THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 2, Number 28. December 11, 2008
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Columbus has joined New York, Washington, Chicago, Indianapolis, New Orleans, and other education-minded cities in building a high-quality new-schools sector. To date, however, the Columbus City Schools has not driven this effort. It has, in fact, dragged it down. This should change.
In recent months, two nationally recognized charter-school programs opened new schools in the city--one adhering to the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) model (see here), the second arising from the Building Excellent Schools (BES) program (see here). Both programs receive the support of serious urban school reformers--now including Columbus business and civic leaders--because they have a track record of delivering strong educational results for needy children. They are unabashedly "no-excuses" schools that deliver academic achievement to kids who have known little success in conventional schools.
In New York, Chicago, and other major cities where high-quality charters such as these have taken off, the school districts invite them to town, provide them with facilities, and sponsor the new schools. For example, the New York City Education Department has an Office of Portfolio Development while Chicago has an Office of New Schools. And, within the past year, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District launched its effort with the creation of its Office of New Innovative Schools (see here). Such units are responsible for recruiting, facilitating, and housing quality charter schools. They also hold schools to account for their results. These cities view charter schools as vital elements of a wider district strategy to improve public education and they treat charters with the same respect and support as traditional schools. District officials help these new schools with transportation and facilities while also protecting the essential operating freedoms that they need to succeed. Those freedoms include selecting (and deselecting) teachers, utilizing financial incentives such as performance-based pay, adapting the calendar and schedule to student needs, and installing high-yield curricula. The deal is simple: freedom in return for results.
In New York, even the teachers union has joined the act by opening two charter schools of its own--this in marked contrast with Columbus, where the school district has offered at best tepid support and the unions have sought to destroy charters through lawsuits, legislative action, and a nasty public relations campaign.
Wanted or not by the system, KIPP and BES have joined the Columbus City Schools in a war against educational failure, poverty, and ignorance, seeking to provide poor urban kids with the same life chances as their peers in wealthier schools and communities. This effort does not oppose or devalue the hard work of traditional district schools. It's another front in a shared struggle. That's why the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation partnered with an awesome gathering of community leaders and educators to help launch these two schools.
We're glad to be doing this. But if the district had embraced this opportunity, we wouldn't have had to. After all, Fordham is primarily a think tank. We generate ideas and policies for education reform that we think can work and criticize those we think will fail or hurt children. Today, to our knowledge, Fordham is the only think tank sponsoring charter schools. In that role, we have a performance contract with the State Board of Education that allows us to "license" schools like KIPP: Journey Academy and BES's Columbus Collegiate Academy to open. We are also their oversight and quality control agent and we, in turn, must answer to the state whose public education system these schools remain part of.
We expect these schools to do as well by Columbus youngsters as the best of their counterparts in New York and Chicago. According to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "The outstanding gains made by students in charter schools this year [2007-08] show what a great choice these schools are providing for thousands of families across the City." In Chicago, according to RAND Education, the average eighth-grade charter student who goes on to a charter high school is seven percent more likely to graduate and 11 percent more likely to enroll in college.
The time is right in Columbus and Ohio's other cities for school districts and high- quality charter schools to join forces in the common struggle to educate all children to a high standard. We at Fordham would gladly transfer our authorizing responsibilities to districts ready and willing to do it right and we'd even help them in their efforts. The state's neediest children would be the beneficiaries of such a deal.
by Terry Ryan
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Lawmakers get schooled on schools
Ohio Senate President Bill Harris believes Gov. Ted Strickland has generated high expectations on education, especially when it comes to the issue of school funding.
Harris, who pledged to a mixed gathering
of Democrat and Republican lawmakers and state education policy groups, Monday,
that he would be bipartisan on education issues, is waiting to see what reforms
the governor will propose next year for the state's K-12 education system.
"He's made this a high-stakes issue," Harris said in an address at the lawmakers
education briefing in Columbus. The event, Closing the Gap: Moving Ohio to a
World-Class Education System, was hosted by the Fordham Institute, KidsOhio.org,
the ESC of Central Ohio, the Ohio Business Roundtable, and the Ohio Business
Alliance for Higher Education and the Economy (see here).
A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows Strickland remains the most popular of those thinking about running for governor in 2010 (see here). This is important because he will need all the political capital he can muster to make good on his promise to "fix" school funding at a time when the state faces "historic" economic problems.
Money certainly was on the minds of those attending the new lawmakers meeting. Both Harris and outgoing House Speaker Jon Husted brushed aside questions regarding the constitutionality of Ohio's school funding formula, which was the subject of repeated Ohio Supreme Court rulings stemming from the 1990s DeRolf case (see here). After the high court repeatedly found the formula unconstitutional, the General Assembly added billions in state money and built new schools across the state's neediest urban and rural districts. The high court, exhausted with the issue, eventually bowed out of the case in 2003, although that left many in the state education establishment unsatisfied.
Both lawmakers vowed to keep education a priority, even though the state will likely be strapped paying for it. Harris, for example, called on putting Ohio's innovative experimental STEM science program in every high school in the state. He didn't say how that idea might be funded, and there is a real possibility that primary and secondary education may be in for unprecedented budget cuts during the upcoming biennium.
"It looks like the state budget will be tight and this will crash with Gov. Strickland's intent to 'solve school funding for good,'" Husted said. "I'd be happy knowing what 'solving for good' meant."
To show just how limited are the governor's school-spending options, Husted said an across-the-board 10 percent cut in the budget would reduce the expected $7-billion shortfall only to about $4.7 billion over the next biennium.
Democratic leaders, including the governor, were invited to address the group but could not make the meeting.
Former Massachusetts education commissioner David Driscoll told the group America needs national K-12 education standards. The No Child Left Behind Act has left the nation with 50 widely varying sets of state standards. "Think about a national standard. It's almost un-American. Well it's not un-Finlandian or un-Korean," he quipped. Students in both of those countries--and in others--now out-perform American students. See the latest TIMSS international testing results in the review below.
While the challenges facing K-12 education in Ohio might seem overwhelming to many lawmakers and citizens, Driscoll said Ohio can make progress by staying focused on what works--high standards for students, teachers, schools, and districts. Driscoll says now is not the time for any state to waiver from standards and accountability.
Massachusetts is America's top performing state when it comes to education. This fact was validated this week with results on international tests showing Massachusetts in the same league as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore when it comes to math and science performance (see here). Driscoll, who is now a member of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute board of trustees, said it wasn't always like that in the Bay State.
The state's schools were sinking, especially those in urban areas, and some classroom teachers were barely literate in the subjects they were teaching. Some had never had a math course. "I always called it the second 'shot heard round the world,'" Driscoll said of Massachusetts' top-to-bottom reform effort of the past decade.
Led by Republican governors and Democrat legislatures, Massachusetts instituted an overhaul against strident opposition from teachers unions attempting to protect teacher prerogatives and parents who considered the reforms too tough on their children. "We stuck with it and they were wrong," Driscoll said. "Everyone was waiting for us to blink. It was a long road and it wasn't easy."
If students, teachers, and schools don't have meaningful standards, young people leave high school without needed job and college skills and "they pay a terrible price later on," he said.
Buckeye Institute puts teacher and administrator salaries online
As part of its effort to promote transparency and accountability in government, the Buckeye Institute has created a searchable, online database of Ohio public school district teacher and administrator salaries (which account for roughly 80 percent of school budgets). Average teacher and staff salary data for districts are available on the state education department's website (start here), but the Buckeye Institute database goes one step further, allowing users to view the salaries of all teachers in a district or search for a teacher by name. The database doesn't contain information for charter schools or the salaries of non-teachers and non-administrators, and is based on the previous year's data. Start searching at www.buckeyeinstitute.org/schoolsalaries.
The clock is winding down on the 127th General Assembly's lame-duck session, although lawmakers continue to introduce new bills. Such late entries rarely become law and are more often than not attempts by legislators to appease interest groups or make a political statement. Such seems to be the case with this week's introduction of House Bill 654 by Rep. Clayton Luckie (see here).
H.B. 654 would allow public school districts to "surrender" the transportation of high school students who live within their boundaries but attend charter schools. Under current law, local school districts are responsible for transporting most students who live within their boundaries, including most private and charter school students. Districts do not have to provide transportation for students in grades 9 through 12, but if they provide busing for high school students attending district schools they must do the same for most charter and private high school students. Separate rules exist for children with special needs. Luckie's bill calls for districts to notify charter schools by June 1 of each year whether they will provide high school transportation for them the following year, and it also provides a formula for the state to use to calculate transportation funding for charter schools.
Transportation is a sticky wicket in relationships between districts and charter schools. Busing is expensive, and in cities like Dayton, where charter school students make up 28 percent of the public education market share, the logistics of getting kids to the right schools on time can be a nightmare. H.B. 654 doesn't call for eliminating busing for private high school students and it allows districts to pick and choose which charter schools they will or won't provide busing for. It doesn't feel like an attempt to improve the charter sector or even to ease district transportation woes. Instead, this bill is just another in a line of recent attempts to hamper charter schools--the good and the bad alike--in the Buckeye State and punish parents and students who opt for them (see here, here, and here, to name a few).
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Highlights
from TIMSS 2007: Mathematics and Science Achievement of U.S. Fourth- and Eighth-Grade
Students in an International Context
December 2008
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2007 results were released Tuesday (see here) and they show American kids are making progress against their international peers. TIMSS is a rigorous international comparison of fourth- and eighth-grade students' math and science test scores across countries. Worth noting: our scores are not bad in comparison to underdeveloped countries, but there's plenty of room for improvement when matched against developed countries in Asia and Europe.
For math, the report reveals that:
For science, the report reveals that:
Okay, so the scores aren't so bad compared to other countries. We are beating Australia in fourth-grade math and Germany in fourth-grade science, but we aren't as competitive as the world's other highly developed countries. This is cause for serious concern. The report also tells us that American math and science scores have gone up since 1995, which is good news. This demonstrates that we're working toward improvements (NCLB was implemented in 2002) but points to the idea that scores can still go up. It's worth mentioning that some countries aren't participating in TIMMS (such as Finland) and perhaps the U.S. might be ranked lower if other countries had been included.
Still, there is one real downer to the report. The report tells us that American students aren't reaching the high international benchmarks that enable them to apply their math and science understanding to complicated situations and to explain their reasoning--basically, the types of skills needed for success in the increasingly competitive 21st century global economy.
These findings imply that the U.S. has some serious work to do in strengthening and improving its standards, testing, and accountability systems. The good news here is that we need not look further than Massachusetts for guidance on what works. In eighth-grade math, Massachusetts' score rose 34 points to 547 from eight years ago, compared with a 7-point increase for the United States, which averaged 508. In eighth-grade science, the Bay State's score rose 23 points to 556, compared with a 5-point gain for the United States, which scored 520 (see here).
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How is the air around your child's school?
A USA Today newspaper story featuring poor air quality around some American schools, including one near Cincinnati, was superficial, according to the Ohio EPA, which said the article was the result of a snapshot and not rigorous testing.
The story in Monday's newspaper
featured the Meredith Hitchens Elementary School in the Cincinnati suburb of
Addyston (see here).
USA Today staffers Blake Morrison and Brad Heath reported that school
district officials pulled all 369 students from the building three years ago
after air sampling outside the building showed high levels of chemicals coming
from a nearby plastics plant. According to the newspaper, state Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) officials concluded the risk of developing cancer there
was 50-times higher than what the state considers acceptable.
The newspaper quoted an Ohio EPA scientist as saying that air monitoring at the closed school shows levels of the most dangerous chemicals have declined significantly, but that levels remain "over our risk goals."
The article reported that air outside 435 other schools in the nation could be even worse and the story certainly should make parents who have children in schools near industrial areas be concerned enough to demand some facts.
"We know people are concerned," Ohio EPA spokeswoman Heather Lauer told The Gadfly Wednesday. "What we we're looking at [in Addyston] was not an immediate health risk. These are not levels we would expect to see immediate health effects. We're talking about long-term cancer risk over 30 years of exposure."
For at least some of its data, USA Today used testing results the state EPA collected several years ago at the Ohio school. The newspaper also conducted some of its own more recent tests and used a federal EPA air quality computer model in preparing its stories. Monday, while not refuting the newspaper's claims, the Ohio EPA issued a letter to Ohio school districts through the Ohio Department of Education claiming the newspaper's testing was not comprehensive and that the agency's testing is superior. Something to note, too, is that the air around neighborhood schools could be very similar to the air around the nearby homes where students live.
"To reach the conclusions in its story, USA Today used a computer model utilized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that simulates air emissions and their effects on air quality. In addition, the newspaper conducted 100 one-time air samples nationwide. This reflects a quick snapshot of air data and estimates of potential impacts on localized quality. We will be reviewing the data that USA Today utilized, and will use this information as a starting point to evaluate what additional inquiries and investigations may be necessary," according to the letter from state EPA Director Chris Korleski.
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The Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Capital City office is now located at 37 W. Broad Street, Suite 400, in downtown Columbus. You can still reach us by phone at 614-223-1580 or visit us online at www.edexcellence.net.
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The Ohio Education Gadfly is published bi-weekly (ordinarily on Wednesdays, with occasional breaks, and in special editions) by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Have something to say? Email the editor 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 email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message. To read archived issues, 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 Institute, along with its sister organization the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 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.