The Education Gadfly

As someone who has been working and living in Dayton for the past seven years, I am constantly reminded of the fact that there are, in fact, two Daytons.

One Dayton--the Dayton where my family is fortunate enough to live and be educated--is defined by opportunity, innovation, and excitement about the future. This Dayton is reflected in the efforts of the Dayton Development Coalition, which is dedicated to creating high-paying jobs, new wealth for communities, and new business opportunities for the region.

This Dayton is giving birth to one of the country's leading science, technology, engineering, and math--STEM, for short--initiatives. Edvention, as the STEM effort is known here, is a high-powered coalition of universities, businesses, school districts, individual schools, and government agencies dedicated to accelerating the development of the region's math and science talent pool.

An important component of this effort is a proposed STEM high school based at Wright State University that would ultimately serve 600 students in grades 6 through 12.

This Dayton is working to be a magnet for talent and investment and it understands that the keys to success are high levels of education and the ability to constantly learn, create, and innovate.

The other Dayton, the urban core where I work and try to help educators make a difference, is defined by job loss, despair, poverty, boarded-up houses and businesses, and deeply troubled schools. This Dayton long ago saw its best and brightest flee and is more worried about defending the status quo, as bad as it may be, than building something new.

This Dayton is defined by grim statistics:

18 percent of families live in poverty;
40 percent of children live in poverty;
Public schools that have seen their enrollment decline from 35,000 in 1980 to 17,000 today;
Half of the city's children aren't proficient in basic math and reading skills; and
80 percent of children in a public school-- district and charter schools-- attend a school rated by the state as in "academic emergency" (an F) or "academic watch" (a D).

The two Daytons are only miles apart, but they oftentimes feel like separate worlds. Yet, connected they are. Dayton is the "brand name" for the region and efforts to recruit talent, investment, and businesses to the region are influenced by how "Dayton" is perceived elsewhere.

The challenge for the region's leadership is to figure out how to inject the innovation, passion, talent, and excitement of the growing Dayton into the school-reform efforts of the declining Dayton.

This is not simply a matter of pumping more money into urban schools. Dayton Public Schools, for example, already receive more per-pupil funding than any district in Montgomery County and fully 70 percent of its funding comes from state and federal sources.

Nor, is it simply a matter of hoping charter schools will come to the rescue, as charter-school student performance in Dayton is generally as weak as that of their peers in district schools.

Conversations between the two Daytons are taking place. And there are exceptional people who have committed themselves to improving education for those students at most risk of being left behind. But for these conversations to have tangible results in the lives of the children and families most in need, they will need to spur new coalitions of partners who haven't worked together in the past.

And, it will certainly require upsetting the status quo and changing dramatically what people have grown used to doing. The time when a few tweaks and a little more cash could make a real difference are long since past and the question for Dayton is whether a city divided can actually stand strong.

By Terry Ryan

This editorial was published February 8 as an op-ed column in the Dayton Daily News (see here).

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Capital Matters

The devil is in the details

In his second State of the State address, Governor Strickland kept with his tradition of not distributing hard copies of the speech ahead of time and not providing supplemental information about his proposed programs and policies. (See Fordham's take on the governor's remarks here.) Those all-important details, still trickling out one week later, are setting up the battle lines over one of Strickland's most innovative education proposals.

"Seniors to Sophomores" would allow the state's high schoolers to spend their senior year on a public university campus at no cost. Ohio's current participation in early-college-access programs is weak--only 12,000 students participated last year, most were white females--and the mechanisms for tracking and evaluating such programs is even weaker (see here).

The governor has indicated that this program will not be a top-down mandate. It will be up to high schools and colleges--not state government--to decide how to implement it (see here). Parents and students, however, are rightly concerned about how the priorities of these institutions will weigh against their own interests. Look at how districts characterize charter schools and education-choice vouchers for an idea of how they might "resist" Seniors to Sophomores. Bottom line, districts will "lose" state funding for twelfth graders who bypass district schools for seats in colleges or universities.

Thus, for adults it all comes down to money. Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, whom Strickland charged with formulating the details of the program, nixed the need for new funding and indicated that the program will be funded much like other public school-choice options (think charter schools and STEM schools) where the state share of per-pupil funding is diverted from the home district to the school the young person attends. In this case, that school would be a state college or university. Superintendents and teacher unions are already clamoring about the loss of that funding and what it might mean for the youngsters left behind (see here and here).

Seniors to Sophomores has the potential to greatly expand and improve early-college access in the Buckeye State and open the doors to a college education for thousands more youngsters. It can also save cashed strapped families and their children some serious bucks (average yearly college tuition in Ohio is just over $6,500). For this to happen, however, high schools and colleges will need to work in tandem to become more nimble, flexible, and student-focused. This would undeniably be a good thing for the state's young people and their families.

By Emmy L. Partin, Kristi Phillips-Schwartz

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From the Tit-for-Tat Department

Times never change, bad news is never welcome

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 (see here). In the report's introduction the institute's president, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and I wrote, "We hope this report triggers a long-overdue discussion about the state's teacher retirement system, its challenges, and ways it can be improved for the benefit of current members, future teachers, and state taxpayers."

The discussion we sparked has been far less civil than we expected. Instead of debating how to modernize and improve the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS), STRS and its supporters, most recently State Senator Sue Morano in the Columbus Dispatch, have attacked the authors of the report--two of the country's premier school-finance economists--and the Fordham Institute (see here).

Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs identified four major shortcomings in Ohio's existing "defined-benefit" teacher pension system:

It's expensive. At the time the report was written, as noted by Senator Morano, STRS was projecting $19 billion in unfunded liabilities for pensions. This number fluctuates with the stock market but this is a significant debt on the future. Second, the debt is even greater when one adds the estimated $9.8 billion--STRS's figure--in health care costs to its obligations. It is to meet these costs that H.B. 315 has been proposed in the Ohio General Assembly to require teachers and schools districts each to contribute 2.5 percent more to the system within five years. Money for these costs will have to come out of the budgets of hard-pressed local school districts (funded by taxpayers) and the paychecks of hard-pressed teachers.
It encourages early retirement. STRS provides highly subsidized health-care premiums for retired teachers until Medicare kicks in at 65, and the system encourages teachers to retire at 55 or 60 when the average American is working to 65 or 67. Can Ohio really afford to have teachers retire at 55 when the Social Security retirement age is rising to 67? As the Pew Charitable Trusts warned in its December 2007 report Promises with a Price, "a growing gap between public and private sector benefits will fuel political debate as taxpayers notice that they are contributing to government employee retirement benefits that are increasingly unavailable to taxpayers at large."
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 10 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 (10 percent now, but 12.5 percent if H.B. 315 becomes law) may hinder recruitment of new teachers.
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 costly. Today, it permits teachers to collect pensions while continuing to work fulltime as teachers (known as "double dipping") at a time when the assets of the system fall far short of accumulated pension and health-insurance liabilities.

At no time has the Fordham Institute or the authors of the report suggested that promises made to current teachers should be broken. What the authors said in the report, and what we have said subsequently in response to various criticisms, is that STRS has serious problems that won't go away without fundamental changes to the system. The time for discussing these changes is now. Declaring all is well, as STRS and its supporters persist in doing, while seeking a five percent increase in spending on the system should raise serious red flags for taxpayers and lawmakers alike. This isn't about ideology but about what Ohio can afford.

By Terry Ryan

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Review

Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Princeton University Press
2008

Chester E. Finn, Jr. found he didn't want to make a career out of teaching when he left Harvard. A year teaching at Newton High School in Massachusetts was enough to reveal teaching just wasn't for him, so Finn did the next best thing and became an education policy expert.

Finn, the president--and the original gadfly--of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has been out and about in Washington, D.C.'s political and education circles for more than 40 years, rubbing elbows both the right way and often the wrong but always educating.

He pours some of that acquired insight and reflection into his new book, Troublemaker: APersonal History of School Reform since Sputnik, describing not only the history of American education policy over the last 50 years but quite a bit of his own education.

Newton High, Finn said, convinced him that teaching was tough, underappreciated, and that there were serious things going wrong with American education since his days in the public schools of Dayton, Ohio. He also learned that, to make a difference, he would have to get out of the classroom, a move that pushed him into graduate school at Harvard and into the arms of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Moynihan helped shape Finn's early ideas on education and social policy and also was responsible for getting him to the nation's capital, where he began his intimate view of every national education endeavor America has launched from racial integration through testing and standards to charters and choice.

What makes this book different and much more interesting than most policy retrospectives is its autobiographical nature. Insights from Finn's personal history help illuminate his years as a Moynihan aide and as a presidential assistant to Richard Nixon. As an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration he saw the possibilities for change and also a desire by administration officials not to rock the boat. He also shares insights into his gradual shift from Democrat to Neocon before most people really knew what one was, although these days he's not real excited about the Republican Party.

Each turn in the road brought new views and Finn shares them. There's enough Checker Finn in this book for both his friends and his foes. But despite his crankiness at times, Finn's tour of the last half century serves up hope, of which America and its education system are in dire need.

By Mike Lafferty

For Checker Finn's own reflections on his book, see here.

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Recommended Reading

School boards: fish, cut bait, or get out of the way

Mark Twain once quipped that God, for practice, first made idiots. Then he made school boards.

In the current issue of The Atlantic (see here), Mark Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, uses Twain to illustrate that America's 15,000 local school boards (more than 600 of which are in Ohio) are a huge roadblock to education reform and that they have to be replaced by a more centralized state or even national system of school governance. Consider this in light of Governor Strickland's proposal to appoint a director of education to usurp the powers of the State Board of Education.

Miller compares the mediocre results in U.S. classrooms with those in other nations. A 2003 assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see here) found that even though America spent more on education than nearly every other nation, out of 29 developed countries examined we ranked 15th in reading, 18th in science, and 24th in math.

Reconsidering these numbers five years later should give pause to those who beat their breasts with the recent Education Week study that gives Ohio's overall efforts a "B" in comparing our schools with those in the other 49 states. While the state and the nation have some very fine schools, collectively we are just not nearly good enough. We haven't been even adequate for a very long time. In fact, 25 years after the report A Nation at Risk exposed serious weaknesses in American education, we are still mediocre at best and we aren't going to get much better, Miller argues, until local school boards are swept out of the way.

In the United States, Miller argues, local school boards, who maintain 15,000 separate curriculums, have kept education from attracting R&D dollars. Worse, local boards of education too often turn over control of many school districts to teacher unions though collective bargaining agreements that can block administrators' attempts to promote new teaching methods or get rid of ineffective teaching methods and teachers.

While, Miller admits, there is little chance of local school boards being eliminated, perhaps their roles can, at least, be minimized. In fact, consolidation might be a good place to start. Let's start in Ohio. We once had more than 2,000 school boards and now we have about 600. One school board per county--88--might be a good target.

By Mike Lafferty

Education|Evolving predicts the future

Wondering what the future holds for public education? Then check out Education|Evolving's predictions and proposals in "The Other Half of the Strategy: Following up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Schooling."

E|E calls for drastic changes, like new and innovative schools and practices to provide alternative modes of student learning and assessment. One idea: expand the role of technology in schools to capitalize on the strengths of the tech-savvy student population and allow them to explore real-world applications of their learning. Another idea: boost pupil motivation by allowing each student to customize his or her education. The Gadfly can't help but fear a whole generation of students who focus their academic pursuits on "The Life and Times of Hannah Montana."

E|E imagines that traditional schools, as we know them today, will still have a place and the report is a bit starry-eyed in its optimistic expectations for reforms. Nonetheless, this report is an easy read that presents an array of possibilities for the future of public education. Read the report here.

By Alex Karas

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From the Front Lines

Wauseon school has four-legged counselor

WAUSEON, Ohio--New members of a school's staff sometimes can take some time to work in, although it's easier when a new staffer has four legs, like Kramer, the new counselor at Burr Road Middle School.

Kramer, a 2 1/2-year-old, part Lab-part Poodle, or Labradoodle, has been bow-wowing Burr Road's 500 students since his first day on the job in October.

"This is so awesome," sixth grader Jake Fitzpatrick told the Toledo Blade's Janet Romaker. "He looks nice. He's going to be good to talk to too. I have always wanted a dog, and now I have one."

A specialist in unconditional love, Kramer greets students arriving at school in the morning and listens to students needing a friendly tail wag. In fact, listening to student problems is a big part of Kramer's job, Principal Joseph Friess told The Gadfly.

"Just about every one of these kids touches him some day, either dropping down and hugging him or just brushing a hand over him," Friess said. "He puts in some pretty long days....He'll go to the basketball games with me. Sometimes we don't get home until 7 PM."

Kramer lives with Friess, who feeds and cares for him. Students help, occasionally hauling big bags of dog food to school. A local vet also donates care.

Both man and dog received training from Assistance Dogs of America in nearby Swanton, Ohio, before going on the job.

By Mike Lafferty

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Gadfly Readers Write...

... about charter-school mediocrity

Robert A. Douglas, of the Richard Allen Schools, responded to an editorial Checker Finn wrote laying out his 10 factors of charter-school mediocrity in the December 12 Gadfly.

You laid out 10 factors that you said contributed to charter school mediocrity. You didn't say anything what part the curriculum plays.

In Arizona, where I now live, charters are able to develop their own curriculum and do not have to align them with the Arizona Academic Content Standards. Three Arizona high schools were recently included in a list of the top-100 high schools in the U.S. Two of those top-100 high schools were Arizona charter high schools.

In Ohio, the charter schools were asked to show how their curriculum was aligned to the Ohio Academic Content Standards. The state provided forms to show how individual items in the school's curriculum were aligned to specific grade-level indicators. This effectively locked charters into the Ohio state-sponsored curriculum.

When I recently saw many sixth-graders still counting on their fingers to compute simple addition problems like 8 + 5, I wondered where they learned that. Sure enough, on page 57 of the Ohio standards, under that 16th grade-level indicator for the first grade in mathematics, were eight "strategies" for computing simple one-digit addition problems. They covered various ways to solve simple addition problems by combinations of counting on your fingers along with memorizing "doubles" (7 + 7 = 14).

Learning to count on your fingers, instead of memorizing, might work in the first grade but it is a prescription not for mediocrity but for failure....The Ohio Academic Content Standards are filled with many such wonderful ideas that were part of what has been derisively called "Fuzzy Math." The Ohio Academic Content Standards for the other subject-areas are filled with bad ideas. It's a wonder charter schools do as well as they do.

Finally, in a recent forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute (their Civic Bulletin No. 49)...two school systems in Virginia were compared (Richmond vs. Fairfax County). Richmond's black students outperformed Fairfax County's black students even though the demographics said that it should be the other way around. A big part of the reason was said to be that Richmond had changed curriculum and Fairfax County had not.

Focusing on what I call the externals and imagining that you can produce significant improvement in charter school performance is a loser. You have to focus on changing the curriculum and all the years...of bad ideas that charters are forced to accept and teach along with what teachers are taught in the ed. schools.

... about high-school reform

Colleen D. Grady, of the State Board of Education, responds to Terry Ryan's opinions concerning high-school reform:

I agree with your list of five keys to high-school reform but felt you stopped short of a couple of crucial ideas.

While I am a fan of daring to be different, different alone doesn't make the difference. A longer school day or school year without qualitative structural changes will just look different--without improvement in student achievement. And before jumping into "different" with both feet, how about having hard evidence that proposed changes (if implemented with fidelity) actually will pay off in improved student performance? We spend far too much time and money implementing changes to our education system without any evidence that our changes have a reasonable chance of effecting positive change.

The other issue that came to mind was middle school. If we are serious about improving graduation rates, reducing dropouts, reducing college-remediation rates, and increasing educational attainment we must include substantial and wide-ranging changes at the middle school. Too many high-school students drop out, fail to continue their education or obtain a job because they left middle school wholly unprepared....If we want world-class high schools it won't happen if middle schools continue to be the "black holes" of K-12 education.

If you have something to say about The Ohio Education Gadfly, say it in an e-mail to an article author or to the editor, Mike Lafferty, at [email protected]. Correspondence may be edited for clarity and length.

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About Us

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 either email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message or sign up through our website. 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.