expenditure than, say, Eastern Local. Fort Laramie (point shown in bright green) spends $7,561 and has a PI of 107; meanwhile, Eastern (point shown in bright red) spends $7,516 EPE and has a PI of 91.  

Second, I mark-off quadrants that show four types of school districts, based on their EPE and PI relative the statewide means. The top left quadrant (low expend, high perform) shows districts that spend less than average, but receive better than average achievement. These districts are generally efficient (though, even among this group, there are more efficient districts—those that lie on the frontier). Meanwhile, districts in the bottom right quadrant (high expend, low perform) are unquestionably inefficient: they expend a lot and get little achievement.

The analysis here is a simple but useful tool for identifying the efficiency of Ohio’s school districts. Surely, further research needs to be done to identify more precisely which districts are efficient according to multiple measures of input and output. This would require a more sophisticated analysis. Further, the analysis doesn’t attempt to explain why and how some districts achieve greater efficiency than other districts. Better management? Smarter use of technology? More effective teaching? Any of these variables could improve the efficiency of a given school district.

Businesses—and even baseball teams (like this year’s low-spending, playoff-bound Oakland A’s)—have figured out how to become leaner and more efficient, without sacrificing the quality of the output. With the flat-lining of resources available for education, it’s time that schools also learn to be efficient. Efficiency doesn’t mean that that kids have to lose; as we’ve seen, there are districts that spend less and get a lot from their kids.

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

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

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

Increasingly schools are seen as pivotal to economic development and states and cities are moving fast to differentiate themselves from others by recruiting and developing top school models and top talent. In Louisiana, for example, state superintendent John White recently sent a personal letter to every high quality non-profit Charter Management Organization (CMO) in the country inviting them to the Bayou State and offering assistance in finding facilities, board members, talent, and resources. The mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean, has personally traveled across the country visiting high performing charter schools, and as a result his office has helped to launch the Tennessee Charter School Incubator (TCSI). TCSI actively seeks out “experienced school leaders to transform Tennessee’s lowest performing schools into high-performing, college-preparatory charter schools and management organizations.”

Ohio is behind in the competition for both school reform talent and in scaling out clusters of great schools. But, we have strengths to build on.

Mayor Dean says “almost every mayor in the country thinks education is the number one issue. This is a lot like economic development, where you are trying to persuade companies to come to you.” For his part, he has “encouraged KIPP to expand in our community.” He has helped them raise money, provided school facilities, and personally encouraged the expansion of teacher talent pipelines like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project that are a key to high-quality charter school growth in his city. And his support and encouragement has drawn much private sector support to the cause of school reform in Nashville, while also making it easier for top-flight charters to attract quality board members to their schools.

Ohio is behind in the competition for both school reform talent and in scaling out clusters of great schools. But, we have strengths to build on. First, after years of effort Teach For America (TFA) finally has a presence in Ohio with corps members now teaching in schools in southwestern Ohio and in Cleveland. Having a TFA presence in the Buckeye State is a big step in creating a pipeline of bright, education-oriented reformers who can launch and lead not only great new schools but various school reform support organizations. Second, cities like Cleveland and Columbus are beginning to appreciate the value of a portfolio approach to public schools by funding and overseeing, to some degree, all schools – be they district or charter – under one umbrella. This emulates the good work being done in places like New Orleans and Nashville. 

Thirdly, Ohio has some high-performing charter school models that are growing and poised to grow faster in the future if they are nurtured and supported. These models include the Dayton Early College Academy in Dayton, KIPP and Columbus Collegiate Academies in Columbus, and Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland. These school models are delivering high academic achievement. Yet, they are also in the middle of the national competition for talent. Not only are they working to recruit top school leaders and teachers from across the country to their cities and schools, but others are trying to recruit their best people to their states and communities.

Just like the competition for business, Ohio is in a struggle to recruit, develop, and nurture top K-12 educators and school models. To compete effectively over the long-haul we need a statewide strategy. It is time for the Buckeye State to launch a nonprofit “EducateOhio” that is committed to making Ohio a leader in supporting and growing top flight charter and district schools and the talented individuals needed to support them.

In short, lawmakers have bought the current defined benefit pension systems some more life. But the STRS system, and this is true to varying degrees of the other retirement systems, is still burdened by fundamental flaws that will force quality educators to retire sooner than they want, and make teaching and educational leadership less competitive in attracting top talent over the long-haul.

The state’s action has undeniably extended the life of STRS. Consider that the legislation moves the unfunded liability facing STRS from “infinity” to 36 years. By law, state pensions must be able to cover their liabilities within a 30-year period, and 36 is certainly a lot closer to what the law demands than is infinity. So far so good, and considering that states like Illinois can’t even agree on how to make their current pension systems solvent this is something of a success. At least in Ohio taxpayers aren’t likely to face new taxes any time soon to pay for retirement promises made to public sector employees, and current educators can count on their pensions.

But, the changes to STRS and the state’s other retirement systems have some unintended consequences that are sure to have a negative impact on public education in the years and decades ahead. First, the pension changes will encourage early retirement of relatively young and able educators. Here’s why.

As explained by the economists Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell, teachers, principals and superintendents in the STRS defined benefits system become eligible to draw a pension at a specific age that depends on the number of years of service. In Ohio, under current rules there are three ways an educator can qualify for regular retirement benefits:

                   1. Five years of service and an age of sixty or more;
                   2. Twenty-five years of service and an age of fifty-five or more; or
                   3. Thirty years of service, regardless of age.

Benefits in the system are then determined by a formula of the following sort:      

            Annual Benefit = (years of service) x (final average salary) x r

The final average salary, under current rules, is an average of the last three years of salary, and r is a percentage that is known as the “replacement factor.” For example, if r were two percent, an educator retiring after thirty-five years of service would receive an annuity of 70 percent of his or her final average salary. Under current Ohio law, for years of service up to thirty, r = 2.5 percent. (To see the details of this formula and how it works in Ohio see Podgursky and Costrell’s report here).

Under the new pension rules, beginning on August 1, 2015 the formula for new retirees will change and become less generous. Specifically, the law changes the “years of service” factor from three to five. This means the last five years of salary will determine the retirement allowance rather than the last three, thus lowering the final number. Further, the replacement factor will decrease from 2.5 percent to 2.2%. Taken together this will result in a smaller pension. Teachers, principals and superintendents who are eligible to retire have every incentive to get out before August 2015, and surely most have already done the math.

Because of the changes to the pension system, for example, it is expected that up to half of the current 16 superintendents in Franklin County (Columbus area) are likely to retire in the next two years. Most of the retirees will be in their mid to late 50s, and absolutely capable of giving more to kids and schools. But their experience and leadership will be lost to the system. The same will surely be true when it comes to principals and teachers as well.

Longer term, most of the savings that come from the new changes to the pension system won’t be realized for decades, and as such they will come on the backs of the next generation of teachers and educators. As reported by the Wall-Street Journal last weekend “Changes made to the retirement plans of newly hired workers are expected to reduce pension costs by 25 percent over the next 35 years, according to Boston College estimates.”

In practice, prospective and new educators will have to pay higher rates over a far longer period of time for fewer benefits upon retirement. This will also trigger lower starting salaries as required employee contributions rise from 10 to 14 percent over several years, which will be a further disincentive for enticing the best-and-brightest young Ohioans into teaching and education leadership. Many new and prospective educators, who are facing student loan debts, thinking about starting families, or hoping to own a home might very well look at the new compensation system and decide they are much better off pursuing another profession.

Ohio’s pension reforms undeniably bought more time for the current STRS and those in it. But the unintended consequences of the reforms will be to drive out good talent early, and make it harder for schools and districts to recruit new talent into education in the future. 

Every year, Ohio’s public schools are responsible for educating 1.8 million students. To ensure that all students are making learning gains and meeting academic expectations, the Buckeye State needs a system in place to hold schools and school districts accountable for student performance. The Ohio Department of Education is currently redesigning Ohio’s accountability system, and lawmakers have promised to put a new Report Card system into law by the end of December.

In its ongoing efforts to improve student achievement, the Ohio General Assembly can benefit by understanding A-F accountability reforms in other states. Whereas Ohio’s current school rating system uses ambiguous terms like “effective,” “academic watch,” and “continuous improvement” to report on school and district performance, other states are moving towards easier-to-understand, A-F summative ratings. We at StudentsFirst recommend that states issue annual letter grades for all schools and districts based on student achievement. Implementing a letter grading system holds schools and districts accountable for the results they produce, provides parents with understandable information about the schools their children attend, and encourages school improvement efforts.

Done well, A-F rating systems place the focus on students by underscoring student achievement. Because the criteria used to determine school grades are objective and results-focused, educators are held accountable for their students’ progress. Many states that employ A-F school grading systems include proficiency scores, learning gains, and progress toward closing the achievement gap. To further improve these systems, states must also have the flexibility to include other indicators of achievement, such as graduation rates and SAT/ACT scores, which reflect college and career readiness.

School report cards help empower parents by making student and school performance more transparent and understandable. For example, when school report cards are distributed in an attendance area where a school is rated as “F,” for “failing,” the parents of the students at that school and all community members are empowered by the information. School letter grading systems can provide Ohio parents with easy-to-understand information, just like their child’s report card. And by issuing grades to schools, parents can more easily compare performance between schools and districts in their area, as well as their own school’s performance over time. This information is necessary to understand the quality of education options available to Ohio families.

In addition to providing parents with more information, an A-F grading systems give schools and districts an incentive to work toward improving student achievement. When grades are published and publicly available, schools and districts cannot hide from their performance as they can under Ohio’s ambiguous and euphemistic designations such as “continuous improvement” (C) and “academic watch” (D). Along with school accountability, states can use these systems to determine strategies for turning around schools that are continuously low performing, which could include requiring a school improvement plan or allowing the state, or even a mayor or some other local authority, to take over management and operations of the schools when they receive a failing grade. Toward that end, Ohio should require three year improvement plans for all schools receiving a grade of D or F – as was proposed in Senate Bill 316 – in an effort to raise student achievement in troubled schools. Adopting such policies would provide immediate steps for improving more than 350 Buckeye State school buildings.[1]

Ohio would not be alone in implementing an improvement plan for schools receiving failing grades. In Arizona, for example, schools that are assigned a grade of “D” must submit an improvement plan to the Arizona Department of Education. In New Mexico, parents with students enrolled in schools that receive a grade of “F” during two of the last four years have the right to transfer them to any public school in the state that’s better performing or to enroll them in a distance learning program through a statewide or local cyber academy. Furthermore, the New Mexico Department of Education ensures that schools and districts that received grades of “D” and “F” are dedicating resources to programs linked to improved student achievement at least until the school earns a grade of “C” or better for two consecutive years.

Other states, such as Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee have begun moving toward an A-F school report card system by including it as a component of their ESEA waiver. Alabama, Indiana and Utah already have A-F school report cards in place similar to those used by Florida, New Mexico and Arizona.

In 1999, Florida became the first state to implement school grading. When it first began grading schools, the state had more schools receiving D and F than it did A and B, which constituted just 21 percent of the school grades. A decade later, however, there were ten times as many A schools in Florida as there were D and F schools. In 2010, 74 percent of Florida’s schools earned a grade of A or B, and the bar for achieving these higher grades has been raised four times The chart below shows the results of Florida’s letter grading policy. The dotted lines indicate the times when the standard for achieving a grade was raised. This improvement in achievement shows that transparent school accountability systems do in fact produce higher-quality schools.

Source: Foundation for Excellence in Education, “Florida’s Education Revolution,” accessed September 25, 2012.

Over the past three years, Ohio has become a leader in education reform by passing legislation that strives to put students first. With important measures such as rigorous annual evaluations for teachers and principals, clear accountability measures for charter schools, and a comprehensive reform plan to improve schools in Cleveland, Ohio is taking steps toward improving student achievement. Implementing an A-F school grading system is another pivotal step in improving Ohio’s education system and will keep the Buckeye State at the forefront of education reform.

The legislature did dedicate $13 million in competitive funding to support the new mandate, and last week the State Board of Education mulled recommending $105 million to support the law in the Ohio Department of Education’s FY2014-15 budget request. But would more money make a difference? Let’s take a look at the relationship between funding and reading achievement in the past.

Ohio had a reading guarantee on the books more than a decade ago (it was watered down before taking effect). At that time, with a governor (Taft) who had taken on improving early literacy skills as a primary policy objective and with the state coffers flush, Ohio poured millions into literacy improvement programs and professional development for teachers (via programs like OhioReads, the State Institutes for Reading Instruction, adolescent literacy grants, and summer intervention programs – to say nothing of federally funded efforts like Reading First). Chart 1 shows state funding for literacy improvement initiatives and reading professional development, from FY2000-01 (Governor Taft’s first budget) to FY2012.

Chart 1: Dedicated state spending on literacy improvement initiatives and professional development, FY2000 to FY2012

Source: Legislative Services Commission, Budget in Detail and Budget Final Fiscal Analysis, FY2000-01 to FY2012-13, accessed 9/19/12; includes line items GRF 200- 433, 445, 450, 513, 551, and 566 (minus unrelated set-asides).

At the peak in 2003, Ohio was spending more than $90 million dollars to support young readers in the schools. Governor Taft’s pet initiative, OhioReads, was sending more than $30 million directly to schools to support early reading efforts and had more than 50,000 community members statewide volunteering in some 1,600 schools as reading tutors. And student achievement was on the rise – the statewide passage rate on the fourth-grade reading test had increased 10 percentage points in four years, to 66.3 percent. Chart 2 shows the statewide proficiency rate on the fourth-grade reading test from the 1999-2000 school year to 2010-2011.

Chart 2. Statewide fourth-grade reading proficiency rate, 1999-2000 to 2010-11

Source: Ohio Department of Education interactive Local Report Card, accessed 9/19/12

The gains were impressive in the early years after the state focused in on helping students learn to read: After five years, the state’s pass rate had increased 20 percentage points. Then progress stalled and the pass rate inched up just seven more points over the next six years. Funding dropped big-time after 2003 (at the hands of both Republican and Democratic governors) and eventually zeroed out in 2011. Did that drop stall students’ reading achievement gains?

Perhaps. However, much of what the state funded in the early 2000s didn’t “disappear” with the dollars. Teachers could still use what they learned during professional development. Books, computer programs, and other student-reading supports were still in the schools. And community volunteer tutoring programs continued without state funding in many schools until recent years.

I’m not sure I believe that the state should invest much more money toward the guarantee. Teaching kids to read is one of the most fundamental jobs of our public schools, a primary reason why they exist. And though this law is new, the state made the importance of teaching reading clear more than twelve years ago.

Yet, the data here seem to indicate that an infusion of well-targeted money early on could spur a boost in achievement. If state leaders do opt to fund the reading guarantee, they should do so in the short-term – give districts money to ramp up their K-3 reading improvement efforts but make it known that the money is going away in X number of years.

And, as an editorial in today’s Columbus Dispatch, points out, that doesn’t necessarily mean infusing “new” money into the system

… a major infusion of new cash might not be needed. Florida, which has seen academic performance rise steadily since introducing its third-grade guarantee in 2003, paid for much of the new intervention services with funds that were diverted from other education programs.

Ohio lawmakers should consider such re-prioritizing when a new budget is hashed out next spring. They also should learn from this first year of the program, in which schools will get a better idea of what they need to carry out the guarantee. The legislature should tweak the law as schools learn more about implementing it.

Schools have no lack of high-priority needs, but few are as important as ensuring that children can read proficiently. Research shows that students who begin fourth grade with sub-par reading skills are more likely to fail in later grades and eventually drop out. That’s a lot more destructive to a student’s future than repeating the third grade.

The Windy City is the moment’s education show pony. The drama of Chicago’s teachers’ strike, chalk-full of a furious teacher’s union, the tough-talking mayor Rahm Emmanuel, and the veil of presidential politics have shone the spotlight on Chicago. For four days during the week of September 11 to 17 the strike made the front page of The New York Times. As theatrical show—yes, with some substance to boot—one cannot get much better than Chicago, September 2012.

The Windy City is the moment's education show pony, but the workhorses of Ohio continue to plow ahead.

While the show’s been going on in Chicago, the workhorses of Ohio continue to plow ahead. In Dayton, education leaders are working toward higher quality charter schools, are implementing blended learning models into their classrooms, and are worrying about a fair and efficient school funding plan. In a Sunday news article, the Dayton Daily News highlighted the DECA charter schools, which includes a newly-opened elementary school (sponsored by Fordham) and a high school. DECA serves mostly economically-disadvantaged students from inner-city Dayton; yet, despite this challenge, the school received the state’s highest rating, “Excellent with Distinction” (A+), on its 2010-11 report card—the last year ratings were given to Ohio’s schools.

Also in Sunday’s paper was a recap of a recent roundtable moderated by the Dayton Daily News, during which local educators and education stakeholders discussed the hottest schooling topics. The conversation, which included Fordham’s Terry Ryan, revolved around issues in blended learning, school choice, and school funding. Springfield Local School District superintendent David Estrop, for example, spoke about the opening of a district-sponsored virtual school. The school offers instructional choices that include traditional teacher-led instruction, blended learning, and online courses. For districts like Springfield to survive, Estrop asserts, “it’s innovate or perish.”

"It's innovate or perish" for schools like Springfield Local

Meanwhile, in Columbus, the state auditor continues his investigation of schools’ tampering with student attendance records. The auditor’s office has found that as many as 50,000 student test scores—equivalent to the size of Columbus City Schools—were excluded from a schools’ performance report card. The auditor’s office is presently investigating which scores were legitimately excluded and which were not. In a September 16 article, the Columbus Dispatch revealed further the extent of the alleged fraud. The article indicates the possible principal involvement in fraudulently removing student records in a few of Columbus City Schools’ buildings. The auditor’s tedious and costly investigation of serious student attendance record fraud should cause major reform in how schools enter, control for, and report accountability data. 

As the education world’s eyes fixate on Chicago at the moment, let’s not forget that significant and important education policy changes are happening in our own backyard. Ohio’s workhorses—whether they’re charter school leaders like Judy Hennessey of DECA, public school superintendents like David Estrop, or the host of investigators from the auditor’s office—are doing the yeoman’s work of making better quality education possible for more of the Buckeye State’s students.

Yet the crowd out effect isn’t limited to public versus private finance. It’s been examined in light of graduate school enrollment (does enrolling more international students crowd out native students?); the labor force (do overeducated workers crowd out jobs for low-skilled workers?); and even charitable donations (do government grants to nonprofits crowd out private donors?).

Crowding out can occur in K-12 education expenditures also, especially with respect to special education spending. Each additional dollar a district spends on special education may mean one less dollar for general education.

To examine at a glance whether special education is crowding out general education, I calculate the ratio of general education to special education spending for ten districts in Ohio. This ratio indicates how many general education dollars a district spends for every dollar of special education. I then compare the ratio of general education to special education for FY 2002 and FY 2011. A declining ratio provides evidence that special education may have crowded out general education, and vice-versa, an increasing ratio provides no evidence of crowd out.

The table below shows ten districts and their general education to special education spending ratio. The results indicate that, for eight of the ten districts, special education may have crowded out general education spending.

Consider Celina City school district, located in rural Mercer County in Northwest Ohio. In 2002, the district spent $4.60 on general education per $1.00 of special education; meanwhile, ten-years later, the district spent only $3.33 on general education per $1.00 of special education. This indicates that increased special education spending has reduced the money available for general education.

Cleveland Metropolitan, Columbia, Lima, Oakwood, Olentangy, and Trimble also have declining general education to special education ratios. But interestingly, two districts, Dayton City and Minford, had increasing ratios—data that indicate that special education has not crowded out general education in these districts.

Table 1: Districts spending less on general education relative special education. General education spending per $1 of special education spending, FY 2002 and FY 2011

Source: Ohio Auditor of State, Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, FY 2002 and FY 2011 for selected districts. Note: Calculation based on Total Government Funds, as reported in the districts’ Statement of Revenues, Expenditures, and Changes in Fund Balances - Government Funds.

The preliminary analysis here (yes, it’s far from complete—there are over 600 traditional public districts in Ohio) provides an early indication that, for the majority of districts, special education spending has crowded out general education during the past decade. This means that district’s core science, math, and English classes are being crunched, while special education services are swelling. In other words, the resources for the regular student population are languishing relative special education—a policy issue that should concern educators, parents, and taxpayers.

The problem of special education crowd out begs for solutions. And for solutions, we’ve turned to Nathan Levenson, a former district superintendent, a Harvard MBA, and a nationally-recognized expert in special education, who has written an Ohio-specific and national analysis of how to improve the cost-effectiveness of special education (see more below). For every district wrestling with increased special education costs—and given the data, it’s probably quite a few districts—these reports are well worth the read.

Ohio’s “attendancegate” began in June when the Columbus Dispatch reported that Columbus Public Schools’ staff had erased more than 2.8 million student-absence days from its attendance system dating back to the 2006-07 school year and instead marked those students as having withdrawn, then reenrolled, in the district. According to the Dispatch, key central office administrators were each responsible for tens of thousands of deletions. The changes would not only improve attendance records (one performance indicator on state report cards), but also could improve proficiency test scores. Only the test scores of those students who are continuously enrolled in a school from October until state tests are administered in the spring are included in the school's overall test scores and report card rating. For example, if a child moves among multiple schools during the year, his performance only "counts" at the state level, and does not apply to a particular school or district. Likewise, if school staff altered the attendance record of a child to make it appear as though the child briefly withdrew from the school, his performance wouldn't hurt the school's overall test-passage rates or attendance figures.

Less than a month after the story broke on Columbus it was reported that Toledo City Schools and Lockland City Schools (a small district near Cincinnati) had also “scrubbed” attendance records to improve their state report cards. In response to what appeared to be systemic attendance-data fraud in Ohio, State Auditor David Yost announced that his office would “scrutinize the data reported by every school district and school in the state.” This is certainly an audacious undertaking, but one warranted by the potential scale of the problem and the high stakes involved. In late August the State Board of education voted to delay the release of school report cards while the auditor investigated the allegations.

The state auditor is first focusing on schools whose attendance data appear to be outliers, then will use those findings to inform a fuller investigation into all schools statewide. The auditor’s office has also raised the idea that the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) might be complicit in the scandal, stating, “In short, it appears that attendance report rigging is not a localized problem with Columbus Public Schools, but that it may be more systemic – and that raises the question of what role ODE played during the time that false reports were made by multiple schools.” According to the auditor, falsely reporting attendance data is a violation of both state and federal law and some school officials across the state could ultimately face criminal charges as well as lose their educator licenses.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of district and school leaders (the state’s 350+ charters are also under scrutiny) are upset that their schools are being tarred by this scandal. Further, they are angry because many of them have to go to voters in November to seek operating levies and there is a cloud of suspicion hanging over their efforts. School districts are asking the state auditor to quickly review their attendance information so they can tell their communities they have played by the rules. And, many districts and charter schools that have worked hard to show academic success want to be able to show their voters, parents and students the results. For example, Superintendent Ed O’Reilly of Grandview Heights (a suburb of Columbus) told his local newspaper while he understood the need to ensure the accuracy of the state data, “I am disappointed that those of us that are willing to certify the accuracy of our data our forced to wait for our results.” O’Reilly’s district is expecting to meet all 26 standards on the report card and to earn the state’s highest academic rating of Excellent or Excellent with Distinction (aka, A or A+).

High-performing charter schools are also being hurt by the scandal and the delay in the release of state report cards. Fordham, for example, authorized eight schools across the state last year and several of them have shown strong achievement gains that are going largely unnoticed. At least four of our schools – all of which serve student populations in which at least 70 percent of kids are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch – will be rated Effective (B) or better. And two of the schools have remarkable stories to share about their graduating eighth graders. Columbus Collegiate Academy, for example, saw 100 percent of its eighth graders proficient in math and reading last year, while KIPP Journey Academy had more than 80 percent of its eighth graders score proficient in both subjects. Yet, they have no report cards to share with their parents, funders, and supporters.

Auditor Yost updated the State Board of Education on the progress of his office’s investigation yesterday and said the work might not be wrapped up until early 2013 (though his team will try to finish up the investigation of districts with levies on the ballot before November). He said he doesn’t believe that “even most schools” are involved with the data tampering and encouraged the board to move forward with the release of the report cards.  According to Yost, doing so wouldn’t impede his work and, as he put it, if a school’s data were “bad” last year, they were probably bad in previous years as well. The board should heed the auditor’s advice, and if data change down the road based on the auditor’s work then report cards should be updated.  But continuing the delay only punishes the innocent.

What do you get when a group of creative and motivated students are empowered to tell the story of their charter school using video and music? You get a movie-style trailer that illustrates not only what the school means to them, but also what it's taught them. Check out DECA Prep's "coming soon" video, created and produced by DECA students, as are all their video materials.

In a world where cynicism and defeatism can rain down from the grown ups to the young people - and expect more of this in Ohio and elsewhere when "Won't Back Down" pemieres later this month - this bit of real life from imaginative and empowered young people is worth celebrating.

By making some common-sense changes to policies and practices, Ohio could both improve special education services and save money.

Can special education be done better while controlling its growth? This is a question we’ve been asked over and over by school leaders and superintendents who struggle to serve all children well while dealing with tighter and tighter budgets. For answers, in partnership with the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, we turned to Nathan Levenson, one of the country’s leading thinkers on doing more with fewer resources in special education and who has done extensive work with local school districts here in the Buckeye State and across the country. The result is a thought-provoking policy paper, Applying Systems Thinking to Improve Special Education in Ohio.

Levenson explains that Ohio’s resources for special education - $7 billion spent annually – are “siloed” not only across the K-12 education landscape but also across a dozen or more state and county agencies. In fact, he reports that “less than 50 percent of funds that help provide children receiving special education services are officially special education dollars.”

He suggests three major opportunities for making special education more efficient and better for students. Specifically, he recommends:

1. Expand the role of Educational Service Centers (ESCs) through the power of competition. Ohio’s 56 ESCs already work to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of services provided to students with special needs. The Buckeye State can build on this strength by creating an information infrastructure for entrepreneurial, results-oriented, high-performing Educational Service Centers to expand their geographic reach and the services they provide. The state department of education could accelerate this process by providing the performance and cost data of ESCs to both schools and parents – this would not only make them better informed consumers but also help foster competition for services.

2. Encourage the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) to help accelerate the shift to more results-oriented, cost-effective special education. Levenson recommends ODE revise its rules and policies regarding identification of students with disabilities and the certification and workload of the adults that serve them. Levenson shows how this sort of regulatory relief could save districts hundreds of millions of dollars while maintaining or even expanding services for students.

3. Make school districts the hubs of integrated services from many state and local agencies. Parents of students with disabilities first enter the world of special education through one of many entry points, often before their child enters Kindergarten and the traditional public schools. What is said, done, or promised for the one or two years before entering school can set the expectations for a child’s entire 15-year school career. Since school districts will provide most of a student’s education and special education services, they should be part of the planning of the services for a student with disabilities from the beginning.

Spending on special education has grown at double the pace of overall K-12 spending in Ohio in recent years, yet children receiving special education services struggle to perform well academically. By making some of the common-sense changes to state policies and local practices recommended by Levenson, Ohio could both save money on special education and improve the services that students receive.

Levenson provides concrete examples.

By lifting the current ban on the use of speech and language assistants for the state’s 30,000 students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs) that require only speech and language services, Ohio’s schools could save $100 million a year statewide and not reduce one minute of service to students.

Or Ohio could use funds and experts from the Department of Drug and Alcohol Addiction and the Department of Mental Health to provide counseling services in schools for eligible students. Levenson calls this a “Match Made in Heaven,” and describes how it could result in multiple benefits at lower costs including: a) better access for students, b) more expert counselors; c) more students served; and d) relief for school leaders who are currently asked to provide services to students they are ill-equipped to offer.

Levenson’s paper on special education in Ohio comes out the same day as his national Fordham Institute special education report, Boosting the Quality—and Efficiency—of Special Education. In the national paper Levenson makes broad recommendations for achieving efficiencies in special education across the country and suggests that small changes in practice could save more than $10 billion annually. This report also draws its conclusions from a national database on special education spending—the largest and most detailed such ever built.

Taken together, these two reports offer practical ideas for better-quality, more cost-effective special education services that will require multiple partners to work together, not alone. But by integrating t efforts, coordinating policies, and playing to strengths the many partners serving children with disabilities can do the work better and at less cost.  

Read the full report here.

The chart below shows that the State of Ohio has contributed far and away the most to Cleveland students’ education. Over the past ten years, Cleveland Municipal School District has received somewhere between one-half and three-fourths of its revenue from the state. In fact, the share of state contributions grew unabated from 2002 to 2009: from 53 percent in 2002 up to 72 percent in 2009. In the past two fiscal years, the share of state contributions fell slightly off its ten-year high, so that in 2011 the state contributed 65 percent of the district’s total revenue.

Source: Ohio Auditor of State, Cleveland Municipal School District 2011 Comprehensive Financial Annual Report (see SR-10 & 11). Note: Calculations do not include miscellaneous income, donations, fees, and investment income (combined, they comprise less than 5 percent of the district’s revenue).

Ex-state congressman Stephen Dyer laments on his blog this week that the state of Ohio has not provided sufficient-enough funding for the students of Cleveland. He writes:

The reason I harp on state money, not total money, Terry (and fellow critics) is because it's the state, not the local residents, which bears the Constitutional duty to fund education. Our local taxpayers have been overly responsible for this cost for too long.

Unless Mr. Dyer proposes an entirely-state-funded public education system (possible but unrealistic), it seems that in the case of Cleveland, the state kicks in a fair and, overall, increasing share of revenue.[1] Cleveland’s fiscal problem isn’t, therefore, the state of Ohio. Rather, Cleveland Municipal’s problem is that it’s located in a city with a rapidly declining inner-core, both economically and demographically, and that the district has failed to adjust its operations to meet these new conditions.

The state board’s decision to delay the release of school report cards was the right one.

The state board’s decision was the right one. They simply cannot make public extensive data about school performance unless they have faith in the accuracy of that information. However, the decision has widespread ramifications for Ohio’s districts, schools, and students. There are a number of policy provisions triggered by the annual report cards and the test data they are based on that will now be put on hold while the state awaits Auditor Yost’s findings.

Five major accountability policies are affected:

• Which schools are subject to mandatory turnaround: Public schools are ranked annually based on student achievement on state tests. Schools that land in the bottom five percent for three consecutive years, and which are rated D or F by the state, are subject to reconstitution.


• Which charter-school authorizers may open new schools: Similar to how schools are ranked, Ohio’s 70-some authorizers are ranked by their schools’ achievement, and the bottom twenty percent are not permitted to take on new schools the following school year.


• Which students are eligible for private school vouchers: Students whose address-assigned school has been rated D or F by the state for two of the past three years are eligible for one of 60,000 state-funded scholarships to attend private school instead.


• Where new charter schools can open: New, start-up charter schools may open only in Ohio’s eight large urban districts, in districts rated D or F by the state, or in districts that fall in the bottom five percent of all schools, based on student achievement.


• Which districts are eligible for a high-performance subsidy: The state pays an additional $17 per student to districts and charter schools that are rated A or A+ by the state.

Additionally, smaller decisions and policies are impacted. For example:

• Districts will be delayed in reporting academic progress for special initiatives and grants, like Race to the Top.


• Charter school authorizers will have less time to review school performance data to inform decisions about opening schools, closing them, or putting them on probation.


• While schools do have access to their raw achievement data via a secure online portal, they will not have any information about value-added progress until the data issue is resolved.


• Schools are required to give a copy of their most recent report card to parents when they enroll their child in the school. Until the new report cards come out, schools will have to distribute old report cards.


• Parents and taxpayers will have less time to consider school performance information to help them make decisions about where to send children to school and how to vote on November’s school levies.


• Schools that are early implementers of Ohio’s teacher evaluation mandate (which goes into effect for all schools next year) will be delayed in their efforts to incorporate student data into those evaluations; subsequent personnel decisions may be delayed as well.


• As long as the investigation is ongoing and report cards aren't released, districts that played by the rules are under the same shadow and suffering the same delays as districts that we already know tampered with data.

If the auditor winds down his investigation soon and confirmed data are released, this delay will have been more of a frustration than a serious impediment to various school improvement and accountability efforts. But that’s a best-case scenario. What if the investigation lingers on, past the fall? Or worse, what if the auditor finds that some districts have been tampering with enrollment records for years? That could call into question more than a decade of school performance data and the state and local decisions that were made based on them.

Starting in the 2014-15 school year, Ohio will replace its current K-12 academic standards in math and English language arts, along with the aligned standardized tests, with the Common Core academic standards and their aligned tests. In Ohio, these exams will be the PARCC exams.

The Common Core standards will differ significantly from Ohio’s current academic standards in content, emphases, and cognitive demand.[1] These standards promise greater rigor in what students are expected to learn and how their learning is applied; therefore, we can also expect that the Common Core’s aligned assessments—again, the PARCC exams—will be more difficult.

How much harder should we expect the PARCC exams to be? Take a look for yourself.

Figure 1 shows two sample questions from Ohio’s current seventh-grade math exam. (The Ohio Department of Education provides practice tests, which are accessible via the source link below the figure.) The questions are relatively simple: the first question tests whether a student understands ratios; the second question tests whether a student understands a basic algebraic equation. Although I wouldn’t suggest that the questions are necessarily “easy” (it took me a few minutes to calculate the answers), they are straightforward—and are basically one-dimensional (testing one concept at a time).

Research shows that not learning to read well in the early grades impacts students in later years.

Other states have enacted third-reading guarantees, Florida being the most notable example. The Sunshine State has had a guarantee in place for a decade, and the research on its impact is positive. In a study released earlier this year the Manhattan Institute’s Marcus Winters found that the benefits of Florida’s remediation were still apparent and substantial through seventh grade (which was as far as the data could be tracked). A new Brooking Institute paper by Harvard’s Martin West confirms these findings and shows that retaining students in the third grade who aren’t proficient in reading has long-term benefits for the students and little in terms of downsides.

Ohio’s new law has ample critics, from those who believe it takes too much decision-making power out of the hands of local educators and parents, to those who decry it an “unfunded mandate” on local schools. But critics and supporters of the policy alike should all agree on this point: The policy can benefit kids, but only if the schools and state do things differently.  

Here are three things that must change.

• Districts must take seriously the law’s requirement that they offer additional reading support to K-3 students who are identified as reading below grade level. High-quality, student-centered, intensive intervention—especially for first and second graders—should help more students read on grade level by the end of third grade and prevent mandatory retentions. Similarly, districts should consider retaining students earlier than third grade if they cannot read.  


• Districts should make prudent use of the law’s good-cause exceptions to advance students to fourth grade. Certain limited-English-proficient students and students with disabilities will be allowed to advance regardless of their performance on the state test, as will students who were previously held back in K-3. More importantly, the law allows the district to prove, with an assessment other than the state test, that a student is ready for fourth grade. This provision retains some power for local educators to have a say in determining which of their students are ready to move on, and which aren’t.


• Schools must engage parents early in the reading-intervention process, well before third grade. Doing so would encourage parents to be partners in their children’s reading development—potentially lessening the need for future intervention—and would prevent parents from being surprised come third grade that their child can’t read and is being held back.

Program implementation should be monitored by the Ohio Department of Education and, like in Florida, research should be conducted on the future academic performance of students who are retained and those who aren’t. The General Assembly should be willing to adjust the law as warranted based on these findings and district feedback. But the state should not be quick to scuttle the policy—in Florida it took several years before positive results were seen as students, schools, and parents adjusted to the new requirements.

Likewise, each biennium the state should revisit whether it should provide additional support via funding, professional development, or other resources to help schools serve struggling readers. As part of the new policy, the legislature provided a small amount of grant funding to help schools develop early literacy supports. Lawmakers must be willing to consider increasing this funding or providing other assistance to districts so that the law works as intended.

Ohio’s third-grade reading guarantee can and should have a positive impact on Ohio’s students. But it will require the ongoing cooperation and serious effort of local educators, state education leaders, and the state legislature alike to ensure that is the case. Starting now will make it more likely the policy will be effective in 2013 and beyond.

Q: Describe the Fordham Institute and your mission.

A: Thomas B. Fordham was a Dayton industrialist who died in 1944. His widow, Thelma Fordham Pruett, established the Ford-ham Foundation in his memory in 1959, and after she died in 1995, the modern foundation was launched by renowned educator Chester E. (“Checker”) Finn Jr. in 1997. Fordham’s mission is to improve primary and secondary education in Ohio and nationally. The institute is the sister organization of the foundation, and today we regard Ford-ham as a statewide education reform and advocacy group with one foot firmly planted in Dayton, which is also a key part of our “grounding in reality” that is crucial to our work statewide and nationally.

Q: What are some of the problems and challenges in education that the Institute is trying to address?

A: We work on a whole range of issues in public education. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve shared reports and organized public forums on issues ranging from the challenges of implementing new academic standards in mathematics and reading – the Common Core – to what digital learning opportunities may mean for students and schools, to doing more with less in American education.

Dayton, to its credit, has made some real gains in the quality of its high schools, but it still faces daunting achievement challenges.

Q: School funding is more of a problem than ever. Thoughts on fixing it? Where can intelligent cuts be made?

A: School funding has been a bane to politicians of all political persuasions since at least the 1990s. It is hard to fix because demographics conspire against us. Ohio’s population is aging and families with children are getting poorer. Competition for tax dollars is intense, and education is entering an era where it really does have to do more with less. As more than 70 percent of school spending goes to paying teachers, the only real way to make education slimmer over the long haul is by helping teachers become more productive. Maybe new learning technologies can help with this the same way technology has improved productivity across other sectors of the economy. But such transitions are not easy, especially for the public sector.

Q: What is your view on charter schools, and where they fit into the equation?

A: I support charter schools and Fordham actually sponsors 11 charters across the state (three in Dayton). Charters can provide an important safety valve for kids stuck in failing schools, and they offer space for innovation. But, as a group, charters in Ohio have done less well than in other states. The fact is, some of the best public schools in cities like Dayton, Columbus and Cleveland are charter schools, but so are some of the most troubled. The Dayton Early College Academy – a school sponsored by Dayton Public Schools – is a fantastic example of how charters can make a difference in the lives of needy kids. I think school districts and charters need to fight less and work together more because the needs of kids are great and resources are scarce.

Q: What advice do you have for a young person who is thinking of going into teaching today?

A: I’d suggest pursuing a rigorous four-year degree in math or science, and then apply to Teach for America to teach in some of America’s neediest schools for two years (including now in Dayton). If they find that they love teaching and are good at it, and they want to make it a career, then I’d say they should go for it. Teachers really do have the power to change lives, but it is a hard job that is not particularly lucrative. In fact, I think it is unrealistic to expect every teacher, or even most, to do the job for 25 or 30 years. The teaching profession needs to adjust itself to working with young professionals who will likely switch careers several times during their working years.

Q: Do communities really have the ability to fix ailing urban school districts? What would it take?

A: Very few cities in the country have been very successful at dramatically turning around their school districts. There are examples of districts that have gotten better – moving from troubled to hopeful – and I’d point to Cincinnati as an example. Dayton, to its credit, has made some real gains in the quality of its high schools, but it still faces daunting achievement challenges. There is no special formula to fixing schools or school districts. But some of the ingredients I’d suggest are strong political leadership at the top (think the mayor of Cleveland or New York City), an empowered superintendent free of school-board meddling who is allowed to lead (not just manage), a relentless district focus on student performance as measured by test scores, creative use of charter school laws and partners, an openness to alternatively trained teachers and school leaders, and a system that pushes resources, decision-making and responsibility down to the individual school and even classroom level.

Q: Is there any place in the nation that’s figured out good solutions to some of the challenges facing Ohio and Day-ton?

A: No one place has figured out a ready-made solution that states or cities can simply apply. But, there are some cities doing really innovative work to improve student achievement. Places like New Orleans, Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Houston, Boston and Denver. I point people to Reynoldsburg City School District, just east of Columbus, where the district is pushing a bold package of reforms while cutting its budget and improving student achievement. As states go, Indiana, Florida, Rhode Island, Delaware and Massachusetts seem to be making real progress. We should also steal ideas from high achieving countries like Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong. Education, like everything else, is increasingly globalized.  

Q: What do you like best about your job and the work you do?

A: The best part of my job is the fantastic people I get to work with and meet every day. I get to talk and learn from a number of amazing educators, researchers, community leaders, business people, philanthropists and politicians (Democrats and Republicans) in Dayton, across Ohio and across the country. These folks are working to make a difference in the lives of kids and families every day, and I am also inspired by the parents I meet who make sacrifices every day to give their kids something better than they had.

In the aftermath of “the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression,” the authors provide some interesting discoveries about our nation’s children. Overall national trends suggest that despite the impact of difficult economic times on children in the United States, things are slowly improving. Both child health and education have seen overall improvement. For child health, the number of children without health insurance has decreased by 20%. In education, areas such as 4th and 8th grade proficiency and on-time high school graduation have improved in recent years at the national level. 

Expectedly, economic well-being decreased for children after the recession, but initiatives like Race to the Top’s (RTTT) Early Learning Challenge and local programs that support children are attempting to curb the damage in my opinion. Specifically, Ohio’s $70 million RTTT initiative focuses primarily on kindergarten readiness and high quality, accountable programming. The Data Book ranked Ohio 18 of 50 states in its education factors; an encouraging point for our recent wave of policy changes. However, issues like the recession deepening the socioeconomic divide among children still need to be addressed. The authors plainly state that policies can “strongly influence children’s chances for success.” So for those Ohio districts and organizations doing “more with less” through collaborative efforts to focus on funding more critical areas, KIDS COUNT has not just provided the state of our children, but a reminder of our priorities as well.

Highland Parks Public Schools, a small district in Michigan that is one the state’s lowest-performers, is on the verge of financial collapse. It made news last week when officials there announced plans to outsource its schools to a private for-profit charter school operator. The district handed over operations to The Leona Group which runs 54 schools in five states; 22 of its schools are in Michigan. The Leona Group will now oversee decisions around the hiring of staff, school curriculum and instruction, as well as school facility and maintenance issues.

What led up to such drastic action and are more districts right behind Highland Parks Public Schools? A perfect storm of low enrollment, poor fiscal management, and some of the worst academic results in the state prompted Highland Parks Public Schools to take bold action. Since 2006 district enrollment has dropped by 58 percent, with only 989 students currently enrolled.  The district’s per-pupil spending of $16,508 far exceeds the state average of $9,202, and it faces a current deficit of $11 million with projections that it could grow another $4 million within a month.  In addition to the grave fiscal situation, Highland Parks has failed academically.  Only 22 percent of the district’s third graders are proficient in reading and in math the situation is even worse: only 10 percent of students perform at or above the proficient level.

By outsourcing its schools to The Leona Group, Highlands Park Public Schools hopes to save and turnaround a district that is on life support. While the Leona Group academic performance record isn’t glowing, it has managed to achieve a graduation rate of above 85 percent in several Detroit high schools. The Leona Group currently operates ten charter schools in Ohio, of which all but two have dismal academic ratings.

Things are so bad in Highland Parks it makes since to take a risk on Leona. And, next door in Ohio we will be paying attention to how this works out because several Buckeye State districts are facing similar financial and academic woes, possibly making them good candidates for a similar approach. Five Ohio districts are currently on the fiscal emergency list with declining enrollment and higher than average student expenditures.

Furthermore, one of the state’s largest and perennially troubled districts -- Cleveland Metropolitan School District--could be a prime candidate for a charter takeover if its levy request fails this fall. CMSD is seeking a 15 mill levy from taxpayers, a large chunk of which would go to restore 50 previously cut minutes of instruction to every school day.  A recent five-year forecast from the CMSD paints a dismal picture for the district. Average Daily Membership for the district is forecasted to decline by almost five thousand students in the next four years. The current tax collection rate of 80.9 percent will most likely remain the same if not worsen, and for FY 2013 a $66 million deficit is projected, worsening to $151.7 million in FY 2014. These financial miseries combined with chronically anemic student performance data could be cause for Cleveland to face tough medicine likes schools in Highlands Park. Voters in Cleveland should pay close attention to what’s going on in Michigan as their choice in November’s levy will have a real impact on who runs their schools.  

This is important to remember as Ohio deals with a widening scandal around allegations of “data fudging” and “manipulation of attendance records” to improve test scores and school report cards. Some Buckeye State educators and lawmakers have suggested that the underlying problem here is accountability, or that the state’s report card has taken on “way too much importance.” Accountability, however, is not the problem. The Columbus Dispatch editorial board got it exactly right when writing:

It’s true that the report card is short of perfect; it is an attempt to tell an extremely complex story – how effective a school district is, allowing for all of its advantages and disadvantages – in a few numbers and phrases. But even so, it is a valuable tool to ensure that educators strive for improvement. To back off now would be harmful.

In the short term, the state must investigate these allegations; and if school employees are found to have wrongly manipulated data, they should be dealt with accordingly.

In the longer term, Ohio should make improvements to its accountability system, and what it reports on school and student success. The state has made a serious commitment to this effort by embracing not only the Common Core academic standards in English language arts and mathematics but also by committing itself to working with 22 other states in developing next-generation K-12 assessments in both core subjects by 2015. Ohio is also working to develop new standards in science and social studies, and new assessments for these subjects will also come online in 2015.

Is there pressure on educators to improve their craft and help improve student performance? Yes and it is appropriate.

If Ohio stays true to its commitments, many of the state’s school buildings and districts will see a drop in their report card ratings. State Superintendent Stan Heffner shared data at our February 2012 Common Core event that showed the percentage of third graders proficient in reading would drop from 80 percent under current standards to about 35 percent under the Common Core, while in math it would drop even further, from 82 to 26 percent. The numbers are equally stark in other grades.

Such numbers are not an attack on schools or on the performance of educators, but rather a truthful recognition that our students, educators, and schools need to elevate their performance in coming years. We have been deceiving ourselves and our children. The U.S. leads the world in annual spending on its schools, but our kids are falling further and further behind other countries in math and science scores.

Is there pressure on educators to improve their craft and help improve student performance? Yes and it is appropriate. Too many of our students aren’t making the progress they need to be successful.

But, just as educators and students need to improve their performance so does our accountability system. This means not only adopting new standardized assessments through PARCC, but also expanding how we measure success and report it through our state report cards. Ohio was one of the first states to incorporate value-added measures into its school report cards. These should be expanded to additional grades and subjects (currently, valued-added results are available in reading and math, for grades four through eight). Test scores, both in terms of absolute achievement and growth, should be included in any sort of revamped report card.

But, other indicators of success beyond state test scores could also be incorporated. This is especially needed in how high school success is gauged. The Ohio Graduation Test is set at or below a ninth-grade achievement level in both math and reading. Superintendents have long argued for a more meaningful approach to measuring high school student success by using a basket of indicators like ACT/SAT scores, AP test performance, college entrance rates, college remediation rates, and the persistence of students in higher education. Ohio already collects much of this information to some degree on its high schools. For graduates who don’t go to college the state could use Department of Labor and other data systems to track what happens to students who enter the workforce or the armed services.

Ohio can take advantage of the spotlight being shined on its accountability system to revamp and improve how it rates school and school district performance. Next generation report cards should include test scores, growth measures, and other objective measures of success. Getting the mix just right will take time and require modifications along the way. But everyone benefits by knowing how well our schools are doing and how they can get better.

In 2010, McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, published a blistering report of America’s teaching profession. McKinsey found that, in comparison to countries with high-flying education systems, America has a woeful teacher workforce: too many American teachers come from the bottom of their graduating college class, while too few top-performing college students consider teaching—much less enter the profession.

With these teacher quality issues in mind, I wanted to see how future grad-school education students fared on their GREs, the grad-school admissions exam. Educational Testing Service (ETS) administers the GRE, and in its summary statistics report, ETS breaks down test results by the test-taker's intended major—with education as a possible selection.

How did America’s future educators fare? Consider figure 1 which compares the average GRE score by intended grad-school major across two exam sections: quantitative (math) and verbal. On the left, education majors rank dead last in average quantitative score, even behind mathematically-challenged English and philosophy majors (they’re part of the humanities category). On the right side of figure 1, we observe that education majors rank in a tie for third-to-last in verbal score, falling well behind their peers in the humanities and social sciences. It’s a relief, however, to know that future educators (many of whom will teach reading and writing) at least outscore engineers and accountants in their verbal skills.

Figure 1: Average GRE score by intended major and test section, August 2011 to April 2012

Source: Educational Testing Service. Note: Score range is 130 and 170. Overall average (quantitative) is 151.3. Overall average (verbal) is 150.8.

What's shown here reinforce the concerns about teacher talent that McKinsey and The New Teacher Project have documented. According to the GRE data, many lower-performing college grads will be entering graduate schools of education, and eventually, the teaching profession. Three strategies to address this human capital problem have and should be further explored:   

• First, the education sector should recruit the smartest and retain the most proven teachers—as McKinsey and The New Teacher Project recommend. This strategy has already given birth to programs such as Teach For America, a national organization that recruits from some of America’s top universities and which will come to Ohio beginning this fall.

• Second, university-level schools of education should develop stronger curricula that emphasize content mastery over pedagogy. As the GRE test scores indicate, grad-school education majors tend to have especially weak math skills and merely average verbal skills; consequently, schools of education must add a strong dose of reading, writing, and arithmetic just to get their students up to par.  

• Third, state boards of education should toughen teaching licensure requirements. Here in Ohio, for example, aspiring early and elementary education teachers are not required to pass a teacher-license exam in any subject area (e.g., English or math). Instead, they only have to pass tests that assess teaching and child development knowledge. The Ohio Board of Education should consider requiring all teachers—from elementary to high school—to pass a content-area exam.

These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and all need to be exploited as pathways to a stronger teaching workforce. With the Common Core standards—which will require deeper content knowledge of our nation’s teachers—looming on the horizon, teacher talent should remain fixed at the top of the ed-reform docket. And in the Buckeye State, which will implement the Common Core in 2014, there should be greater urgency in rethinking how our future teachers are selected, trained, licensed, and retained. There should be no place for teachers who can’t do math, read, and write well: how can one teach well, if one hasn’t learned?

Ask most people about innovation and they’ll probably talk about products—airplanes, laptops, smartphones. But innovation also refers to process. That’s what blended learning is for education. It turns the process of teaching upside down.

Today, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in partnership with Knowledge Works and Reynoldsburg School District, welcomed Anthony Kim, founder and CEO of Education Elements, to Ohio. Founded in 2010, Education Elements is a California-based company that advises schools on how to adopt and implement blended learning models. Education Elements has assisted charters (KIPP Los Angeles), traditional public school districts (Houston Independent School District), and parochial schools (Mission Dolores Academy in San Francisco).

Anthony Kim, founder and CEO of Education Elements

Kim began the conversation with an audience that included superintendents, teachers, lawmakers, and state board members by describing his blended learning model. According to Kim, blended learning has three goals:

• To differentiate teaching by breaking the classroom into smaller groups
• To increase the collection and use of student achievement data to improve teaching
• To create more efficient schools

How does blended learning achieve these goals?

First, blended learning can address some of the challenges of teaching students who read, write, and do math at different levels. Blended learning deploys a classroom rotation model: students are first broken into groups and then these groups rotate through different work stations throughout the school day.

Kim presented a three-station model, in which station one is where teacher instruction happens (e.g., lecture), station two is where students work on team projects, and station three is where self-paced digital learning occurs. In a blended learning environment, students would be working at all three stations simultaneously. This hybrid approach enables teachers to cluster their students by ability and to create a more balanced approach to student learning—not all lecture, not all team-project, and not all computer-based learning.

Second, blended learning can increase the collection and application of student achievement data. Because up to a third of a student’s learning is done digitally, teachers can immediately look at results from informal, online student assessments. Thus, the student-teacher “feedback loop” is reduced.

Third, blended learning can handle larger class sizes, which improves school efficiency. Because the blended learning model divides classes into smaller groups—some students here, others there—larger classes can be taught with potentially fewer instructors.

Blended learning is a completely different process of teaching. It’s clearly not your parents’ education: gone is the teacher as omniscient lecturer, with students quietly sitting—or sleeping—at their desks.

But does it work? It’s still very much an open question, since blended learning is so new. (The first blended learning schools came online around 2008.) Certainly, the fact that some of this country's best charters use blended learning attests to its effectiveness– but these are also schools with an ingrained culture of innovation and tech-savvy teachers.

For blended learning to work on a larger scale, traditional school cultures would need to change radically (something Kim acknowledges). And this type of change would require visionary school leaders who can secure the buy-in from teachers who would use this model. Will any of Ohio’s educational leaders be daring enough to deploy this cutting-edge model in their schools? Only time will tell.

Correction (7/30/12): A previous edition of this post reported that Education Elements had partnered with Rocketship. That is not the case and the mention has been removed.

Anthony Kim's PowerPoint presentation

Governor Bush said that the more rigorous Common Core standards, if backed up by equally rigorous assessments, will show that only one in three children in America would qualify as college or career ready. Bush warned that such bluntness about the poor health of American education and student achievement will trigger serious political backtracking. He said, “My guess is there’s going to be a lot of people running for cover and they’re going to be running fast.”

But, as Governor Bush and other speakers during the two day conversation argued, running away from the Common Core would be a huge mistake and a serious step back for the country, its children, and its future. This, in fact, was the overwhelming feeling of the group of business leaders gathered in Orlando. A recurring message throughout the event was that states must move forward with the Common Core, and that business must be a key champion for the effort, especially when the going gets tough.

Several speakers warned that if the Common Core effort fails it will result in the further eroding of America's international competitiveness. During breakout sessions business leaders from some of the largest, most innovative and successful companies in the world – General Electric, IBM, Boeing, Disney World, Apple Inc., and Intel – lamented that they had good jobs in American factories and offices they couldn’t fill because they couldn’t find candidates with the required math and science skills to do the work.

In fact, it was reported, "during the last recession there were 3 million jobs that went unfilled because there were not enough prepared workers to do the work." This was backed up by findings in the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness report Road Map to Renewal that read, “When asked about skilled production jobs, 74% of businesses said that workforce shortages or skills deficiencies were having a negative impact on their ability to expand operations or improve productivity. In the US Manufacturing sector, a recent survey of 94 CEOs estimated the total impact of the skilled labor shortage at $4.7 billion, an average loss of $50 million per manufacturing firm."

The most sobering presentation given in Orlando was by Dr. William H. Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University (and one of the lead authors of the Common Core State Standards in mathematics). Schmidt shared data from his book Inequality for All that reported it isn’t just America’s lowest performing students who are falling further behind, but even our best students are increasingly mediocre in international comparisons. According to Schmidt, "our top 5 percent of students are in the middle of international comparisons in mathematics." He attributed our problem to fragmented and fractured curriculum. Schmidt said that schools in the United States teach math in “largely incoherent and illogical ways.” In fact, according to Schmidt, the U.S. curricular philosophy has been totally out of whack for years and because of this there has been very little coherence in the teaching of mathematics. Not surprising then that 15-year-olds in more than 20 countries had higher mathematics achievement scores than our kids on international assessments in 2009. 

Schmidt said the Common Core mathematics standards tackle this fragmented nature of learning by creating a far more logical, visible and coherent approach to teaching mathematics over multiple years of instruction. Schmidt shared slides showing how the Common Core is benchmarked internationally and said there is “90% overlap between the Common Core and the standards used by international top-performers.” He went on to say, despite what critics may content (see here), that the Common Core standards in mathematics are better “than even what the highest performing states now have.” He concluded by saying if we can get the assessments right and stay true to rigorous cut scores then states now have it within their grasps to finally start improving student achievement in mathematics.

But, it wasn’t just business leaders, former governors, and researchers that spoke to the group in Orlando about the importance of the Common Core. Teacher union leaders Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA and Randi Weingarten of the AFT also joined the conversation and expressed their support, and that of their members, for the Common Core. David Coleman, a leading architect of the Common Core and future president of the College Board, told the gathering, “We wouldn’t have the Common Core without Randi and Dennis.” Both union heads shared that their members support the Common Core, but that there are real concerns and issues around ensuring that teachers are actually prepared to teach to these more rigorous standards. Schmidt shared survey findings during this presentation that showed, “Our teachers are not prepared to teach these more rigorous standards and they don’t know it yet.” Schmidt warned that teachers still have a superficial knowledge about how the new standards will dramatically differ from the current standards.   

Van Roekel said that over the long haul teacher “quality at the front door is huge.” We need better candidates getting into teaching. Governor Bush concluded his comments on the same theme when he said “the Common Core presents a golden opportunity for innovators, especially those who can come up with new and better alternatives for preparing teachers.”

Business is coming around to the importance of the Common Core and why their voice in supporting it is critical. Business leadership can help ensure that state lawmakers and educational leaders keep a stiff spine when the going gets tough and test scores across the country tank. The fact is that the Common Core will expose further just how misaligned education is to the needs of our children, our economy, and our society. It is going to take strong voices across the spectrum to stay the course, and kudos to the business community for joining the fray.

While new policies can be exciting, school officials are finding them challenging to implement. HB 153 requires both principal and teacher evaluations. For the latter, at least 50 percent of a teacher’s rating must be dependent on student academic growth. The process also includes at least two observations and a conference before and after each observation for each evaluation. Superintendents have raised eyebrows at the estimated 15-20 hours per-teacher time commitment these rigorous evaluations may require. To meet these time requirements, Frontier Local School District’s Board of Education approved the transfer of a principal from one school to serve as part-time assistant principal at another.

Other Ohio districts can begin thinking creatively about these issues before they adopt this policy in 2013. For districts already short-staffed, it will take strategic planning to conduct these evaluations properly. However, contract language can have a significant impact on how time consuming evaluations become – because-- all teachers may not have to be evaluated every year and the bill does not specify who must conduct evaluations. In Wolf Creek, the superintendent is brainstorming ways to lessen the burden on principals and considering outside support. However, even this has its drawbacks. Wolf Creek stressed the importance of finding someone who understands the district’s philosophy and has done more than simply “meet the state requirements for an evaluator.” Since every district is a little different (and with Ohio having more than 600 districts and roughly 350 charter schools), it is not hard to understand why being familiar with their particular nuances is an advantage.

Nuances or none, all Ohio districts will soon have to face these issues, and may begin to question whether it’s worth the trouble. Where the pilot may work well in some districts, it may not be a good fit in others. Wolf Creek, for example, claims to not have the problem the new system primarily aims to fix (poor teachers staying in the classroom). Some may find the time devoted to evaluations superfluous. Some may run into staffing complications. Others may dread additional costs associated with measuring the 50 percent student growth component in non state-tested subjects. In any case, tough decisions must be made and stakeholders will definitely be keeping a close watch on how these pilot districts fare in the upcoming school year.

Why the agreement? It’s because the standard matters.

So in Ohio, charters are "bad" compared to what standard? To answer, I take a slice of data from Cleveland to look at the performance of its charter schools relative two comparison groups. First, I compare how Cleveland’s charters stack up against Cleveland Municipal School District (the city’s traditional public school). Second, I compare Cleveland's charters against a broader set of public districts--all districts in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland Municipal, poorer inner-ring suburban districts, and some affluent suburban districts.

I use the fourth grade math proficiency rate—essentially, the proportion of students who “pass” Ohio’s annual standardized test in a given grade and subject—for the 2010-11 school year. And by using what’s called a “z-score” in statistics, I calculate how far each school's proficiency rate is above or below the average proficiency (pass) rate.[1] A school with a positive score has an above-average proficiency rate; vice-versa, a school with a negative score has a below-average rate.

Figure 1 shows how charters compare against their district peers. Each bar indicates a school: charters are shown in red and district schools in grey. The vertical axis indicates schools’ z-scores—again, indicating how far their proficiency rate is from the group average proficiency rate.

On the left chart (figure 1A), Cleveland charters are pretty evenly distributed above and below the average. Conclusion: Cleveland’s charters do just about the same as their district peers. So far so good; but remember, Cleveland Municipal is one of Ohio’s worst traditional public school districts and consistently one of the nation’s worst urban districts. For now, put the champagne on ice—performing on par with one of the worst districts in Ohio and the nation should be no cause for celebration for charters.

When I expand the geographic scope to all Cuyahoga County (figure 1B), charters, as a group, do worse. More charters fall below the average line and fewer remain above the average line. Note the greater density of the red lines below zero. The rise in the average proficiency rate when higher-performing suburban schools are included causes this downward shift. In other words, when the standard gets higher, charters do worse. (Consider, though, that a few charters compete with the best schools in this group. But these remain the “Needles in the Haystack.”)

Figure 1: Fourth grade math proficiency rates, scaled to the average rate, 2010-11. (A) Cleveland charters versus Cleveland Municipal School District schools. (B) Cleveland charters versus Cuyahoga County public school districts, inclusive of Cleveland Municipal. Data source: Author’s calculations based on Ohio Department of Education data.

Have Ohio’s charters “done badly?” Depends on your standard. If you favor low standards, then perhaps there’s no reason for concern. As a group, Cleveland’s charters fail just the same as their peers in Cleveland Municipal. But if the standard is high—for charters to outclass schools across their county and state—then charters, as a whole, disappoint. I’ll stick with high standards.

With every financial scandal and every school closing due to academic failure, Ohio’s charters face greater and greater scrutiny—as they should.

With a prominent global publication taking our charter schools to task, readers around the world—from New York City to London to Tokyo—now know what many of us locally know too well. Ohio’s charter sector has failed to deliver. Despite some exceptional schools (e.g., DECA in Dayton, Constellation Schools and Breakthrough in Cleveland, KIPP and Columbus Collegiate Academy in Columbus), charters in Ohio—as a group—have far too often disappointed students and parents who placed their hopes in these schools. With every financial scandal and every school closing due to academic failure, Ohio’s charters face greater and greater scrutiny—as they should.

We’ve repeatedly recognized here, here, here, here, and here that Ohio’s charters have, as a whole, not delivered and need improvement. Other states do it better. We’ve argued in a 2006 report to lawmakers, in a 2010 book, in numerous op-eds, and in public testimony to lawmakers that Ohio’s charter sector needs reform through smarter accountability, consolidating the state’s 80-plus authorizers, and actively recruiting talent and successful school models to the Buckeye State. We’ve urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would close failing charters quickly and raise the standards for who can open schools in the first place. We’ve partnered with community leaders in Dayton, Columbus, and Sciotoville to open and run quality charter schools, but we readily admit there is more we can do as an authorizer and supporter of charter schools.

Though not a direct or substantiated attack on Ohio’s charters, The Economist’s oblique shot should be a wake-up call for Ohio’s charter schools. Charters are working better for students in other parts of the country, as The Economist reports. The problem in Ohio, however, isn’t with the charter school model itself; rather, it’s often the talent and even integrity of the people running the schools, the strength of the governing boards and authorizers overseeing the schools, and too-little appreciation by lawmakers that accountability for performance is just as important as choice itself.

Here’s to a brighter future for Ohio charters—and we at Fordham are committed to it. Days when Ohio isn’t cited internationally as the dregs of America’s charter schools. Days when charters have strong governing boards and authorizers. Days when sensible oversight and accountability for performance separate the charter chaff from the wheat. And days when charter students irrefutably succeed – in their classrooms, in their communities, and in life.

Osborne shows clearly that, despite the various warts and problems facing charters (and his paper deals with many of them), they “do outperform traditional public schools, while receiving almost 20 percent less money per student on average.”

But, Osborne argues, the nation’s charter school sector must do better—and can if it focuses squarely on two main things:

• Replicating the most successful school models, and


• Closing the worst charter schools.

“Improving Charter School Accountability” tackles the second issue head-on by focusing on authorizer quality, the single biggest driver of charter school quality. Osborne writes, “Today, it is time to open a third frontier: authorizer quality. The key to quality in the charter sector is quality authorizing.” When I read this sentence I wanted to jump out of my chair and do a quick dance around my desk. Fordham has been arguing—with our friends at organizations like the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) and the National Charter Alliance—this case since at least the mid-2000s, both in Ohio and nationally. The hard fact is that most people—and this includes lawmakers, policy makers, and others involved in setting education policy—have no idea what authorizers are, what they do, or why they matter.

Not surprisingly, as the work of authorizers is so little known and even less appreciated, it has not been done very well across the country. Osborne’s summary of the situation facing the nation’s authorizer community is largely a tale of limitations—limitations in political will, in money, in expertise, in data, in law, in performance, and in the capacity to do the job well. But, if the worst charter schools are to be closed and replaced with better options then authorizers need to be supported and bulked up as they are the entities with the authority—as imperfect as it may be—to actually take action against broken charters.

There are other reasons why it is so important to support and encourage authorizers in closing their weakest schools. Osborne shares the following:

• To protect the entire charter sector from being discredited.


• To protect taxpayers, we need to close charters that waste money.


• To ensure the continual improvement of the charter sector.


• To heighten competition and raise the bar on all schools.

"Closures are often controversial and messy, and most human beings prefer to avoid such pain."

Yet, Osborne notes, there is a fundamental disconnect between the logic and need for closing failed charters and the capacity and will of authorizers to actually do this work. Having been intimately involved with a few charter closures in Ohio I couldn’t help but sympathize with Osborne’s point that “Closures are often controversial and messy, and most human beings prefer to avoid such pain.” It is also expensive and, as Osborne notes, most states significantly underfund authorizers. Our experience bears that out: Fordham has been authorizing charter schools since 2005 and we have yet to have a year where our sponsorship costs haven’t had to be subsidized by our endowment or outside grant support.

It is because charter closures are costly and hard, I’d argue, that more and more quality authorizers are taking far more seriously the upfront decision of who to issue new school contracts to in the first place. Experience has taught many that it is far easier to say no to a prospective charter applicant than it is to say yes, and then be forced to close the school in five or six years. Quality authorizers are increasingly expert at hedging their bets, and this is why authorizers increasingly prefer sponsoring schools from successful networks or management companies. It is risky to authorize untested upstarts. This, of course, comes at the expense of innovation, which is another dilemma facing charter authorizers.

Osborne’s paper is a must read and does a fantastic job of shining a light on the need for better authorizers and the challenges of getting them. Even better, he provides a series of recommendations for how states can make progress in this important work. Maybe Osborne’s work on this important topic will motivate policymakers and charter proponents to recognize that the work of improving charters begins with improving their authorizers.

In a blog earlier this month, we wondered aloud about whether these extremely high ratings (100 percent) for so many schools accurately reflect how well these schools narrow racial achievement gaps. We posed the question: Could some of these schools have an all- or mostly-White student population—with simply no achievement gap to close in the first place? It’s conceivable that, without multiple racial subgroups, all-White schools could receive a 100 percent rating with little or no effort, so long as its White students perform well.

To answer this question, we dig deeper into the racial composition of these 100-percent-rated schools.  Using a random number generator, we randomly sampled 89 of the 890 Ohio schools that received a 100 percent rating for gap closure. When we examined these schools’ racial composition, here’s what we found:

Figure 1: Average racial composition of 100 percent-rated gap closure schools

(Source: Ohio Department of Education simulated data and authors' calculations)

The chart shows that, on average, these schools were nearly nine-tenths White and Asian, the two racial subgroups of little interest for racial gap closure. Further analysis shows that nearly two-thirds of these schools, 56 out of 89, had a White and Asian population of greater than 90 percent. We may be measuring a problem—racial achievement gaps—that simply dosen't exist in these schools.

We found too that not all of the schools rated 100 percent were all- or mostly-White. Boulevard Elementary, for example, located in the Cleveland Heights district near Cleveland achieved a 100 percent gap closure rating, while serving a racially diverse population: 15 percent Asian, 41 percent Black, and 37 percent White students. Similarly, a Cleveland charter school, Constellation Schools’ Westside Community School of the Arts, also received a 100 percent rating. Westside serves a population comprised of 16 percent Black, 35 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Multiracial, and 37 percent White students.

Schools like Boulevard Elementary and Westside Community School are probably the true stars in closing racial achievement gaps; they produce results across multiple racial subgroups, rather than for a single racial subgroup.

The logical conclusion is two-fold: should all- or mostly-White schools be held accountable for narrowing racial achievement gaps? (No – there’s no gap to measure.) And how can schools that are truly great at serving multiple racial groups be identified and rightly rewarded? (Could Ohio consider a weighted system that accounts for the greater effort of schools with more racial diversity?)

Reducing racial achievement gaps is an important educational objective. However, we also hope that the Ohio won’t award phantom accountability points to schools without achievement gaps to close, while also appropriately rewarding schools that truly close achievement gaps.

The odds were against these students, but failure was never an option for the teachers and staff at KIPP. When the inaugural class of fifth graders walked through the door only 33 percent of them passed the state reading test. Fast forward to 2011 and after just two years at KIPP 73 percent of those same students passed the seventh-grade reading test-- a gain of 40 percentage points.  After many years of hard work and going out into the community to personally invite families and parents to enroll their students in KIPP, the school’s staff and board of directors watched the first class of eighth graders graduate from KIPP earlier this month.

Sixty-four eighth graders graduated from KIPP and will matriculate to some of the area’s best high schools. Come this fall students will begin their next step toward college when the begin at high- performing schools such as Columbus Alternative, St. Charles Preparatory School, Metro High School, and Columbus School for the Girls. Congratulations to these Kippsters. They are truly an example that hard work and dedication pay off – they are not only a symbol of hope and progress for their families, but for the Linden Park community and anyone who believes that the odds are against them.

Read more about KIPP: Journey Academy’s graduation celebration in this Columbus Dispatch op-ed by Federal Court Judge and Chair of the school’s governing board, Algenon Marbley.

To educate Columbus’ citizens who may soon decide on whether to raise taxes, KidsOhio recently issued an excellent fact sheet about the district. In particular, they do well in comparing the district‘s student achievement and finances for three school years: 2003-04, 2007-08, and 2010-11. Some facts to consider from their report include: The district

• lost 12,000 or 19 percent of its students, from 2004 to 2011
• cut 1,670 jobs or 19 percent of its labor force, from 2004 to 2012
• spent $15,000 per pupil in 2010-11, the third highest per pupil expenditure in Franklin County
• “passed through” $97 million to charters in 2012, an increase from $64 million in 2008
• projects a $71 million shortfall in its cash position by FY 2015, despite having a $112 million cash surplus balance in FY 2012.

To add onto KidsOhio’s “just the facts” piece, we’ll contribute two additional pieces of information about the district, taken from its financial audits, as food for thought: The district

• increased millage rates from $59.18 per $1,000 of assessed (taxable) value in 2004, to $67.65 in 2008, and to $75.50 in 2011.
• receives a substantial proportion of its overall revenue from local sources relative what other districts receive (with the exception of Cincinnati). Consider the table below, which shows the percentage of the district’s revenue generated by local taxes:

From these two added points, it seems that Columbus’ property owners are doing their fair share of lifting when it comes to funding their local public school. Columbus’ millage rate has steadily increased during the past decade, and compared to many of Ohio’s other metropolitan districts, Columbus generates considerably more of its revenue locally.

These facts, taken together, should give voters some pause before uncritically pulling the lever in favor of the levy—again, if the levy proposal gets that far. Given the district’s shrinking size (in terms of students and workforce), their relatively high per pupil expenditures, and the already-sizable local effort to fund the district, does an increased tax truly make sense for Columbus’ residents? Or does the district need to present more creative options about how to solve its (projected) budget woes—either on the revenue or expenditure side?[1]

True, the district has been leaking some local revenue due to the tangible property tax repeal (it made up about 10% of its tax base in 2004); but could it reach out to businesses who benefitted from the repeal—maybe even (gasp!) its hefty tax-exempt population—to help it generate lost resources? Does it need to right-size its expenditures even more? Consolidate or merge even more buildings? (Yes, it has closed 33 buildings since 2004.) The superintendent’s advisory committee, along with Columbus’ residents, should ask these questions and more before another tax increase is placed on their shoulders.  

Columbus Collegiate Academy (CCA)
Last summer, CCA moved from space that it shared with a Weinland Park area church since the school opened in 2008 to a new location on Main Street, in the near eastside of Columbus.  In terms of student achievement, 40 students were “NWEA all-stars” – meeting ambitious academic growth targets set for them in both reading and math. Sixth graders also participated in “Run the City,” a day-long project where they dealt with the ins and outs of running a city, including banking, marketing, and advertising. Students also got a glimpse of college life with full-day visits to the Ohio State University, Ohio Dominican University, Ohio Wesleyan University, and Denison University. CCA leadership recently launched a new charter management organization, the United Schools Network, which will open a second middle school, Columbus Collegiate Academy-West, this August.

KIPP: Journey Academy
KIPP received excellent news this spring when the school was awarded the prestigious New Leaders for New Schools EPIC Award for outstanding academic growth. KIPP: Journey Academy was the only school in Ohio and the only KIPP school nationwide to receive the award. The inaugural class of “KIPPsters” graduated from the middle school this year and will take their next step on the journey to college as they matriculate to some of the highest performing high schools in Columbus. KIPPsters also extended their learning beyond the classroom and participated in end-of-year trips to Washington, D.C.; West Virginia; Chicago; and Atlanta.

Dayton Leadership Academies: Dayton Liberty Campus and Dayton View Campus

Dayton Liberty and Dayton View Academies are excited about an influx of new staff for the coming school year: this spring the schools received confirmation that over the next two years at least ten Teach For America corps members will be placed across the two campuses. Teach For America was officially introduced to the Southwest region of Ohio earlier this month. Both Teach For America and the Dayton Leadership Academies are excited about this new partnership and the impact it could have on student achievement.

Phoenix Community Learning Center

The Phoenix Community Learning Center, in Cincinnati, capped off 2012 with its signature event, Culturama. Culturama is a three-day school-wide event during which classrooms explore particular aspects of a theme country’s culture, food, music, literature, industry, and more. This year, the Caribbean nations were the focus, as captured by a group of eighth-grade students who decorated this door.

Springfield Academy of Excellence

In 2011-12 the Springfield Academy of Excellence added the Project MORE reading intervention program. Project MORE utilizes volunteers to provide one-on-one mentoring to students reading below grade level. This year the program served 16 students and the school reports that it had a positive impact students’ progress between reading levels.

Sciotoville Community School (aka East High School)

This spring, two Sciotoville students presented at the State High Schools that Work Best Practices Showcase. Student Christopher Rittner won the High Schools that Work Senior Achievement Award. He also won the Honda Math Medal Award. In sports, the Tartan’s softball team broke the school's record for the most softball wins in the school history, finishing the season at 22-5. Several students also placed in the 2011-12 Scioto County Art Show.

Sciotoville Elementary Academy

Junior High Language Arts teacher, Kristen Wawro took two student teams to the district Power of the Pen Interscholastic Competition for Young Writers. One seventh grader and five eighth graders qualified for the regional tournament, and one eighth grader went on to qualify for the state competition.

And of course both Sciotoville schools were featured in our short documentary, The Tartans: The Story of the Sciotoville Community Schools.

Aside from a few big-ticket items (like sharing local tax dollars via grants with high-performing charter schools, increasing reading intervention in fourth and fifth grades, and purchasing new school buses), the district hasn’t detailed if, and how, it might alter its overall spending patterns if the levy passes. In the meantime, we can look at how the district is spending money today versus a few years back, for clues.

Charts 1 and 2 show per-pupil spending for Columbus’s elementary and middle schools against the percent of students in each school who were economically disadvantaged for the 2005-06 and 2010-11 – the most recent year for which data are available—school years (2005-06 dollars are adjusted for inflation to reflect 2011 values).[1]

Source: Ohio Department of Education PowerUsers reports

What do the charts tell us?

Demographics: Students are more economically disadvantaged in 2011 than they were in 2006.

• The district’s economically disadvantaged students made up 74 percent of total enrollment in 2006 and 82 percent five years later (ranking Columbus eighth statewide in terms of the percent of such students, behind Akron, Cleveland, Dayton, East Cleveland, Lorain, Mansfield, and Youngstown).
• Today 42 Columbus elementary and middle schools serve student populations in which more than 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged; five years ago just ten schools served such a population.

Spending: Spending has increased slightly, but it isn’t clear that increases are focused on students who need it most.

• The average per-pupil spending for elementary and middle schools increased over five years by about 10 percent, or $1,200, to $13,500.
• No elementary or middle school is spending less than $10,000 per student today; when accounting for inflation, 13 were in 2006.
• Large gaps in spending levels between schools that serve similar populations existed in 2006 and were still present in 2011. Take schools in which more than 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged:
• In 2006, spending ranged from $15,736 at Weinland Park Elementary (where 75.4 percent of students were disadvantaged and the school was rated Academic Emergency by the state) to $11,308 at Starling Middle School (97.3 percent disadvantaged, also rated Academic Emergency), a gap of $4,400.
• Today that gap is $5,700. In 2011 Starling Middle School (now 96.5 percent of students disadvantaged, rated Academic Watch) spent $15,877 per pupil, while West Mound Elementary (94.4 percent disadvantaged, rated Continuous Improvement) spent $10,176 per student.

There is also no clear relationship between school performance and spending. In 2011, the top-achieving Columbus elementary or middle school, Clinton Elementary, spent $13,928 per student – about $2,000 more than the lowest-achieving school, Fairwood Alternative Elementary, spent $11,560. Yet spending across the district doesn’t mirror such a pattern.  Other high performers spend less, or only slightly more, than Fairwood; and low-performers are spending more than their high-performing peers. Similarly, there is no apparent relationship between spending and the percent of students who are English language learners, have special needs, or are highly mobile.

Alex Fischer, CEO of the Columbus Partnership and a member of the levy advisory committee, encourages the district to seek “transformational change” as part of its levy request. Moving toward a system where per-pupil spending is based on students’ educational challenges and follows kids to the school they attend would certainly be such a change. Columbus’s students are more disadvantaged than they were five, or ten, years ago. The district acknowledges this reality and that more money may need to be directed to students who need it most. Current spending patterns show that the district isn’t systematically directing more dollars toward neediest students today, but such a shift – to a student-based funding model (aka weighted-student funding) – could be made, and should be considered, along with passage of a levy.

The age-old debate about what kids should be reading attracted my attention this week. As my colleague Kathleen Porter-Magee observed last week, two camps seem to have emerged in the “what kids should read” debate: those who want more literary fiction in the classroom and those who want more informational non-fiction.

But should what kids read supersede the question of why kids read? ODE’s English language arts’ 11th and 12th grade model curricula elegantly answers this question:

“They [students] must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, challenging texts and develop the skill, concentration and stamina [emphasis in original] to read these texts independently and proficiently.”[1]

Notice that ODE doesn’t prescribe book lists or even specific genres to read—there’s no specification of what kids read—so long as the texts are of “high-quality.”[2] Even more importantly, notice the statement’s purpose clause: “to develop the skill, concentration, and stamina” of the student.

The purpose clause in ODE’s statement on reading has significance for why we teach reading, and secondarily, has implications for how we teach reading.

Let me illustrate with an anecdote. I was recently surprised to learn that the med school entrance exam is primarily a reading comprehension exam. When a friend asked how I would study, I suggested reading academic literature from many topics. This advice was rooted in my own experience reading journals, which for me—and I assume others—are intellectually-taxing material. Comprehending an article requires not only skill (ability to read), but as importantly, full concentration (focused attention) and stamina (grit to push through the tedium). Background TV or radio need not apply.

My argument isn’t that middle- and high-school students should read academic journals. Rather, in agreement with the Ohio Department of Education, I suggest that true reading happens when the student has to (1) be fully focused and (2) demonstrate willpower to comprehend the material—regardless of the material matter. Indeed, this is precisely why reading needs to be taught: to produce people with the focus and willpower to accomplish a task.

So in a way, both sides of the “what should be read” debate get it wrong. We teach reading neither to produce a high-brow society nor to blandly barrage kids with information. Rather, we teach reading in order to sharpen the concentration and stamina of a student. Requiring quiet and sometimes solitude, reading is indeed the antithesis of our noisy, post-modern zeitgeist. And precisely because of its opposition to the spirit of our times, reading has its value. It forces us to concentrate and to comprehend for ourselves, rather than being force-fed thoughts through an HDTV. Thus our kids benefit not mostly from the content of the text—who really remembers much of the plot of Hamlet anyways, despite reading and re-reading it—but from the intellectual discipline that reading demands.

The writer/philosopher at the Ohio Department of Education therefore gets it right: the central purpose of reading is “to develop skill, concentration, and stamina,” the text-type be damned. For practitioners, the purpose of reading should inform how reading is taught. For teachers—and not just English teachers only—this means judiciously selecting texts, across multiple topics, genres, and sources, that stretch and challenge students. And secondly, the purpose clause requires re-thinking classroom design and management; perhaps schools need more quiet, “concentration time” for students to independently focus on the text.

The Olympics have a three-word credo: citius, altius, fortius, Latin for “Swifter, Higher, Stronger.” Perhaps it’s time we adorn the Common Core English language arts standards with a credo too:  “Skill, Concentration, Stamina.”

Education and politics go hand and glove. When it comes to education the question isn’t just whether or not a policy is right or smart, but whether it can politically fly. The debates swirling around Senate Bill 316 – part of Governor Kasich’s mid-biennium budget review – is an interesting case study in that it seeks bold policy change but collides with political calculations and complications.

In late March, Governor Kasich introduced his education proposals and major components included:

• A greatly strengthened third-grade reading guarantee—Ohio has had a version of this guarantee on the books for years, but it has gone largely unenforced;[1]
• An A-F school-rating system that more accurately reflects schools’ true performance and is more straight-forward than the current one (“continuous improvement”, etc.);
• Increased charter-school accountability, including for drop-out recovery schools, which have been outside the state accountability system for more than a decade, and changes to how sponsors are ranked;
• Increased reporting and tracking of student data, including tracking public preschool students through K-12, and reporting the performance of graduates of the state’s teacher preparation programs;
• Required development of digital and blended learning policies at the state level;
• Increased accountability for publicly-funded preschool and child-care programs; and
• Necessary tweaks to the teacher-evaluation legislation passed last year, and various other small clean-ups to state education law.

After the painful referendum defeat borne by the governor and his fellow Republicans per Senate Bill 5 – the collective bargaining reform bill – in November 2011, reformers were pleasantly surprised that the Governor decided to push significant school reforms this year. Frankly, it would have been easy for Governor to do very little or nothing until after the November election, but he and his team put forth some pretty significant and necessary improvements to Ohio education policy. 

The Senate took first crack at SB316, and as part of their process to get things right they heard not only from a myriad of Ohio voices, but the Ohio Senate Education Committee also recruited national experts to testify on some of the thorniest issues. For example, Patricia Levesque and Mary Laura Bragg, of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and Marcus Winters, of the Manhattan Institute, testified about Florida’s decade-long experience with both the 3^rd grade reading guarantee and A-F rating system. Their presentation was powerful and well received by the Senate. Their testimony also resulted in two front-page stories in the Columbus Dispatch and an editorial calling on all lawmakers to support the Governor’s proposed changes.

On another controversial issue –setting standards for drop-out recovery schools and holding these schools accountable for performance – the Senate recruited national expert Jody Ernst from the Colorado League of Charter Schools to share her state’s experience in drafting, implementing, and enforcing standards for drop-out recovery schools.

After hearing from the field and from national experts, the Senate took a thoughtful and reasonable approach to both the 3^rd grade reading guarantee and the A-F rating system when they crafted policy that would implement both changes over a couple of years. The Senate also found $13 million in lottery funds to help districts meet some of the transition costs for the reading guarantee. The Senate passed its version of the education budget by a 30-2 vote.

But both Governor Kasich and the House had problems with the Senate version. The Governor was upset because he felt it didn’t force change fast enough (his plan actually called for new ratings for schools and districts starting this August) and he opposed new money being spent on the 3^rd grade reading guarantee. There was much back and forth on these issues in Ohio’s newspapers and editorial pages, but the debate was an honest one – how fast should reform go and who should pay for it? Both sides had strong arguments.

The House, however, has been upset with the whole process because, they argue, the bill – as first presented by the Governor and passed onto them by the Senate, had too much policy for them to adequately understand it all in a very tight time frame.  Speaker Batchelder told reporters on May 24^th that, “This (SB316) has been very tough to keep up with…That was a particularly heavy policy bill and a lot of our folks were concerned about reading it, and I would have to say frankly, a lot of them were concerned about having their superintendents take a look at it.” 

There is continuing disagreement among the Governor, Senate and House regarding the final version of education reforms and how bold these should be. This is where politics comes into play. It is not unreasonable – and certainly not irrational – for House members to be far more cautious than the Senate and the Governor on reforms that are both controversial and potentially distasteful to supporters. Many House members are up for re-election in November. Republicans control the House by a 59-40 margin, which if things went poorly in November could surely be reduced. (Recall that Democrats controlled the House from 2009 to 2011.) The Senate (where Republicans dominate 23-10 and have run the place since the 1980s) can be less concerned about the November elections. The Governor doesn’t run again until 2014.

But, maybe the smart politics here is to be bold. Governor Walker’s win this week in Wisconsin shows Midwesterner’s aren’t opposed to serious reform. And, Ohioans have repeatedly told pollsters over the years that they support education reforms that focus on increasing academic expectations for children, hold all schools accountable for their results, and advocate for smarter and better school choices. Politically there is surely never a perfect time to make tough decisions around education, but Ohio has done a number of things right in recent years and now is not the time to slow down.

To learn more about all this we sat down with CCA founder Andrew Boy to hear first-hand what he hopes to achieve through the United Schools Network. 

Q. Why did you decide to form the United Schools Network (USN)?

A. While launching a high-performing, high-need, school in Columbus is challenging and satisfying, we want to do more. We recognize that we have a unique opportunity to do so. If CCA can create excellence in our flagship school, then there is no reason we cannot similarly create excellent schools in other areas of Columbus and in other parts of the Midwest. It is in pursuit of this goal that we have created an organization to support the growth and replication of schools based on the United Schools Network model. 

Q. What will be the main function of USN?

A.  A “home office,” which will house the Chief Executive and other key senior leaders of the organization, will centrally direct USN operations. At its core, the “home office” will be charged with the following responsibilities:

• Providing resources to USN schools: Teacher recruitment support; external fundraising; alumni services; marketing and branding.
• Providing services to USN schools: Vendor contract administration; financial management and budgeting; human resources management; professional development and leadership development.
• Defining the core framework of a USN school: Curriculum development, assessment determination and analysis; school culture planning and execution.
• Providing accountability to USN schools: Student performance benchmarking; leader selection; leader evaluations and professional development plans; stakeholder surveys, annual reporting; school improvement initiatives.
• Determining the strategy of USN schools: New school development; strategic partnership creation and maintenance; central board governance training and support.

USN is designed to be a strong home office that will have strict control over many school design elements and school functions that are managed primarily at school sites in other CMO structures. We believe that by clearly defining key elements of the USN school design and of the manner in which USN schools will operate, we can reduce the variability between schools and ensure the high-quality implementation of the USN model and brand in each USN building. We believe that within this clearly defined structure, highly-talented and capable school leaders will be able innovate and improve upon the extant model to ensure the highest level of performance for our schools. 

Q. When deciding what USN should look like and how it should operate, did you study other successful CMO’s around the country?

A. Yes, we most closely align with Uncommon Schools. However, we used research from several national reports to compile all of the best practices from those who have come before us. 

Q. Where do you get your teachers, and what does the recruitment process look like?

A. We cast a very wide net to find the best and the brightest teachers. We have received more than 500 applications for a handful of available positions this year. Many of our teachers are Ohio natives that have left the state for one or another reason and are now looking to return. Our human capital search begins with the job post. It is vitally important that we get exposure to the right talent and that these folks are able to locate our job posts easily. The goal is to make USN schools the spot for educators to apply for those already living in the Columbus area and for those looking to return to Ohio. Emphasis will be placed on candidates from local and national organizations, such as Teach For America, that have a demonstrated track record of success. After posting positions, we follow a very specific process.

Q. Will USN set up a leadership pipeline, and how are you going to provide training?

A. We are considering several different options. Some include an internal training program and others include a close partnership with Building Excellent Schools that will support the development of our rising leaders.

Q. What are your future growth plans for USN?

A. Over the next five years, USN will work aggressively to deliver the value and opportunity presented by the CCA educational model to over 1,000 additional students by founding two additional K-5 “No-Excuses” charter schools. We also plan to evaluate and identify other “opportunity” locations for replication throughout the Midwest. 

TFA officially launched in Southwest Ohio last week when over 30 corps members spent the week in Cincinnati and Dayton visiting schools and getting to know the communities they will be working with. Corps members had the opportunity to meet with parents, teachers, and school leaders from the neighborhoods where their students reside.

As part of their Dayton visit corps members met with area students and local high school and university educators. They also participated in a half-day discussion hosted by Ben Lindy (TFA Executive Director) that  took place at Dayton View Academy– one of the charter schools that corps member will be working in this fall. The meeting brought together well respected and knowledgeable members of the Dayton community for a discussion on Dayton’s history, education challenges the city faces, and how TFA can be a driving force in change that is so badly needed. Community leaders such as Dr. Tom Lasley, former Dean of Education at The University of Dayton; Dr. T.J. Wallace, long time Dayton educator and current Executive Director of the Dayton Leadership Academies, David Taylor, principal of the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) and a parent of child enrolled in Dayton View Academy were all present to give the new corps members a flavor of Dayton and the education challenges facing the city.

Educators and parents in attendance expressed excitement about the potential of these bright and energetic young teachers. Their excitement and energy are needed in Dayton and Cincinnati now more than ever. In 2011, just 39 percent of fifth graders growing up in the city of Cincinnati were proficient in grade-level math compared to 91 percent of their suburban peers. The gap is similar in Dayton, where 28 percent of fifth-graders were proficient, compared to 84 percent of their neighbors growing up in higher income households. The challenges are immense it and will not be an easy road but when children are held to high expectations they can rise to the occasion. Teach for America in Ohio presents a tremendous opportunity to inject new teaching talent into communities with some of the oldest teachers (the average age for a Dayton Public School teacher is 49). This mix of new and experienced teachers should help improve education for our neediest kids. 

The group visited the following charter schools:

• Aspire Eres Academy in Oakland. Eres operator is Aspire Public Schools. Aspire is one of the nation’s top-performing charter school operators and serves about 12,000 K-12 students in 34 schools across California. Aspire Eres is Aspire’s first foray into blended learning. The Eres Academy serves about 220 students in grades K-8. The student population is 98 percent Hispanic, 97 percent free and reduced-price lunch and 60 percent English Language Learners.
• Downtown College Prep (DCP) in San Jose. DCP opened its first building in 2000 and currently operates a high school and a middle school serving grades 6-7. The flagship high school serves about 400 students, while the DCP Alum Rock middle school is currently serving about 180 students. The middle school will serve grades 6-8 in 2012-13 and expects 300 students at full capacity. Students at DCP Alum Rock spend 90 minutes a day in a learning lab run by the school’s blended learning wizard Greg Klein. Klein and his team have developed a blended learning program that provides students with a variety of offerings including Khan Academy (math), Teen Biz/Achieve3000 (ELA), MangaHigh (math), ALEKS (math) and Goalbook.
• KIPP Bridge in Oakland. This school was voted as the top performing charter school in California by the California Charter School Association in 2011. It serves about 260 students in grades 5-8. The student body is 70 percent African-American, 24 percent Latino or Hispanic, and 72 percent of students qualify for free and reduced price meals. The school put in place just this year a blended-learning math program for 6^th graders that utilizes Kahn Academy.

In addition to the school visits we met with leaders from:

• Rocketship Education – the first charter school network to open hybrid schools. Rocketship opened its first school in 2007 and is now in rapid development phase. It hopes to open approximately 30 Rocketship schools in San Jose by 2020, serving 15,000 students. Each Rocketship school serves grade K-5 and enrolls about 500 students. The average student body is 90 percent free and reduced price lunch and 75 percent English Language Learners. The Rocketship model combines traditional classroom teaching with individualized instruction using tutors and online technology to meet the specific needs of each and every student. Rocketship students attend school for eight hours a day – six hours in a classroom setting and two hours in a learning lab practicing core skills.
• Junyo – this Silicon Valley start-up is working closely with Rocketship, other schools and school systems, publishers and online learning providers to create the “Pandora for learning.” Junyo operates under the premise that the smart use of information and data should guide decisions in education. Collecting frequent, detailed data provides the foundation to effectively assess, experiment, iterate and improve student instruction and learning. By turning mountains of data into user-friendly information Junyo believes the outcomes for education will be dramatic. This effort is being aligned closely to the Common Core and expects to scale-out fast and large.
• Education Elements – this Silicon Valley start-up is becoming a one-stop shop for schools and school districts that want to put into place blended learning models. Clients have included KIPP LA, a consortium of school districts in Pennsylvania and Memphis city schools. Ed Elements is growing rapidly and the company is headed up by the New Schools Venture Fund educational entrepreneur of the year Anthony Kim. Their Education Elements Hybrid Learning Management System promises to “pull it all together, offering schools a streamlined platform that includes a student friendly interface for instructional content, a teacher dashboard that makes it easy to monitor student progress, and simple administrative solutions.”

Observations and takeaways (in no particular order):

• The blended learning sector is still very much in its infancy, or as Anthony Kim said when we met “you all wouldn’t have flown out here from all over the country to meet with us and a handful of charters if this wasn’t new stuff.”
• There are myriad new products coming on-line almost daily. This sector is primed with investment capital. Or, as one person told us, “product development is speeding up. More and more tools for students and teachers alike, including instructional games.”
• The ongoing economic crisis facing school districts and charter school operators are boons to blended learning providers. Forward thinking schools and school districts are trying to figure out how to elevate their performance while saving money. Technology offers the best hope for preserving, or even making, gains while maintain or reducing costs.
• The Common Core offers the hope of scaling out rapidly and across many jurisdictions new products and blended learning models. Innovators and entrepreneurs are excited about the Common Core because it facilitates focused and scalable efforts across multiple states. School and instructional designs don’t need to be customized to 50 standards and accountability systems. They can now be targeted to one set of standards and an aligned assessment system. This encourages large scale investments and hopefully a race to quality.
• The teachers we heard from were self-selected and sought out these innovative schools. They are innovators who want to teach in a blended learning environment. Or as one school leader described her team, “these are eager skeptics” wanting to push the envelope and show what’s possible.
• Blended learning changes the nature of teaching. Or as one teacher said, “I wouldn’t say I’m doing less work; I’d say I’m doing better work. It’s about being more efficient and effective. I’ve seen kids grow a lot this year, mostly a result of small grouping, and that makes me want to stay.”
• “Teaching is moving towards tutoring here. Increasingly there is almost no direct instruction in this building. Our motto is ‘only teach the kids if there is something you can’t find elsewhere,” is what we heard in one school.
• School leaders and teachers worry most about “tech dramas and nightmares.” A dysfunctional IT system can sabotage the efforts quickly. Technology wizards at the building level will increasingly be in high-demand for schools as they grow evermore dependent on their technology and IT systems for delivery of instruction and assessment.
• A well-defined school culture is key to schools successfully transitioning to blended learning. School leaders and teachers made it clear to us that their blended learning models work because they have integrated the technology into strong and well-defined school culture. The technology facilitates and encourages more efficiency and effectiveness in instruction and learning, but the culture of the building is the precondition for success or failure. 
• The kids like the freedom and flexibility of blended learning. Done well, they own their learning. We saw some kids who weren’t engaged in their learning and seemed to be staring at the screen. Most, however, were engaged and even excited about what they were doing. The data shared with us by the students themselves showed some phenomenal growth in math and reading (two or three years of growth in nine months.) When I asked one student why he was doing so much better in his work this year than last he said that his teaching was driving him hard and that he knew he had the tools to succeed.
• Management is harder in a blended learning model. This type of innovation is high stakes. It is largely uncharted territory and everyone understands that done poorly this will be a serious waste of time and money. School management has to provide substantial support to teachers and staff during the start-up phase. We heard several teachers and school leaders say that what they were doing by the end of the year was radically different than what they were doing at the start. To implement blending learning models well demands flexibility, constant learning and smart adjustments along the way.
• Blended learning can be a teacher-driven reform. Some schools and CMOs are rolling out blended programs by redesigning their whole school model. But other schools, like KIPP Bridge, are following the lead of one entrepreneurial teacher who learn about Kahn Academy or another tech program and start a pilot within the school. 

The proposed system’s third indicator, gap closure, is a newly-conceived measure of how well nationally-defined student subgroups (e.g., racial, economically disadvantaged, special education, English language learners) perform on standardized tests compared to a state-designated baseline test score—an annual measureable objective (AMO). Any school building with more than 30 students in a subgroup must report its subgroup scores.

To gauge how well schools would perform under the proposed accountability system, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) simulated schools’ performance using 2010-11 data. ODE’s simulated results, however, put into question the validity of the gap closure indicator, as currently designed.

The following charts show ODE’s simulated results. Consider the distribution of Ohio school buildings’ overall rating (Figure 1). The vertical axis indicates the number of school buildings that received a certain rating, and the horizontal axis shows the rating scale, which is expressed as a percentage. We observe that most school ratings fall within a relatively narrow band between 75 and 95 percent, somewhat normally distributed, though with a leftward skew (mean = 73 percent, standard deviation = 16.9).

Figure 1: Overall school building ratings relatively evenly distributed around mean. Distribution of overall school building ratings, ODE simulated results using 2010-11 data.

Source: Ohio Department of Education and author’s calculations. Note:  A higher percentage for a building’s rating—the horizontal axes in Figures 1 and 2—correspond to a higher grade. This is equivalent to how student grades are calculated (e.g., “A” ≡ 90 to 100 percent). Overall school building rating is comprised of three equally weighted indicators (1) student achievement, (2) student growth, and (3) gap closure.

Now consider how school buildings are distributed according to Ohio’s proposed gap closure indicator (Figure 2). Again, the vertical axis indicates the number of school buildings, while the horizontal axis indicates a school’s gap closure rating. We notice a very different distribution of schools’ gap closure ratings compared to schools’ overall ratings. Gap closure ratings are nearly evenly dispersed across the entire rating scale (mean = 64 percent, standard deviation = 33.5). Moreover, we observe a large number of schools falling in the extreme margins of the distribution; for example, 890 out of 3,275 buildings received a 100 percent rating while 320 received 25 percent rating or less.

Figure 2: More than one in three schools rated at extreme margins (indicated in brighter red, 100 percent or under 25 percent) for gap closure indicator. Distribution of gap closure rating by building, ODE simulated results using 2010-11 data.

Source: Ohio Department of Education and author’s calculations. Note: Buildings without reported data were removed from calculation.

The distribution of gap closure ratings seems unusual. Why don’t we see a more balanced, normally-distributed  dispersion of school ratings, similar to what the overall ratings show—with schools gravitating toward  the mean? Moreover, should we conclude that the 890 schools which received a 100 percent rating are marvelously narrowing achievement gaps, while the 320 buildings that received less than 25 percent are miserably failing?

These questions warrant a closer examination of the schools at the extremes. Perhaps we’ll find that the top-performing schools actually only have few or only one subgroup to educate, while those at the bottom of the distribution have to educate many students across many subgroups.

A preliminary scan of schools supports the hypothesis. Take Midway Elementary School, a rural all-White school: it received a 100 percent gap closure rating, because it met the test score benchmark for one subgroup—White students. Meanwhile, the urban Charles Mooney Elementary School in Cleveland received a 0 percent gap closure rating, as it did not meet the state standards for any of its five subgroups.

Narrowing achievement gaps for disadvantaged subgroups is a legitimate educational objective, and ODE is right to include gap closure in the annual school and district report cards. But school ratings should also reflect effort. In a follow-up piece, we plan to conduct a more detailed examination of the schools that fall in the extreme margins to ascertain whether the schools at the top of the distribution (100 percent ratings) are simply those with few or only one subgroup, while those at the bottom of the distribution are those with numerous subgroups.

If some schools do in fact receive 33 percent of its overall school rating points virtually free—simply because they have few subgroups—ODE should consider adjusting its gap closure rating formula. Perhaps they could upwardly adjust the rating of high-subgroup schools based on their number of racial minority or special education students. This would be tantamount to a degree of difficulty adjustment. (Think figure skating scores: missing a triple axel is punished less than missing a single axel.) Another alternative may be to reduce weight of the gap closure indicator from 33 percent for single or low-subgroup school buildings. These adjustments would ensure that low-subgroup schools are not unfairly rewarded and high-subgroup schools are not being excessively punished in their overall school building ratings.

_________

 [1] Ohio’s current accountability system includes four indicators: (1) student achievement, (2) student growth, (3) school performance, which includes graduation and attendance rates, and (4) annual yearly progress, which includes racial, special education, etc. subgroup performance. The proposed accountability system, as described in Ohio’s NCLB wavier application, keeps indicator (1), student achievement, the same, modifies indicator (2), student growth, by adding a graduation gap closure measurement, eliminates indicator (3), school performance, and replaces (4) annual yearly progress with the new gap closure indicator. The applicable pages from Ohio’s NCLB waiver (revised May 24, 2012) are pg. 51-52.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 fea