A different kind of investment

Education is often referred to as an investment in our future, and undoubtedly it is, as we prepare our young people to enter the workforce with creativity, energy and entrepreneurship. However, modest investment increases in public education also have an immediate, and direct, beneficial effect upon those making the investments.

A recent study by the Brooking's Institute revealed

An analysis of national and metropolitan data on public school populations and state standardized test scores for 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 reveals that:
[...]
Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.

This is clear evidence that investing a few hundred dollars per year to increase your local schools performance will have a dramatic effect on your home values - typically $11,000 per year, according to this study. The reason is no secret of course, people with school age children want to live in areas that have excellent schools, and are prepared to pay a premium for it. These results have been found to be true over and over. The St Louis Fed found

Traditional empirical models of the capitalization of education quality on house prices have established that the quality of primary school education is positively correlated with house prices. Recent capitalization studies have used various approaches to address concerns about omitted variable bias induced by failing to account for the correlation between school quality and unobserved neighborhood characteristics. Most of these variations on the traditional hedonic approach (including the boundary discontinuity regression) have assumed that the house price premium is constant because in all these models the contribution from school quality on house prices is constrained to be linear.

In this paper, we propose an alternative formulation that allows for nonlinear effects of school quality. We show that this formulation is preferred by the data over a baseline linear boundary fixed effects model and that the rate at which the house price premium rises increases over the range of school quality. In other words, the standard linear specification for test scores overestimates the premium at low levels of school quality and underestimates the premium at high levels of school quality.

In the St. Louis metropolitan area, houses associated with a school ranked at 1 SD below the mean are essentially priced on physical characteristics only. In contrast, houses associated with higher-quality schools command a much higher price premium.

Interestingly, and in contrast to many studies in the literature, the price premium remains substantially large, especially for houses associated with above-average schools. This is true even in our most conservative estimates, which complement the boundary discontinuity approach by explicitly controlling for neighborhood demographics. These estimates also reveal that the racial composition of neighborhoods is capitalized directly into house prices.

This then makes the move to downgrade Ohio's schools based on some new, arbitrary standard all the more baffling. Not only will this move potentially produce lower school ratings, it may also destroy tens of millions of dollars worth of housing value at a time when house prices are already under extreme stress and the economy struggling to improve.

Consider this then, when they vote one levies. A few hundred bucks could add thousands of dollars to the value of you home. One can only imagine the added wealth that could be created if the state lived up to its constitutional responsibilities and invested properly in public education too.

Education News for 04-23-2012

Statewide Education News

• Ohio's education leaders want to overhaul 12th grade so students are ready for college, training (Plain Dealer)

Ohio's top education leaders want to "reinvent" the senior year of high school so that instead of cruising through their final year, students get involved in technical training, apprenticeships or college classes. "We want to have no distinction between the senior year of high school and the first year of college," said Stan Heffner, superintendent of the Ohio Department of Education, at a meeting this week of the Ohio Board of Regents, which oversees higher education. Read More…

• Ready for college? (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

Tim Saxton said he's not surprised by the number of high school graduates who need to take at least one remedial course when they get to college to "catch up." Although Saxton, superintendent at Brookfield Schools, said he's not sure how many students graduating from his school district need remediation he realizes there's definitely a gap between high school and college. "I know it's a concern and we need to work on closing that gap," he said. Read More…

Local Issues

• 2 charter schools, TPS mend relations (Toledo Blade)

Frayed relations between Toledo Public Schools and two charter schools it sponsors appear improved and the schools’ once-possible defection to the Ohio Department of Education apparently is off. Phoenix and Polly Fox academies’ boards have approved agreements to keep them affiliated with TPS until 2014. Read More…

• Special-needs students seeking new vouchers (Dispatch)

Special-needs students from 11 of Franklin County’s 16 school districts have applied for new taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools. That includes Bexley, Dublin, Hilliard, Upper Arlington and Worthington — suburban districts where most students haven’t been eligible to use a private-school voucher before. Twenty students who live in the Westerville district applied. In Columbus, 32 did. Read More…

• Funding, school jobs linked to state tests (Dayton Daily News)

During the next three weeks, every third- through eighth-grader in Ohio will take state-mandated tests that are increasingly impacting every level of public education — student achievement and retention, school and district state report card ratings and, as early as next year, teacher evaluations. Read More…

• Cuts force schools to nix gifted programs (Hamilton Journal News)

Although school districts are mandated to provide a variety of services for students with disabilities, and are given funds by the state and federal government to provide those services, there is no requirement to provide services to gifted students. An examination by the JournalNews found some Butler County school districts provide specific programs for gifted students, but others, because of budget constraints, don’t provide specific programs. Read More…

• District saves thousands by using college tutors (Springfield News Sun)

Springfield City School District is saving thousands of dollars on afterschool tutoring by using work-study or volunteer college students from local colleges as tutors to staff the program. “There is no more money, so you’ve got to use what we have,” said Springfield City School District Superintendent David Estrop. “You can re-purpose it or you can find a different way of doing something. But you can’t say we need to spend more money doing this because there is no more money.” Read More…

• It's almost summer: New teachers near end of first year (Chillicothe Gazette)

It's usually during this time of the school year -- the home stretch -- that the weather improves, students become restless and the world outside their classroom has a greater appeal. Summer vacation was looming large over Bishop Flaget School on Friday, where the signs of the season were visible on the school uniforms of students in the computer lab. One boy's blue khakis were torn and smeared with dirt from kickball. Another boy's white shirt sported a bright-green grass stain. Read More…

• Paying more attention to printed word pays off for youngsters learning to read (Akron Beacon Journal)

When preschoolers gather on the rug for story time to hear a storybook such as I Stink! about a New York City garbage truck, they mostly focus on the pictures and the sound of the teacher’s voice telling the story. “They’re most likely looking at the pictures on the page,” said Shayne Piasta, assistant director of the Children’s Learning Research Collaborative at Ohio State University. “They may not understand where the words are coming from because they haven’t yet made that connection between the printed words on the page and the words that you are speaking.” Read More…

• Budget Challenge teaches kids finance (Cincinnati Enquirer)

As an undergraduate environmental science and public policy major at Harvard University, Palmira Buten found herself in credit card debt, mismanaging her cash flow and bouncing checks. Dave Buten was a chemical engineering student at Purdue University when he first bounced a check. “How could that happen when the ATM said he had money in his account?”, he questioned. “I was smart,” Palmira Buten says. “But you just don’t know this stuff.” Read More…

• Students avoiding healthful lunches (Dispatch)

Grandview student Kyle Modlich’s meal, left, is from a restaurant while Trevor Voelker chows down on his packed lunch. Schools across the state have ditched deep fryers and high-calorie meals this school year in favor of foods the state deems nutritious. But in some districts, as calorie levels have dropped, so have lunch sales. Particularly in schools where students can leave for lunch, sales have declined sharply as students pass up entrees such as pita and hummus for lunches packed at home or bought at restaurants. Read More…

• TPS students rally, rev up for Ohio academic testing (Toledo Blade)

It's testing season again in Toledo. Thousands of students in grades three through eight will immerse themselves in test booklets starting Tuesday, as Toledo Public Schools administers the state mandated Ohio Achievement Assessments. The math, reading, science, and social studies exams provide the bulk of data used to rate schools on the state's report cards and under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Read More…

• More riding on state-mandated tests (Middletown Journal News)

During the next three weeks, every third- through eighth-grader in Butler County will take state-mandated tests that are increasingly impacting every level of public education — student achievement and retention, school and district state report card ratings and, as early as next year, teacher evaluations. Read More…

Editorial & Opinion

• Don’t wait (Dispatch)

Protests from school officials and teachers who want a reprieve from tougher grading standards are predictable, but that doesn’t make them valid. The Ohio School Boards Association, teachers’ unions and others are asking for a delay in applying new performance standards proposed by Gov. John Kasich for school grade cards to be issued this summer. The new system, which places more emphasis on whether poor, minority, special-education and other categories of students are catching up to mainstream students in test-passing rates, is likely to lower the overall grade for most districts and charter schools. Read More…

• Ohio bottoms out in preschool funding: Brent Larkin (Plain Dealer)

Gov. John Kasich wants Ohio to become a winner in the federal government's Race to the Top competition for public schools. But in funding for one key component to educational success, Ohio has tumbled to the bottom. Rock bottom. The positive impact that quality preschool programs have on learning is no longer a theory. Read More…

• Measuring performance (Dispatch)

If teachers are to be evaluated based in part on how much academic progress their students make in a year, schools need a fair way to measure that progress. That’s the central challenge of a state-law provision that requires teacher evaluations by 2014 to be at least 50 percent based on student growth, and it ought to be a top priority for education experts throughout the state. Read More…

Teach the Books, Touch the Heart

FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation. Related in Opinion

We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”

But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.

For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my principal after learning that a former stellar student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school — one that often attracts the literary-minded offspring of Manhattan’s elite — into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in jail, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her fare better in high school, where they would inevitably encounter, perhaps for the first time, peers who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned not G.E.D.’s but Ph.D.’s.

Along with “Of Mice and Men,” my groups read: “Sounder,” “The Red Pony,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.” The students didn’t always read from the expected perspective. Holden Caulfield was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage. About “The Red Pony,” one student said, “it’s about being a dude, it’s about dudeness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read “The Grapes of Wrath” and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical perspective was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, ex-students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their freshman year as a result of the classes.

And yet I do not know how to measure those results. As student test scores have become the dominant means of evaluating schools, I have been asked to calculate my reading enrichment program’s impact on those scores. I found that some students made gains of over 100 points on the statewide English Language Arts test, while other students in the same group had flat or negative results. In other words, my students’ test scores did not reliably indicate that reading classic literature added value.

[readon2 url="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/taking-emotions-out-of-our-schools.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all"]Contimue reading...[/readon2]

Experience Counts

Among the more bizarre trends in education reform debate has been the emergence of an argument that experience doesn’t really matter. The problem appears to be that some researchers have not found ways to measure the importance of experience very effectively, and so, cheered on by cost-cutting and union-bashing allies, they tell us that after the first few years, teacher experience doesn’t matter. They have the test scores to prove it, they say.

I’m not here to argue the opposite. I’ve seen new teachers who have a skill set that rivals some of their veteran colleagues. However, I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t believe they could still improve. After all, we’re in the learning business. With experience comes not only time to learn more content and more pedagogy, but also to learn more about children, psychology and brain neurology, about working effectively with peers, administrators, and the community.

Think of other professions, and let me know if you know of any where experience isn’t valued. If education research isn’t showing the value of experience, then I think we should be asking questions like, “What’s wrong with their research methods? What’s wrong with the measures they’ve chosen? What’s wrong with schools and education systems that they can’t put experience to better use?”

This morning, I heard an interesting story about the oil industry, and the experience gap that is emerging among its engineers and other workers. To my untrained eye, this seems like an industry where experience wouldn’t matter. You’re dealing with physics, chemistry, machinery, manual labor – does the oil rig know or care how old or how experienced the workers are? Is there any chance that the properties of oil are unpredictable? If you can build, repair, or operate machinery in another industry, is the oil industry machinery so different?

[readon2 url="http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/experience-counts/"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Accountability for vouchers

On the idea of vouchers in the new world of accountability

The rise of testing-based accountability measures immeasurably complicates this argument for vouchers. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, public schools have to demonstrate their performance on certain standardized measures in order to receive funding. Race to the Top further centralizes educational affairs by encouraging states to adopt a nationwide core curriculum and by emphasizing a testing-driven component for teacher evaluations. The argument on behalf of such measures is that public dollars demand proof that they will be spent in a valuable way, and standardized testing is, apparently, the best way to establish this value. (Yes, this argument may be flawed in many, many ways, but let us leave that to the side for the moment as well.) If one wants to establish a centralized, federally-run public school system, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top provide a sturdy foundation for that enterprise.

If, however, one wants to support a pluralist, voucher-driven kind education reform, this movement toward standards-based accountability could prove much more problematic. If the premise of this accountability is that public dollars require proof of effectiveness, what is the reason for demanding that a school run as a public institution (that is, a public school) should be held to any different standard than a school run as a private institution? Both would receive tax dollars from state and potentially local and federal governments: why should they be held to two different standards?
[...]
Once you've bought into the idea that standardized testing establishes a school's quality, it becomes harder to resist the idea that public money ought to go only to those private entities that have demonstrated their effectiveness in teaching. Moreover, these standards for accountability will, as both Louisiana and federal reforms demonstrate, tend to come from bureaucrats working in central government offices.

Under a universalized voucher program and homogenous standards system, the federal government, which would be the engine that de facto drives education policy under this "reformist" vision, would have increasing control over private schools. Why? Over a period of years, private schools would become increasingly dependent upon government tax dollars, and he who pays the piper picks the tune. Maybe not now, maybe not a few years from now, but eventually legislators and regulators could start placing further demands upon these newly dependent private schools. After all, if education is truly in a state of crisis, shouldn't government be demanding the best from schools in exchange for the taxpayer's hard-earned dollars?

In Ohio, much of this discussion has already begun to happen.

• A 2009 newspaper report titled "Ohio voucher students must do better on tests "

But that doesn't mean these schools [voucher eecipients] — and their students — shouldn't be held accountable.

That's needed more than ever after the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that voucher students performed poorly on state achievement tests.

An analysis of about 2,900 students revealed that six in 10 did not pass math, science or social studies, four in 10 failed reading and three in 10 failed writing.

• A 2010 article titled "Voucher students' test scores lag"

Several thousand Ohio students who used Education Choice scholarships to attend private schools are doing no better than students at the public schools they left behind, state test data show.

• A 2011 report titled "Ohio Vouchers Fail to Raise Student Achievement"

The latest data from the Ohio Department of Education showed that students in the state’s voucher programs did not perform better academically than their peers in public schools. In fact, public school students outscored those in voucher schools in many cases.

• And when voucher students were compared to the much maligned Cleveland Schools, this headline was produced "Cleveland students hold their own with voucher students on state tests"

The push is on to expand school voucher programs in Ohio, but new state data suggests that students who attend private schools with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers don't necessarily fare better academically than the children they leave behind.

Cleveland public school students often outperformed voucher students on 2009-10 state proficiency tests, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.

As the article we opened with discusses, tax payers are unlikely to want to see their precious dollars fund private schools, in light of the overwhelming evidence that these private schools are producing results no better, and in many cases, a lot worse than their public school alternatives.

It would be reasonable to suggest that we ought to have accountability for private schools that receive tax dollars. If they cannot produce results as good as, or better, than their public school counterparts, they ought not to be able to continue to receive tax payer assistance.

If we are to continue to pursue a policy of choice, we have a duty to ensure those choices are of the highest possible quality available, and that goes for private schools too.

Education News for 04-20-2012

Statewide Education News

• Raising the bar at Ohio pre-K’s (Dispatch)

Thousands of poor youngsters start kindergarten unprepared to learn and behind their peers, delays that can cause them to struggle throughout their school years. A proposal being considered by Ohio lawmakers aims to reduce those learning gaps by requiring all tax-funded preschool and childcare programs to participate in a rating system to help guide parents and ensure high standards. Read More…

• Turn in a bully anonymously (Marietta Times)

Anonymous phone lines to report bullying and other behavior could be coming to local school districts. Providing some means to anonymously report bullying, harassment and intimidation is part of House Bill 116, signed into law by Ohio Gov. John Kasich earlier this year. It requires schools to expand their anti-bullying policies and include possible suspension for cyberbullying. Read More…

• Rallying cry of city students: Do your best on state test (Vindicator)

Students at Williamson Elementary School got rousing support as they prepare to take the Ohio Achievement Assessment next week. "We want them to bring on the OAA because we are ready," Principal Wanda Clark shouted at a Thursday morning rally at the school. "Are we ready?" Students shouted back that they are. First- and second-graders marched in the school gymnasium, holding posters and cheering, "Do your best, pass the test." Read More…

• Cyberbullying Law Now In Place; Students Note Positive Changes (NBC-4)

Bullying doesn't stop when your kids leave school, and as many as half of American teenagers said they've been bullied online. But now, there is something schools can do about it. Ohio's new law, The Jessica Logan Act, prohibits cyberbullying whether or not it's on school property, and schools are required to alert students and parents about discipline options if cyberbullying occurs. Anonymous reporting is also part of the act, but are schools changing their policies? Read More…

Local Issues

• Newark High School to get iPads, laptops

Newark City Schools administrators plan to add 400 laptops and 100 iPads to the high school this fall, with the goal of getting them into students' hands as much as possible. Superintendent Doug Ute envisions a time when teachers are more fully integrating technology into their lesson plans and students will carry their devices rather than heavy books in backpacks to and from school. Read More…

• Oregon Schools working on alternative energy project (WTOL )

Oregon City Schools put the massive blades for its 900 kilowatt wind turbine in place on Thursday, and they will help provide more than 80% of the energy for Clay High School. The turbines serves as a working monument to the district's commitment to the environment and taxpayers. Read More…

• Beavercreek district plans 30 layoffs, extensive cuts (Dayton Daily News)

The Beavercreek City School District plans to eliminate more than 50 full- and part-time jobs and cut academic courses across the district following a third-straight levy defeat. About 30 of the job cuts will come through layoffs and the rest through attrition, said Beavercreek Superintendent Nick Verhoff. Read More…

• Reality Check gives students glimpse of adulthood (Hamilton Journal News)

Students at Fairfield Freshman School had kids, bought a car, a house, insurance and other necessities — all within the space of 45 minutes or less. Granted, the children were represented by ping-pong balls. That’s because the students were participating in Reality Check, an annual event coordinated by the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce. Read More…

• CPS busing costs go up, up, ouch! (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Transportation cost overruns are blowing up Cincinnati Public Schools budget. The state’s third-largest school district expects to spend a whopping $29.5 million this year just to transport 21,000 kids to and from school each day. That’s 9 percent, or $2.3 million, more than budgeted and $1.3 million more than last year. Read More…

• KSU delegation visits Senior High to see Algebra Project work (Mansfield News Journal)

A delegation from Kent State University watched this week as Mansfield Senior High School math teacher Amanda Clawson led her Algebra Project junior class in analyzing two equations. "How are they different? How are they the same?" Clawson asked. Read More…

• Lorain City School layoffs; District cuts 182 positions, notices sent next 2 days (Lorain Morning Journal)

Lorain City Schools will be sending layoff notices today and tomorrow as the district cuts 182 positions, according to Interim Superintendent Ed Branham. “Letters are going out to be passed out to (today),” Branham said. The first group receiving the letters today will be secretaries, media clerks and health professional, with teachers and teachers and the remaining people being laid off get notices Friday, he said. Read More…

• State admonishes teacher fired for viewing porn on school laptop (New Philadelphia Times Reporter)

Howard “Mike” Winland, a former Strasburg elementary teacher, has been admonished by the State Board of Education for viewing pornographic images on a district laptop computer. Unless he engages in additional conduct unbecoming to the teaching profession, however, Winland will retain his teaching license. Read More…

• Unioto, ACLU near deal to avert bullying lawsuit (Chillicothe Gazette)

Five months after the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio threatened legal action against Union-Scioto Local Schools for allegedly not doing enough to address anti-gay bullying, the two sides are said to be close to an agreement that would stave off a lawsuit. What began as an incident Oct. 17 between two Unioto High School students flared into national news this past fall after a video of the attack went viral online. The mother of the victim, a 15-year-old freshman, said her son was attacked because he's gay and that the school had not done enough to protect him. Read More…

• Updated academic plan approved for Youngstown schools (Vindicator)

State Superintendent Stan Heffner has approved an updated plan to get the city school district out of academic distress. Though the plan in place since July 2010 focused on elementary schools, the updated document aims more at the district’s high schools. The plan was approved last month by the city schools’ academic-distress commission and submitted to Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction. Read More…