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The Ohio Education Gadfly |
A Bi-weekly Bulletin of
News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute Volume 4, Number 21. August 25, 2010 |
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RttT reforms are good, but can we afford them over the long-haul?
Ohio deserves recognition for being one of the first states to adopt the Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics and for prioritizing high academic standards and the creation of assessments aligned to them. This is an important step toward lifting Ohio's student performance, and Race to the Top surely helped nudge Ohio off the fence about adopting the standards. The state also deserves credit for other reform areas highlighted in its application, such as leadership in the collection and use of value-added data connected to teachers.
It's been noted that the ten winners (Ohio came in dead last among the list, barely making the final cut) were awarded on the basis of the reviewers' scores , a natural defense against speculation that politics played a role in the final decisions -- especially in Ohio, where a Democratic incumbent governor is facing a tight race for re-election. However, politics certainly may have played a role in Sec. Duncan's decision not to go against the reviewers' recommendations and reward the most-deserving states. After all, it seems glaringly unfair that seriously reform-minded states like Louisiana, Connecticut, and Colorado -- who've already enacted the sorts of radical changes that Race to the Top purports to represent -- fell to Ohio, a state with a laundry list of promisesnot yet realized, and certainly not funded. Now that the award has been made, Ohio must ensure that this one-time money creates systemic changes that will last long after the final grant dollar is spent. Ohio has committed itself to a long list of reforms that include many we like, such as:
Ohio needs most of these reforms, but it also needs to live within its means. The state's RttT application makes promises for future programs and efforts, many of which are needed, but it doesn't do this in a way that cuts costs elsewhere. Further, there's little reason to believe that state leaders will have the political will to enact these changes, especially without ample funding and with Ohio allowing local districts to pick and choose reforms. To give just one example -- Ohio couldn't overcome union resistance to pass a law allowing Teach For America alumni to get licensed to teach here, but we should believe the state will suddenly be open to working with TFA now? Savvy grant writers spun Ohio's list of layered-on, rather hodge-podge promises into an award-winning proposal. In the end, though, we've simply vowed to do more without a viable, long-term plan for how that will happen when the federal funds and current political leaders are long gone. Use value-added data to measure teacher effectiveness; but humanely But, the political firestorm around how these findings were reported by the Times may very well result in them being discredited or simply ignored. The Times asked Richard Buddin, a senior economist and education researcher from Rand, to analyze seven years of reading and math scores to calculate performance of teachers who've taught grades three through five. To illustrate its point about the importance of teacher quality, the paper actually used Buddin's analysis to publish -- by name -- "effective" teachers as well as "poor-performers." Unfortunately, the manner in which the Times published the data was unfair to individual teachers. This outing of teachers based exclusively on the use of value-added data triggered a furious reaction by the Los Angeles teachers union. The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) press release sought to discredit the value of standardized testing, value-added analysis, and even the primacy of teachers in children's learning. Further, the union has threatened to boycott the newspaper.
Taken seriously, these findings should encourage Ohio to think carefully about how it can use its wealth of value-added data to help determine teacher quality. The state has a relatively sophisticated system of value-added analysis in reading and math in grades 4-8, and has accumulated multiple years of data.
Currently this value-added data is used to help rate school quality, but it is not used as an indicator of teacher effectiveness. Further, the well-respected Battelle for Kids has been doing excellent work with school districts to help school officials and teachers use value-added data as a diagnostic tool for improving instruction. The federal Race to the Top (RttT) competition has encouraged states to use value-added data as a measure of teacher effectiveness. In its winning RttT application, for example, Tennessee committed itself to having at least half of teacher evaluations based on student achievement measures, including value-added growth. Ohio has yet to make a similar commitment, but it should. There are ways of using this data as a component of teacher evaluations that are both rigorous and fair to teachers. Moreover, using student performance data to determine teacher effectiveness is not going away any time soon. That the Times was willing to take on this analysis and stand up to the teachers union is profoundly significant, as was the New York Times' and the New Yorker's critical coverage of teachers unions (e.g., articles on New York City's "rubber rooms") over the last year. Traditionally left-leaning news outlets -- and many leading Democrats -- are taking the stance that not only does teacher quality data matter, but so does the way we use it to recruit, reward, and retain teachers. The Times' value-added analysis is the latest piece to provide evidence of the need for sensible teacher-related reforms. Ohio -- a state that is already ahead of the game in terms of having the data -- should not wait for a similar outing of teachers and should take a proactive rather than reactive approach to coming up with ways to use student growth data as a metric for determining teacher quality. College outlook not bright for Ohio grads, says ACT report First, being "college-ready" by ACT's definition is by no means a guarantee of higher-education success. Rather, it means that a student has a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better and a 75 percent chance of earning a C or higher in entry-level, credit-bearing college classes. Second, the college-readiness gap between white and Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers is even more troublesome than the K-12 achievement gap. For example, based on ACT results, 78 percent of white Ohio graduates are prepared for college English composition coursework and 54 percent for college Algebra, while just 36 and 14 percent of black students are, respectively. Asian-American students are best prepared, with 80 percent ready for college English class and 72 percent for college Algebra. Third, that 28 percent of college-ready students is based on the test-taking population, which is just two-thirds of last year's graduating class. Factor in the unprepared students who didn't take the test as well as the more than 15 percent of students who never finish high school, and the number of Ohio 18- and 19-year olds who are ready for college is much, much lower. These numbers might come as a surprise to casual observers of Ohio's education system. After all, the governor and state superintendent routinely boast that Ohio has the "most innovative" and "fifth-best" schooling system in the country. But the findings are surely no surprise to college officials. This weekend the Columbus Dispatch reported on the gap between high school and college expectations. In 2008 (the most recent year for which data are available), 39 percent of Ohio's first-year public college students required a remedial course, despite most high school graduates boasting a final GPA with a B average or higher. In fact, according to the Ohio Board of Regents, the vast majority of Ohio public high schools see at least one in ten of their graduates (who attended a public college or university) take college remedial classes. That number soars above 60 percent in dozens of schools. As to ACT scores themselves, statewide results have slowly inched up -- from 21.5 (out of 36) in 2006 to 21.8 in 2010. The average national score has slipped a bit, from 21.1 in 2006 to 21.0 this year. (Similarly, performance among high schoolers nationally on the National Assessment of Educational Progress has remained stagnant for more than a decade.) ACT's report is not all bad news and offers useful information for policymakers. The company found that students who took a rigorous "core curriculum" of high school courses are slightly better prepared for college than students who did not (15 percent versus eight percent among Ohio students). This is good news for the Buckeye State's class of 2014, because starting with this year's high-school freshman, all Ohio students must complete the "Ohio Core" curriculum in order to earn a diploma. But students who are serious about college shouldn't stop at the Ohio Core. ACT found that students who took high-level math and science courses above and beyond what is required by the core curriculum were far better prepared for college (in Ohio, 59 percent of students who took such courses were "college-ready," compared to 15 percent of minimum core-curriculum takers). Districts improve performance despite increasing poverty Indeed, many in the room (lawmakers, district leaders, academics, policy wonks, and philanthropists) were curious to know how a district like West Carrollton, whose student poverty rate has risen from seven percent at the start of the decade (2001-02) to nearly fifty percent (49.4) last school year, has managed to hold academic achievement steady -- let alone improve it. West Carrollton is currently rated Effective by the state, up three categories from Academic Emergency when Clifford first took over in the late 1990s. With the unemployment rate still high, and presumably more districts serving economically disadvantaged kids, we wondered the same. How many districts have seen sharp growth in poverty rates over the last decade? And how many of those have been able to hold steady, or even improve, instead of sliding backwards? The results are surprising, but in a good way. First we looked at student poverty (as measured by Ohio's "economically disadvantaged" status) and Performance Index scores among all Ohio districts from 2003-04 to 2008-09. (Poverty data prior to 2003 was somewhat spotty, and 2003 is when Ohio began phasing in the current generation of state achievement tests.) We defined "high growth in poverty" over that time period as an increase of 75 percent or higher (i.e., for a district with a starting poverty rate of 25 percent, a 75 percent increase is 18.75 percentage points, resulting in a final poverty rate of 43.75). We only paid attention to districts with a significant final poverty rate of 40 percent or higher. Then we looked at what was happening to those districts' Performance Index scores over the same period of time. Intuition might suggest that an increasing poverty rate results in lower performance, and that we'd observe lower achievement averages or at least stagnant ones in many such districts. However, only four (out of 38) such poverty-growth districts saw PI scores drop -- and even then only by small amounts (the greatest was a 4.75 percent drop in Richmond Heights Local). The vast majority of poverty-growth districts actually increased PI scores by decent margins; four districts witnessed a 15 percent or higher incline in PI scores while also experiencing growing numbers of economically disadvantaged students. Below are the top ten achievement-increasing districts among those that also had high poverty-growth. Figure 1: Top ten Performance Index-increasing, poverty-increasing districts (2003-09) Source: Ohio's interactive Local Report Card (iLRC) These ten districts (and the 24 others who improved their scores) deserve recognition. This data provide evidence that just because a district has increasing numbers of poor students does not mean that lagging performance is inevitable. Of course, one wonders why these high poverty-growth districts are experiencing somewhat counterintuitive performance improvements, and explanations abound. Perhaps the kids rated as "economically disadvantaged" are the same kids (whose parents lost jobs or fell into poverty) rather than an influx of outsiders. A "core" group of the same kids could have a stabilizing effect. Many of the districts we observed are rural, or located in towns experiencing significant job loss. The experience of poor urban districts might differ. Perhaps most importantly, none of these districts had a final poverty rate that was as high as the quintessential most-challenged district. While some have poverty rates that climbed into the 70s and 80s, most on the list have a moderate poverty rate that is still far less than that experienced in Ohio's Big 8 urban districts. Similarly, none had a starting Performance Index that was any lower than 76 (fairly close to an 80, which marks proficiency) and so didn't have to make up enormous ground. Districts experiencing growth in poverty while also having very low performance to begin would undoubtedly have a harder time improving performance. Maybe the greatest takeaway is that it's easier to hold steady on decent performance (as these districts did) even in the face of rising poverty, but essentially impossible to improve terrible performance. Whatever the explanation, these districts deserve credit, and other increasingly disadvantaged communities would do well to learn from them. Ohio Gadfly will be examining more performance trends in the coming weeks, following the 2009-10 report card release. Stay tuned. School turnarounds headed down familiar path I'd like to announce a career move I'll soon be making jointly with my husband. We've decided to combine our experience working in urban schools and in policy (Mike's 14 months as a behavioral psychotherapist in a school for behaviorally challenged kids, and my two years teaching and handful of years doing other education work) and open a center that will assist troubled schools in turning themselves around. As you may know, Ohio has been awarded $132 million in federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) funds to distribute to chronically failing schools, who will select from a range of providers to assist in turnaround efforts. We're thrilled to announce that our new venture, Radical Ohio Turnarounds (ROT), has been invited into the pool of turnaround providers! (The name ROT was birthed out of our love for well-known Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach and we will probably use the lotus flower in the company's logo.) We are still hammering out details but our vision is to utilize Mike's skills in psychotherapy (specifically, empathic listening and cognitive behavioral techniques) with my broad knowledge of schools and education. Although school turnaround work is brand-new for us, we are confident that our commitment and enthusiasm will prevail and that we can assist staff in many failing Ohio schools in reclaiming their confidence, self-worth, and happiness. While the above announcement was meant to be absurd, the premise behind it -- that just about anyone can try to turn around schools and receive approval (and public dollars) to do the work -- is frighteningly real. A recent New York Times article exposing several "inexperienced companies" going after school turnaround funds made the SIG program sound more like a topic on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show than a legitimate federal program whose goal -- to turn around the nation's worst schools -- is profoundly urgent. The NYTimes piece gave way to lots of criticism and has since prompted Rep. George Miller (chair of the House Education and Labor Committee) to announce that hearings will be held to determine if school turnaround groups are qualified to do such work. Good news for Ohio, a state that approved 71 turnaround providers (nearly twice as many as the number of SIG-funded schools slated for turnaround) including the life-coaching couple whose "Center for Evocative Coaching" first caught our attention for its services sounding more like group therapy than rigorous school intervention work. Unfortunately, the cart has come before the horse when it comes to school turnarounds. The No Child Left Behind Act identified schools in need of corrective action but left them languishing in failure as states had no teeth with which to enforce turnaround reforms. Nearly a decade later, there are still few examples of effective turnaround efforts and most failing schools live on. Sec. Duncan has reignited a sense of urgency around turning around the nation's lowest five percent of schools and has tied federal dollars to turnarounds (via both SIGs and Race to the Top). This is a step in the right direction, but if one thing has been made clear throughout RttT and SIG, it's that we still don't really know what we're doing when it comes to turnarounds. For starters, Ohio -- and most other states -- couldn't really point to successful examples of turnarounds in their Race to the Top applications, a fact that was forgiven by application reviewers despite asking for evidence of past success in other reform areas. Six elementary schools in Cincinnati were recently labeled a "turnaround success" for lifting themselves from Academic Emergency (F) to Continuous Improvement (C) through the help of the University of Virginia's Turnaround Specialist Program, news that is encouraging but also evidence that there are few such examples of turnarounds in the Buckeye State. (Ohio's academic rating system has so many loopholes that moving to Continuous Improvement in and of itself isn't really a feat, so much as an example of how broad and vague the CI category is.) Further, the fiasco over the questionable list of SIG providers in Ohio -- as well as the fact that most schools slated for turnaround have selected the least rigorous option for overhaul, and won't require replacement of staff or closure -- demonstrates how difficult it is to translate a good idea into practice effectively. This isn't to say we should accept the status quo and abandon school turnarounds altogether. But when commitment to an education reform idea is ahead of states' and districts' capacity to actually carry it out, policy makers must think strategically about how to attract the kind of talent and entrepreneurialism necessary to implement it (think, Massachusetts's Mass Insight). In the mean time, Ohio must do everything in its power to maintain strict quality control in the school turnaround arena, rather than promote an anything-goes mentality that years ago, created similar quality control issues in the state's charter sector. Advancing High-Quality Professional Learning Through Collective Bargaining and State Policy: An Initial Review and Recommendations to Support Student Learning The result of an 18-month study between four organizations and teams in Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, this report examines state policies and collective bargaining agreements as it relates to teachers' professional learning. It argues that embedding professional learning standards into law and bargaining agreements is the "primary pathway" toward increasing educator effectiveness. Unfortunately, the report's analysis (and recommendations) is peripheral to improving student achievement and come across as an extension of the national teachers unions' agenda. First, the report set about defining professional learning (aka professional development), which consists of activities teachers follow to increase personal content knowledge, teaching skills, and opportunities for career growth in order to both improve teaching and student learning. Next, it examined state policies and bargaining agreements to see how various states and districts handle professional learning and the extent to which they codify it. Of the six states studied, four are collective bargaining states while two -- North Carolina and Texas -- are not. Specifically, producers of the report looked at areas such as: time and budget for professional development; how it fits into "career" (National Board Certification or state licensure); and the extent to which learning is "collaborative" (teacher decision making, mentoring, collaboration, flexible designs). Ultimately, they concluded that "professional learning does not have a significant place in policy and collective bargaining language." Though the authors rightly argue that teacher quality is the most critical "in-school factor" when it comes to student achievement -- and even point to research illustrating this -- they are incorrect in applying such research to argue that policies to improve professional learning de facto lead to increased teacher effectiveness and improved student achievement. Not so. In fact, much research shows that professional development programs do not have any impact on student learning and often are wasteful in terms of states' and districts' scarce resources. While the report provides an opportunity to review several states' professional learning policies, that is about the only interesting or salient component. It overlooks any discussion of how specific professional development practices can positively impact student learning -- or whether they have. The report is available here.
Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males While its title sounds hopeful, this report's findings are not very auspicious. The Schott Foundation for Public Education takes an in-depth look at the education of Black males across the US (and state-by-state), analyzing several areas related to performance, such as graduation rates and reading proficiency. Overall, the results are pretty grim. In 2007-2008 the national graduation rate for Black males was 47 percent. The variation in graduation rates across states is also shocking: States such as Texas and Florida, which have a relatively comparable Black male population of 341,219 and 313,887 respectively, have drastically different graduation rates. Texas has a graduation rate of 52 percent for Black males and New York has a graduation rate of 37 percent. With a majority of Black males not graduating, it's clear that federal and state leaders must step up and ensure that all students are given equal opportunities. Another alarming statistic that this report examines is the percentage of Black males reading at or above a proficient level (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the "nation's report card"). The national average for reading proficiency among eighth-grade Black males was nine percent. Results for Black males in Ohio mirror the grim national results. Ohio's graduation rate for Black males in 2007-08 was 41 percent, six percentage points below the national average. In Cleveland, a city with 18,419 Black male students, this number was just 27 percent. Cleveland is also behind in the percentage of Black males that can read at a basic level. In Cleveland 61 percent of Black males are below even a basic level of reading on the eighth grade NAEP. Overall, the report's findings don't live up to its title. Both nationally and in Ohio, this report makes evident that the educational system is not providing Black males with the necessary skills and tools they need to succeed. To check out the complete report and how your state ranks, click here.
Better Benefits: Reforming Teacher Pensions for a Changing Work Force Just a month after Ohio's eight major newspapers ran a series of reports on the state's precarious pension system, Aldeman and Rotherham provide a national lens for the topic. They mince no words: Teacher pensions are a huge problem. Most obviously, they drain state and district budgets. In Ohio, the total unfunded liability for the states pensions is almost $20 billion (or $1,700 per person), accounting for over four percent of the total liability nationally. And these are conservative estimates.
Flypaper's Finest The wheels on the bus go... late, off-route, and terribly mismanaged
Should school ratings be available before start of new school year?
I want to go to that school
New Fordham report: Best and worst cities for school reform A new report from the national Fordham team surveys 30 American cities to find out which have environments that are most conducive for school reform (measured by factors such as access to human capital, a solid funding pipeline, a thriving charter-school market, etc.) The report also grades cities accordingly -- no city earned an "A," while Columbus ranks alongside eight others with a "B." Learn more about the report on Fordham's website. Think Tank + Sponsoring Charter Schools = Harder Than It Looks Please RSVP to [email protected] or 202-223-5452. PLEASE NOTE: If you're not up for trekking to DC for this one, the event will be WEBCAST nationwide. There is no need to sign up for the webcast -- simply visit www.edexcellence.net as the event begins, and click on the event link. Members of the webcast audience who would like to submit questions during the event can email them to [email protected]. |
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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.
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