Education News for 04-09-2012

Statewide Education News

• Fewer students would pass state’s tougher exams (Dispatch)

If Ohio students had already taken the new, tougher state tests, only about 4 in 10 would have passed math or reading. The Ohio Department of Education plans to publish predictions of how districts might fare on the more-difficult exams on this year’s report cards. It has suggested that school districts look at their own what-if passing rates and ask “Are we ready?” for the new exams, which will replace current ones in three school years. Read More…

• Senate bill focuses on historical texts in education (This Week News)

The South-Western City School District will have to revise its social studies curriculum now that an Ohio Senate bill has been approved. Senate Bill 165 requires the State Board of Education to incorporate original texts of the Declaration of Independence and its amendments, Northwest Ordinance, U.S. Constitution and Ohio Constitution into state social studies standards by July 1. At least 20 percent of the end-of-course examination in American government would cover the historical documents. Standardized tests would include the new material by July 1, 2014. School districts would have to adopt an interim form of assessment by July 1, 2013. Read More…

• More hold on to substitute teaching licenses (Dayton Daily News)

A significant increase in statewide substitute teacher license renewals indicates that more workers are keeping temporary employment options open while searching for permanent jobs. Ohio Department of Education data show that one-year renewals of substitute teacher licenses increased from 6,569 in 2008 to 8,738 in 2011, a 33 percent boost in three years. At the same time, new one-year licenses issued dropped from 8,578 in 2008 to 6,753 in 2011, signaling that fewer new licensed subs are joining the pool while others are holding on to their substitute option longer. Read More…

• New teacher evaluation process in infancy (Wooster Daily Record)

A new ranking system, new academic standards and new assessments are part of the ever-changing world that is public education. Added to the mix is the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System to be implemented in the 2013-14 school year. Schools that receive Race to the Top funds will be the pilot districts for the program. "New ratings, new evaluations," said Triway Local Schools' Superintendent Dave Rice at the March meeting of the board, mean districts have a lot on their plate. Read More…

• ‘Flipped’ classes take learning to new places (Dispatch)

Math teacher Wayne Tsai advises students while they complete an online exercise through the Kahn Academy at Hilliard Darby High School. Tsai is an advocate of a teaching model called the “flipped classroom.” Since the start of the school year, many of Wayne Tsai’s math students have been watching his lectures at home or in the computer lab. They take notes and jot down questions about his algebra and geometry lessons and then return to Tsai’s classroom the next day, ready to apply what they’ve learned to problems and projects that traditionally would have been assigned as homework. Read More…

• Schools to get grade in phys ed (Bucyrus Telegraph Forum)
• Ohio adds testing student fitness

The Ohio Department of Education recently stepped out of the classroom and into the gym. The department has graded schools on student scores on tests such as the Ohio Achievement Assessments and the Ohio Graduation Test for math, science, language arts and history for a while. Now the state is requiring schools to provide information on whether students are proficient in other areas -- in this instance, physical education. Read More…

Local Issues

• Shelved school plans cost CPS $4.7 million (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Cincinnati Public Schools spent $1.2 million to have a Fairfield architecture firm design the new Quebec Heights school. The technology-rich, LEED-certified, “green” school in East Price Hill was to serve as a community learning center and an anchor for the neighborhood. But in January, months before construction was to begin, the district killed the project due to declining enrollment and lack of money. Now the renderings are shelved. The money is gone. And it’s not the first time. Read More…

• Schools re-arrange agriculture classes into ‘pathways’ (Marietta Times)

Local schools are selecting agriculture education "pathways" under new state requirements intended to better assess their programs and improve articulation to colleges. "It's a little clearer what students are learning, what students are coming out with," said Ike Kershaw, assistant director of career technical education for the Ohio Department of Education. Read More…

• Suburbs’ schools can play defense (Dispatch)

As the city of Columbus continues to expand into neighboring counties, school districts there might consider joining the Win-Win agreement to protect their territory from being annexed into the Columbus district, a consultant told suburban school officials in 2010. The 1986 Win-Win pact, named after a negotiating technique, allows nine suburban Franklin County school districts to continue to serve areas of Columbus, although they must share revenue from commercial and industrial properties with the Columbus schools. Read More…

• Group that helps city's students finish college is moving ahead (Plain Dealer)

An effort to ensure that more Cleveland students graduate from college is well under way six months after local civic leaders and educators decided to team up. And it’s clear that they have plenty of work ahead of them. Only 136 of the 865 Cleveland school district graduates who enrolled in 14 Ohio private and public universities or at Cuyahoga Community College in 2005 had graduated six years later, according to data provided to the Higher Education Compact of Greater Cleveland. Read More…

• No longer excellent? (Record Herald - Washington C. H.)

New academic performance grading system that could be in place as early as this year will reduce the number of "Excellent" schools in Ohio from 382 down to just 22. Washington City and Miami Trace Local Schools will be two of those to suffer the downgrade. Under the new system both school districts will go from the former "Excellent" distinction to a "B" under the new letter grading system. "We accept the challenge," said Washington City School Superintendent Keith Brown. "We will do our best to get an A-plus and we will continue our focus to increase the growth of all our students." Read More…

• Harrison Hills buses get eco-friendly boost (Times Reporter)

The Harrison Hills City Schools’ fleet of 26 buses will be more eco-friendly thanks to a $55,000 reimbursement grant through the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Ed Kovacik, the school district’s director of operations, worked to obtain funding through the Ohio EPA’s Clean Diesel School Bus Retrofit Program, which will equip the buses with E-Guardian heaters from Espar. Read More…

• Pondering kindergarten (Lima News)

Figuring out the best college for a child can be a daunting task. But today's parents fret over another question years before college even comes up: to send to kindergarten or to wait. Academic redshirting has become a national phenomena of sorts, with much media attention given to the idea of holding children back from kindergarten so they are 6 instead of 5 when they head to school. Read More…

Merit pay and the candle problem

Let us pretend for one moment that many of the corporate education reforms being proposed offered more than just a metaphorical big stick with which to fire teachers more easily, but also a few carrots too in the form of extra money toward paying high performers as determined by their students test scores. Yes, yes, we know.

Let's go even further, and pretend that student test scores were the perfect means with which to judge the effectiveness of any teacher. What do we know of financial incentives? From Nature magazine.

here's a simple fact we've known since 1962: using money as a motivator makes us less capable at problem-solving. It actually makes us dumber.

In the 1940, an experiment was carried out, now referred to as the "Candle Problem". The experiment has the participant try to solve the problem of how to fix a lit candle on a wall in a way so the candle wax won't drip to the floor. The participant can only use (along with the candle) a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks.

Let's go back to that Nature article to explain the rest of the experiment, and it' counterintuitive results

The only answer that really works is this: 1.Dump the tacks out of the box, 2.Tack the box to the wall, 3.Light the candle and affix it atop the box as if it were a candle-holder. Incidentally, the problem was much easier to solve if the tacks weren't in the box at the beginning. When the tacks were in the box the participant saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called "Functional fixedness."

Sam Glucksberg added a fascinating twist to this finding in his 1962 paper, "Influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition." (Journal of Experimental Psychology 1962. Vol. 63, No. 1, 36-41). He studied the effect of financial incentives on solving the candle problem. To one group he offered no money. To the other group he offered an amount of money for solving the problem fast.

Remember, there are two candle problems. Let the "Simple Candle Problem" be the one where the tacks are outside the box -- no functional fixedness. The solution is straightforward. Here are the results for those who solved it:

Simple Candle Problem Mean Times :
WITHOUT a financial incentive : 4.99 min
WITH a financial incentive : 3.67 min
Nothing unexpected here. This is a classical incentivization effect anybody would intuitively expect.

Now, let "In-Box Candle Problem" refer to the original description where the tacks start off in the box.

In-Box Candle Problem Mean Times :
WITHOUT a financial incentive : 7:41 min
WITH a financial incentive : 11:08 min
How could this be? The financial incentive made people slower? It gets worse -- the slowness increases with the incentive. The higher the monetary reward, the worse the performance! This result has been repeated many times since the original experiment.

We've published a video on this phenomenon before, titled "As Teacher Merit Pay Spreads, One Noted Voice Cries, ‘It Doesn’t Work’", and an article from the Harvard Business Review, titled "Stop Tying Pay To Performance".

Here's another video - The surprising truth about what motivates us

Knowing all this begs the question, why are we going down the path of some of these corporate education reforms, when we have known for over half a century many of them are flawed concepts that have been demonstrated to fail time and time again?

How to Buy and Sell School Reform

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions.

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K-12 schooling are about $525 billion a year. Nevertheless, a half-billion dollars in discretionary money yields great leverage when budgets are consumed by ordinary expenses. But the reformers—even titanic Bill and Melinda Gates—see themselves as competing with too little against existing government policies. Hence, to revolutionize public education, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction, reformers must get state and local governments to adopt their agenda as basic policy; they must counter the teachers’ unions’ political clout. To this end, ed reformers are shifting major resources—staff and money—into state and local campaigns for candidates and legislation.

Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003-2011), sums up the thinking: “We’ve learned the hard way that if you want to have the clout needed to change policies for kids, you have to help politicians get elected. It’s about money, money, money” (Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2010).*

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Education News for 04-06-2012

Local Issues

• Cleveland Teachers Union and Mayor Frank Jackson to continue negotiations next week over schools plan (Plain Dealer)

They'll be back at it again next week. Mayor Frank Jackson and the Cleveland Teachers Union concluded more than six hours of negotiations Wednesday night over the disputed parts of Jackson's school plan without reaching a final agreement, deciding to take a break from the talks over Easter weekend. Read More…

• Cleveland education reform plan discussed at community meeting (News Channel 5)

CLEVELAND - Mayor Frank Jackson and Cleveland Schools CEO Eric Gordon outlined the plan for transforming schools at a community meeting Thursday night. "We're focused on quality education," Jackson told about 60 residents who gathered at the Gunning Recreation Center. Read More…

• Chardon High School student, employee called heroes for efforts during shooting in February (Plain Dealer)

In the frantic moments after shots rang out Feb. 27 at Chardon High School, cafeteria worker Cherie Reed held open a kitchen door, offering students a haven from chaos and evil. Travis Carver, a 16-year-old junior, heard the noises and thought they were someone popping paper bags. Then he noticed T.J. Lane. Read More…

• Olentangy bomb ‘threat’ no joke, teen told (Dispatch)

Hours before he boarded a plane that took him and his family to Kuwait yesterday, a teenage boy admitted to a Delaware County Juvenile Court judge that he had joked about blowing up his school the day before. Mohamed Mahmoud, 15, pleaded guilty today to inducing panic at Olentangy High School, which was evacuated and searched by authorities in response to what officials thought was a bomb threat. Read More…

• Parents asked to weigh in on Beavercreek redistricting plan (Dayton Daily News)

Beavercreek City Schools officials want to hear from local parents about plans that affect where their children will attend school in 2013-14.< District officials held a public forum Wednesday at Beavercreek High School to present three sets of initial redistricting maps, and put those maps online Thursday. Read More…

Flunking the Test

Fareed Zakaria is worried about the state of American education. To hear the CNN host and commentator tell it, the nation's schools are broken and must be "fixed" to "restore the American dream." In fact, that was the title of Zakaria's primetime special in January, "Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education." Zakaria spent an hour thumbing through a catalog of perceived educational woes: high dropout rates, mediocre scores by American students on international tests, inadequate time spent in classrooms, unmotivated teachers and their obstructionist labor unions. "Part of the reason we're in this crisis is that we have slacked off and allowed our education system to get rigid and sclerotic," he declared.

This is odd. By many important measures – high school completion rates, college graduation, overall performance on standardized tests – America's educational attainment has never been higher. Moreover, when it comes to education, sweeping generalizations ("rigid and sclerotic") are more dangerous than usual. How could they not be? With nearly 100,000 public schools, 55 million elementary and secondary students and 2.5 million public school teachers currently at work in large, small, urban, suburban and rural districts, education may be the single most complex endeavor in America.

Zakaria's take, however, may be a perfect distillation of much of what's wrong with mainstream media coverage of education. The prevailing narrative – and let's be wary of our own sweeping generalizations here – is that the nation's educational system is in crisis, that schools are "failing," that teachers aren't up to the job and that America's economic competitiveness is threatened as a result. Just plug the phrase "failing schools" into Nexis and you'll get 544 hits in newspapers and wire stories for just one month, January 2012. Some of this reflects the institutionalization of the phrase under the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark 2001 law that ties federal education funds to school performance on standardized tests (schools are deemed "failing" under various criteria of the law). But much of it reflects the general notion that American education, per Zakaria, is in steep decline. Only 20 years ago, the phrase was hardly uttered: "Failing schools" appeared just 13 times in mainstream news accounts in January of 1992, according to Nexis. (Neither Zakaria nor CNN would comment for this story.)

Have the nation's schools gotten noticeably lousier? Or has the coverage of them just made it seem that way?

Some schools are having a difficult time educating children – particularly children who are impoverished, speak a language other than English, move frequently or arrive at the school door neglected, abused or chronically ill. But many pieces of this complex mosaic are quite positive. First data point: American elementary and middle school students have improved their performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study every four years since the tests began in 1995; they are above the international average in all categories and within a few percentage points of the global leaders (something that few news reports mention). Second data point: The number of Americans with at least some college education has soared over the past 70 years, from 10 percent in 1940 to 56 percent today, even as the population has tripled and the nation has grown vastly more diverse. All told, America's long-term achievements in education are nothing short of stunning.

As the son and husband of schoolteachers, I can't say I'm unbiased on this subject. But as a journalist, I can't help but see the evident flaws in some of the reporting about education – namely, a lack of balance and historical context, and a willingness to accept the most generic and even inflammatory characterizations at face value. Journalists can't be faulted for reporting the oftentimes overheated rhetoric about educational "failure" from elected officials and prominent "reformers" (that's what reporters are supposed to do, after all). But some can certainly be faulted for not offering readers and viewers a broader frame to assess the extent of the alleged problems, and the likelihood that the proposed responses will succeed.

Check out some of the 544 articles that mentioned "failing schools" in January; they constitute an encyclopedia of loaded rhetoric, vapid reporting and unchallenged assumptions. In dozens and dozens of articles, the phrase isn't defined; it is simply accepted as commonly understood. "Several speakers said charter schools should only be allowed in areas now served by failing schools," the Associated Press wrote of a Mississippi charter school proposal. The passive construction of the phrase is telling: The schools are failing, not administrators, superintendents, curriculum writers, elected officials, students or their parents.

The running mate of "failing schools" in education stories is "reform." The word suggests a good thing – change for the sake of improvement. But in news accounts, the label often is implicitly one-sided, suggesting that "reformers" (such as proponents of vouchers or "school choice") are more virtuous than their hidebound opponents. Journalists rarely question the motives or credentials of "reformers." The Hartfort Courant hit the "reformer-failing schools" jackpot when it reported, "Like most people seeking education reform this year..the council wants policies that assure excellent teaching, preschool for children whose families can't afford it, and help for failing schools."

One reason schools seem to be "failing" so often in news accounts is that we simply know more than we once did about student performance. Before NCLB, schools were measured by averaging all of their students' scores, a single number that mixed high and low performers. The law required states to "disaggregate" this data – that is, to break it down by race, poverty and other sub-groups. One beneficial effect of the law is that it showed how some of these groups – poor children and non-English speakers, for example – lag children from more privileged backgrounds. But rather than evidence of a "crisis," this new data may simply have laid bare what was always true but never reported in detail.

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Education News for 04-05-2012

Statewide Education News

• Money questions surround Kasich's education reform plan (Dayton Daily News)

COLUMBUS - So many third-grade students are reading below grade level that Ohio Gov. John Kasich is proposing requiring school districts to provide summer school or retain struggling students. But some lawmakers and educators had one question: Where’s the money to pay for the changes? Read More…

Local Issues

• Schools chief: ‘This is about kids’ (Tiffin Advertiser Tribune)

The leader of Ohio's public school system visited Tiffin Wednesday to introduce a new phase of school improvement set to begin in the 2014-15 school year. Stan Heffner, superintendent of public instruction for Ohio Department of Education, spoke during Rotary Club of Tiffin's meeting Wednesday afternoon. "This is about kids," he said. "My goal is to put kids ahead of institutions." Read More…

• Backers of e-schools protest state’s new grading system (Dispatch)

About 100 parents and students of Ohio e-schools relayed a message to lawmakers today that they should oppose Gov. John Kasich’s proposed school-grading system “until it is fair for all schools.” Instead of the current grading system, in which 92 percent of traditional schools get the equivalent of an A or B, Kasich proposed tougher accountability standards that measure performance on state tests, graduation rates, student progress and how well certain categories of students are doing. Read More…

• CMSD Proposes Cuts to Reduce Budget Deficit (WJW-Cleveland)

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is considering laying off teachers as one of several ways to reduce its $66 million deficit. At least 600 teacher and 50 staff member positions are at stake under the proposed cuts, as well as implementing an employee separation incentive program. Selling district owned buildings no longer needed is also under consideration. Read More…

• Teays Valley principal was fired illegally, Ohio Supreme Court rules (Dispatch)

The former principal of a Teays Valley Local elementary school must be rehired because school-board members denied her the opportunity to meet with them before she was fired, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The 7-0 decision, written by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, said the Pickaway County school district broke state law in 2008 by improperly firing Principal Stacey Carna of Ashville Elementary School. Read More…

• Disputed schools legislation filed in Columbus as Cleveland Teachers Union and Mayor Frank Jackson plan to continue talks tonight (Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland Teachers Union and Mayor Frank Jackson plan to resume negotiating a deal on Jackson's school improvement plan tonight, even though legislation that the union objects to was filed at the Statehouse today. CTU and Jackson had planned to meet after Easter, both sides said yesterday, but they have called a meeting at 7 p.m. tonight at City Hall. If they can reach agreement on one of two remaining sticking points - how to handle staffing at struggling schools - Jackson has hinted that he may not see a need for the other disputed point - his push to start contract negotiations from scratch, throwing out all previous contracts. Read More…

• Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, teachers union make progress on school reforms plan but don't reach final deal (Plain Dealer)

The Cleveland Teachers Union and Mayor Frank Jackson met for more than seven hours in a last-minute negotiation session Wednesday night trying to reach agreement on the last two disputed points in Jackson’s school improvement plan. The sides broke up about 1:30 a.m., saying they continued making progress and that lawyers would work on language for them to review early next week. Read More…

• Students learn science to a different beat (Beacon Journal)

Sitting on the floor in Karen Grindall’s room at Portage Path elementary school on Tuesday afternoon, two cheery first-graders tapped an iPad with enviable ease and laid down their own hip-hop beats. Jullian Lopez and Claire Haidet grinned widely listening to their songs with headphones. They were eager to share them with their teacher, John Bennett. The next step was to write lyrics expressing science concepts in their own words. Read More…

• Sheriff: Olentangy H.S. Student Told Others Bomb Would Be Set Off Thursday (WBNS-Columbus)

A student who told another student that a bomb would be set off at Olentangy High School Thursday was being sent to a juvenile detention center, the Delaware County Sheriff’s Walter Davis said Wednesday. The freshman student said that he was leaving the country for the Middle East and that a bomb would be set off at the school at 11 a.m. Thursday, Davis said. Read More…

• Green athletic director, attorney still considering course of action (Beacon Journal)

GREEN: Canton attorney Randolph Snow and Green schools Athletic Director Mark Pfaff said they still are considering their next moves following the nonrenewal of Pfaff’s contract last week. “We’re still reviewing the matter to determine what course of action we’ll take,” Snow said in an interview Wednesday. Snow said there is nothing in Pfaff’s personnel file to suggest that the recommendation of Green High School Principal Cindy Brown that Pfaff receive a two-year contract renewal “shouldn’t happen.” Read More…

• Lancaster teacher accused of hurting girl, 6 (Dispatch)

A first-grade teacher accused of slamming a student against a locker over homework has been charged with assault and removed from the classroom. Tara W. Graham, 42, pleaded not guilty to the first-degree misdemeanor on Friday in Fairfield County Municipal Court. She teaches at West Elementary School in the Lancaster district. Read More…

Editorial

• Building block (Dispatch)

Gov. John Kasich is right to resurrect the idea of the so-called third-grade reading guarantee, this time with more help to prevent kids from falling behind. Lawmakers who are fretting about its cost should work with the administration to develop a plan and then figure out how to fit it into state and school-district budgets. Few academic goals are as important as having children reading at grade level by the end of third grade, because that’s roughly the point at which lessons become complex enough that children can’t master them without good reading-comprehension skills. Read More…