THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and
Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 3, Number 4. February 18, 2009
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Ohio at the crossroads--more of the same or a new approach?
Gov. Ted Strickland's education plan calls for "modernizing" Ohio's K-12 education system, but perversely his "evidence-based" approach to school funding would likely scuttle his efforts to pull Ohio primary-secondary education into the 21st century.
According to an analysis (see here) released Tuesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Strickland plan "would prop up an outdated system of school finance that establishes funding levels based on convention rather than need, sustains institutions whether they work or not, spends money with little regard for results, holds adults accountable for compliance not results."
Author Paul T. Hill, Corbally Professor at the University of Washington, director of that university's Center on Reinventing Public Education, Senior Fellow at Brookings, and former senior social scientist at RAND, puts it this way: "though Governor Strickland asserts that his school-funding model is evidence-based, in fact there is no proven link between what's proposed and what's effective in schools�or, for that matter, what Ohio's schools and children actually need."
This is serious criticism from an analyst who knows what he is talking about. An Ohio State University graduate, Hill was lead author of a six-year, $6 million, nationwide assessment of school finance completed in December. Funded by the Gates Foundation, Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools (see here) is the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted and presents some of the best-grounded findings about the links between state spending and school performance.
The Strickland plan, however, flies in its face. As Hill explains, "once one gets past the rhetoric, one finds that the main active ingredients in the governor's plan are spending increases geared toward helping schools and districts employ more administrators, teachers, and support staff." In short, the details of the plan read more like a jobs program than an education plan�maybe not a bad thing as an anti-recessionary scheme but not a sound way to revamp school finance.
Hill maintains that the governor's plan "is tight where it should be loose and loose where it should be tight." If Ohio truly wants an adequate education for all its children, Hill contends, it must be "open to experimentation with different forms of instruction, different mixes of teacher salaries and other instructional assets like technology, and different uses of time. It should also encourage innovative instruction and new mixes of teacher-led instruction and on-line learning." Hill warns, "It can't do those things by tying up all the money in salaries."
If Ohio wants its schools to improve, it must also let money chase performance. Here, Hill explains, the governor's plan is too loose. To encourage performance the system, Hill says, "must be tight and disciplined about closely measuring how much every student learns every year in every school�including charter schools and on-line schools�identifying outliers, reproducing the highest performers, and replacing the least productive schools."
On balance, Gov. Strickland's school-finance plan seeks to impose certainty where none exists. According to Hill, "What we have now is a finance system that is focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children. This system doesn't fit America's (or Ohio's) needs." Hill admits "we haven't figured out how to educate the growing number of poor and minority children." But, the Governor's plan would "finance and control schools as if we knew exactly how."
Hill says a very different and vastly more flexible approach is called for if we are serious, about educating all children to world-class standards and maximizing their talents. "Schools and systems that work best," he explains, "especially for poor and disadvantaged youngsters, are not all alike: they use funds, teachers, students' time, materials, and technology very differently. Some take money out of administration to pay for materials, technology, and information systems to track results. Many go for longer days rather than longer years and allow principals to make trade-offs (e.g., adjusting class size according to student needs and teacher abilities)."
The irony here is that Gov. Strickland wants to personalize and modernize education. Yet, the implementation of his "evidence-based model" does none of that. It would simply bulk-up a one-size-fits-all model of education under the banner "evidence-based." According to Hill, "Governor Strickland and Ohio lawmakers should modify their current course of direction. It is not too late to take a decent plan and make it great."
Read Ohio at the Crossroads: School funding�more of the same or changing the model here. See coverage of this report from some of the state's newspapers here and here.
by Terry Ryan
A few more thoughts…
In the news business, reporters have a saying for a boilerplate quote an editor can remove to tighten a story. It's "throw-away" and that's exactly what the governor's response to the Fordham/Paul Hill study deserves.
Strickland's spokeswoman talked of the governor's plan having components that have been shown to help students succeed (see here). We should hope so. But, again, there's no applicable evidence that they will for all children across an entire school district, let alone across an entire state.
The governor continues to say his top-down, one-size-fits-all requirements are best for Ohio schools. Why does he think there is one, state-mandated solution for bettering education in every school in the state, let alone the inner-city classrooms crying out for innovation and change? Top district superintendents know this and are opting out of cookie-cutter education. In Cleveland, the district has opened an office of new and innovative schools dedicated to opening new schools, including charters. Gene Harris, the savvy superintendent of the Columbus City Schools has pledged to open new single-gender schools as part of that district's reform plan.
In Dayton, the top performing schools are either stand-alone charters or district schools that have many charter-like freedoms (see here). The governor's one-size fits all approach has been tossed aside by many working with our neediest children.
Education is crying out for more innovation and experimentation. Consider that only 36 percent of eighth graders in Ohio scored proficient or better in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2007 (see here). The math results were similar and the data were far bleaker for poor and minority youngsters. It's laughable that giving teachers and school leaders a chance to innovate, while also holding them tightly accountable for results, would somehow violate fiscal accountability and transparency standards as the spokeswoman contends.
Now, let's free our school leaders and teachers to figure out what works and then reproduce it. Taxpayer education dollars should produce education for children, not just paychecks for adults.
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State board likes the governor's plans even without the details
The State Board of Education passed a resolution last week (15-2, with two members absent) commending Gov. Strickland's education reform plan (see here). The board put forth the resolution despite the fact that crucial information about the governor's plan�like legislative language, which isn't expected until later this month, and details about how the school-funding model calculates funding levels�are still not available. One board member voted against the resolution because she did not feel there was enough detailed information meant for her and her constituents to fully evaluate it (see here).
It is hard to understand all the pieces of Strickland's plan without more details, but at first blush many of the governor's proposals seem to butt up against major recommendations from two previous board-sanctioned reports�the August 2008 An Integrated Approach to School Funding Reform in Ohio (see here) and the February 2007 Creating a World-class Education System in Ohio (see here). Perhaps that's why the board didn't mention these reports in its recent resolution supporting the governor's plan. The resolution did indicate, however, that the governor's plan aligns with the board's July 2008 "vision document," Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century: A Vision for Transforming PK-12 Education in Ohio (see here). For the most part, the aims of the governor's plan and this state board document agree. However, the board's vision for public education in Ohio includes an important component that Strickland's does not: accountability for performance.
While the governor would seemingly hold schools and school leaders accountable mainly for inputs (see more in the editorial above), the board has identified 10 external indicators to gauge the success of Ohio's education system. These include graduation and dropout rates as well as percent of:
Measuring performance and holding schools accountable for results has been a consistent and major theme in the board's recent history. The governor's plan could be much improved if it took the advice of the state board and focused squarely on measuring what works in schools and driving new dollars toward these efforts over time.
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Seniority-Based Layoffs will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education
Marguerite Roza
Center on Reinventing Public Education
February 2009
State and local officials are starting to cut education dollars to get their budgets out of the red. Hiring freezes, retirement incentives, and trimming non-personnel expenditures are all ways to cut. Yet, another popular approach has been seniority-based layoffs. Seniority-based layoffs eliminate jobs across different classifications (such as teachers, aides, and custodians) for the most recently hired personnel, regardless of performance. Is "last hired, first fired" the best way to address budget woes? Probably not, according to the rapid response analysis conducted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This concise and easy-to-read analysis assumes that recent hires make less money, so more recent hires need to be fired to make up for budget gaps. The result is that more school personnel are fired than needed. If cuts were made without considering seniority (meaning firing people across the pay scale spectrum), then there would need to be fewer cuts to make up for budget gaps. The analysis estimates, stunningly, that there are over 260,000 extra layoffs nationally than necessary because of seniority-based policies. And, of course, none of these dismissals are based on the performance of teachers, and so many let go may actually be some of the best instructors. Performance, or lack there of, should drive who stays and who goes, but last hired, first fired prevents this from happening. To read more details, see here.
A Longitudinal Analysis of Charter School Performance in Oakland Unified School District
California Charter Schools Association
January 2009
A new report from the California Charter School Association indicates Oakland-area charter schools are out-performing their public district-school peers (see here).
The report, A Longitudinal Analysis of Charter School Performance in Oakland Unified School District, looks at the performance of the Oakland charter schools vs. traditional California public schools from 2006 to 2008. Each charter school's performance was compared to that of the three most similarly matched district schools within a five-mile radius. Nearly 69 percent of the charters outperformed their district counterparts. Minority students and high-poverty students in charters also surpassed their district-school peers. These results are even more impressive when you factor in that the charters are serving a higher percentage of Latino and high-poverty students and an equal number of African-American students as similarly matched district schools.
These charter schools are eliminating the commonly accepted and continually reinforced stigma that poor and minority students cannot be successful in public schools. The charters have used innovation, dedication, high standards, and quality authorizing to produce student success and achievement, which have been difficult for minority and poor students to attain in traditional public schools. They show that charter schooling done well can be an effective and powerful force for improving education. Read the report here.
The Forgotten Middle: Ensuring that All Students are on Target for College and Career Readiness before High School
ACT
2009
Building upon ACT's previous work, this report examines the factors predicting college- and career-readiness. This analysis looks at student data from 2005 and 2006 in schools participating in the ACT College Readiness Systems. This is a standards, benchmarks, and assessment system intended to prepare students for college and the workplace. What are the specific factors that influence college and career readiness? The level of eighth-grade achievement proves to be most important. This is particularly true for subgroups of minority students, as well as students from families of different income levels. To understand more about what influences commonly known predictors of later academic performance, such as eighth-grade grade failure and ninth-grade GPA, the report examines student data from 24 middle schools across the country. It finds that a student's academic discipline, good conduct, and positive relationships with school personnel are good signs of later academic success. The report is an easy read and you can do that here.
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Cincinnati Catholic schools are beginning to tout test scores
More schools in the Cincinnati archdiocese, the nation's eighth-largest Catholic school system, are touting test scores to encourage enrollment.
And parents are using the scores students receive on annual nationally normed Terra Nova tests to help decide whether to enroll their children, according to Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Denise Smith Amos (see here).
The Terra Nova test measures student performance on subjects compared with students nationwide. The test also measures cognitive ability and natural learning strengths.
The archdiocesan attitude about not ballyhooing the scores is loosening, according to Smith Amos. Although school officials can show their scores to anyone, church officials don't want the numbers published on websites or used in marketing brochures because they fear parents would inappropriately compare schools.
Catholic schools can't be shy about test scores, especially in highly rated public school districts, said the principal of St. Vincent Ferrer in Kenwood.
"Our parents here are paying tuition. They've got a lot of money invested in their children's education. They want to see results. This is a way we share results," he said.
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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.