Ohio charters are solving the wrong problem

NPR has begun what looks to be a very interesting series of articles on charter schools in Ohio.

In 1998, Ohio opened its first 15 charter schools. There are now more than 300, and they’re enrolling more than 100,000 primary and secondary students. Ohio is paying upwards of $500 million to support those schools. But as charter schools have grown, so have divisions between them and traditional public schools.

The whole piece is worth the time to read. As charter schools are given ever greater license to expand and spread, they are coming under ever greater scrutiny. A handful of charters, with a few failing might be seen by most as no big deal, hundreds of charters with dozens upon dozens failing begins to stand out in sharp relief.

One hundred and twenty charter schools in Ohio have collapsed over the last 13 years. They owe the state millions of dollars in audit findings.

Considering there are only 300 charters in Ohio, that's an astonishing number. When you couple that with terrible academic performance and the catastrophic failure of e-schools in Ohio, maybe greater attention to charter reform is needed.

The great promise of charters was supposed to be their ability to innovate without the shackles of regulation. Instead, charter operators and their sponsors have used the lack of regulation in order to drive down the costs of providing education, which in turn has driven down the quality. Why is it, free from regulation, no charter or sponsor has decided to try and replicate successful education models used in countries like Denmark? Here's Diane Ravitch talking about our race to the bottom, and the alternatives

The corporate influence on the charter movement isn't creating excellence in education through innovation, it is simply driving out quality by drivning down costs. That's decidedly NOT the problem charters were sold to Ohioans as trying to solve.

What We Lose When Teachers Retire

In many of his speeches, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cites the projection that one million teachers will retire over the next decade. He uses this projection to support his policy objectives to transform the profession by reforming teacher evaluation systems, identifying effective and ineffective teachers, rewarding and removing teachers based on their effectiveness, and recruiting a new brand of teacher.

These are all common strategies leaders use to improve the labor force, but I wonder if these are the right strategies to emphasize when one third of the individuals in the profession are about to exit. I worry about the loss of what Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap call "deep smarts" within schools. In their book Deep Smarts, Leonard and Swap describe how experienced professionals carry a highly sophisticated mixture of explicit and tacit knowledge. This knowledge is developed over time when experiencing variants of common problems. Leonard and Swap describe how this specialized knowledge is often lost when experienced professionals leave an organization. They urge organizations to protect this essential knowledge that resides in the heads of their professionals.

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Ohio E-Schools are catastrophically failing

The Quick & the Ed, in a follow up article show that Ohio's E-Schools are in serious academic trouble.

Ohio performance indicators for 2010-11 should cause some heartburn for E-school operators. Based on these indicators, the vast majority of Ohio’s e-schools are mediocre or poor academic performers. Only two of the 20 rated e-schools were considered “effective” in 2010-11, while 11 resided in the bottom two categories.

This situation has been highlighted before, by others. About six months ago, Innovation Ohio produced a report and stated

"Ohio's e-schools are an outrageous taxpayer rip-off, a cruel hoax for many students and parents, and a textbook example of the 'pay to play' culture that too often permeates state government," Butland said.

"At a time when Ohio's traditional schools are seeing unprecedented state cuts, most Ohioans have no idea how shockingly bad Ohio's e-schools are and how much state money is being funneled to the for-profit operators who run them."

Around the same time, the Governor's educztion Czar was asked “What is your vision of the future?”. His answer

• Technology will be integrated in such a way to personalize education via “mass customization.”
• Whole group classroom instruction — a teacher addressing an entire class — will be rare if nonexistent.
• Adult success will be judged in terms of student success.
• The use of technology and improved management will make education much more cost effective.

He should probably take a look at the failing E-Schools if he thinks simply adding more technology and removing teachers from classrooms is some panacea to quality education. It clearly isn't.

Teacher Evaluation Reform - Report from NBPTS

The The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has released their "Getting it Right: A Comprehensive Guide to Developing and Sustaining Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems" report.

The National Board’s framework for developing and sustaining a teacher evaluation and support system includes four major stages:
1. Developing an Evaluation and Support System
2. Implementing and Managing the Evaluation and Support System
3. Conducting Collaborative Evaluations that Enhance Teaching Practice and Student Learning
4. Supporting Teachers

The report also notes "While those who evaluate teachers could take student test scores over time into account, they should be fully aware of their limitations"

Getting It Right

Bad charter sponsors, bad policy

It comes as little surprise to anyone who follows the development of what some call Ohio education policy to learn that Ohio's charter school laws have serious flaws.

The Ohio Department of Education has just released their charter school sponsor rankings. As StateImpact notes

The sponsor role is different from the role of a charter school operator. Charter school operators, which include both for-profit and non-profit groups, manage schools’ day-to-day operations while sponsors are supposed to play more of an oversight role.

These rankings are important because under HB153, sponsors who fall into the bottom 20% cannot authorize any more charter schools until their schools improve. LSC (page 216):

(New R.C. 3314.016)
The act prohibits a community school sponsor from sponsoring any additional schools, if it (1) is not in compliance with statutory requirements to report data or other information to the Department of Education or (2) is ranked in the lowest 20% of all sponsors on an annual ranking of sponsors by their composite performance index scores. The composite performance index score, which must be developed by the Department, is a measure of the academic performance of students enrolled in community schools sponsored by the same entity. Presumably, if a sponsor is subject to the prohibition due only to its ranking, it may sponsor additional schools if it later raises its ranking above the lowest 20%.

We have published the ranking list below. People who posses the ability to think critically will already have concluded 2 things about this prescriptive law.

1. Marion City with a performance score of 69.2 is barred from authorizing any more charters, while Lorain City with a performance score of just 69.4 can continue to operate as it just misses the 20% cut.
2. No matter what performance sponsors have there will always be a bottom 20%

Why didn't the law specify an actual performance measure? The legislature saw fit to do exactly this for teachers under SB5, but not for sponsors of charter schools.

To complicate matters further, the Ohio Department of Education which is tasked by law to create these rankings, will also be getting back into the business of being a charter school sponsor. A task it once had taken away from it because of abysmal performance that made Ohio charter schools the laughing stock of the nation.

Now, under HB153, ODE will not only be responsible for sponsoring charters again - but producing the rankings - including their very own. This doesn't strike us at Join the Future as a very wise situation.

Will ODE be able to exert enough independence between its sponsorship role and its evaluation of sponsors, even if its own performance is substandard as it was in the past? That's an obvious question that should not have to be asked if state education policy was properly thought through and developed in a collaborative manner.

In the meantime, we can take solace in the fact (as the Disptach reports) that Mansfield, Marion, Ridgedale, Rittman, Upper Scioto Valley and Van Wert school districts; the Richland Academy; and the educational service centers in Hardin and Portage counties cannot open any more charter schools.

Ohio Charter School Sponsor Rankings

Checking in on Ohio’s E-schools, Part 1: Enrollment

The Quick & the Ed are beginning a new series of posts looking at Ohio's E-Schools.

In 2005, the Ohio state legislature put a moratorium on the creation of new e-schools, but allowed existing schools to continue enrolling new students. Since then, enrollment has increased 65 percent. It’s accelerated, too: in 2011, e-schools added 3,963 students, more than any other post-moratorium increase. In retrospect, 2010 looks to have been a down year for e-schools in terms of enrollment.

Check out the rest of their post.