THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and
Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 3, Number 9. April 15, 2009
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School funding and weak evidence
Gov. Strickland's school funding plan has come under heavy fire in recent weeks. Republican lawmakers--and outside experts on school finance--have criticized it for lacking any real evidence (see here). Numerous editorial writers and school district officials have observed that it spends more money on wealthy districts than on poor districts (see here). And even some of its supporters--for example, the Ohio Business Roundtable and the Ohio Grantmakers Forum--have sought to inject greater flexibility into it so as not to undermine such innovations as STEM schools, quality charter schools, and early college academies.
Many, probably most, of these challenges have merit and deserve serious, reasoned responses. Yet the governor's office is all but stonewalling. The latest is the release of a "statement by experts validating Ohio's evidence-based approach to education." It came out late on Good Friday--a classic political ploy to minimize attention to something, usually bad news that someone important cannot conceal but wants to minimize. (Wait until everyone has started their holiday weekend.)
Yet according to the Strickland press release, "The analysis, commissioned by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, validates the governor's research-based proposal to establish a constitutional system of education in Ohio" (see here). That looks more like vindication or corroboration than bad news. Why bury it on Easter/Passover weekend?
We can think of three possible reasons. First, maybe the governor's team did not want reporters and analysts to look too closely at the innards of the "Review and Analysis of Ohio's Evidence-Based Model" prepared by finance consultants Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden. For its detail indicates that implementing their "evidence-based model" would actually cost far more than the governor has let on. For example, they propose considerably smaller school sizes than is the norm in Ohio today (see here).
That would require millions of dollars in new school construction and render many current schools obsolete--including some that are brand-new, thanks to Ohio's use of the "tobacco money." Odden and Picus also recommend smaller (and costlier) adult-student ratios than does Gov. Strickland. If their model is really evidence-based, however, one may fairly ask what led the governor to propose something different than the model's own gurus say is called for by their "evidence?"
A second possibility for the odd timing is this: The governor's plan, whether or not it is faithful to the work of Odden and Picus, purports to show what it would cost to educate all children in Ohio to a high standard. Unfortunately, there is no such price tag. As Stanford economist Eric Hanushek explains, "Decades of scientific research across a wide range of school experiences has focused on uncovering the contribution of schools to student outcomes. This substantial body of work shows, contrary to widely held popular beliefs, that there is not a consistent relation between school resources and student achievement" (see here).
Indeed, in another report cited by the governor's team as further evidence, Achieve Inc. and McKinsey & Co. observed in February 2007 (see here) that it's impossible to calculate "the true costs of educating each student to the level of the State standards" because the state doesn't even collect the data needed to determine such a cost. Worse, no state collects such data. Hanushek calls so-called evidence-based models "educators' wish lists" and concludes they are "an inappropriate basis for judicial or legislative deliberations on school finance."
Finally, Strickland's team may worry about their advisors' credibility. In 2003, a Montana judge tossed out the testimony of Picus on a school-funding adequacy case, observing that Picus "danced with the girls that brought him." The judge noted that Picus had testified in both Kansas and Massachusetts that those states had equitable and constitutional funding systems but subsequently testified in Montana that its system was inadequate and violated constitutional requirements. This, the judge noted, despite the fact that Montana's system was objectively more equitable in virtually every measure than either Kansas or Massachusetts.
Gov. Strickland is keen to spend more state money on K-12 education. This is surely his prerogative and he ran for office promising to do just that. Unfortunately, his "evidence-based" model is really nothing more than the selective interpretation of a hodgepodge of research studies by hired guns. Maybe that explains why their expert "validation" was released late on Good Friday when everybody had stopped paying attention.
by Terry Ryan
State cuts would set back online learning in Ohio
Online learning is the fastest-growing sector in education. In the fall of 2008, 44 states reported offering significant full-time or supplemental learning opportunities for students. Ohio has been a leader in moving toward this powerful educational innovation, but it risks sliding backwards when it comes to cyber charters.
Gov. Ted Strickland proposes to cut $105 million in cyber-charter funds in fiscal year 2010. His proposal would also burden existing cyber charters with new requirements and limits, including outlawing the for-profit firms that operate some of the better e-schools, such as Connections Academy (see here) and the Ohio Virtual Academy (see here).
Whether called e-learning, virtual schooling, or cyber schooling, online learning opportunities provide an outlet to traditional classroom-based instruction for parents seeking to customize learning opportunities for their children. Just as important, they allow parents to be actively involved in their child's education. In short, e-learning programs offer learning opportunities for children and places for parents to turn if they and/or their children are unhappy with the education provided by their traditional schools.
Online learning also has the potential to help students access rigorous courses taught by high-quality teachers that they might not otherwise get. Students in a rural southeastern Ohio county, for example, could take an advanced physics course from a top-rate teacher in a suburban Columbus district. It opens new learning opportunities for students living in rural areas, attending hard-to-staff urban schools, or stuck at home or in a state institution. Some of these programs have also been remarkably successful with high-school drop-outs or those about to drop out--students who often gravitate toward learning at their own pace and in their own ways.
Online learning opportunities vary, which is, partly, why they're exciting. They may be either full-time or supplemental. They may involve teachers and students working at the same time or teachers and students working at different times. Students may take courses online at school, at home, or anywhere else where they have access to the Internet. Online education can be delivered by a host of providers such as universities, school districts, or independent entities. Online programs can reach across a district, a state, the nation, or globally. They may be district, charter, magnet, or private.
Because Internet-based learning models remove geographic, physical, and time barriers to learning, they allow successful educational models to expand rapidly. Entire states, for example, have embraced online learning opportunities. The Florida Virtual Academy (see here) is a full-time online school built and operated by the Florida Department of Education that has seen course enrollment grow exponentially, from 77 in 1997 to 113,900 in 2008. The Michigan Virtual School (see here), another state-supported effort, is an online resource that partners with brick-and-mortar schools to supplement course offerings. It has provided courses to more than 23,000 students since its start in 2000.
Ohio legislators have caught onto this trend and are planning to expand Ohio's school-based online opportunities. In February, Reps. Garrison (D-Marietta) and Harris (D-Columbus) introduced House Bill 4 creating Ohio's first state-led and state-wide online-learning pilot in district high schools (see here). It would offer Advanced Placement and foreign-language courses via teleconferencing to every Ohio public high school. The pilot promises to provide students access to classes that some individual districts can't offer because they don't have enough students who want to enroll to justify the expense or there simply isn't a teacher available to teach the students. Top teachers in advanced science, math, foreign languages, history, and other specialized subjects would suddenly be available to remote schools or, again, to schools otherwise unable to afford the services of these expert instructors.
Ohio's high quality cyber charters already offer similar opportunities--yet their funding is set to be cut by 50, 60, or even 70 percent. Cyber charters make fairly easy political targets as most people still don't understand how they work and there is skepticism about whether they actually do work. Nearly 75 percent of respondents in a 2005 Fordham survey on Ohio education (see here), for example, considered virtual schools to be a "fair" or "poor" idea. These numbers may have moved up some in the last four years, but when people think of school they still think primarily of school buildings, classrooms, desks, and teachers standing in front of students lecturing.
Added to this initial skepticism, the quality of Ohio's cyber schools has been decidedly mixed. The RAND Corporation reported last month (see here) that virtual schools constitute a large part of the charter enrollment in Ohio but students in these schools "have significantly and substantially lower achievement gains while attending virtual charter schools" than they experience in their traditional schools. Finally, lawmakers find it hard to understand why cyber charters need the same level of funding as regular schools when they don't have to pay for things like facilities, heating, and busing.
It would be a shame if the state of Ohio were to put the brakes on cyber charters by cutting their funding across the board. Done well, these schools offer important opportunities for traditionally underserved children and they serve as models that can spawn new innovations in delivering quality, 24/7 learning opportunities for the state's children. That said, the state is right to seek value for its educational investments and those schools that don't deliver a quality product don't deserve endless state support. Let's hope the search for quality drives funding for these schools.
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Expert to offer guidelines for improving state's academic standards
The national education curriculum expert who helped design the country's premier standards and accountability system in Massachusetts will tell an Ohio Senate panel today that the 21st century skills-based program being proposed for Ohio will actually retard student learning.
In testimony prepared for the Ohio Senate Education Committee this afternoon,Sandra Stotsky, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, will tell the lawmakers that, "Statements about skills, learning processes, or learning strategies are not standards, chiefly because they are generic in nature, content-free and not sufficiently content-specific" (see here).
The concept of 21st century skills is a major part of Strickland's sweeping education plan being considered by the General Assembly.
In her prepared testimony, Stotsky says the 21st century skills movement actually inhibits learning. "Attempts to emphasize skills, processes, or strategies, as in the 21st century skills movement, will point teachers in the wrong direction and retard student achievement," she says.
As senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003, Stotsky had a key role in revising that state's education standards. Massachusetts' standards are generally regarded as the strongest in the United States and the state's education system is considered the nation's best.
"What did we do to ensure a set of strong and coherent academic standards in each subject? First, we eliminated all strands, substrands, or statements that were chiefly about skills and learning processes or strategies," she says.
Stotsky calls Ohio's current standards mediocre.
She believes it is imperative that Ohio have a strong school curriculum with solid intellectual content that starts before kindergarten and extends through high school.
Effective teachers, Stotsky says, should want their students to acquire knowledge and that should be reflected in state standards. The skills related to that knowledge will be developed naturally later as students "grapple with and grasp" the content of their lessons, she said.
Stotsky will tell the panel that successful education needs a strong curricular framework in English/reading, mathematics, science, history, geography, economics, civic education, foreign languages, and the arts.
"Why are curriculum frameworks with strong academic standards the beginning and the end? Because they heavily shape, or should, the academic components of all the other documents a state department of education develops for pre-K-to-12," she says.
In her prepared testimony, Stotsky describes a Massachusetts environment, when she arrived there, similar to Ohio's now. "Most of the educators on the original standards development committees had spent their time arguing about, and developing prescriptions for how teachers should teach or what strategies and skills student should learn, not the basic intellectual content to be taught from grade to grade," she says.
The governor could benefit from a sit-down with the president
Tis the season for school reform and both President Obama and Gov. Strickland are pushing their school reform agendas hard. In comparing and contrasting the efforts of these two Democratic leaders some similarities emerge, but so do some interesting differences.
Where there is agreement: Both the governor and the president want to spend more money on public schools; both, also, want new investments in early education. These are long-standing Democratic positions so no surprises here. But, and this is new, each is seeking more seat time in schools for kids. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan could have been speaking for both Strickland and Obama when he said recently, "I fundamentally think our children are at a competitive disadvantage. The children in India and China who they are competing [with] for jobs are going to school 25, 30 percent more than we are." Gov. Strickland wants to add 20 days a year to Ohio's school calendar.
Where they disagree in kind: Both Strickland and Obama say they see quality teachers and better teaching as pivotal to improving student achievement. Here, Strickland's plan is less bold than Obama's, but controversial enough that it has garnered the ire of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. The governor's plan seeks to overhaul teacher tenure (making tenure decisions in nine years, up from the current three), and his plan would create new teacher licensure requirements and a teacher residency program.
President Obama goes further and challenges one of the central orthodoxies of teacher unionism when he proposes merit pay. The president has even hinted at the possibility that such pay should be connected to student test scores. Obama acknowledged that the teacher unions don't like his plan when he told Hispanic business leaders recently, "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom."
The need for improved academic standards and testing are also common to the education plans of both the president and the governor. However, details are sketchier. Obama says the "solution to low test scores is not lower standards--it's tougher, clearer standards." The governor, meanwhile, seems captivated with adding new standards for hard to define, and harder yet to measure, 21st century skills.
It also appears that the governor and his team would abandon test-based accountability if they could. He told the Columbus Education Association recently, "Teachers must have the freedom to teach without the fear of standardized test results communicating that you're a bad teacher. Finally, testing and assessment ought to be diagnostic….This is not how it is in its current incarnation," Strickland said.
To their credit, the Obama administration has declared that it will not abandon the testing-based accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. The Obama team has gone further and actually is also pushing for national, voluntary standards that states could opt into.
Where they disagree in full: In both his 2007 and his 2009 budget proposals Gov. Strickland sought to cut funding to charter schools while increasing their regulatory burdens. He has also sought to ban for-profit school-management companies from operating in the Buckeye State. President Obama, on the other hand, has been an advocate for more federal charter school spending and has spoken openly about his support for charters.
The president told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently, "the number of children going to the Cleveland Public Schools who are actually prepared to go to college [is] probably one out of seven or eight or ten. And that's just not acceptable. It's not acceptable for them. It's not acceptable in terms of America's future. And so we've got to experiment with ways to provide a better education experience for our kids, and some charters are doing outstanding jobs." Further, Education Secretary Duncan, when CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, built one of the country's premier portfolios of charter schools--which now serves about 23,000 students. This included a 1,450-student school operated by the for-profit charter operator Edison Learning. It also included holding schools to account for results.
The tension around education (reformers vs. teacher unions) within the Democratic Party has been much discussed since the August Democratic National Convention in Denver (for a recent example see here). President Obama and Governor Strickland seem to be in different factions when it comes to school reform and their party. We wish the president well in this struggle.
by Terry Ryan
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The eight-percent solution sounds like a gamble
The board of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio told members last month that it could not rely on a nine percent return on investment to fund future retirement benefits. The implication is that the board will continue to rely on a long-term return of eight percent.
While that eight percent might seem ridiculous given the vast losses in the stock market, it turns out that just about all public pension funds depend on that rate. It also turns out that public pensions need a rate of return that is much higher--by about one-third--than the comparable figure for private pension funds, which generally calculate growth at a long-term average rate of about six percent.
Why the difference? According to a pension-fund analyst at the Center for Retirement Growth at Boston College, public pension funds generally expect wage growth to be higher for their members than the managers of private pension funds. "The private sector has a little more expectation of trying to keep on top of costs," Jean-Pierre Aubry told The Gadfly.
Getting that higher rate of return means gambling, according to Jay Greene, the chairman of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. But, in a Gadfly interview, Greene pointed out that, because public pension funds such as the STRS are guaranteed by the government they are essentially gambling with taxpayers' dollars.
An eight percent return may sound perfectly reasonable to some, he said. "The trouble is we don't know the future will resemble the past. Will the next century look like the last century? We can look over the world and see markets that vary widely. There's no way to know looking at the average return in the recent past."
"We're investing with considerable risk as current events show," he said. "Japan has had 30 years of no returns. It's not inconceivable."
Not making that eight percent is huge, especially in a down market. Boston College's Aubrey was co-author of a report in March that calculated the aggregate assets for state and local pensions have dropped $1.3 trillion since the peak of the market in October 2007. The current level is $1.6 trillion below the expected level based on an assumption of an eight-percent return. Further, the center estimates that, nationally, pension funds need $270 billion in extra contributions over the next four years, and then more than $100 billion extra annually for the following 20 years.
Greene said the market, however, does tell us what the risk-free return should be and that is the rate on U.S. Treasury bonds. They are now at about four percent and, long-term, are much closer to the six-percent general rate on which private pension funds are based.
Assuming a four-percent return, a teacher pension fund that would have been 70-percent funded at eight percent would drop to 44-percent funded. Teachers, school districts, and/or taxpayers would either have to make up the difference or have a very serious discussion about how much less than 100 percent of salary a realistic pension should provide.
Some critics might argue that the Treasury rate is too conservative but Greene argues that the only way to get a higher return is by increasing taxpayers' risk. Of course, over the last year or so, pensions have lost big. During all of 2008, the STRS, for example, lost 29 percent of its value.
The creaky nature of the pension funds (see here) isn't new. Public pension funds are generally considered in OK shape when their assets are roughly 80 percent of liabilities. But generous pension outlays have been so steep (average public pensions far exceed private pensions) that in 2007, well before the financial meltdown, roughly 40 percent of the major teacher pension plans, nationally, were short of future cash needs, according to Greene.
The STRS board warned bluntly at its March meeting that the fund might not be able to meet future obligations without substantial changes such as teachers working longer, an increase in contributions, and alterations to how benefits are calculated (see here).
Lawmakers in more than half the states are considering changes to their pension funds (see here). New Mexico recently hiked employee contributions and required new workers to work longer before retiring. And, in New Jersey, the governor said that he has to balance the state's obligations to its faltering public pension funds against state services such as education and health care, according the Philadelphia Inquirer (see here). The teachers' fund alone was short $14 billion last June.
Perhaps echoing Ohio's future, a New Jersey official told the newspaper, "I just don't see how the state can raise the revenues to make those kinds of payments. It's depressing."
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Evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts after Three Years
Patrick Wolf, Babette Gutmann, Michael Puma, Brian Kisida, Lou Rizzo, Nada Eissa
Institute of Education Sciences
March 2009
Amid all the sound and fury surrounding the D.C. voucher program, this study is a significant feather in the cap of the program's supporters. Why? Because despite the study's rigorous methods (a gold-standard, randomized, controlled trial, which usually finds "no effect"--see here), students offered a voucher were performing at statistically higher levels in reading after three years (equivalent to a 3.1 month gain) than students not offered a scholarship. The reading finding is even more striking since the treatment group was highly mobile--a factor that likely contributed to the null findings in years one and two.
Unsurprisingly, both groups performed similarly in math and the program did not have a significant impact in reading or math for those students who applied from the worst-performing public schools. While this latter finding is unfortunate and has been cited as reason to shut down the program, we should remember that students coming from the very worst schools are the hardest to remediate and require the most time to do so. This study only measures three years.
The researchers also discovered that the voucher program had improved reading achievement for five subgroups: students notpreviously attending a school in need of improvement, those with higher levels of performance at time of entry into the program, those entering grades K-8 when they applied (i.e., everyone but high school students), female students, and first-year students (though these last two are less reliable than the other three). Read the report here.
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...about proposed funding levels for charter schools
Myrrha P. Satow, CEO and superintendent of EdVantages Inc., took issue with an April 1 Ohio Gadfly editorial concerning Gov. Strickland's proposals for funding charter schools.
The Fordham Institute's recent editorial analysis of Dayton charter school funding under Gov. Strickland's proposed funding fix, "Governor's proposal for charter-school funding a head scratcher," April 1, 2009, makes some very good points, but also provides some misleading data.
Attempting to demonstrate that "there are some serious charter school winners in the governor's plan, and some big-time losers," the editorial incorrectly stated that Trotwood Preparatory and Fitness Academy (TPFA) was among the "serious winners." This is not accurate. Our internal analysis of TPFA's funding for next year concluded that TPFA would lose over $400,000 under the new plan.
Fordham relied on numbers provided by ODE. We at EdVantages, TPFA's nonprofit EMO, were deeply perplexed by ODE's analysis and we believe it to be incorrect in many instances.
We applaud Fordham's statements regarding the gross inconsistencies in the plan, the potential incompetence of its designers, and the long- term consequences of a poorly designed system. However, State Rep. Clayton Luckie (D- Dayton) publicly singled out TPFA, in front of students, families, and staff, as evidence of the plan's supposed charter-friendliness. Printing inaccurate data has consequences.
Fordham did acknowledge that the numbers it so prominently displayed may be "simply inaccurate." Lacking confidence in the numbers, it makes little sense to make examples of specific schools.
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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.