THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and
Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 2, Number 27. December 3, 2008
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Coming soon: Fordham probes the brain drain
When 30 Ohio college students were interviewed in November at three of the state's top universities, they were asked to play what researcher Steve Farkas calls the "finish the sentence game."
Farkas, president of the New York-based FDR public opinion research company (see here), asked students to complete the phrase, "Ohio is...." The most common answer was "Ohio is...home." In short, young Ohio natives usually love their state but they are too often ready to leave as soon as they clutch their degrees. They're happy to have grown up here and just as happy to leave for adventures, jobs, or advanced degrees as soon as they're done with college. This isn't surprising. The problem for the state, however, is how to keep more of these bright, educated Ohioans right here.
Leaders from Gov. Ted Strickland on down are worried. So is the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The departure of so many capable, articulate citizens already hurts and will be devastating as Ohio attempts to restructure and reinvigorate the state's K-16 education system and, beyond that, to retool the economy. Farkas is helping to illuminate this issue for Fordham. The Institute has contracted with him to conduct an in-depth survey of 800 sophomores, juniors, and seniors currently attending Ohio's more prestigious colleges to learn just what they think about their state. The November focus groups of students--all with grade point averages of 3.5 and above--were designed to help construct questions for a larger survey in February. Farkas is a seasoned and well-respected researcher. In education, alone, he has conducted more than 150 focus groups with students, parents, teachers, and administrators. He is an ace at teasing out real attitudes and opinions.
In a sense, Farkas will put a face to what Ohio leaders already know. A 2003
Ohio Board of Regents study indicated that only 61 percent of those earning
a bachelor's degree in engineering at an Ohio university worked in-state
following graduation. Even fewer chemistry and physics majors, 46 percent, stayed
here. More recent surveys only reinforce the fear that the flight of too many
of our brightest young people is systemic, which makes overcoming it that much
more difficult. Tackling this challenge, for example, is a big part of what
the state's billion-dollar Third Frontier science and technology investment
program is all about (see here).
Obviously, Ohio-trained scientists and engineers can't remain in the state
if there are few jobs for scientists and engineers.
Ohio doesn't seem to win over many out-of-staters either. Few students fall
in love with our state. There was a sense of missed opportunity: too many had
never left the confines of their colleges and never came to appreciate their
neighborhoods, much less the state they had moved to. "They were aliens
that never assimilated," Farkas told us. Often they simply couldn't
imagine working here. "We can visualize the jobs but we can't feel them--we
don't know what it's really like," one told Farkas.
Not only did the focus-group students plan to leave, they also mostly dismissed Ohio's leaders as half-baked and uninspiring. As one kid in Cleveland told him, "It's never the best, they always half-ass it." While college students may feel the same about political leadership no matter where they live, Ohioans, they felt, are not proud of themselves.
So, Ohio needs to figure out how to entice a second look, hopefully through a job or other opportunity like a paid internship or tuition forgiveness in exchange for working here. Regarding jobs, the students showed a surprising sense of maturity when they said they want flexibility, responsibility, and diversity where they work as well as definable, achievable goals. They don't care as much about job security. They would rather manage their own money than have a pension and have more money up front. They want to be stimulated, fly from place to place, solve problems, and be stars.
Maybe a stint in something like Teach for America (see here), which targets the best and brightest college students for recruitment, would help. Unfortunately, to experience this grads have to leave Ohio. There is no Teach for America program in the Buckeye State. For kids without a clearly defined path (which is most) or who wouldn't mind taking a break before going to graduate school, Teach for America might be very attractive. As far as reforming Ohio education, the challenge is getting more of these top-flight students to consider a career in teaching, which, in the focus groups, meant an "honorable, challenging, and low-paying" job.
What Fordham's survey will deliver is a detailed look at whether grads are planning to leave or stay and, if they're planning to leave, what might entice them to remain, at least for a little while. Does Ohio represent opportunity and a good place to advance personally and professionally? What's needed to make them feel like investing their futures here? The study also will probe college students' perceptions of the K-12 education field. What could attract them to teaching? And do they know there are other less conventional job opportunities in education such as starting a charter school or working for a non-profit educational organization?
Fordham will have the answers in May.
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Grappling with weighted student funding in a billion-dollar ed. plan
The State Board of Education will vote next week on a new method of allocating and spending education dollars as well as a call to boost state K-12 spending by $1 billion.
The ideas are major recommendations of the board's school-funding subcommittee. Their report, An Integrated Approach to School Funding in Ohio, is the result of two years of hard work by board members and education department staff to develop recommendations for improving how Ohio finances public education.
Most notably, the report moves toward proposing a system of Weighted Student Funding (WSF). WSF enjoys bi-partisan support as a fair way to allocate education dollars (see Fordham's Fund the Child report here), and it gets a thumbs-up from educators who use it (see here). WSF rests on a handful of principles: school-funding must be transparent; funding must be based on students' educational needs; funding must be portable and follow a child to the building level and move with the child when he or she changes schools; and educators at the school level must be empowered to allocate resources as they see fit to meet individual student needs (see here).
The subcommittee's report calls for adopting weights for students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students, and gifted students. And, it does the tough job of recommending what those weights should be, defining eligibility, and estimating the cost. The report also recommends that Ohio build a better system to track building-level needs and spending and hold districts accountable for allocating money among buildings based on the learning needs of their students.
The report ultimately falls short of a true WSF plan, however. The subcommittee report continues central office control over real spending decisions and does not empower school leaders closest to the children. Nor do the recommendations call for funding to follow the child from school to school. Unfortunately, as written, the recommendations are a missed opportunity and may simply result in funding the education status quo to the tune of $1 billion more per year (see here).
Other noteworthy recommendations contained in the report:
Read the full report here and an insider's take on it here.
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Study says school finance system prevents education reform
A six-year, $6-million study of the American school-finance system has determined what many education experts conclude every day--that the system is broken and must be reformed before any true long-term education fix can be fashioned.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, comes just months before Gov. Ted Strickland unveils his school-funding reform plans and just as the Ohio State Board of Education considers a recommendation to add $1 billion to the $17 billion the state already spends on K-12 schooling (see above).
The report, Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools, recommends that spending concepts such as Weighted Student Funding are far better at targeting resources for the education of individual students. Facing the Future is the work of more than 40 economists, lawyers, financial specialists, and education policymakers. It includes more than 30 separate studies, including in-depth looks at Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington.
"Like an old computer that has become so laden with new applications that it can no longer do anything well, our school finance system is a product of many unrelated policies and administrative arrangements that, in combination, freeze everything up," said lead author Paul T. Hill, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington. "We need a new model that is optimized to do one thing, that is, ensure that every child learns what she needs to become an involved citizen and full participant in a modern economy."
Hill and the report's other authors conclude that the current system "is controlled by decisions made in the past, sometimes for reasons and on behalf of people who are no longer in the system, and at such a distance from schools, that educators have scant flexibility to adapt to the needs of the here and now. Teachers and principals, the people whose work the whole system is supposed to support, get complexity and constraint rather than help. In the meantime, the costs of everything are hidden, and people who would like to make trade-offs in pursuit of more effective schools cannot do so."
Thus, when the State Board of Education considers a proposal to spend an additional $1 billion on education, what will that money really accomplish unless the way it is spent is actually changed? While the board's school-funding subcommittee has used some principles of Weighted Student Funding to determine statewide needs, it failed to recommend two critical principles--portability and site-based decision making (see previous article).
Facing the Future makes four recommendations that Ohio's lawmakers need to consider for any meaningful school funding fix:
See the report here. For a detailed explanation of Weighted Student Funding, see the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's study, Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance, here.
AG Rogers: Admit it, you just don't have a case
There's a good chance--logically speaking--that Attorney General Nancy Rogers will not appeal the latest rejection of the state's claim that a poorly performing charter school violates the Ohio charitable trust law (see here).
First, the Nov. 24 decision by a Hamilton County Common Pleas judge rejecting Rogers' attempt to close the Harmony Community School is the second time in three months a court has turned down the AG's interpretation of the statute, so precedent is building. Second, the 30-day deadline for appealing the decision falls just before Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray becomes the new attorney general in January.
Rogers--and Cordray--may feel that, given the budget cuts now being made across the board in state government (see here), spending tens of thousands of additional dollars on a rejected legal theory may not be a prudent use of taxpayer money.
As Gadfly has argued from the start, it never was (see here). The Hamilton County case was one of a trio of lawsuits launched by former Attorney General Marc Dann, at the behest of the Ohio Education Association (see here). The OEA originated the novel and now twice-discredited legal claim that the schools are charitable trusts and that their dismal academic performance violated the law. In ruling against the AG, Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Jody M. Luebbers echoed a September ruling in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court in favor of the New Choices charter school. Unfortunately for taxpayers, Rogers decided to appeal the New Choices decision.
A third case, against Miami Valley Academies in Dayton, is pending in Montgomery County. Harmony is not out of the woods since Luebbers did rule that the AG's case against the school for allegedly failing to keep up its workers' compensation premiums can go forward.
However, Luebbers was blunt on the charitable trust idea. "Simply put, nowhere in [state law] does it state that the attorney general has the authority to shut down a community school through its powers over charitable/public trusts," Luebbers wrote in her decision, adding that "...if the General Assembly desired the attorney general to have this authority, they would have specifically granted it."
And, it is important to remember, state law has been in place that forces persistently failing charter schools--those ranked F on the state's academic rating system for three consecutive years--to close. Two will close at the end of this year and 23 are at risk for closure in 2010 (see here).
There is a right way and a wrong way to go after failing charters, and the AG is absolutely going about it in the wrong way.
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Charter
School Authorizers in SREB States: A Call for Accountability
Southern Regional Education Board
November 2008
The Southern Regional Education Board has identified key elements to gauge
the success of charter schools (see here).
This 15-page report examines charter school student achievement, data systems
and state-level policies and practices in the 16 SREB states of Alabama, Arkansas,
Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North
Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
While the charter-school grades are mixed, the most interesting part of the report identifies three elements needed to make a valid assessment of charter performance:
Ohio needs to consider these points while moving forward with improvements to the state's charter program. Our state has developed and implemented quality state-wide student-achievement and data systems. But, we have not done a good job of overseeing authorizers (see here). The Columbus Dispatch observed recently in a Nov. 26 editorial that the "gaping" hole in Ohio law "that grandfathered dozens of sponsors [a.k.a. authorizers] already in the charter school field from any direct connection to the department [of education]." To drive home the point, the Dispatch stated that 56 of 74 Ohio sponsors do not have any type of accountability agreement with the Ohio Department of Education.
Ohio would be wise to take a page from the SREB report and focus on authorizer quality and oversight. The state should hold all authorizers accountable to the same performance standards and it should support quality authorizers. In turn, we might just see an improvement in the quality of charter schools in this state.
What
Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?
Paul E. Peterson and Daniel Nadler
Education Next
Winter 2009
It's a cliché that things aren't always what they seem. But in the case of alternative teacher certification programs, when they are what they seem, they're pretty stellar--that is, in terms of recruiting minority teachers and boosting student achievement. In the latest issue of Education Next, Harvard's Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler examine the alternative certification (AC) programs of 47 states (three states do not allow it). They found that in 21--Ohio is not one of them--there were genuine alternative programs, meaning that would-be teachers did not have to take the same number of courses as traditionally certified teachers or they could take a test to demonstrate teaching competency. In those states with genuine AC, over a quarter of teachers chose this route in 2004-05, compared to just five percent in states with symbolic AC. In these latter states, participants had to take the full 30 education credits. The study also measured minority inroads into teaching in relation to alternative certification, and in the 21 states with genuine alternative paths to the classroom, they found minority representation was much higher than in those states with symbolic or no alternative licensure. Finally, Peterson and Nadler also found that genuine AC states posted greater NAEP gains between 2003 and 2007 than did states with symbolic AC, though the researchers were unable to control for other state policies that may have been introduced during the same time.
Bottom Line: If we want to recruit more minority teachers into teaching and likely boost achievement, we'd be wise to lift the barrier--otherwise known as 30 credits of tedious education courses--that keeps them out. Ohio policymakers would do well to pay attention: though 22 percent of the Buckeye State's students are nonwhite, only six percent of its teachers are (see here) and Ohio's NAEP scores inched up, at best, from 2003 to 2007. Read the study here.
by Amber Winkler (Winkler is research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Washington, D.C. office.)
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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.