Education News for 10-29-2012

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State Education News

  • Privilege issue stalls hearing in suit over schools’ private discussions (Columbus Dispatch)

    • After its in-house attorney told members of the Columbus Board of Education in July that they couldn’t hold private meetings to discuss an unfolding data-rigging investigation…Read more...

  • Ohio Attorney General honors Chardon High School shooting first responders (WEWS)

    • Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine honored a packed house…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Some of the best will help kids learn to read (Cincinnati Enquirer)

    • A who’s who list of local business leaders is about to kick off an early childhood literacy campaign that seeks support from every workplace in the region…Read more...

  • District changes evaluation process for top officials (Hamilton Journal-News)

    • Fairfield City Schools will change how it evaluates its treasurer and superintendent, giving those officials the first evaluations they’ve had in some time…Read more...

  • Charter school’s scores outperform Springfield’s (Springfield News-Sun)

    • Two of Springfield’s three charter schools fared worse than the city’s traditional public schools, and a third school outperformed Springfield City Schools…Read more...

  • $23M Pettisville school goes green in big way with building project (Toledo Blade)

    • Low emission and fuel-efficient cars get premium parking spots outside Pettisville’s new K- 12 school building…Read more...

  • T.J. Lane using rarely successful plea in Chardon shooting (Willoughby News Herald)

    • After Keith Ledeger killed custodian Peter Christopher and wounded three other adults at Wickliffe Middle School on Nov. 7, 1994…Read more...

  • Choffin school faces discipline issues after influx of Career Academy students (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • A teacher believes the addition of Career Academy students to Choffin Career and Technical Center is causing disruption for other students…Read more...

Editorial

  • Poor excuse (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The second round of state Auditor Dave Yost’s probe of attendance-record-keeping practices in Ohio schools reveals two important things…Read more...

  • Facing facts (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The bad news is that graduation rates have fallen for most Ohio high schools on the latest state report cards…Read more...

  • Local school districts dealing with huge financial challenges (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • Here’s a sobering reality about public education in Ohio that should open the eyes of voters in the Nov. 6 election…Read more...

Where the polls stand - 1 week to go

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With the debates behind us, and just a week of swing state campaigning ahead, the race for the Presidency is once again a close, polarized affair, between two very different choices.

Real Clear Politics has Mitt Romney falling back slightly from their previous weeks projection, with Obama favored to win 201 electoral college votes, Mitt Romney 191 (down from 206), and 146 up for grabs.

President Obama maintains a small but persistent lead in Ohio, of around 2%

The NYT calculates that this persistent lead is now projecting a 74.9% chance of President winning Ohio next Tuesday.

538 projects Obama to win 296.6 electoral college votes to Mitt Romeny's 241.4

Education News for 10-26-2012

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State Education News

  • ACLU wants seclusion-room tactics halted at schools (Columbus Dispatch)

    • There’s no need for seclusion rooms in Ohio schools and they ought to be phased out within three years, the ACLU of Ohio says…Read more...

  • FBI joins probe of schools’ records (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The FBI has launched its own investigation into the data-scrubbing probe that began with Columbus City Schools and has spread statewide…Read more...

  • 2 city schools ranked excellent or above for first time (Springfield News-Sun)

    • For the first time, two Springfield City elementary schools were ranked as “Excellent” or above on the preliminary Ohio Department of Education report card…Read more...

  • Revere BOE OKs new electronic device policy (West Side Leader)

    • Students with iPads, Kindles, Nooks and other electronic devices will now be able to use them at school for educational purposes…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Coleman hears of employers' need for graduates to be 'work-ready' (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Companies that are developing business in Columbus are placing a higher premium on the talent of the work force…Read more...

  • NC'town BOE terminates teacher's contract (New Philadelphia Times)

    • The Newcomerstown Board of Education voted Wednesday to terminate the teaching contract of sixth-grade teacher Scott Thomas, effective immediately…Read more...

  • Riverside teachers earn $9,800 grant for robotics (Willoughby News Herald)

    • Students at two Riverside schools will spend their time playing with Legos after the Dominion Foundation awarded a grant to the district…Read more...

  • City students celebrate programs that begin after dismissal bell rings (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • More than 150 city elementary- and middle-school students marched along Wood Street, chanting the praises of their schools and the Youngstown Afterschool Alliance…Read more...

2 new studies question value add measures

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Evidence is overwhelming, as yet more studies show that using value add to measure teacher quality is fraught with error.

Academic tracking in secondary education appears to confound an increasingly common method for gauging differences in teacher quality, according to two recently released studies.

Failing to account for how students are sorted into more- or less-rigorous classes—as well as the effect different tracks have on student learning—can lead to biased "value added" estimates of middle and high school teachers' ability to boost their students' standardized-test scores, the papers conclude.

"I think it suggests that we're making even more errors than we need to—and probably pretty large errors—when we're applying value-added to the middle school level," said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, whose study examines the application of a value-added approach to middle school math scores.

High-school-level findings from a separate second study, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., complement Mr. Harris' paper.

"At the elementary level, [value-added] is a pretty reliable measure, in terms of predicting how teachers will perform the following year," Mr. Jackson said. "At the high school level, it is quite a bit less reliable, so the scope for using this to improve student outcomes is much more limited."

The first study mentioned in this article concludes(emphasis ours)

We test the degree to which variation in measured performance is due to misalignment versus selection bias in a statewide sample of middle schools where students and teachers are assigned to explicit “tracks,” reflecting heterogeneous student ability and/or preferences. We find that failing to account for tracks leads to large biases in teacher value-added estimates.

A teacher of all lower track courses whose measured value-added is at the 50th percentile could increase her measured value-added to the 99th percentile simply by switching to all upper-track courses. We estimate that 75-95 percent of the bias is due to student sorting and the remainder due to test misalignment.

We also decompose the remaining bias into two parts, metric and multidimensionality misalignment, which work in opposite directions. Even after accounting for explicit tracking, the standard method for estimating teacher value-added may yield biased estimates.

The second study, replicates the findings and concludes

Unlike in elementary-school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding tracks effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, algebra teachers have modest effects and there is little evidence of English teacher effects.

Unlike in elementary-school, value-added estimates are weak predictors of teachers’ future performance. Results indicate that either (a) teachers are less influential in high-school than in elementary-school, or (b) test-scores are a poor metric to measure teacher quality at the high-school level.

Corporate education reformers need to begin to address the science that is refuting their policies, the sooner this happens, the less damage is likely to be wrought.

Education News for 10-25-2012

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State Education News

  • Staff earns cash for grades (Dayton Daily News)

    • Springboro Community City Schools is planning to pay staff more than $200,000 in bonuses…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Lakota anticipates spending deficits in next 4 of 5 years (Hamilton Journal-News)

    • Spending deficits are projected in Lakota’s near future, and school officials have said further budget reductions will have to come…Read more...

  • Granville schools, Lodge strike deal on valuation (Newark Advocate)

    • The Granville School District and five other tax districts will not have to refund tax collections to the current owners of Cherry Valley Lodge because of a decrease in the lodge’s property valuation…Read more...

  • BP sets STEM curriculum (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

    • Trumbull County Schools' new curriculum will give students a competitive edge in both their education and their career of choice…Read more...

  • Lorain: School system, city on the brink (WKYC)

    • The city of Lorain and the Lorain City School District are struggling to survive. The area has been hit hard by the economy and unemployment, and families are struggling to get by…Read more...

Dispatch must apologize

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The school attendance erasures issue continues to be a scandal that isn't. Despite finding nothing more than bureaucratic missteps in his first interim report, the State Auditor has now released a second interim report that has found no evidence of wrongdoing at a further batch of schools.

Just two weeks before school districts across Ohio ask voters for more money, state Auditor Dave Yost reported that his team has not uncovered any more evidence of scrubbing student attendance data.

In the latest update, Yost said auditors examined records at 81 schools in 47 districts and cleared all but eight of the 81. Testing at those eight buildings as well as 15 other buildings from the first interim report is still underway, Yost said. A final report is due sometime around Jan. 1.

Twenty of the 81 schools examined in this round had reporting errors but not enough to suggest scrubbing.
[...]
“Odds are most districts are reporting their attendance data accurately and they’re not scrubbing,” Yost said at a press conference Tuesday.

Again, simply some bureaucratic missteps caused by "the sheer complexity of the accountability system" as the Auditor himself describes it, in his conclusion.

This is a far cry from the irresponsible reporting and opinionating that the Columbus Dispatch has engaged in for a number of months now. Time and time again they have failed to wait for the evidence, and instead jumped to conclusions and made inferences that turned out to be incorrect.

Rather than bemoan the slipping away of a potential Pulitzer, they surely thought they were earning, they ought to have some serious introspection on how they could have gotten a story so very wrong and caused Ohio's schools systems so much trouble.

They have slandered and smeared thousands of public school employees up and down the state with their reckless allegations and accusations. They need to apologize and accept responsibility.

Second Interim Report on Student Attendance and Accountability System