The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, organizations whose agenda is to expand charter schools, co-wrote the following testimony against the Charter provisions that were secretly placed into the budget bill (HB153) by the House Republicans.
NACSA Letter opposing HB153 Charter ExpansionDoes David Brennan have no supporters in the charter school community?
Michele's Rhee's reputation was already a little shaky amongst educators, as she pushed a partisan and deceptive corporate education reform agenda, but now that reputation must be in tatters on the news that she and her nascent organization "StudentsFirst" employed lobbyists in Ohio to architect major parts of SB5 and the SB5 provisions in the budget bill.
If the name Robert Klaffky sounds familiar, it's because he was featured in an Disptach article only this weekend, frontpage headlined "Kasich friends in high demand - 3 who have long been advisers to governor become top lobbyists".
The details of Klaffky's lobbying are laid out in a HuffingtonPost report
How much work StudentsFirst actually did on SB5 is not entirely clear. While Klaffky said he was tasked with putting language into the controversial bill, Hobson insisted that the group's primary focus was on the budget, HB153. The reason SB5 was put on the lobbying disclosure, she said, was because Klaffky simply discussed the matter with StudentFirst officials.
That explanation, however, appeared to contradict local reports, which had Rhee personally asking Kasich to include performance pay for teachers in SB5. It also did little to win over critics of Rhee, who argued that the former chancellor's willingness to work with the likes of the Ohio governor gave him the type of cover needed to make sweeping changes to the collective bargaining law. Adding amendments to the bill, the logic goes, inherently supports the bill.
"It now turns out that Michelle Rhee hired a close friend of the governor to lobby in favor of SB5," said Piet van Lier, head of Policy Matters Ohio who has worked on education in Ohio and opposes SB5. "This bill would require merit pay and test-based evaluations for teachers, neither of which has solid research support as a way to improve schools."
There should be no educator in the country now in any doubt about Rhee's corporate, partisan "reform" agenda and her disdain for public school teachers.
We Are Ohio has so many SB5 petition books coming in, it's proving difficult to keep up. They are asking for help to log signatures so they can keep track.
The campaign can use help anytime between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., seven days a week until June 30th. The process occurs at SEIU 1199 at 1395 Dublin Rd in Columbus.
Please contact Brendan Kelley at bkelley@weareohio.com to let him know if you can help.
Following up on our earlier piece, of experts warning of the dangerous of using student test results to evaluate teachers, Greg at Plunderbund brings into view the notion that HB153 also calls for the use of test results to evaluate principals. This brings forth the uncomfortable connundrum of having a faulty grading system grade principals as "unsatisfatory" and then having those very same "unsatisfactory" principals be responsible for evaluating teachers. As Greg notes, with a bit of math
It's time that lawmakers start to get the sense that education is a team sport, not one of individual competition.
Testing experts recently joined together to issue a letter to the NY State Board of Regents, where they recently approved using value added measurements to account for 40% of a teachers assessment. In Ohio, under HB153 50% would be accounted through testing.
In summary, their conclusion
Here's the full letter:
May 15, 2011
To The New York State Board of Regents:
As researchers who have done extensive work in the area of testing and measurement, and the use of value-added methods of analysis, we write to express our concern about the decision pending before the Board of Regents to require the use of state test scores as 40% of the evaluation decision for teachers.
As the enclosed report from the Economic Policy Institute describes, the research literature includes many cautions about the problems of basing teacher evaluations on student test scores. These include problems of attributing student gains to specific teachers; concerns about overemphasis on “teaching to the test” at the expense of other kinds of learning; and disincentives for teachers to serve high-need students, for example, those who do not yet speak English and those who have special education needs.
Reviews of research on value-added methodologies for estimating teacher “effects” based on student test scores have concluded that these measures are too unstable and too vulnerable to many sources of error to be used as a major part of teacher evaluation. A report by the RAND Corporation concluded that:
The research base is currently insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions about individual teachers or schools.
The Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences stated,
…VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness … should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.
Henry Braun, then of the Educational Testing Service, concluded in his review of research:
VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.
According to these studies, the problems with using value-added testing models to determine teacher effectiveness include:
*Teachers’ ratings are affected by differences in the students who are assigned to them. Students are not randomly assigned to teachers – and statistical models cannot fully adjust for the fact that some teachers will have a disproportionate number of students who may be exceptionally difficult to teach (students with poor attendance, who are homeless, who have severe problems at home, etc.) and whose scores on traditional tests have unacceptably low validity (e.g. those who have special education needs or who are English language learners). All of these factors can create both misestimates of teachers’ effectiveness and disincentives for teachers to want to teach the neediest students, creating incentives for teachers to seek to teach those students those expected to make the most rapid gains and to avoid schools and classrooms serving struggling students.
*Value-added models of teacher effectiveness do not produce stable ratings of teachers. Teachers look very different in their measured effectiveness when different statistical methods are used. In addition, researchers have found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings differ from class to class, from year to year, and even from test to test, even when these are within the same content area. Henry Braun notes that ratings are most unstable at the upper and lower ends of the scale, where many would like to use them to determine high or low levels of effectiveness.
*It is impossible to fully separate out the influences of students’ other teachers, as well as school and home conditions, on their apparent learning. No single teacher accounts for all of a student’s learning. Prior teachers have lasting effects, for good or ill, on students’ later learning, and current teachers also interact to produce students’ knowledge and skills. Some students receive tutoring, as well as help from well-educated parents. A teacher who works in a well-resourced school with specialist supports serving students from stable, supportive families may appear to be more effective than one whose students don’t receive these supports.
These problems are exacerbated further by the fact that the kind of grade-level tests and end-of-course tests used in New York are not designed to measure student growth.
While value-added models based on student test scores are useful for looking at groups of teachers for research purposes – for example, to examine the results of professional development programs or to look at student progress at the school or district level, they are problematic as measures for making evaluation decisions for individual teachers.
We urge you to reject proposals that would place significant emphasis on this untested strategy that could have serious negative consequences for teacher and for the most vulnerable students in the State’s schools.
Eva Baker, Distinguished Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education
Director, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST)
President, World Educational Research Association, 2010-2012
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Executive Board Member, National Academy of Education
Edward Haertel, Vida Jacks Professor of Education, Stanford University
Chair, Board on Testing and Assessment, National Research Council
Vice-President, National Academy of Education
Past President, National Council on Measurement in Education
Helen F. Ladd, Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
President, Association of Public Policy and Management
Henry M. Levin, William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Past President, Evaluation Research Society
Past President, Comparative and International Education Society
Robert E. Linn, Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Past President, National Council on Measurement in Education
Aaron Pallas, Professor of Sociology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Fellow, American Educational Research Association
Richard Shavelson, Dean Emeritus and Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Lorrie A. Shepard, Dean & Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Past President National Academy of Education
Past President National Council on Measurement in Education
Lee S. Shulman, Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
President Emeritus, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Past President, American Educational Research Association
The Republican controlled legislature and the Governor have determined that the state budget will be balanced on the back of public education and the middle class. Much of the solution will pass the buck to local government and school districts, by eliminating the tangible personal property tax (TPP) replacement money, leaving many school districts in dire straits. Further costs are passed onto working Ohioans with a 2% pension shift, directly extracting hundreds of millions from paychecks over the next 2 years alone. A significant portion of the money that is left over for public education is diverted to expand charter schools and vouchers. A plan even conservative charter proponents oppose. Much of the rest of the budget gap is filled with one time money from the privatization of Ohio's assets, from roads and prisons, to the lottery and alcohol.
Clearly a more balanced approach would be welcome.
A short while ago we discussed and demonstrated that the income tax cuts made through HB66 in 2004 has had a negligible effect on a typical teachers tax burden. For those tax cuts to make a real tangible difference one would have to earn significantly more than any Ohio teacher - hundreds of thousands of dollars more in fact.
A recent study by the Education Tax Policy Institute (ETPI), found
While the study determined that the reform of Ohio's business tax structure in 2005 improved both the fairness and the competitiveness of the state's revenue system, the authors also determined that the combination of the recent recession and the changes in the state’s tax system in House Bill (HB) 66 lowered state revenue by $3 billion below the levels anticipated in 2005 when the state revamped its business tax structure.
The summary can be read here, with the full report is below. The report demonstrates that Ohio does not have the crushing tax burden that some would have us believe, but instead has areas where improvements could be made that would raise revenue without causing any economic harm.
The following two charts from the report show the sources of tax revenue, the first for the state, the second for local taxes.
State Sources of Tax Revenue
Local Sources of Tax Revenue
As you can see, business pays very little, with the vast majority of taxes being paid by individuals through income tax, property tax and sales taxes. One would hardly have to be draconian to realize significant tax revenues from simply closing outdated loopholes
You can see some of the crazy tax loopholes in this document
The Tax Expenditure Report Ohio
In total those tax exemptions add to over $7 billion.
The evidence is overwhelming that an alternative, more balanced approach to the budget is available to law makers should they choose. They do not have to continue on this path that seriously harms public education and the middle class. They can solve the budget problems without passing the buck down to local government. The question is, will they chose a new path?