Contents
Welcome to the Ohio Education Gadfly

• Back from summer break

Investigative Analysis

• Analysis of Ohio report-card data shows improvement lagging in big-city schools

Editorial

• Road to effective change eludes public schools

From the Front Lines

• Economists respond to the STRS's attack on pension-system report

Reviews

• Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children

Announcements

• Funds available to expand high-performing charter schools
  

Welcome to the Ohio Education Gadfly
Back from summer break
Investigative Analysis
Analysis of Ohio report-card data shows improvement lagging in big-city schools

Despite a decade of school reform efforts in Ohio, students in the state's largest cities still struggle to meet basic academic standards and are nowhere close to achieving the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law, according to an analysis of the latest Ohio school report-card data.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute found forty-six percent of 183,000 public and charter school students in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton are attending schools graded either D or F (officially, academic watch or academic emergency). That compares to about 75,000 students in D or F schools in the entire rest of the state. (These figures do not include a few thousand students attending online e-schools or in schools that did not receive academic ratings.)

This figure is frightening. There are literally thousands of children in Ohio whose futures are at serious risk. The urban results are in stark contrast to student performance in most Ohio school districts where the majority of children meet state standards and attend schools rated Excellent or Effective. Ohio's best schools are getting better, leaving many urban children behind. This fact raises profound questions about the impact of poverty on student achievement, and Ohio's move toward measuring individual student progress over time should provide better data on this issue in coming years.
It's not all bleak in the state's big cities. Reading and math student achievement scores continue long-term improvement in Ohio's eight largest cities, according to the state data, but results still fall far short of minimum standards and the trend lines aren't nearly steep enough to close the state's achievement gap any time soon.

There are good, and even excellent, schools in every city. Some are district-operated schools, some are charters; but there are not nearly enough to go around and improvement is just too slow. We needto study what works in both high-performing district and charter schools and encourage the replication, expansion and growth of these efforts.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute analysis found that:

• In the eight largest urban districts, which house most charter schools, overall performance levels between the two sectors were similar. In reading, about six in ten charter and comparable district students were proficient. In math, about half of charter and comparable district students were proficient.
• Only in Dayton did charter schools outperform district schools, by about eight percentage points, in reading and math.
• Charter e-school performance lagged that of schools statewide in both reading and math.
• Over the last six school years, urban charter-school performance has improved at a more rapid pace than Ohio's eight big-city districts. In the last year, however, district school improvement was higher.
• Relatively low percentages of both charter and district schools in the Ohio Eight fared well in state and federal accountability systems. Only thirty-eight percent of Ohio Eight district schools met the federal standard of Adequate Yearly Progress, compared with twenty-eight percent of urban charter schools.

The Fordham analysis was based on annual school report-card data released Tuesday by the Ohio Department of Education. The report-card data rates every charter school and district school in the state, based on test scores, graduation rates, attendance, and other factors for the 2006-2007 school year.

In Dayton, for example, thirty-six percent of students (district and charter) are attending schools the state considers in academic emergency while forty-three percent are attending schools graded academic watch (for a total of seventy-nine percent of students in D or F schools). For Dayton district schools alone, eighty-four percent of students attend schools in the two-lowest categories. Charter school students fare a little better, with about seventy percent of those students in schools rated academic emergency or academic watch.

Of the four cities Fordham looked at in depth, Dayton struggles the most, while Columbus is the bright spot - at least for traditional public education. In that city, thirty-four percent of students attended either district or charter schools in the two-lowest categories. Also, Columbus Public Schools out-performed its charter schools, with thirty percent of public school students in academic-emergency or academic-watch schools, compared with fifty-six percent for charter schools.

In Cleveland, forty-seven percent of students were in district or charter schools in the two-lowest categories. However, district schools beat out charter schools with forty-three percent of district students in the two-lowest categories compared with sixty-nine percent in charter schools.

In Cincinnati, forty-six percent of students attended district and charter schools in the lowest-two categories. About forty-three percent of district school students were in the lowest-rated schools compared with sixty percent for charter schools.

Charter schools were launched in Ohio in 1997 as alternatives for children in failing public schools and as laboratories to forge new ways to educate children. After a decade, it's time for charter schools to live up to their promise.

Even friends and long-time supporters of charter schools and chartering are tired of explaining away mediocre and poor results, the more so because the too-few terrific schools demonstrate that it doesn't have to be this way. But district officials must be as impatient with their weak schools as many friends of chartering are weary of explaining away the poor performance of too many of theirs.

This data makes painfully clear that too many children in charter schools are being left behind. Sadly, for many the only choice they have is to go back to a district school that's not performing any better.

View the Fordham Institute's full analysis of 2006-2007 report-card data here.
To access all public school report cards, visit the Ohio Department of Education's website.

by Terry Ryan, Mike Lafferty

Editorial
Road to effective change eludes public schools
The powerful forces bearing down on Ohio and public education here were nicely encapsulated in two recent Dayton Daily News articles.

The first was headlined "Newly laid-off Dayton teachers may have to leave Ohio to find jobs" (June 24th), while the second simply read "Report: Delphi to offer buyouts" (June 25th). These are two completely different industries, yet the same forces are at work.

Two industrial-age enterprises-public education and automobile manufacturing-both burdened by powerful and self-interested, industrial-style union work forces, are painfully and involuntarily finding themselves being restructured for the 21st century. How they deal with these changes will profoundly affect the future economic and social health of the Buckeye State.

Judging by recent developments in Dayton, early signs in public education are not encouraging. Urban schools particularly seem to be in denial, struggling mightily even to picture what it would mean to do things differently.

In Dayton, management is struggling to keep the ship afloat, while labor clings to all it can-seniority above all else-even as the vessel threatens to sink. At Delphi, by contrast, part of an industry that has been buffeted longer than public education by job losses, automation, and competition, the United Auto Workers union (UAW) is working with management to restructure the labor force so Delphi cancompete anew.

This collaboration is hard, but it's driven by the blunt reality that Delphi is bankrupt and lost $5.5 billion in 2006. Seeking to survive, one key move is to offer early retirements and buyouts to older workers. To remain viable, Delphi and the UAW understand that the company must attract, develop, and retain young, flexible, and energetic employees.

No such lesson has yet been internalized by the public-school sector and its unions.

With the recent rejection of Dayton Public Schools' operating levy, the district is being forced to lay off 208 teachers and 87 aides. (Salaries typically account for more than three quarters of school system budgets-and nobody seems to know how to reduce those costs by substituting technology or other productivity enhancers.)

Following old-fashioned seniority rules, Dayton's cuts are falling mainly on young teachers without regard to individual effectiveness or the personnel needs of particular schools.
This one-size-fits-all approach to downsizing the work force is why one of the city's premier academic high schools-the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA)-has been forced to leave the district and become a free-standing charter school. Its eager younger instructors are much of the reason DECA has earned the academic rating of "excellent."

But only by becoming a stand-alone charter school can it retain them. To its great credit-and the consternation of the Dayton Education Association-the school district's leadership is facilitating this transformation, mindful that hundreds of children stand to benefit.

Unfortunately, other innovative, high-performing schools in Dayton-Stivers School for the Arts, the World of Wonder school, the Charity Adams all-girls school-will see their teaching staffs dramatically altered for 2007-08. These schools, all led by strong principals who have labored to build successful school cultures and teaching teams, must bid farewell to many of the instructors they have developed.
Maybe the principals can do it again, this time by struggling to teach new tricks to set-in-their-ways veterans. Or maybe the schools will sink into mediocrity. That would not be a healthy development for a district where nearly half the schools are already getting the equivalent of Ds or Fs on the state report card.

Laying off young teachers and keeping old ones has the perverse effect of increasing the per-unit cost of educating children without creating greater efficiency or effectiveness.

Yet Dayton Public Schools' leaders are hostage to an industrial model of education, enshrined in a collective bargaining agreement that rewards teachers for longevity, not their impact on student achievement or even the staffing needs of school leaders.

This is a recipe for disaster for a district with a declining tax base and an increasingly poor and aging population that demands doing more with less.

The auto industry may finally be learning its version of this lesson. In the circles that run public education in Ohio, however, there's little evidence that anyone in Columbus or Dayton is intent on rewriting the rules so schools such as DECA (and the personnel arrangements they need to thrive) can become the norm as opposed to a one-time exception.

The time has passed for bailing out the leaky, old ship. It needs to be mothballed and a new one launched.

Read a letter challenging Ryan's op-ed piece, from the July 31st Dayton Daily News: "Writer's comparisons of schools misleading."
Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott used his blog to open discussion on the seniority issue: "Ryan: Seniority killing school change."
Elliott further discusses the seniority issue in a story in the August 5th Dayton Daily News: "Budget cuts reach beyond those who were laid off."

by Terry Ryan

From the Front Lines
Economists respond to the STRS's attack on pension-system report
In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a study of Ohio's teacher pension system entitled Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System. This report has triggered much overdue public debate in Ohio and beyond regarding teacher pension systems and their interaction with school-improvement efforts. The report, however, was not well-received by the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS), which attacked the authors of the report.

The study, authored by Dr. Robert M. Costrell, of the University of Arkansas, and Dr. Michael J. Podgursky, of the University of Missouri, identified four major shortcomings in Ohio's existing "defined-benefit" teacher pension system:

1. It encourages early retirement. Over time, the pattern of pension wealth accrual built into Ohio's teacher pension system has created powerful incentives for teachers to retire in their fifties. The average retirement age for Ohio teachers is fifty eight, which is well below the current minimum age for regular retirement in the Social Security system (age sixty five, but soon rising to age sixty seven), and below the private sector generally. With rising life expectancies, the cost of Ohio's defined benefit system will continue to rise as increasing numbers of teachers retire relatively young. Early retirement also creates a heightened demand for health insurance, because Medicare coverage does not begin until age sixty five, putting increasing strain on Ohio's already severely under-funded teacher retiree health insurance fund.
2. It's a disincentive for young teachers and hinders teacher mobility. Young teachers who move from Ohio's pension system to another teaching or non-teaching job suffer serious losses in pension wealth. Teachers with ten or more years of seniority suffer very large losses if they move into another line of work or to another state. Additionally, Ohio's high payroll-contribution rate (currently ten percent and likely to rise) may hinder recruitment of new teachers.
3. It lacks transparency. Ohio's teacher pension system is remarkably complex and opaque. Relatively few people understand its intricacies, which have allowed the system to evolve into a costly and completely irrational structure-a set of "golden peaks" and "perilous cliffs" in pension wealth accumulation that defy any logic-with limited public awareness of how the system works and what the implications of its workings are over the long term.
4. It is rife with ad hoc fixes. Because the system now encourages early retirement, Ohio has responded by adding ad hoc incentives for continued employment, making the system even more complex and costly. Today, it permits teachers to collect their pensions while continuing to work full time as a teacher (known as "double dipping")-at a time when the assets of the pension system fall far short of accumulated pension and health insurance liabilities.

The STRS responded to this first-rate study in an inflammatory fashion, charging mistakes and misstatements and disseminating these charges far and wide, and in fact shared its critique with every teacher in the system.

In response to this attack, Costrell and Podgursky have now provided a detailed, documented professional response. (Read Costrell and Podgursky's full reply.)
A summary of Costrell and Podgursky's response:

• The STRS ignores the central theme of the report. The way individual pension wealth is built up makes no sense, especially from the perspective of a young teacher.
  
  "We think it is significant that a Columbus teacher entering the Ohio system at age twenty five, would, at age fifty, suddenly earn $123,000 in pension wealth accrual, after much smaller annual accruals for the previous twenty-four years," they said. "At age fifty, it is as if her 401(k) retirement account contributions totaled $123,000 in that one year."
  
  If she stays another five years, she accrues the equivalent of another $448,000 in contributions to her retirement account. Then, over the last half of her fifties, she gets very little increase in her pension wealth. If she sticks it out to age sixty (thirty-five years), she gets a one-year jump of $113,000. But if she stays any longer, the pension system punishes her, reducing her pension wealth each and every year.

• The only misstatement seems to be that of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio.The retirement system's rather emphatic statement that, "STRS Ohio is not seeking any contribution increase for the funding of its pension plan" is explicitly contradicted by two features of its proposal to boost teacher and employer contributions to the system. First, 0.6 percentage points of the STRS's proposed five-point increase in contributions are designated for pensions. (See page twelve of the Ohio Retirement Study Council's Annual Report 2006.) Moreover, as the STRS states in its March 2007 report to the Ohio Retirement Study Council, once the contribution hike is in place, "the current one percent of employer contributions going toward health care can start flowing back into the pension fund" (see page five of the report here). Taken together, the proposed five-point contribution increase will result in a 1.6 point increase for pension funding-about one third of the total hike.
  
  Clearly the hike is designed to shore up both pension and retiree health care funding (as the report states), contrary to the STRS's claim that it "is not seeking any contribution increase for the funding of its pension plan."

• The STRS was consulted.The STRS statement that it was not consulted for the report is simply false. E-mails were exchanged and a conference call was conducted with an STRS board member; however, the STRS never responded to a list of questions submitted asking for additional information.
  
  As it turned out, the report focused on the incentives embedded in the defined benefits formula, and this analysis could be conducted with publicly available information. That analysis stands-as does the rest of the report-despite the STRS's failure to provide answers to the researchers' questions.

In short, the report stands. The STRS's attack against the authors and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has no foundation and serves only to divert the Ohio public from the important issues identified and the first-rate analyses of these issues provided in the report. We strongly encourage all Gadfly readers to read the original report, the STRS critique, and Costrell and Podgursky's reply very closely. There is much here to consider and think through, especially in light of ever more calls for increased educational spending to do more of the same. Ohio-as a state that is getting grayer and poorer-badly needs to spend its tax dollars smarter, and Costrell and Podgursky provide powerful guidance on how to do this while also making the teaching profession more appealing to young college graduates.

Read the original report, Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs.
View the STRS's critique of the report.
Read the authors' full reply to the STRS's critique.

by Mike Lafferty

Reviews
Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children
Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), schools have ramped up instructional time in reading and math but are spending less time teaching things like history, social studies, science, and the arts-subjects not tested under the federal law (see here and here). Unfortunately, this narrowing of the curriculum is happening at the same time employers all over the world are seeking the most competent, creative, and innovative people on the planet with a very high level of preparation in reading, writing, speaking, mathematics, science, literature, and the arts-as was highlighted in a recent presentation on Capitol Square by Marc Tucker of the National Center for Education and the Economy (see here).

Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children examines the need to restore the liberal arts to the K-12 curriculum through a volume of papers-most presented last December at a conference in Washington, D.C.-assembled by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch (both Fordham Institute board members). It stresses the need to ensure productive and responsible citizens who can think critically and are prepared for work and a satisfying life. There has been an age-old calling for a "broad, liberal arts education"-Aristotle said it is necessary for one to act "nobly" and Benjamin Franklin said it is needed to cultivate "the best capacities" in humans. Finn and Ravitch call for its revival in the context of our fast-paced modern world: where "one may well speak with his Hispanic neighbor before leaving for the office, bargain with a Nigerian taxicab driver, then negotiate a marketing deal via teleconference with counterparts in Tokyo, Sao Paolo, or Moscow, one needs to broaden his base of learning."

Finn and Ravitch note the harmful and unintended consequence of NCLB in creating a "curricular squeeze" and caution against the inclination to substitute "kill and drill" for "problem solving." They also warn against too much STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education without enough flowers (i.e., history, foreign language, arts, geography, etc.). (Finn and Ravitch also make the case for flowers in a commentary in the August 8th Wall Street Journal.)

This volume offers some worthwhile recommendations for ensuring that every child receives a solid liberal arts education, including recruiting talented teachers who themselves enjoyed a rigorous liberal arts education; arming them with a solid, content-rich curriculum; and holding them accountable for preparing students broadly, not just in "basic skills." All those interested in the rebirth of the liberal arts curriculum should check out the report here.

by Kristina Phillips-Schwartz

Announcements
Funds available to expand high-performing charter schools
 The Charter School Growth Fund is seeking charter management and support organizations to participate in a six-month project to develop strategic business plans, financial models, and implementation plans for expansion. At the conclusion of the project, selected organizations will receive multi-year grants and loan packages to help with the costs associated with expansion.
Applicant organizations must demonstrate that they:

• have run one or more exemplary charter schools,
• have sustained strong achievement gains with underserved youth, and
• are dedicated to expanding a network of high-performing schools.

Visit the Charter School Growth Fund's website for more information, but don't delay-the application window ends September 21.
The Charter School Growth Fund is a philanthropic venture firm founded to make early-stage grants and loans for the development and expansion of charter management and support organizations that provide a quality education option to underserved students nationwide.

Slipping Standards, Serious Consequences
The growing number of students scoring "proficient" on Ohio's battery of K-12 state assessments (and a slew of tests in other states) may, in part, be attributed to some weak-kneed tests and low cut scores for passage. A new report from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (see here) compared student scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)--considered the "gold standard" of assessments by many--with those on myriad state tests across the nation. The results suggest that too many state accountability policies--Ohio's included--pay only lip service to claims of high standards and rigor.

When 32 state proficiency standards for fourth-grade reading were placed on the NAEP scale, none met the NAEP's minimum proficient cut score. A whopping 24 failed to meet even the NAEP's "Basic" cut score. Eighth-grade reading fared only slightly better. Again, none of the 34 state proficiency standards matched up to the NAEP's (only Wyoming's and South Carolina's came close)--and 13 fell below the NAEP's "Basic" standard. In fourth-grade math, two of the 33 states analyzed met or exceeded the NAEP's proficiency standard--Wyoming and Massachusetts. The eighth-grade math analysis saw three out of 36 states meet or exceed the NAEP standard. Yet in both math comparisons, most states hovered between NAEP's "Basic" and "Proficiency" standards, and more than a few languished in the nether regions below "Basic."

Count Ohio's proficiency standards in fourth- and eighth-grade reading among the bottom-dwellers. In fourth- and eighth-grade math, the Buckeye State's standards improve slightly, though still fall squarely between "Basic" and "Proficient" on the NAEP scale. This "proficiency gap" explains why in 2005-06, Ohio deemed 77 percent of its fourth-graders and 69 percent of its eighth-graders as proficient or above in math, while the 2005 NAEP pegged those percentages at just 43 (for grade 4) and 34 (for grade 8). In reading, only 35 percent of fourth-graders and 36 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient or above on the 2005 NAEP--in stark contrast to Ohio's 2005-06 figures of 77 percent in both grades.

To be sure, the problem is a national one (see here), and Ohio is by no means the most lenient of states. (Tennessee's proficiency standards plumb the depths at all four grade levels, and Mississippi's abysmally low fourth-grade reading standard deserves a scale all its own.) Yet the marked differences in rigor evidenced by this study have serious consequences down the line. Consider the recent drama over Ohio seniors failing to graduate because they could not pass all portions of the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT), a 10th grade level (see here and here). In Cleveland, over 1,300 district seniors--43 percent of the senior class-- fell into this category (see here).

The solution, one that would help Ohio and other states reconcile assessment rigor with real-world expectations, may lie in one set of national standards and assessments (as we've argued before --see here and here). With a common set of academic expectations, students in Ohio and across the nation could also be held to a common definition of proficiency--one that might very well swell the ranks of Ohioans who not only don cap-and-gown, but also graduate ready for college and the global marketplace.

by Quentin Suffren