Education News for 07-18-2012

Local Issues

• Brecksville-Broadview Heights school board meeting draws hundreds as teacher negotiations continue (Sun News)

Emotions ran high at the July 17 Brecksville-Broadview Heights Board of Education, as teachers, parents and residents asked tough questions of the board in front of a crowd about 300 people. Jeff Luce, who recently resigned from his post as Advanced Placement math teacher at Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School after 18 years, said he was concerned the board would bypass more qualified teachers for younger — and less expensive — educators. Read more...

• No mediation sessions yet slated in NB contract talks (Findlay Courier)

NORTH BALTIMORE - North Baltimore school officials and the teachers' union are checking their calendars to arrange a date for a mediator to join stalled contract talks. An impasse in negotiations was declared recently and a mediator was contacted. "We're waiting for dates they have available," Eve Baldwin, the school district's treasurer and a member of the board's negotiating team, said Tuesday. Vacation schedules have made arranging a date challenging. Read more...

• New Lex students to get iPads through lease deal (Times Recorder)

NEW LEXINGTON - Summer's end might be unwelcome, but New Lexington High School students will have a something to ease their pain this year -- free iPads. New Lexington City Schools recently signed a three-year lease with Apple. The district will pay $416,316 -- three payments of $138,772 -- and in return will receive 600 32GB iPads with WiFi. That equates to about $690 per iPad over the three-year lease. That's more than the $599 list price to buy a new iPad outright, but the New Lex deal also comes with a two-year protection plan. Read more...

• District adds business chief (Tribune Chronicle)

WARREN - A former superintendent from Trumbull County is returning to the area to work at the city school district - as its executive director of business operations. Warren City Schools Board of Education on Tuesday unanimously appointed Michael Wasser of McDonald to the post. He was awarded a one-year contract, which provides an annual salary of roughly $90,000, effective July 23, 2012, through June 30, 2013. Wasser is replacing Michael Notar, who moved from the position to the high school principal's seat earlier this year. Read more...

Editorial

• Promising plan (Findlay Courier)

Suppose, with one good idea, we could: Decide the fate of Findlay's Central Middle School after students move out this winter? Keep at least part of the beloved old school around for our lifetimes? Save a key property from becoming an embarrassing, gaping hole in Findlay's downtown, and huge parking lot for no one in particular? This seems to be the promise of a plan for a performing arts center built around the Central Middle School auditorium and unveiled to the public via the Findlay Board of Education. Read more...

Catastrophic failure of teacher evaluations in TN

If the on going teacher evaluation failure in Tennessee is any guide, Ohio has some rough waters ahead. Tennessee's recently passed system is very similar to Ohio's.

It requires 50 percent of the evaluation to be comprised of student achievement data—35 percent based on student growth as represented by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) or a comparable measure and the other 15 percent based on additional measures of student achievement adopted by the State Board of Education and chosen through mutual agreement by the educator and evaluator. The remaining 50 percent of the evaluation is determined through qualitative measures such as teacher observations, personal conferences and review of prior evaluations and work.

Tennessee’s new way of evaluating classrooms “systematically failed” to identify bad teachers and provide them more training, according to a state report published Monday.

The Tennessee Department of Education found that instructors who got failing grades when measured by their students’ test scores tended to get much higher marks from principals who watched them in classrooms. State officials expected to see similar scores from both methods.

“Evaluators are telling teachers they exceed expectations in their observation feedback when in fact student outcomes paint a very different picture,” the report states. “This behavior skirts managerial responsibility.”

The education administration in Tennessee are pointing the fingers towards the in classroom evaluations, but as one commentator on the article notes,

Perhaps what we are seeing with these disparities is not a need to retrain the evaluators, but rather confirmation of what many know but the Commissioner and other proponents of this hastily conceived evaluation system refuse to see -- the evaluation criteria mistakenly relies too much on TVAAS scores when they do not in fact accurately measure teacher effectiveness.

It has been stated over, and over, that the use of value add at the teacher level is not appropriate, subject to too much variation, instability, and error. Yet when these oft warned about problems continue to manifest, they are ignored, excused and other factors scapegoated instead.

As if to make matters worse, the report (read it below) suggests that "school-wide value-added scores should be based on a one-year score rather than a three-year score. While it makes sense, where possible, to use three-year averages for individuals because of smaller sample sizes, school-wide scores can and should be based on one-year data."

So how did the value add scores stack up against observations? With 1 being the lowest grade and 5 the highest

Are we really supposed to believe that a highly educated and trained workforce, such as teachers are failing at a 24.6% rate (grades 1's and 2's). Not even the most ardent corporate education reformer has claimed that kind of number! It becomes even more absurd when one looks at student achievement. It's hard to argue that a quarter of our workforce is substandard when your student achievement is at record highs.

Instead it seems more reasonable that a more modest 2%-3% of teachers are ineffective and that the observations by professional, experienced evaluators are accurately capturing that situation.

Sadly, no where in the Tennessee report is a call for further analysis of their value add calculations.

Teacher Evaluation in Tennessee: A Report on Year 1 Implementation

Education News for 07-17-2012

Statewide Stories of the Day

• Schools facing reading issues (News-Sun)

More than one in five third-graders in a dozen Miami Valley school districts were not proficient in reading last year, according to 2010-11 report card data. In Dayton and Jefferson Twp., about 45 percent failed to meet that state standard, while in Springfield it was about 37 percent and Middletown, 30 percent. School districts are taking steps this summer to prepare for the new state third-grade reading guarantee, which would generally require districts to hold back third-graders starting in 2013-14 if they are not reading at grade level. Read more...

• Ohio’s education challenge (Vindicator)

Gov. John Kasich, a man who does not shy away from challenge, is saying that he intends to work with the legislature to come up with a better way to fund the state’s schools, likely in time for next year’s new state budget. Meanwhile, members of the General Assembly are doing the homework needed to craft reform. Parents who think their district is doing great might be shocked to find out that, compared with national achievement-test scores, in many cases student performance is substandard. Read more...

Local Issues

• Backpack program helps parents feed kids (Middletown Journal)

MIDDLETOWN — It sounded like she was talking about more than a plastic grocery bag full of six meals for her children. “This is a godsend,” Julie Oglesbay, 44, a mother of two children, said Friday afternoon at the Catalina Manufactured Home Community. “As a mother, you always want your kids’ stomachs full. This helps tremendously.” Because of a $1 million grant from Governor John Kasich’s office, a Summer Weekend Backpack Meals program was established this year in the state, including the Middletown area. Read more...

• Canton City Schools students learn guitar in summer program (Repository)

CANTON — Newly formed non-profit, Ohio Regional Music Arts and Cultural Outreach (ORMACO) teamed up with Canton City Schools’ Arts Academy at Summit, the University of Akron’s guitar department and McKinley High School to offer summer guitar lessons to City Schools students. Led by Arts Academy music instructor George Dean and James Marron, guitar professor at the University of Akron, the program will culminate in a free concert for the public. Read more...

Editorial

• The Creativity-Testing Conflict (Education Week)

Doublethink is "to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them," according to George Orwell, who coined the phrase in his novel 1984. American education policymakers have apparently entered the zone of doublethink. They want future Americans to be globally competitive, to out-innovate others, and to become job-creating entrepreneurs. Read more...

Maureen Reedy, Ohio teacher running for office

Diane Ravitch, writing about 2002 teacher of the year and Ohio House candidate for distrcit 24, Maureen Reedy

Maureen Reedy, a teacher in Ohio for 29 years, was Ohio teacher of the year in 2002. Now she is running for the Ohio House of Representatives.

She deserves the support of every taxpayer, parent, and citizen in Ohio.

She is angry at the waste of taxpayer dollars for bad, deregulated charter schools. Forget what you read in The Economist about the miracle of privately managed charters. As she points out below, half the charter schools in the state are in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 public schools.

She is especially outraged by the rapacious cyber charters. As she points out in this article, two of Ohio’s major charter sponsors have collected nearly a billion dollars of Ohio taxpayer dollars since 1999:

Charter schools are a poor investment of Ohio’s education dollars and have a worse track record than public schools in our state; there are twice as many failing charter schools as successful ones, and one in two charter schools is either in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 traditional public-school buildings. Five of seven of Ohio’s largest electronic-charter-school districts’ graduation rates are lower than the state’s worst public-school system’s graduation rate, and six of seven of the electronic charter schools districts are rated less than effective.

And finally, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow has failed in every identified state category for eight years, a worse track record than the Cleveland City School system, which is under threat of being shut down by the state. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is run by unlicensed administrators. Lager, in addition to his $3 million salary, earned an additional $12 million funneled through his software company, which sells products to his charter-school corporation. Just how much does the average teacher in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow earn you may ask? Approximately $34,000 per year.

Why do the Governor and the Legislature look the other way? Why are they quadrupling the number of vouchers and reducing oversight of the state’s troubled charter schools?

That’s easy:

I am appalled at the direct pipeline funneling vital state dollars for our children’s education directly into the pockets of millionaires like David L. Brennan, chief executive officer of White Hat Management ($6 million yearly salary) and William Lager, CEO of the state’s ninth-largest school district, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow ($3 million yearly salary).

Let’s follow the money trail of political contributions by these two for-profit charter-school CEOs to high-ranking GOP legislators. In the past decade, Brennan and Lager have donated a combined $5 million to high-ranking GOP legislators, including Gov. John Kasich, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, House Speaker William G. Batchelder and Sen. Kevin Bacon, chairman of the Senate Committee on Insurance, Commerce and Labor.

Why isn’t the U.S. Department of Education blowing the whistle on these scandals?

Is education reform about improving education or about lining the pockets of campaign contributors?

Not a hard question in Ohio.

You can find out more about Maureen Reedy by visiting her website, www.maureenreedy.com.

Education News for 07-16-2012

Statewide Stories of the Day

• New state law: Third graders must read to pass (Marion Star)

MARION - An educator will tell you that, until the third grade, a student learns to read. When that student reaches third grade, that's when the student reads to learn. A new law in Ohio adds another layer to that adage. A third-grader will have to read to pass. A compromise in Columbus postponed the full implementation of what's called the third-grade reading guarantee. Students entering third grade in 2013 will have to pass a threshold to be determined by the Ohio Board of Education. Read more...

• Troubled tutoring service gets dismantled (Dayton Daily News)

A troubled tutoring program that drew allegations of fraud and mismanagement locally and across the state has been dismantled in favor of giving local school districts more control over providing help to struggling students in low-performing schools. The Ohio Department of Education revamped the federally-funded Supplemental Educational Services (SES) program as part of its waiver under No Child Left Behind. Individual school districts will now receive money through the program and be in charge of providing the necessary oversight. Read more...

Local Issues

• Property owners pay to ‘settle’ schools’ tax-value appeals (Dispatch)

Property owners owe taxes to schools, parks, libraries, county agencies that protect children and help the developmentally disabled, and others. But what if they could cut a deal to pay just the schools and make part of the potential bill that they owe the others disappear? It’s happening more and more as businesses settle property-value disputes with a “direct payment” to a school district in return for the district dropping a case in which it claimed that a parcel’s appraised value was too low. Read more...

• Talk about East Holmes schools over breakfast (Times Reporter)

BERLIN — Residents of the East Holmes Local School District are invited to join board members and administrators for breakfast and conversation about the schools during a series of meetings in the coming weeks. Residents will have the opportunity to share thoughts and concerns directly with the board and to have any questions answered. Meals will be paid for by the Citizens For East Holmes for any East Holmes resident willing to attend. “We want to talk about whatever they want to talk about,” said Superintendent Joe Edinger. Read more...

Editorial

• Talk to kids about sexting (Houston Chronicle)

There was a time, not that long ago, when a young person's occasional minor lapses in judgment were treated mostly as private matters involving his or her parents, maybe school officials and perhaps a member of the clergy or other trusted counselor. No more. Technology has made many a young person's "What was I thinking!" moment a matter of public and unfortunate permanent record - before discretion and privacy concerns intervene. This is not brand-new. Read more...

Investment loser

Via the Public Education Network

In a costs-benefit analysis of testing mandates under NCLB and Race to the Top, Peter Smagorinsky on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post writes accountability is profitable for publishing companies and school superintendents who cheat, and expensive for everyone else. The expense isn't merely the $20 billion annually in taxes to support the testing apparatus.

Teachers increasingly dislike their jobs, and according to one survey, 40 percent of new teachers nationwide are likely to leave within five years. For students, education has been reduced to the ability to fill in bubble sheets. Smagorinsky would invest the same $20 billion in a nursing staff in all schools, so kids in poverty can undertake studies with a reasonable degree of health and balance. He would expand free and reduced-price meals, and work to improve the healthiness of the offerings under these services. He would also staff school libraries with knowledgeable, helpful media specialists to direct students to books that benefit their educational development.

In general, he would invest in school infrastructure, so schools aren't falling apart at the seams. He notes he offers this proposal entirely for free, unlike in Colorado, where 35 percent of federal education money goes to consultants.

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