HB136 The Privatize Public Education Bill

HB 136 pass out of the House Education committee yesterday 12-10, a party line vote with just one Republican voting no. But what is HB 136?

The bill replaces the ʺEd Choiceʺ and "Cleveland Scholarship" voucher programs, and replaces them with a voucher program instead based on family income, and calls it the "Parental Choice and Taxpayer Savings Scholarship Program" or ʺPACTʺ.

So it's a statewide voucher program with the amount of the voucher deducted from a studentʹs school district, with no limit on the number of PACT vouchers that can be awarded. Of course these vouchers can be used at any eligible nonpublic school.

So here we have a bill that allows unlimited amounts of money to be taken from any school district and sent directly to private institutions, effectively gutting public education for the majority of citizens students, The Governor and the Department of Education must have some thoughts on this? Gongwer

Speaker Batchelder, an architect of the Cleveland Voucher Program, said he has yet to review the final version of the measure, which won't be taken up by the full House until at least next week.

"It's had a lot of deliberations" in committee, he said. "It's a very important bill."

Nevertheless, the speaker said he would "have to see if the administration, which is going to come forward with a new plan on primary and secondary (education), whether they're friendly, unfriendly or what."

"I have not talked with the state superintendent either at this point, so I think we have a little more work to do while it's in Rules (Committee)."

Rob Nichols, spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, said the governor strongly believes in school choice but has not taken a public stance on the measure. ODE also said it has no formal opinion.

How can a bill the effectively provides the means to privatize public education have had a "lot of deliberations" if the Governor, ODE, and State Superintendent not taken any position?

Greg Mild at Plunderbund walks through just one scenario to highlight how destructive this bill would be

If a parent in Dublin finds a private school, enrolls their child, and receives the HB136 funding, the Dublin City School district suffers a net loss of $3,757. Doesn’t sound too bad in isolation, does it? Well, keep going….

Assuming Dublin parents can find private schools to take their children, this could continue until every student has taken their private tuition money out of the Dublin pool and the entire district is privatized. Except that would be impossible because the pool of money can’t sustain the model in the legislation. Honestly, it’s just basic arithmetic at this point.

District funds remaining: $12,089,366
[Divided by] private tuition voucher: $4,626
[Equals] Number of vouchers available for funding: 2,613
Number of total students in Dublin City Schools: 13,910
So, after student number 2,613 has taken their tax money and run, I’m left with two questions for the “financial experts” down at the Statehouse:

Who pays for number 2,614?
Who funds the remaining 11,000+ students?

As Greg notes, HB136 would destroy a public school that is graded excellent with distinction and leave over 10,000 students out in the cold.

Here's the LSC synopsis of HB136, you'll note we haven't even touched upon the education savings accounts aspect to the bill.

HB136 Synopsis

The Debate over Teacher Merit Pay

The term “merit pay” has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing the D.C.’s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other cities gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank of Education Secretary Arne Duncan‘s reform platform. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals. There’s just one problem: educators almost universally hate merit pay, and have been adamantly opposed to it from day one. Simply, teachers say merit pay won’t work.

In the last year, there’s been some pretty damning evidence proving them right; research showing that merit pay, in a variety of shapes and sizes, fails to raise student performance. In the worst of cases, such as the scandal in Atlanta, it’s contributed to flat-out cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. So, are we surprised that educators don’t respond to monetary incentives? Is that even the right conclusion to draw?

[readon2 url="http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/20/the-debate-over-teacher-merit-pay-a-freakonomics-quorum/"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Van Roekel: The NEA Plan for Teacher Accountability

By Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association

This summer, the National Education Association took a historic vote and adopted a new policy statement. It put us on the record, for the first time, as calling for a comprehensive overhaul of both teacher evaluation and accountability systems to improve professional practice and advance student learning.

Why now?

The myopic focus of the current education reform debate promotes lowering professional standards, finding quick and cheap ways to rate teachers based solely on tests, and making it easier to fire “bad” teachers while lowering the bar to enter the profession.

The irony is that teachers themselves have long complained that evaluation systems are broken. They have been some of the most forceful advocates for better evaluations linked to meaningful feedback and support. What’s been missing is sufficient guidance – developed by and for teachers – to help navigate this challenging and complicated environment.

The policy statement is an opportunity for NEA and our members to assert ourselves in a debate that has been raging for years. We know that current systems for teacher evaluation and accountability can be improved, but too often in the past we have simply taken a defensive posture, trying to prevent damaging policies instead of promoting those that will actually raise student achievement.

We have heard all of the bad ideas. Now it’s time for us to take the lead, and draw on our experience to propose policies that will actually work for students. This is our profession and our responsibility.

Our new policy statement lays out rigorous standards and delineates the multiple indicators of teacher practice that must be taken into account in an evaluation and accountability system. It clearly articulates the link between teacher accountability and student success and defines an appropriate evaluation system. And it signals a commitment to a new, more prestigious profession of teaching:

• It includes student learning and growth indicators as one of three key components of evaluation systems.  
• It calls for a well-designed system for improving a struggling teacher’s practice, and should that teacher not improve within a specific time, the policy statement provides for a fair and expedient dismissal process. 
• It calls for support for beginning teachers so that they will not just stay and survive, but thrive in the profession.

In adopting this policy statement, our members said loud and clear that we want to raise standards for the teaching profession, not lower them. And we want to provide leadership on one of the toughest education issues today.

Now the real hard part begins, as we start to translate this policy into action. We have a chance to define the teaching profession for the next generation, and we will not let that opportunity slip through our grasp.

Dennis Van Roekel is president of the National Education Association and a 23-year teaching veteran.

How unemployed parents might affect your job

A recent paper titled "Short-run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children's Academic Achievement", found the following

We study the relationship between parental job loss and children’s academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children’s grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children’s academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.

Parents becoming unemployed affect their children's academic achievement. Here's the unemployment trend for Ohio

As you can see, in recent years, unemployment in Ohio has escalated alarmingly to around 10%. That's a lot of students who have potentially been academically impacted by this trend.

We mention this because this is just one variable of many that isn't captured through student/teacher linkage, or the Value Add calculation, yet could critically affect student achievement and hence their teacher's evaluations.

What happens to these teacher level value add scores when a large local employer has mass layo-offs? Will it lead to lower performance evaluations for teachers in that area? Would that be fair?

These kinds of questions are going to need to be investiagted, and having silly web forms isn't going to cut it.

Moving Beyond ‘Blame the Teacher’

Most of the current efforts to improve public education begin with the flawed assumption that the basic problem is teacher performance. This "blame the teacher" attitude has led to an emphasis on standardized tests, narrow teacher evaluation criteria, merit pay, erosion of tenure, privatization, vouchers and charter schools. The primary goal of these measures has been greater teacher accountability — as if the weaknesses of public education were due to an invasion of our classrooms by uncaring and incompetent teachers. That is the premise of the documentary, "Waiting for Superman," and of the attacks on teachers and their unions by politicians across the country.

We see distressing parallels between this approach to quality in education and the approaches that failed so badly in U.S. manufacturing. Recall the reaction of domestic manufacturers in the 1970s as Japanese competitors began to take market share: Many managers and an army of experts blamed American workers. They denounced workers' "blue-collar blues," lackadaisical attitudes and union job protections as the chief impediments to higher quality, productivity and competitiveness.

It took nearly two decades for manufacturers to realize that this diagnosis was deeply flawed and that the recommendations that flowed from it were leading U.S. industry further into decline. Recall the success of Japanese-run auto transplants operating in this country during the 1980s: They reached world-class quality levels with a U.S. workforce, in some cases a unionized workforce, while domestic auto companies continued to blame American workers and saw their quality levels stagnate.

Noticing the discrepancy, a growing number of manufacturers turned to the teachings of the quality guru W. Edwards Deming. Deming argued that U.S. industry's failure was not in its workers but in the system they labored under. He taught that pushing workers to work harder in a poorly designed system cannot improve outcomes. U.S. firms were being outcompeted because they relied on an outdated management system in which decisions were all top-down, tasks were narrowly specialized and workers were told to leave their brains at the factory door. To fix quality, manufacturers needed to fix these systems, and to do that, they needed to involve workers in that effort. Do those two things, and American workers were willing and able to achieve world-class levels of performance.

Much of the current wave of school reform is informed by the same management myths that almost destroyed U.S. manufacturing. Instead of seeing teachers as key contributors to system improvement efforts, reformers are focused on making teachers more replaceable. Instead of involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform, they are being pushed aside as impediments to top-down decision-making. Instead of bringing teachers together to help each other become more effective professionals, district administrators are resorting to simplistic quantified individual performance measures. In reality, schools are collaborative, not individual, enterprises, so teaching quality and school performance depend above all on whether the institutional systems support teachers' efforts.

[readon2 url="http://neatoday.org/2011/09/20/moving-beyond-blame-the-teacher/"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Vote No on Issue 2 to repeal SB5

To repeal SB5 you vote No on Issue 2, because issue 2 is bad for you!
Here are some of the reasons why. You can download the flyer here. Please share this as widely as possible, with your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues.

ps. You should consider signing up to receive We Are Ohio text messages, especially if you have an unlimited plan, They've been really great about only sending infrequent but important information.