In a short time, a big mess

It took former Governor Ted Strickland almost his entire first term to implement his evidenced based model for education (EMB) in Ohio. Lengthy collaboration between multiple stakeholders produced the first real attempts at education reform in Ohio since its funding mechanisms had been judged to be unconstitutional.

Governor Kasich made it clear he would scrap this approach before it had time to be implemented. What he proposed to replace it with wasn’t clear, and still isn’t.

In less than six months we have a partisan state board of education in disarray and unable to find a suitable candidate to lead any reform effort. A promoted interim superintendent whose first task is to lay off members of his organization in order to cope with budget cuts. New teacher evaluation and merit pay framework provisions, with few real details, that were cooked up over a weekend by non-education expert legislators, and another law designed to curb the Ohio teacher professions association heading for likely repeal.

Did we mention the biggest mess of all? Almost $3 billion in cuts to public education while simultaneously sending more money to charter schools and for-profits and no funding formula for schools to plan around going forward.

Just how was this mess created

After making it clear that the EBM was dead, Governor Kasich’s first step wasn’t to collaborate to develop his own education reform plan and find a constitutional funding mechanism, but instead to attack his parties political foes via SB5’s union busting measures. SB5 was a direct assault on public employees, but especially teachers. SB5 curtailed collective bargaining, instituted an ill-thought out merit pay rubric that had only minimal support primarily from corporate education reformers, and relied heavily on discredit value add measures using high stakes testing of students.

Concurrent with this, the Governor sought to remake the independent state board of education. The first step was to ensure the votes were his by appointing tea party members to the board. Even going to the extent of replacing one of his own, board president and Republican Robin C. Hovis with Debe Terhar, described by the Dispatch as a "Cincinnati Tea Party conservative"

What followed next was unexpected and unprecedented – the State Superintendent was threatened, and then forced out.

Empowered by a new presence on the state school board, backers of Gov. John Kasich have forced out Ohio's state superintendent of education.

A tearful Deborah Delisle resigned yesterday.

"Last Friday, it was made known to me by two members of the governor's staff that my tenure was limited," Delisle said during the board's monthly meeting in Columbus. "They said they have the votes to replace me."

Her resignation takes effect April 30.

Delisle said she was asked "to support the governor's budget and remain ambivalent about it. I said I hadn't seen it. ... I perceived (the comments) as bribery or a threat."

She said she was told that "if I did good, there would be a nice exit strategy."

Several board members reacted with anger and tears of their own.

"This is disgusting," said member Robin C. Hovis, a Republican who was replaced as board president earlier in the meeting by a tea party proponent. "I denounce it."

He predicted that Kasich will pick a "puppet superintendent" and replace Ohio Department of Education staff members.

That “puppet” was to come in the form of the Governor’s education czar, Bob Sommers. Sommers, a former charter school executive from Detroit subsequently withdrew from contention claiming somewhat bizarrely that lawyers advised him that his ability to do the job would be limited because state ethics laws would keep him from having contact with the governor's office for a year.

While it’s not known the true reason for his withdrawal, it is suspected that he did not have enough votes from the state board of education to be appointed. The rancor and bad press from the Delisle ouster having caused some board members to rethink their independence.

That lack of independence early on was now causing a serious problem for the board in the search for a replacement. Having initially made sure the pool of candidates to choose from were only drawn from the ranks of corporate education reformers and believers, their list of candidates was getting smaller and smaller.

Reynoldsburg Superintendent Dackin withdrew after his board made him a financial offer he couldn’t refuse

Reynoldsburg schools spokeswoman Tricia Moore said the board will vote today to raise Dackin's base pay by $25,000. If that is approved, he will make $145,156. He would also be eligible for up to $24,000 a year in merit pay if he meets specific goals outlined by the board.

In a surprise last minute effort by the board to save face interim Superintendent Stan Heffner was appointed.

It was becoming clear that the Governor's other assault on public education and teachers was failing too.

Public sector workers had come together in a manner not seen in over 30 years to oppose SB5’s assault on the middle class, culminating in a record breaking 1.3 million signatures being collected to place a repeal initiative on the November ballot.

The Governor himself seemed confused about SB5, claiming wrongly that "Senate Bill 5 doesn't require merit pay for teachers.”

The vacuum caused by these missteps was filled by all manner of ill-conceived policies being inserted into the state’s biennium budget. From huge giveaways to for-profit charter schools, to SB5 like provisions, the crazy was turned up to 11.

Recognized by many, the new Republican majority in their rush to exert their political force were on the verge of destroying education in Ohio. Denounced from all angles, including the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute who said the budget released by House Republicans "risks making the Buckeye State the nation’s laughing stock when it comes to charter school programs." The legislature was forced to backtrack from the most extreme policy measures, but what passed was still a radical assault on public education.

Where we are now

We now face almost $3 billion in education cuts over the next 2 years, and no funding formula going forward to replace the EBM with. Districts are having to make massive budget cuts to budgets already stretched thin.

A discredited State Board of Education, and a State Superintndent with less resources to implement a much larger mission. That mission now includes the Department of Education getting back into the Charter School Sponsorship business - an effort it failed so spectacularly at the first time around it had its authority stripped. Simultaneously the department needs to develop, in short order, merit pay and teacher evaluation systems - where the only collaboration with teachers to date has been an insulting web form. Soliciting ideas form teachers - ideas for a system that already has its framework in place via a budget bill.

Whatever the motives of the Governor, and it does become hard to ascribe genuine values to them, there can be no doubt that his bullrush approach to "reform" has left an environment of mistrust, anger and confusion in its wake. Governor Kasich has a lot of damage to repair, yet there are few signs he intends to do so.

Indeed, by placing himself at the head of the pro-SB5 campaign, a campaign that will undoubtedly cast further aspersions upon teachers, is unlikely to prove beneficial anytime soon.

Our Broken Escalator

THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.

Alas, we’ve forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.
[...]
How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?

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Union-Management Collaboration Can Help Public Schools

For most of the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has centered on teacher quality. In this debate, teachers and their unions have often been seen as the problem, not part of the solution. Further, current discourse often assumes that conflicting interests between teacher unions and administration is inevitable. What is missing in the discussion, however, is a systems perspective on the problem of public school reform that looks at the way schools are organized, and the way decisions are made. Most public schools today continue to follow an organizational design better suited for 20th century mass production than educating students in the 21st century.

"Reforming Public School Systems Through Sustained Union-Management Collaboration," a paper by Saul A. Rubinstein and John E. McCarthy, offers an alternate path in this debate—a counterstory that looks at schools as systems. It focuses on examples of collaboration among stakeholders through the creation of labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions, school administrators, and school boards. These partnerships improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized.

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Teacher Attitudes about Compensation Reform

We want to bring to your attention 3 study papers from The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER). Some of it is pretty dense reading and probably isn't for everyone on a sunny summer's day. However we are heading into a period where lots of these issues are now front and center in how it impacts the teaching profession. It's worth a few minutes to simply read the conclusions if the entire paper is a little too much.

As Ohio moves towards high stakes teacher evaluations using student test scores, and of course, merit pay based on these high stakes evaluations it will become increasingly important for educators to understand these issues. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses and the state of current understanding will be crucial, for it is certain that there are lots of corporate education reformers who care less about whether new approaches actually work, and care more about profit seeking or their ideologically driven agendas.

The first paper looks at Value-Added Models and the Measurement of Teacher Productivity, and unsurprisingly finds that while VAM has some interesting uses, the data and measurement techniques are not mature enough to be reliable for high stakes decision making.

Value-Added Models and the Measurement of Teacher Productivity

The second paper looks at Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform, and finds that

We conclude with a reminder that our analysis says nothing of the politics of adoption. Whether a district is able to successfully adopt compensation reform clearly depends on its relationship with its teachers union, not just the attitudes of individual teachers. And while the WSTCS presents these various incentive plans as if they are separate from each other, if compensation reform is to have the types of effects that advocates and reformers hope for, various combinations of incentives may need to be considered: not just merit pay alone but merit‐pay combined with subject‐area pay and/or combat pay and/or NBPTS incentives. Teacher opinions about such combinations are an important topic for future research.

The final paper we want to bring to your attention covers Stepping Stones Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes, simply to highlight that school and student performance is affected by many complex variables, including school leadership itself.

We hope you continue to find the research we bring to your attention useful and informative and if you are aware of any research we haven't uncovered please let us know.

Freedom School children march against budget cuts

We received this yesterday from the Children's Defense Fund, and wanted to share it with our readers. Civic engagement to improve the lives of students is at the heart of what we care about.

Nearly 400 children participating in eight Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools sites in Central Ohio held a “teach-in” and marched to the Statehouse to highlight the dangers from proposed federal budget cuts to education. The children, ages 5-18, joined thousands of others from 151 Freedom Schools locations in 87 cities and 27 states as part of a “National Day of Social Action.”

The Freedom Schools college “servant leaders” who teach and mentor the children enrolled in these summer schools hosted the “teach-in” for community leaders, policymakers, advocates, and parents to discuss possible federal budget cuts that pose a huge threat to education and great harm to children. Some proposals, like the Ryan budget passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in April, would roll back education funding to 2008 levels, cut Pell grants by as much as $126 billion (more than $800 per grant), and slash $770 billion from health care funding that protects one in three children – while giving $4.2 trillion in tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires and big corporations. And such cuts would come on top of the state and local cuts that have already hurt public education.

During the event held at Broad Street United Methodist Church, college servant leaders and children shared stories about how education has shaped their lives and led participants to write letters to their federal lawmakers urging them to protect children from education budget cuts and invest in children to strengthen the nation’s economic future.

Lamar Graham, 25, of Columbus, is a servant leader intern at Urban Resurrection CDC's Freedom School. Graham was in foster care for eight years and said he was placed with “too many families to count,” but that the experiences gave him an “inner strength to better not only my life, but others’.” He is a graduate of Wilberforce University and Columbus State Community College. Graham said, "I never would have been able to go to college without Pell grants. Pell grants saved me from taking out many student loans. If you cut educational funding, it's like the foundation: if there is no foundation, the house can't stand."

For more information on the CDF Freedom Schools program visit www.freedomschools.org

Guest Post: A Comprehensive Union

A guest post by Robert Barkley, Jr., Retired Executive Director, Ohio Education Association, Author: Quality in Education: A Primer for Collaborative Visionary Educational Leaders and Leadership In Education: A Handbook for School Superintendents and Teacher Union Presidents, Worthington, Ohio – rbarkle@columbus.rr.com

As employee organizations, whether one prefers the term association or union, come under severe attack from many angles, it is time once again to reflect upon exactly what is our duty. Or, to put it in terms I discovered as I worked for several years with a coalition of management and labor, what would it mean to be a “comprehensive union.”

My work in that period of studying such collaboration led me to understand the parallel need for transforming our local associations/unions in tandem with the changes we seek in the school districts with which, and in which, we work.

Unions, like all organizations, go through life cycles. We are at a time in education where the pure trade unionist approach to representing education employees is at least understandable to most, and still appealing to many. Elsewhere this acceptance of even a traditional role for unions is fragile at best. There is a great deal of antipathy toward a union in any form, even among the union's own membership.

Against a backdrop of serious threats to public education as an institution, unions must walk a difficult line between the traditional expectations of many veteran school employees about what their union should be, internal union critics, and the changing expectations represented by many of those entering teaching today. In this climate, those who purport to represent school employees find themselves needing a more comprehensive perspective about what they offer.

Typically employee organizations seek, or should seek, to attend to three aspects of our members work: 1) the labor they engage in, 2) the contribution that labor makes to the community, and 3) the performance level attributed to those efforts.

Consistent with those three aspects a truly comprehensive union must engage in four distinct but interdependent functions. First, the traditional union role has not, probably should not, and cannot go away. At this point in its evolution, the comprehensive union needs to maintain its historic role. But what is that role? From conversations with many members, it seems to boil down to protecting members from the vicissitudes of the systems in which they work. More specifically it is protection from the consequences of out-dated, inadequate, and/or dysfunctional systems.

The second historical and essential role for our organizations is to assure that our members are appropriately rewarded for their labor, contributions, and performance. [Yes, there’s that word performance mixed in with setting compensation. It’s real and must be addressed both intelligently and fairly.]

This leads to the third role for a comprehensive union -- accepting responsibility, in collaboration with others, for the design and continuous improvement of the systems in which our members work. It's not a matter of giving up one for the other. It's a matter of accepting simultaneously the responsibility for protection, system redesign, and accountability.

For decades, designing the systems in which people work has been thought of as the purview of management. In fact, based upon the wording of many "management rights" clauses in bargained contracts, designing the systems and maintaining the quality of work has been essentially off-limits to unions. This was naïve from the beginning and certainly is today.

If one asks members or potential members if they would join for protection, many say yes. Ask them if they would join and support efforts to improve the system in ways that would reduce the need for protection, the response is usually some mix of three replies. One, they don't believe the need for protection would ever go away completely. Two, they never thought of the union as doing that sort of thing. And three, they like the idea, but they're worried that doing the second would compromise doing the first.

Taking on these dual challenges is further than many are ready to go. Yet there appears to be an even more attractive prospect for a transformation to comprehensive unionism. Once fundamental survival needs are met, the greatest service anyone can give workers is the fourth aspect of a comprehensive employee organization: an opportunity for its members to realize joy and satisfaction in their daily work.

I opened by suggesting that all organizations have life cycles. Moving from one established life cycle to the next is never easy nor is the road clear. We are often sustaining one cycle while designing the next. We find ourselves in that dilemma today -- torn between the continuing need for protection and the growing responsibility for improving the system. I have found this concept of the comprehensive union useful in conducting the reflection and dialogue necessary to grow and learn.