No one is watching Better Ohio ads

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Better Ohio, more aptly described as Bitter Ohio by the tenor of their campaign, has just launched a new ad featuring a teacher. The same teacher who appeared in a Teachers for Kaisch ad during the gubernatorial campaign. While watching that latest propaganda we thought it interesting to check the viewing stats for Issue 2 ads on each of the campaign's Youtube channels.

Let's start with We Are Ohio ads

That's a total of 1,319,579 views.

Now let's take a look at Bitter Ohio

That's a total of 17,353 views. Ouch!

The Bitter Ohio campaign is generating only 1.3% the advertising views that We Are Ohio is able to generate. It's easy to see from this transparent accounting where the interest and grassroots support lies

Here are some ads that got more views than Bitter Ohio's efforts

A Model for Teacher Effects From Longitudinal Data

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This paper from the Journal Of Educational And Behavioral Statistics takes a look at longitudinal individual teacher effects

One of the most challenging aspects of modeling longitudinal achievement data is how to address the persistence of the effects of past educational inputs on future achievement outcomes. In this article, we are concerned primarily with the effects of individual teachers and how best to model the accumulation of those effects across a longitudinal series of student achievement measures. For example, if a teacher improves student reading comprehension by teaching comprehension strategies, then we might expect the strategies to be useful for improving achievement in both current and future years. However, it is less clear how much the effects will persist and how the effects on future achievement will relate to the effects for the current year. The utility of comprehension strategies might diminish over time as students develop other methods for reading comprehension and the teacher’s effect on future scores might decrease and eventually fade to zero.

Results from these kinds of studies continue to raise concerns

As the prospect of using longitudinal achievement data to make potentially high-stakes inferences about individual teachers becomes more of a reality, itis important that statistical methods be flexible enough to account for the complexities of the data. The increasing frequency of tests that are not developmentally scaled across grades, as well as the concerns about the properties of developmental scales, suggests that longitudinal data series may need to be treated as repeated correlated measures of different constructs rather than repeated measures of a consistently defined unidimensional construct. Coupled with the inherent complexity of the accumulation of past educational inputs,models that assume equality or otherwise perfect correlation between proximal and future year effects of individual teachers may be inappropriate and run the risk of leading to misleading inferences about teachers. The GP model developed in this article tackles these issues head-on by generalizing existing value-added models to handle both scaling inconsistencies across repeated test scores and potential decay in the effects of past educational inputs on future test scores.

The results of our empirical investigations suggest that the assumption of perfect correlation between proximal and future effects of individual teachers is not entirely consistent with the data.

Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics-2010-Mariano-253-79

ODE subject matter contact info

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The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has just released this contact information document by subject matter expertise. We thought it might be useful to share with our readers if you;re trying to find the right perosn for the the right topic. Feel free to download it, or just book mark this page.

ODE Contacts by Topic

Why Pay for Performance Should Get the Sack

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The following article discusses the problems with perfoamcne pay in the financial sector, the heat of capitalism. Extrapolating this compensation gimmick to educators as corporate education reformers are seeking to do continues to be proven problematic

By Bruno S. Frey, Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich and Margit Osterloh, Professor (em.) for Business Administration and Management of Technology and Innovation, University of Zürich; and Professor, Warwick Business School. Cross posted from VoxEU

As the bonus culture in the financial sector once again comes under attack, this column rubbishes the typical defence that banks need to pay top dollar to attract the best talent.

Scientific literature has extensively dealt with variable pay-for-performance. Despite the fact that serious problems linked to this approach have thus become obvious, many authors continue to support compensation according to predetermined performance criteria because they are committed to the traditional concept of the ’homo oeconomicus’.
Overall, there has been a marked change of opinion in academia (see for instance Bryson and Freeman 2008 on this site). The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Empirical research, in particular experimental research, has shown that under suitable conditions human beings care for the wellbeing of other persons. Above all, they are not solely interested in material gains (see eg Frey and Osterloh 2002). Recognition by co-workers is greatly important. Many workers are intrinsically motivated, ie they perform work for its own sake because it is found challenging and worth undertaking. This applies not only to qualified employees but also to persons fulfilling simple tasks. They often are proud of their work and performance.

There are four major arguments against variable pay-for-performance:

  • In a modern economy, it is practically impossible to determine tasks that are to be fulfilled in the future precisely enough so that variable pay-for-performance can be applied. In a society continually faced with new challenges, superiors oftentimes find it impossible to fix ex ante what an employee will have to do in the future.
  • It would be naïve to assume that the persons subjected to variable pay-for-performance would accept the respective criteria in a passive way and fulfil their work accordingly. Rather, they spend much energy and time trying to manipulate these criteria in their favour. This is facilitated by the fact that employees often know the specific features of their work better than their superiors. The wage explosions observable in many sectors of the economy can at least partly be attributed to such manipulations, eg when managers are able to contract easily achievable performance goals.
  • Variable pay-for-performance results in employees restricting their work to those areas covered by the performance criteria. In the literature, this is known as the ’multiple tasking’ problem. This may induce employees to spend considerable time and energy during their work trying to find a better-paid job with another firm. They therefore neglect their tasks insofar as they are not contractually fixed by the performance criteria.
  • Variable pay-for-performance tends to crowd out intrinsic work motivation and therewith the joy of fulfilling a particular task. However, such motivation is of great importance in a modern economy because it supports innovation and helps to fulfil tasks going beyond the ordinary.

[readon2 url="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/why-pay-for-performance-should-get-the-sack.html"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Issue 2 Early Vote Rally

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Early Vote Flyer

In other early voting news, it appears that the effort to collect enough signatures to delay the implementation of HB194 has been succesful. HB194, among other things would have reduced the early voting period from about 5 weeks to 3. This naturally would have impacted the effort to repeal SB5 by voting NO on issue 2.

Ohio officials are preparing for early voting to begin on Tuesday for the Nov. 8 general election because a challenge to a new election-reform law is expected to put the law on hold today.

Even though House Bill 194 is scheduled to become effective on Friday, county boards of election have girded for the possibility that it will be delayed and the election will be conducted under current state law, which permits more time for absentee and in-person voting.
[...]
Once the signatures are turned over to the Ohio secretary of state, the new law automatically will be put on hold. The signatures then will be sent to the 88 county election boards to be validated, a process estimated to take 10 to 15 days. If Fair Elections Ohio comes up short after the county boards’ count, it would have 10 days to gather more signatures.
[...]
Among other things, the law cuts early voting from 35 days before the election to 21 days by mail and 17 in person. It also limits in-person voting before the election by barring it on Saturday afternoons, Sundays and the three days prior to the election. If House Bill 194 were to take effect on Friday, voting by mail would begin on Oct. 18; in-person voting on Oct. 22.

Why Vote Absentee?

By voting absentee you can

  • Avoid lines on election day, which may discourage others from voting
  • Avoid the cold and rain, or unexpected events that may make it harder
  • Avoid any voting machine mishaps
  • Let the We Are Ohio campaign concentrate on getting less enthused voters to the polls on election day

Once you have voted, it’s time to ask those in your friends, family and neighbors team to vote absentee! Locking in as many No on Issue 2 votes as early as possible is critical to success on election day!

You may request an Absentee Ballot by…
Using the application form prescribed by the Secretary of State (Form 11-A) to apply for your absentee ballot.

You may return your absentee ballot to the Board of Elections by…
U.S. Mail: the return envelope containing your marked ballot must be postmarked no later than the day before the election and received by the board of elections no later than 10 days after a special, primary or general election.

In person, either by you or an eligible family member: your marked ballot, which must be sealed in the completed and signed identification envelope provided with the ballot, must be delivered to the board of elections office no later than the close of polls on Election Day.


Note: No voted ballot may be returned to a board of elections by fax or email. If a voted ballot is returned by fax or email, it will not be accepted, processed, or counted.

Your absentee ballot must be received by the Board of Elections for your county before 7:30 PM on Election Day to be counted!

Full instructions for absentee voting can be found on the Ohio Secretary of State's website, here. A list of all the county boards of elections, their addresses, phone numbers and emails can be found here.

The Stability Of Ohio’s School Value-Added Ratings

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The Albert Shanker Institute has an important analysis of Ohio's school report card data, and finds a large amount of instability in the results. This should cause some pause, especially as we move towards using teacher level value add data for high stakes decisions. To say it will be critical to have reliable, trustworthy, and stable data when making hiring/firing and salary decisions is an obvious understatement. If there are serious and genuine questions about building level data stability, then the rush to go further ought to at least have some brakes applied.

On the other hand, there’s a degree to which instability is to be expected and even welcomed (see here and here). For one thing, school performance can exhibit “real” improvement (or degradation). In addition, nobody expects perfect precision, and part of the year-to-year instability might simply be due to small, completely “tolerable” amounts of random error

Some people might look at these results, in which most schools got different ratings between years, and be very skeptical of Ohio’s value-added measures. Others will have faith in them. It’s important to bear in mind that measuring school “quality” is far from an exact science, and all attempts to do so – using test scores or other metrics – will necessarily entail imprecision, both within and between years. It is good practice to always keep this in mind, and to interpret the results with caution.

So I can’t say definitively whether the two-year instability in ratings among Ohio’s public schools is “high” or “low” by any absolute standard. But I can say that the data suggest that schools really shouldn’t be judged to any significant extent based on just one or two years of value-added ratings.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening in Ohio. Starting this year, all schools that come in “above expectations” in any given year are automatically bumped up a full “report card grade,” while schools that receive a “below expectations” ratings for two consecutive years are knocked down a grade (there are six possible grades). In both cases, the rules were changed (effective this year) such that fewer years were required to trigger the bumps – previously, it took two consecutive years “above expectations” to get a higher report card grade, and three consecutive years “below expectations” to lose a grade (see the state’s guide to ratings). These final grades can carry serious consequences, including closure, if they remain persistently low.

As I’ve said before, value-added and other growth models can be useful tools, if used properly. This is especially true of school-level value-added, since the samples are larger, and issues such as non-random assignment are less severe due to pooling of data for an entire school. However, given the rather high instability of ratings between years, and the fact that accuracy improves with additional years of data, the prudent move, if any, would be to require that more years of ratings be required to affect report card grades, not fewer. The state is once again moving in the wrong direction.

Check out the entire article here.