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.

Private schools getting more public dollars

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a great article on the expansion of vouchers in Ohio, and what that means for the public schools affected. This year Ohio has expanded eligibility to 30,000 students, with further expansion to 60,000 next year.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia direct about $1 billion a year in public money to private schools through voucher or tax credit programs, according to ASCD. The nonprofit organization, which develops resources for educators, ranks Ohio fourth in the amount provided, after Florida, Louisiana and Wisconsin.

Current Ohio voucher programs are limited by geography, and income, but that can change

There is also support for even more growth in vouchers. Rep. Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, is championing a bill still in the legislature that would award private-school tuition vouchers of up to $4,626 to families based on their household incomes -- with no geographic restriction and no requirement that students come from failing public schools.

The vouchers have a crippling financial effect on the public schools who lose these students, the Euclid district lost 544 students to vouchers on top of 1,067 students to independently operated charter schools. There are further pernicious effects

Another twist that hurts: Students can keep their vouchers through high school, even if their public schools improve and get off the EdChoice list. So, Euclid High School ultimately may be affected even though it's never been on the list.

As for the quality of education these students who transfer to private schools at the expense of public school students, the results are suspect

Research done so far on voucher programs across the country - including Ohio -- has failed to show that they lead to better academic achievement, according to a report released last month by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, a group that advocates for public education.

Ohio recently started requiring that EdChoice and Cleveland voucher students take state tests to gauge their performance in private school. Early data suggests that their public school counterparts often did better.

Common Core Cooperation?

Terry Ryan of the Fordham Institute had a sit down with the new Ohio Superintendent Stan Heffner and discussed the development of Ohio's common core academic standards. Heffner revealed to Ryan that he believed teachers input would be crucial to success

Heffner argued to me (and previously had written in a February 2011 paper for the Council of Chief State Schools Officers) that the successful implementation of the Common Core, in any state, will come down to teacher involvement and ultimate buy-in. He believes that teachers should be involved in the implementation process in five significant ways:

• They must have a significant presence in the development of the new common assessments.
• They will have to change their instructional practices in critical ways if the Common Core is to ultimately lead to higher levels of student achievement.
• They will need model curricula – either generated by states themselves or by SBAC or PARCC in partnership with states – to help them understand and embrace the rigor and expectations of the Common Core standards.
• They must be involved in the development of the model curricula.
• They will need significant amounts of professional development in order to change their established practices and culture in favor of a new design that the Common Core standards and common assessments will demand.

We can only hope that cooperation breaks out, so that Ohio education policy can take a turn for the better.