Education News for 10-17-2012

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State Education News

  • Cuyahoga Heights schools' former employee stole almost $4.2 million, state auditor says (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

    • Nearly $4.2 million was stolen from the Cuyahoga Heights school district by its former technology director…Read more...

  • Cheating shows charters, testing failed, author says (Columbus Dispatch)

    • School cheating scandals aimed at improving high-stakes student-proficiency test results are a symptom of a failed reform plan that is wasting billions of dollars…Read more...

  • State finally releases school and district grades (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The Ohio Department of Education released school and district grades for the 2011-12 academic year today, a couple of months late…Read more...

  • Online academy takes learning beyond school day (Hamilton Journal-News)

    • An online school is expanding Hamilton students’ technology knowledge and helping teachers provide more specific remediation…Read more...

  • Schools have a role in shaping healthy habits (Newark Advocate)

    • Jane Krueger’s class at John Clem Elementary School looked more like a school dance than a physical education class as students grooved to the beat…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Columbus City Schools: Schools treasurer urges $25M in cuts (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Columbus City Schools need to cut $25 million from next school year’s budget or risk running out of money, Treasurer Penny Rucker warned school board members last night…Read more...

  • Northridge good now, could be in debt in 2015 (Newark Advocate)

    • The Northridge Local School District is expected to be in the black until 2015, but the district likely will need levy funding to avoid a deficit in three years…Read more...

  • TPS drops to academic watch on report card (Toledo Blade)

    • Toledo Public Schools lost its continuous improvement ranking on Ohio school report cards and slipped into academic watch…Read more...

Editorial

  • Ohio schools should have their own EpiPens (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

    • The Ohio Association of School Nurses is busy writing what it hopes will be lifesaving legislation -- a bill that would require schools…Read more...

  • Classroom crime (Columbus Dispatch)

    • A scandal that landed a former Texas school superintendent in prison — for arranging for test scores of low-performing students to disappear from his district’s records — shows the gravity of the alleged data rigging…Read more...

Charters and their supporters failing our kids

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ODE has finally released the full school report card, though only in spreadsheet format, and it comes with a warning

ODE will not publish PDFs of the Local Report Cards until the investigation by the Auditor of State is concluded.

We thought it would be useful to compare how effective traditional public schools were versus their charter school counterparts. The results are staggeringly bad for charter schools

Report Card Rating Traditional Schools Charter Schools
Academic Emergency 3.4% 18.8%
Academic Watch 4.6% 15.6%
Continuous Improvement 10.4% 27.3%
Effective 21.4% 15.6%
Excellent 41.0% 7.4%
Excellent with Distinction 14.4% 1.1%
Not Rated 4.8% 14.2%

61.6% of all charter schools in Ohio are less than effective, while that can only be said of 18.4% of traditional schools. If the purpose of charter schools was to be incubators of excellence, they are doing a very poor job, with only 8.5% of them hitting the excellent or better rating. Indeed, if you truly want to see excellence, you have to look at traditional public schools, where over 55% are rated excellent or better.

If "school choice" organizations in Ohio had any integrity, the choice they would be urging in almost all cases, would be for parents to choose traditional public schools. In the vast majority of cases, their advocacy of charter schools are an advocacy of miserable failure, at huge tax payer expense.

Diane Ravitch spoke to this issue in Columbus yesterday

Proficiency testing and charter schools were billed in the late 1990s as solutions to a broken public-education system. Now, they are part of a failed status quo, said Ravitch, 74, an author and U.S. assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush.

Proficiency tests have changed — from something that assesses students to something used to punish teachers and schools, said Ravitch. And after a decade of poor results from charter schools, she said, the charter movement and high-stakes testing have proved to be failed national experiments.

Also at the same event, Greg Harris, the Ohio director of the 65,000-member charter-school advocacy group StudentsFirst

...charters were supposed to provide an experiment in innovation, and though many have failed, many others are working.

“The parents are making these choices” to go to charters, Harris said. “These are parents from high-poverty backgrounds who are making major sacrifices to get their kids out of failing schools.

“We agree with her that bad charter schools should be closed, but why close good ones?”

Parents are often steered into these choices by corporate education reformers and their boosters, like StudentsFirst, the most ironically named group of all. And when parents aren't being steered into wrong choices, it's because they are using factors other than quality to make their decisions, as we noted in this article.

Why the ‘market theory’ of education reform doesn’t work

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Modern education reform is being driven by people who believe that competition, privatization and other elements of a market economy will improve public schools. In this post, Mark Tucker, president of the non-profit National Center on Education and the Economy and an internationally known expert on reform, explains why this approach is actually harming rather than helping schools.

Years ago, Milton Friedman and others opined that the best possible education reform would be one based on good old market theory. Public education, the analysis went, was a government monopoly, and, teachers and school administrators, freed from the discipline of the market, as in all government monopolies, had no incentive to control costs or deliver high quality. That left them free to feather their own nest. Obviously, the solution was to subject public education to the rigors of the market. Put the money the public collected for the schools into the hands of the parents. Let them choose the best schools for their children. Given a genuine choice among schools, parents would have a strong incentive to choose the ones that were able to produce the highest achievement at the lowest possible cost, driving achievement up and costs down.

At first, there was little appetite among the public for this approach. But, in time, many people, both Republicans and Democrats, seeing the cost of public education steadily rise with no corresponding improvement in student performance, began to blame the school bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions. They saw charter schools as a way to get away from both. All of these people, both those driven by ideology in the form of market theory and those driven by anger at the “educrats” and the teachers unions, found that they could agree on charter schools. A coalition of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Wall Street investors put their money behind the cause and the die was cast. The U.S. Department of Education then jumped in with both feet. Choice and markets, in the form of the charter movement, began to drive the American education reform agenda in a big way.

The theory is neat as pin and as American as apple pie. But what if it is not true? What if it does not predict what actually happens when it is put into practice?

For the theory to work, parents would have to make their decisions largely on the basis of information about student performance at the schools from which they can choose. But it turns out that they don’t do that. American parents seem to care most about their children’s safety. Wouldn’t you? Then they prefer a school that is close to home. At the secondary school level, many appear to care a lot more about which schools have the most successful competitive sports programs, rather than which of them produce the most successful scholars. How many trophies in the lobby of the entrances to our schools are for academic contests? If the theory was working the way it is supposed to, you would expect that the first schools to be in trouble would be the worst schools, the ones with the worst academic performance. But any school superintendent will tell you that the most difficult task a superintendent faces is shutting down a school — any school — even if its academic performance is in the basement. How could this be? Does it mean that parents don’t care at all about academic performance? I don’t think so.

But it does mean that, if they have met teachers at that school that seem to really care about their children, take a personal interest in them and seem to be decent people, they are likely to place more value on those things than on district league tables of academic performance based on standardized tests of basic skills, especially if they perceive that school to be safe and it is close to home.

The theory doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in theory (because most parents don’t place academic performance at the top of their list of things they are looking for in a school) and it doesn’t work in practice, either. How do we know that? Because, when we look at large-scale studies of the academic performance of charter schools versus regular public schools, taking into account the background of the students served, the results come out within a few points of each other, conferring a decisive advantage on neither. It is certainly true that some charter schools greatly outperform the average regular public school, but it is also true that some regular public schools greatly outperform the average charter school.

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Education News for 10-16-2012

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State Education News

  • Grad rates tumble under new rule (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Call it the ugly truth. Many Ohio schools saw their graduation rates plummet after the state required them to track whether every high-school senior…Read more...

Op/Ed

  • School Reform, But From Whose Perspective? (Education Week)

    • Public K-12 schooling is a popular subject in all forms of media these days, with the majority of coverage highly critical of both the professionals who work within the system…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Bluffton board OKs new policies (Findlay Courier)

    • The Bluffton school board approved a number of new policies Monday, including one to provide reading intervention to students who may need it. Superintendent Greg Denecker said most of the policy changes were made because of changes in the laws…Read more...

  • Tri-Rivers levy would fund job training, upgrade facilities (Marion Star)

    • Tri-Rivers Career Center is talking job development as it seeks a tax levy that officials say is needed for updating the building and equipment…Read more...

  • New school could help lure jobs (Springfield News-Sun)

    • A major corporation’s sponsorship of the Global Impact STEM Academy not only secures help for the school but also provides a boost to local efforts to bring more businesses and jobs here…Read more...

  • LaBrae principal praises lockdown (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

    • LaBrae High School principal Rocco Adduci said he is pleased with the way staff and law enforcement secured the facility and took three intruders into custody…Read more...

  • TCTC decides against being part of solar project (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • The Trumbull Career & Technical Center board of directors has decided against participating in a proposed $8 million Solar Planet project…Read more...

What of test integrity?

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The Atalanta Constitution Journal has a detailed report on the integrity of tests now being used to make high stakes decisions. Their findings are torubling.

The stain of cheating spread unchecked across 44 Atlanta schools before the state finally stepped in and cleaned it up. But across the country, oversight remains so haphazard that most states cannot guarantee the integrity of their standardized tests, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.

Poor oversight means that cheating scandals in other states are inevitable. It also undermines a national education policy built on test scores, which the states and local districts use to fire teachers, close schools and direct millions of dollars in funding.

The AJC’s survey of the 50 state education departments found that many states do not use basic test security measures designed to stop cheating on tests. And most states make almost no attempt to screen test results for irregularities.

The whole article is well worth a read. We have long held that the increased stakes tied to test scores can only increase the incidence of cheating - it happens in every corporate system.

you can see the ACJ survey results here, which include Ohio.