On SB5, full repeal or no deal

In a surprise move that could only have been prompted by terrible internal poll results, Governor Kasich (R), Speaker Batchelder (R) and Senate President Niehaus (R) sent a letter (below) to the We Are Ohio campaign asking for compromise on SB5. The letter, as you can see is rife with condesension and mistruths. Worse than the letter however was the revisionist press conference that followed shortly afterwards.

The We Are Ohio campaign issued a press release almost immediately and held a press conference of their own

Today We Are Ohio once again stood firmly with the 1.3 million Ohioans who signed petitions to repeal SB 5 by telling the extreme politicians who passed it, to repeal it. Following a press conference held by Governor Kasich, Speaker Batchelder and Senate President Niehaus, We Are Ohio issued the following statement:

“We’re glad that Governor Kasich and the other politicians who passed SB 5 are finally admitting this is a flawed bill,” said Melissa Fazekas, spokeswoman for We Are Ohio. “Just like the bill was flawed this approach to a compromise is flawed as well. Our message is clear. These same politicians who passed this law could repeal it and not thwart the will of the people. They should either repeal the entire bill or support our efforts and encourage a no vote on Issue 2.”

We Are Ohio is a citizen-driven, community-based, bipartisan coalition that has come together to repeal SB 5, the unfair attack on employee rights and worker safety. We Are Ohio includes public and private sector workers and employees, police officers, firefighters, teachers, nurses, pastors, small business owners, Republicans and Democrats, local elected officials and business leaders, students, Moms, Dads, family members, and your neighbors.

Senate Minority leader Cafaro (D) also issued a statement

"Governor Kasich and Republicans in the General Assembly have finally admitted that Senate Bill 5 went too far. If they thought they could destroy collective bargaining in Ohio and get away with it, they have been proven wrong. More than one million Ohioans have already sent a strong message that Senate Bill 5 should be repealed.

"The time to negotiate was during the legislative process, not 197 days after Senate Bill 5 was first introduced in the Ohio Senate. Unfortunately, it has taken too long for the Governor and GOP leaders to acknowledge they overreached."

Our sources indicate that no one from the We Are Ohio campaign intends to aquience to these political games and attend a Friday meeting. The message has been made clear by 1.3 million supporters of repeal. A message the Governor's desperate ploy highlights.

Without repeal there is no deal.

Letter to We Are Ohio

New Poll:What Americans believe about public education

The annual Phi Delta Kappa International/Gallup poll on public education has just been released. The poll delves into all manner of questions from teachers, including unions, salaries, hiring/firing practices, and curriculum.

People overwhelmingly support teachers and public schools

The survey shows the public has a generally positive view of teachers. Nearly three out of four of those surveyed said they had confidence and trust in teachers today, and two out of three said they would be in favor of their child becoming a public school teacher. It wasn’t just their own children they wanted to become teachers—they wanted the highest-achieving high school students to be recruited for the classroom.

“It’s clear that Americans recognize the importance of getting quality students to become the next generation of teachers,” Mr. Bushaw said.

The poll, in this way, points out some of the areas where current policy and public opinion don’t match up, said Thomas Toch, the co-founder of the Education Sector think tank and the currrent executive director of Independent Education, a Washington-area private school consortium. The public wants to find and retain the highest-quality teachers, and it wants to compensate them based on a number of factors, with student test scores being the least important. Experience, academic degree, and principal evaluations all ranked higher than test scores in the survey. Merit-pay, an important element of the Obama administration’s education agenda, calls for great emphasis to be placed on student test scores when determining teachers’ salaries.

“This poll today shows a much more sophisticated public that is willing and ready to invest in teachers,” Mr. Berry said.

There's a lot more fascinating results in the poll, including no support for firing teachers without cause or converting underperforming schools to charters, even though charters are well supported. People also believe strongly there is a funding crisis (wait till they get a load of the Governor's budget!). Here's the poll.

2010 Poll Report

Parents choose public education

That's a headline you won't see in the Columbus Dispatch anytime soon, but if recent evidence is any guide, that's exactly what parents have done when it comes to Ohio's voucher expansion boondoggle.

Interest from Ohio parents has been light as the state expands its offer for vouchers that allow children to move from low-performing public schools and into private schools.

The state budget signed by Gov. John Kasich at the end of June more than doubled the number of taxpayer-funded vouchers available for the new school year under what's formally known as the EdChoice Scholarship Program. The state will provide as many as 30,000 scholarships, an increase from the previous cap of 14,000 vouchers, which are worth up to $5,000 each.

1,575. That's how many of the additional 16,000 vouchers have been applied for. Proponents of this expansion argued that there was massive pent up demand from parents to move their children out of public education and into the private sector, but the 14,000 cap was trapping them. In fact, so pent up wa the demand that next year the cap is increased again to 60,000 vouchers!

Now the excuse seems to be that they need more "marketing", that parents aren't aware. If parents aren't aware, how was there ever any pent up demand? As we reported earlier, research has demonstrated that vouchers do not have a strong effect on students academic achievement.

Since 2000, more evidence has accumulated about the impact of vouchers on student test scores, particularly from longer-term studies of the publicly funded voucher programs inMilwaukee, Cleveland, and D.C. [...], these studies have generally found no clear advantage in academic achievement for students attending private schools with vouchers.

The rhetoric used to support voucher programs has shifted, with some proponents giving less emphasis to rationales based on achievement and more emphasis to arguments based on graduation rates, parent satisfaction, and the value of choice in itself.

If Ohio's experiment with expanding vouchers is any guide, parents are choosing public education over privatization, despite what million dollar education privatization advocacy campaigners at School Choice Ohio would have us believe.

Maybe we ought to listen to Ohio's parents and invest in struggling public schools instead of syphoning away scarce resources for an experiment few seem interested in.

Educators Offer Solutions For NCLB Rewrite

It’s punitive. It over-emphasizes standardized testing. It narrows curriculum and takes a one-size-fits-all approach to education.

The problems with federal education policy under No Child Left Behind, the current incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, are numerous and frustrating for America’s educators and students.

With the Obama administration’s recent announcement that it will soon establish guidelines for states seeking relief from NCLB’s onerous requirements, there have been renewed discussions on what it will take to fix NCLB permanently and comprehensively.

America’s educators, who are intimately familiar with the practical problems NCLB presents at the classroom level, are eager to be heard in those conversations.

[readon2 url="http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/08/15/educators-offer-solutions-for-nclb-rewrite/"]Read more...[/readon2]

Common Standards to Play Pivotal Role in NCLB Waivers?

Unless you've been in the wild without an Internet signal, or on a vacation where you really, um, don't check your SmartPhone, you've heard by now that Education Secretary Arne Duncan has given states the formal go-ahead to apply for waivers from No Child Left Behind requirements. As was made clear in a White House press briefing on Monday, this direction comes from President Obama.

Details of what states must do to get the waivers won't emerge until next month, but at the briefing, Duncan listed the elements in the all-or-nothing package of reforms states have to embrace (and you've heard this mantra before): teacher and principal effectiveness, turning around low-performing schools, growth-based accountability systems, and yes, college- and career-ready standards.

[readon2 url="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2011/08/duncan_moves_ahead_with_nclb.html"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has just published their report "Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Variation and Change in State Standards for Reading and Mathematics, 2005-2009"

This research looked at the following issues

How do states’ 2009 standards for proficient performance compare with one another when mapped onto the NAEP scale? There is wide variation among state proficiency standards.
Most states’ proficiency standards are at or below NAEP’s definition of Basic performance.

How do the 2009 NAEP scale equivalents of state standards compare with those estimated for 2007 and 2005? For those states that made substantive changes in their assessments between 2007 and 2009 most moved toward more rigorous standards as measured by NAEP.
For those states that made substantive changes in their assessments between 2005 and 2009, changes in the rigor of states’ standards as measured by NAEP were mixed but showed more decreases than increases in the rigor of their standards.

Does NAEP corroborate a state’s changes in the proportion of students meeting the state’s standard for proficiency from 2007 to 2009? From 2005 to 2009? Changes in the proportion of students meeting states’ standards for proficiency between 2007 and 2009 are not corroborated by the proportion of students meeting proficiency, as measured by NAEP, in at least half of the states in the comparison sample.
Results of comparisons between changes in the proportion of students meeting states’ standards for proficiency between 2005 and 2009 and the proportion of students meeting proficiency, as measured by NAEP, were mixed.

The full report can be found here (PDF). We've pulled out some of the graphs that show Ohio's performance vs the rest of the country for each of the 4th and 8th grade reading and math achievement levels.