THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and
Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 3, Number 5. March 4, 2009
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Special analysis of House Bill 1
Substitute House Bill 1, the legislative vehicle for Gov. Strickland's biennial budget proposal, was introduced last week. At more than 3,100 pages, the bill is massive, and its education section alone numbers more than 700 pages. It is a tall, but necessary, task to quickly analyze the budget bill and understand what its many education-related provisions mean for Ohio's schools and students. We have pulled out the sections of the bill that we think are most important to improving public education in the Buckeye State and offer our analysis for Gadfly readers (see full analysis here).
Following are some of the highlights of the bill and our analysis of these provisions:
Academic Standards: No one doubts that Ohio's mediocre academic standards could use a makeover. Sub. H.B. 1 is tackling a necessary challenge when it seeks to upgrade Ohio's academic standards. It is clear, however, that Sub. H.B. 1 seeks to modify significantly Ohio's standards and its aligned accountability system by focusing less on knowledge and academic content and more on nebulous and hard-to-define 21st century skills.
Specifically, the bill calls for revising the state's academic standards every five years so as to develop not only core academic content (reading, math, science, etc.) but also:
Trying to marry core content and 21st century skills--a concept that is ill-defined in its own right, see the following piece by educational historian Diane Ravitch--risks creating a mishmash that will be hard for teachers to understand, let alone teach to, and is sure to confuse teachers about what is important. Indeed, Sub. H.B. 1 makes no specific mention of history, geography, civics, literature, or technology. Additionally, redesigning a state's academic standards is a complex, time-consuming, and costly effort, and the state should seriously consider whether or not it wants to mandate revisiting the standards every five years--and take the associated risk of having also to remake its assessment system, alter its curricula and instructional materials, and, potentially, break the "trend line" by which school and school-system progress is monitored. Working in isolation, most states have bungled the effort of creating anything close to "world-class" standards because they deploy armies of stakeholders rather than trusting subject-matter experts and practiced standards-writers.
K-8 Assessment/Testing: Sub. H.B. 1 seeks to redesign that state's testing system. The legislation would replace current state achievement tests with "achievement assessments." As with changing a state's standards, changing a state's assessment and accountability system is an enormously complex and time-consuming project that must also conform to the exacting mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. For example, NCLB mandates testing in reading, so Ohio's move toward "English Language Arts" exams could put Ohio in conflict with federal law. Additionally, Ohio is also required by NCLB to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tests reading, not English Language Arts. Ohio has spent millions of dollars in professional development efforts over the last decade to help districts, schools, and teachers understand the state's current standards and testing system. When a move away from the current testing system is undertaken, it will require supports and resources to connect the old systems to the new systems and to help teachers understand these changes and adjust their professional practices to meet these changes.
New High School Assessments: Sub. H.B. 1 proposes to replace the Ohio Graduation Tests with a multi-factored assessment system as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Specifically, the multi-factored assessment system shall consist of a:
The extant Ohio Graduation Tests employ an eighth- to tenth-grade standard and should be replaced, but the proposed new measures may or may not drive stronger performance and foster true results-based accountability. Moving to the ACT as the nationally standardized assessment has merit as higher education values the test. Chancellor Eric Fingerhut has issued an ambitious strategic plan indicating that the state's public university system will rely heavily on ACT tests for purposes of placing students in college-level courses. Several other states have adopted it as their universal high-school test. End-of-course exams is an idea with merit but if done on a statewide basis enormous time, effort, and expense must be devoted to developing, piloting, and validating such tests.
It's also questionable whether it's sensible in 2009 for Ohio to develop its own unique end-of-course exams considering a) that there are multi-state efforts of this kind already underway, b) many people expect additional multi-state or national projects pointed toward internationally benchmarked "common standards", and c) demographic and career mobility (as well as students flowing in and out of Ohio for higher education) may argue for Ohio policymakers to join with the rest of the nation rather than work in isolation.
New Regulation and Compliance Mandates: Sub. H.B. 1 is chock full of new regulations and mandates for public schools (district, STEM, and charter) and for school districts. Many of these are presented under the guise of "accountability." A few have merit--for example creating standards of financial reporting for all schools and holding them accountable for this reporting, but many of the proposals raise a number of questions and concerns as they relate to cost and effectiveness. At a minimum, the proposed legislation would require a dramatically bulked up Ohio Department of Education to take on a number of new responsibilities including conducting school inspections of each of the state's 3,700 schools at least once every five years.
Charter Schools: There is much in Sub. H.B. 1 when it comes to charter schools, and frankly if all portions of the bill became law it would kill charters in two ways. First, it would starve them by cutting funding by 20 percent or more. Not even the finest schools can succeed without sufficient resources. To legitimately be held to account for their results, and to be fairly compared to district-operated schools, charters need per-pupil funding and facilities equivalent to what is provided to district schools.
Second, Sub. H.B. 1 would strangle charters and their sponsors through myriad new and costly regulations including requiring charter schools to comply with the same teacher certification burdens that plague traditional district schools. And if killing off charters weren't enough, the proposed legislation would effectively result in the Ohio Department of Education taking over the rights and responsibilities of both charter school sponsors and the governing boards responsible for their operations.
This is unfortunate, because the idea that all sponsors should be held accountable for their performance by the Ohio Department of Education has merit--but only if charters are funded fairly, their operational freedoms protected and if there is a nonpartisan watchdog put in place to monitor and report on ODE's performance as the regulator of charter school sponsors. Sub. H.B. 1 recommends the creation of several study groups, commissions, and the like, including one to study the effectiveness of the 50-plus county educational service centers. Surely it makes sense to have a Charter School Quality Advisory Council that could report fairly on Ohio's charter school program and make recommendations for its improvement.
Teacher Licensure & Employment: Sub. H.B. 1 includes several promising proposals around teacher licensure and employment, including:
Other provisions in the bill are worrisome. The bill calls for all alternatively licensed teachers to go through a common, state-determined summer institute before entering the classroom. This would leave no space in Ohio for successful efforts like Teach for America, which conducts, as an integral part of its program, its own "boot camp" to prepare new teachers for the classroom.
The bill admirably calls for incorporating student academic progress into decisions about granting teacher and principal licenses, but it is unclear how this will be possible across all grades and subjects. The state's valued-added measure is a good starting point and can provide classroom-level data, but it is only available in reading and math in grades four through eight. It would require a massive boost in state testing to have such data for all teachers. Any decisions about how to measure teacher effectiveness should be informed by the work of Battelle for Kids to provide value-added data across more grades and subjects, including high school.
This is just a taste of what's in Sub. H.B. 1 as it relates to education. To get deeper into all of this, check out our full analysis here.
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21st century skills: an old familiar song
Diane Ravitch (see here) is a research professor and educational historian at New York University, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, a nationally renowned education expert and author, and a Thomas B. Fordham Institute/Foundation board member. She has authored seven books, including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn. This editorial was adapted from a presentation she gave Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., as part of a panel discussion concerning the proper role of skills in the curriculum. The event was sponsored by Common Core (see here). Ravitch's concerns about 21st century skills are particularly relevant to Ohio where Gov. Ted Strickland is seeking to rewrite the state's standards (see above) to focus more on the acquisition of 21st century skills (see here).
In the land of American pedagogy, innovation is frequently confused with progress, and whatever is thought to be new is always embraced more readily than what is known to be true. Thus, policymakers, thought leaders, and elected officials in Ohio and other states are rushing to get aboard the 21st century skills express train, lest they appear to be old-fashioned or traditional.
So, I was not surprised, a few days ago, to receive an e-mail from Professor John Richard Schrock, director of biology education for Emporia State University in Kansas. He complained that a group of school superintendents in Kansas is pushing a form of "21st Century Learning" that directs veteran science teachers to shut up and assign students to "independent learning." Teachers are not to speak much and then only to give directions. Students are to work on projects to learn scientific concepts on their own. The Kansas Board of Education is not exactly happy with the specifics of what this group has proposed. Still, the board has endorsed its own version of 21st century learning. "It is no longer important," according to the board, "what bits of information a student knows, but only that students be able to locate information."
As a historian of education, I have often written about the educational enthusiasms of the past century, the bouts of infatuation, and the rise and fall of one fad after another. The same ideas have been iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the decades as they searched for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content. The basics of the 21st century skills movement are not new but simply the dusted and polished version of century old thinking.
In 1911, for example, the dean of the education school at Stanford thought it foolish to saturate students with "a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead." A few years later, in 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick, a fabled Teachers College professor, urged that, instead of a sequential curriculum laid out in advance, boys and girls should engage in hands-on projects derived from their own interests.
In the 1930s, many educators endorsed the idea of replacing high-school courses like science and history with interdisciplinary courses, which they called the "core curriculum" or "social living." Some districts merged several disciplines--English, social studies, and science--into a single course focusing on life experiences instead of subject matter. Occasionally, there were protests. In Roslyn, N.Y., parents were incensed because their children couldn't read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The school superintendent, however, assured them that baking nut bread was an excellent way to learn mathematics.
In the 1950s, it was known as the Life Adjustment Movement; in the 1980s, as Outcome Based Education. Schooling needed to be relevant, hands-on, and directed to the real interests and needs of young people. In the early 1990s the U.S. Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills recommended exactly the kinds of functional skills that are now called 21st Century skills. I recall hearing the commission director say that students didn't need to know anything about the Civil War or how to write a book report; these were obsolete kinds of skills and knowledge.
None of these initiatives survived, although they did leave American education with a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. In our schools of education, we should have been educating future teachers to be experts in their subjects. We should have been helping teachers determine ways to light up young minds with genuine excitement about historical imagination or scientific discovery.
Instead, we have numbed the brains of future teachers with endless blather about process and abstract-thinking skills. We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries, but we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically unless one has quite a lot of knowledge to think about. One thinks critically by comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. One must know a great deal before she or he can reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.
The new century has brought, again, the need to appreciate that much important knowledge is not acquired "hands-on." The educated person learns not only from his or her own experience, but also from the hard-earned experience of others. We do not restart the world anew in each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to learn from the experience of others. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the learned capacity to understand the lessons of history, to indulge in the adventures of literature, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.
Until we teach our teachers and our students to love knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well.
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School success under NCLB depends on the state
Whether schools, including those in Ohio, make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under federal law is as much a product of inconsistent rules set by state education officials as of actual pupil achievement, according to a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The Accountability Illusion study (see here) analyzed the performance of 36 real schools in 28 states, then analyzed which would make AYP under the different No Child Left Behind rules set by each state. Of 18 elementary schools, 17 would make AYP in Wisconsin and 15 in Arizona, but only one would make the grade in Massachusetts and Nevada. In some states most of these elementary schools would "need improvement" while other states would give them passing marks.
"This study proves that the current AYP system under NCLB isn't truly working," said the study's lead author John Cronin, from the Kingsbury Center at NWEA, a national non-profit education research organization. "The current system doesn't help improve our schools."
The researchers found Ohio's proficiency standards are relatively easy. Most of Ohio's cut scores are below the 35th percentile. Looking across the 28 state accountability systems surveyed, the number of elementary schools that made AYP in Ohio was exceeded in just six other states. Within Ohio, ten of 18 elementary schools and 16 of 18 middle schools sampled failed to make AYP in 2008 under the state's accountability system. The data examined for Ohio came from 2005-2006, before the state included a value-added measure to calculate its adequate yearly progress, although Ohio's data still help understand AYP from a national perspective.
Under NCLB, to avoid sanctions, states must bring all students in grades three through eight to proficiency in reading and math by 2014. It's up to individual states, however, to define proficiency as well how it's determined.
Rather than scrap NCLB or federalize standards, Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Vice President Michael Petrilli suggest in a foreword to the study that the federal government should create incentives for states to agree to comprehensive common standards. Results for all schools should be published but state could still decide what to do with schools that don't measure up.
Buckeye charter schools continue to shoot themselves in the foot
Charter schools in Ohio are under serious threat. The governor has presented a state budget that would cut funding for charter schools to the point that most schools would have to close, while all would face increased regulation (see above).
Fighting to protect decent charter schools and the space for them to operate has been a tough road to hoe in the Buckeye State. The fact is that charters in Ohio have always faced tenacious opposition from teacher unions and others. And, far too often this opposition has been emboldened by high profile charter school blow-ups, various scandals, and greedy operators. Consider the contrast between the following stories from today.
The Columbus Dispatch ran a piece showing that the Columbus superintendent Gene Harris has delayed taking a raise for the fourth time as superintendent citing the bad economy and the district's upcoming labor-contract negotiations (see here). Harris, the Dispatch reports, earns a base salary of $172,000. While at the helm of the 52,000 student district Harris has seen the district's academic performance steadily improve. In fact, for six straight years the district has made academic gains and the district has maintained a rating of "Continuous Improvement"--the equivalent of a C on the state's scale for the last couple of years. If performance matters, Gene Harris deserves every penny she earns and frankly more. She is not only astute politically but also knows how to run a decent school system.
Meanwhile, out of Akron we learn that the chief executive officer and founder of Summit Academy Management--a non-profit charter school operator--is on leave of absence as his organization undergoes a "broad-based review." The Akron Beacon Journal reports that DiMezza earned $298,270 in salary and benefits last year running an organization that manages 27 charter schools across Ohio (see here). Of the 18 Summit Academy Schools that received academic ratings in 2007-08 from the state of Ohio, one school was rated Continuous Improvement (a C), two were rated Academic Watch (a D), and 15 were rated Academic Emergency (an F). Here, compensation seems utterly disconnected from performance, and politically this is another blow for a charter program fighting for its very existence.
Stories of greedy school operators that run poor performing operations are played up big time by charter opponents. They make it really hard for charter school supporters to argue these schools are both underfunded and worthy of their operational freedoms. Yet, the fact of the matter is that most charters in Ohio are operating on razor thin margins and the people running them are not getting rich.
The best way to ensure that the state gets good value for its charter investment is through strengthening accountability for performance.
Start here. Tighten up the current academic death penalty on underperforming charters. This can be accomplished by using the state's current accountability system and extending automatic school closure to charter schools that:
In this fashion, schools that don't perform won't continue to receive state funds. And school operators who run bad schools will not be able to pay themselves high salaries.
by Terry Ryan
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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.