The Education Gadfly

As lawmakers in Washington hash out the details of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), both accountability and standardized testing are facing mounting criticism and skepticism. This backlash is felt in the Buckeye State, where some would like to move our academic accountability system away from the state's current achievement tests. While many speak of national standards and a national assessment (Fordham included), there are powerful forces in Ohio encouraging us to take a step backward instead.

Governor Strickland favors multiple measures of performance as the basis for academic accountability (see here). Teachers and principals participating in the administration's education focus groups say that portfolio assessments are a major topic of discussion. And George Wood, author of Strickland's K-12 education transition report, is a critic of the standards-and-testing movement. On his blog, Wood writes about Nebraska's assessment system as a model to which Ohio and other states should look for guidance and inspiration (see here).

Nebraska's STARS (School-based, Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System) allows the state's 517 school districts to design their own assessment systems. These assessments include a portfolio of teacher classroom assessments, district tests that measure how well children are meeting locally developed learning standards, a state writing test, and at least one nationally standardized test to serve as what Wood calls a "reality check" (see here).

Results of these local assessments, not surprisingly, show that Nebraska's students are making academic gains (see here). Wood wonders, then, in a recent entry why the Cornhusker State's legislature decided to mess with a good thing last summer by enacting the state's first statewide standardized assessments in reading and math. One guess is that legislators looked at the gold-standard national "reality check" and questioned how well the state's students were actually performing.

On the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 38 percent of Nebraska's fourth graders scored proficient or above in math, up from 33 percent in 2003. In eighth-grade math 35 percent of students met proficiency, up from 32 percent four years ago. Results are similar in reading, with 35 percent of Nebraska's fourth and eighth graders meeting the proficiency bar.

Contrast these results with the proficiency rates on the state's annual academic report. In 2006-2007, Nebraska reported that 89 percent of fourth graders and 90 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and that 91 percent of fourth graders and 88 percent of eighth graders met the state's math-proficiency bar. These results do not jibe with the state's NAEP performance. To be fair, NAEP is a reality check for the rigor of Ohio's statewide assessments, too (see here). However, Ohio has seen larger gains than Nebraska in NAEP performance in recent years, especially in math.

There also are policy and implementation concerns related to decentralized assessments. Creating a fair, reliable, standards-based assessment at the state level has been a mammoth task. Imagine if that work were being done 612 times over by every district in the state. How would Ohio ensure that there were not vast differences between the expectations being set for urban children and suburban children? How would we accurately gauge whether achievement gaps exist and measure our progress toward closing them?

Ohio's students are mobile. In urban districts 15 percent of students tested on state assessments last spring were not in the same building for the entire school year. How would local assessments, unique to each district, measure the progress of students between districts? How would portfolios follow students across schools? And, to the bottom line, how much money and staff time would it take to implement such a system? Would that time and money be drained away from classroom instruction and resources?

Teachers should regularly review and monitor students' academic progress and tools like portfolios and short-cycle assessments are critical for this work. Classroom instruction should not be based solely on the content of annual statewide tests and local school districts should be encouraged to expand academic offerings beyond the state's standards. But this does not mean we ought to abandon statewide standardized testing. Accountability in education requires, at the very least, objective assessments based on common standards. Standardized testing, while not perfect, provides an important floor for public education and removing it would cost the state's neediest children most.

Ohio should continue thinking about other ways to measure school and student performance in addition to the statewide achievement tests, and we can learn from the strengths of systems like STARS. But we are making progress in Ohio and improving our accountability system with the new value-added component (see here). Doing away with statewide standardized testing would be a giant step back for children in the Buckeye State.

By Emmy L. Partin

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Capital Matters

State teacher pension plan: What, me worry?

Teacher retirement systems across the country are receiving much attention as of late. Lawmakers and leaders of Ohio's state teachers' pension plan need to read a feature in the new issue of Education Next (see here) by economists Robert Costrell and Michael Podgurksy. In the article they explore the peculiar incentives of teacher retirement systems around the country and the impact they have on the composition of our teaching workforce and on public finance. This will not come as a surprise to Gadfly readers as Costrell and Podgurksy examined Ohio's system in a report in June that identified a $19 billion unfunded liability for pensions and questioned the impact of the system's generous, optional retiree health-insurance program on the fiscal health of school districts and teachers (see here).

One solution, according to Costrell and Podgursky, is to switch from defined benefit (DB) plans to defined contribution or cash balance plans that tie benefits to contributions made by teachers and their districts. Most of the private sector in America has switched to defined contribution (DC) plans over the last 20 years. A few teacher pension plans (Ohio's is one) have also started to offer DC plans but with strings attached that make them less appealing than the traditional DB plans.

In Education Next, Costrell and Podgursky provide a detailed primer on how teacher pensions work and their pitfalls. Teachers typically earn relatively little in the way of pension benefits until they reach their early 50s. The system encourages teachers to "put in their time" until then, whether or not they are well-suited to the job or want to make a career out of teaching. Then, after 25 or 30 years, the pension system begins to punish teachers for staying on the job too long, pushing them out the door at a relatively young age even if they are still good teachers and want to keep teaching.

Teacher pension systems also have important implications for recruitment. Many young teachers might prefer more of their compensation paid up front rather than diverted into a system from which they may well never benefit, according to the economists.

Retirement benefits have major impact on school finances because teachers are living longer. According to Costrell and Podgursky, a teacher retiring at age 55 in Ohio with a $50,000 inflation-indexed annual pension has received an annuity valued at over $1 million.

Finally, retiree health insurance can add much more to the taxpayer-supported bill. To fund these benefits requires large contributions from employees and employers. In Ohio, for example, contributions currently stand at 24 percent of salary (10 percent from the teacher and 14 percent from the district). But even this falls well short of what is needed.

The Columbus Dispatch reports on STRS's efforts to shore up its retiree health-care benefits by putting the squeeze on already hard-pressed local school districts and working teachers (see here). Through H.B. 315, STRS would create a dedicated health-care benefit fund and add at least $9.8 billion in health-care costs to its obligations. Over five years, school district contributions to the system would increase to 16.5 percent of an employee's salary and working teacher contributions would reach 12.5 percent. All this, and still no guarantee that these larger contributions would cover future health-care costs any more than current contributions will cover future pension checks.

The financial journal Barron's also has weighed in on the state of public pension systems with an editorial calling for a defined-contribution system that is simpler and fairer than the increasingly archaic defined-benefit system. Barron's calls for a public pension system that "does not lock people into jobs they do not like or pushes people out of jobs they want to do" (see here).

Citing an example, provided by Costrell and Podgursky, "an Ohio teacher can work for 24 years accumulating benefits that would be paid starting at age 60, if he quit or retired at any time in those 24 years. But on working a 25th year, the teacher suddenly becomes eligible for retirement at 55, gaining five years of benefits in an instant. Missouri uses a 'rule of 80,' permitting retirement when age and years of service add up to 80, as long as the teacher is over age 45."

"Such features have been seen in private plans," according to Barron's, "but they are more powerful when there is an inflation adjustment in benefits. That's a feature almost never seen in private pensions, which of course are sponsored by entities lacking the power to levy taxes on their customers."

By Michael B. Lafferty and Emmy L. Partin

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Recommended Reading

Fordham plus choice equals charters

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has issued its "Sponsorship Accountability Report 2006-07" for the nine charter schools it sponsors in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Springfield (see here). The bottom line of the report is that Fordham and the schools we sponsor have a lot of work to do. As a group, Fordham-sponsored schools are simply not performing as well as we, or they, had hoped they would, but that doesn't mean we're giving up or that those schools are not making a difference to the students and communities they serve.

Fordham got into sponsorship by choice because it was the most obvious way to begin to bring much needed change to public education. Creating and running charter schools in Ohio has proved incredibly difficult for both sponsors and school operators. Yet, our challenges are largely mirrored by urban districts in Ohio. When the state report card data came out in August, we saw that 183,000 district and charter-school students in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton were attending schools graded either D or F (officially, "academic watch" or "academic emergency"). In Dayton, Fordham's hometown, the numbers were especially grim. Fully 80 percent of children attend a public school in Dayton (district or charter) rated F or D.

Clearly, both charters and public district schools must improve. Toward this end, Fordham is excited about its effort to sponsor two strong new school models for Ohio: a KIPP (see here) school and a "Building Excellent Schools" (see here) school will both open in Columbus in 2008 under Fordham sponsorship. Additionally, we are working closely with the current schools we sponsor to see them strengthen their academic performance. In the two years that Fordham has sponsored schools, most have struggled to meet and exceed state standards. Even so, students in Fordham-sponsored schools have largely outperformed their peers in charter schools statewide and in their home districts in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Springfield. They have done so with 30 percent fewer operating dollars per pupil than district schools, with no public money for facilities, and in an increasingly hostile political environment (see here).

Despite the challenges, we at Fordham believe that sponsorship is worth continuing and even expanding, although the charter school cap makes this hard to do. Too many children in Ohio still attend low-performing schools. For these children, charters provide hope. Moreover, we know that Ohioans value school choice in general and the charter option in particular. Support among residents of Ohio's big cities is even higher--a fact not very surprising considering these folks' long and painful experience with troubled district schools that seem inert to change. (For survey details, see here.)

We've learned many important lessons as a sponsor, beginning with the tremendous challenge of successfully educating acutely disadvantaged children. We share these lessons in the report and we note that we certainly don't have it all figured out. But, what we have learned is interesting for those who work in, or care about, public education in urban communities.

By Terry Ryan and Michael B. Lafferty

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Review

To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence
National Endowment for the Arts
November 2007

A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts tells an alarming story about the decline in reading among young Americans, concluding that 1) Americans are spending less time reading; 2) reading-comprehension skills are eroding; and 3) declining literacy rates will have serious social, economic, cultural, and civic implications for our country. Not even one-third of 13-year-olds read daily and the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period, according to the report.

Readers get more exercise, have higher levels of academic achievement, garner higher wages, and vote more frequently but the report finds that TV and other couch potato electronic forms of media are stealing the attention of most teens. "C U at book club" does not seem to be a frequent text message among high schoolers. The report concludes that these newer forms of electronic media do not provide a measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated by sustained and frequent reading and that our nation will certainly suffer if this disturbing trend is not curbed.

For those Americans who do still read in their leisure time, this report is worth reading and can be found here.

Also worth a read is the Education Week article on this report, where Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, makes controversial (and largely unsubstantiated claims) about schools failing to instill a love of reading due to their focus on preparing students for tests (see here).

By Kristina Phillips-Schwartz

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From the Front Lines

Here's an idea: fire the boss

The Toledo Public Schools teachers union has proposed that the district's lowest-performing school should be teacher-run.

"Our proposal is that there would be no administrators and it will be totally teacher-led," said Francine Lawrence, Toledo Federation of Teachers president, told the Toledo Blade's Ignazio Messina.

The proposal for Pickett Elementary would selectively place teachers, offer salary incentives, concentrate on early childhood education and community engagement, and include a longer school year, Messina reports.

Lawrence called her idea "somewhat unique" in the nation. But, the Gadfly would like to remind readers that it was precisely this idea that was the genesis behind the charter school ideal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, there is nothing preventing public school teachers in Toledo or elsewhere in Ohio from opening a charter school and this is being done by union teachers in New York City (see here).

"The ultimate goal, what we are committing to do, is that the school will exit school improvement status," she said of Pickett's annually poor ranking.

The idea has some hurdles sans the charter school path: state law requires administrative leadership in schools and the principals' union contract states there will be a principal in every school.

But is also has support in high places.

"I was enthusiastic about some of the pedagogy and some of the ideas," State Superintendent Susan Tave Zelman, told the Blade.

By Michael B. Lafferty

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Announcement

Charter-school report to be released December 5

December 5, the National Charter School Research Project at the Center on Reinventing Public Education is hosting a luncheon to release the 2007 edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools. Presenters include Andrew Rotherham (Education Sector), Priscilla Wohlstetter (USC), Jon Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools), Ben Wildavsky (Kauffman Foundation), and Robin Lake (NCSRP Executive Director and editor of the report). This year's event is at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. For more information or to register, contact Kate Ratcliffe at [email protected] or (206) 685-2214.

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About Us

The Ohio Education Gadfly is published bi-weekly (ordinarily on Wednesdays, with occasional breaks) by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Have something to say? Email us at [email protected]. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email [email protected] with "unsubscribe gadfly" in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward the Gadfly to others, and from our website you can even email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message or sign up through our website. To read archived issues or obtain other reviews of reports and books, go to our website and click on the Ohio Education Gadfly link. Aching for still more education news and analysis? Check out the original Education Gadfly.

Nationally and in Ohio, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, along with its sister organization the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, strives to close America's vexing achievement gaps by raising standards, strengthening accountability, and expanding high-quality education options for parents and families. As a charter-school sponsor in Ohio, the Foundation joins with schools to affirm a relentless commitment to high expectations for all children, accountability for academic results and transparency and organizational integrity, while freeing the schools to operate with minimal red tape. The Foundation and Institute are neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.