Strong Schools - Strong Communities

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Another pro-public education organization is joining the fray in Ohio. Strong Schools - Strong Communities. ABC 6 News reports on their announcement

Deb Papesh, a Dublin City Schools parent, had this to say about the groups formation

"I believe Strong Schools, Strong Communities is looking at that to see what they can they borrow from what we did to help on a more global level," she said following the press conference.

Papesh thinks communities across the state can help each other with campaigns that center on funding issues.

Right now those involved with Strong Schools, Strong Communities say their job is to keep an eye on and testify for or against any new legislation that affects public education in Ohio.

They also say they’re prepared to activate their network in the same way the grassroots organization We Are Ohio mobilized in 2011 to push back against a legislative effort to limit collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Teacher Donna O'Connor had this to say

“We believe a child’s ZIP code should not hinder their access to a high-quality public education. We will advocate for a fair and sustainable and equitable funding formula and educate the public as to next year’s budget and policies that come out of our next session.”

We encourage you to follow them on Facebook, here at www.facebook.com/StrongSchoolsOhio. You can also receive a weekly text message update by texting "SSSC" to 51555.

Here's a video fo the press conferecne event

Part one

Part two

Part three

There's a growing resistance in Ohio, to the corporate education movement.

Education News for 11-14-2012

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State Education News

  • Schools, governments urged to share costs (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The message to local schools and government entities from Gov. John Kasich’s administration is clear: Team up, and share services to cut costs…Read more...

  • Criminal referrals likely over school data (Columbus Dispatch)

    • As state officials said there’s a “strong likelihood” they’ll refer Columbus school employees for criminal prosecution…Read more...

  • Ohio Education Officials Unveil Plan For Future Based On Tennessee Model (WBNS)

    • Ohio has 400,000 people who need a job and a 100,000 job openings, and officials said the problem is education. For example, only 1 of out 4 Ohioans has a college degree, and many others lack the skills for 21st century jobs…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Accounting policies create transparency in district finances (Hamilton Journal-News)

    • Monroe Local Schools officials have instituted new accounting policies to prevent falling again into fiscal emergency and state control…Read more...

  • Mixup delays Marion City school buses (Marion Star)

    • A paperwork mix-up with the state took 14 Marion City Schools bus drivers off their routes, delaying the delivery of students, primarily elementary pupils, from school to their homes…Read more...

  • PAVE program's future at risk after state cuts funding (Newark Advocate)

    • As president of the Prevent Assault and Violence Education program, Emily Minton has talked to countless middle school students about bullying…Read more...

  • Award given to national good behavior program used in many local schools (Newark Advocate)

    • A game designed to reward students for good behavior and used in almost every Licking County elementary school has received its own reward…Read more...

  • Akiva students learn lessons at OSU'S Lake Erie lab (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • They caught fish from Lake Erie using a net, measured sun penetration in the water and scooped plankton from the lake bottom…Read more...

Editorial

  • Good adviser (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The search for a new superintendent for Columbus City Schools should benefit substantially from the steady hand and sincere concern…Read more...

Partisan purges

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Fresh of their electoral defeats that produced a large majority thanks to partisan gerrymandering, the extremists in the Ohio House are not done with their partisan purging. Now they are going after the Ohio Accountability Task Force, according to a report in Gongwer

The task force, which first met in December 2003, was tasked with examining how to implement the value-added report card measure in ways that are most useful for improving student achievement, according to ODE documents.

With its name changed to the Ohio Accountability Advisory Committee, the panel's membership would see "substantial" changes including the removal of: the ranking minority members of the House and Senate education committees, a teachers union representative, a school district board of education member, and a school superintendent, Mr. Stebelton said.

It instead includes three members of the public each appointed by the Speaker of the House and the Senate President, two appointed by the governor and one appointed by the state auditor, he said. The superintendent of public instruction would be a nonvoting member.

"It sounds like from this list that what's been removed from this group, from this board is representation of folks who have experience in education," Rep. Nickie Antonio (R-Lakewood) said.

When Republicans are questioning the merits of the partisan purge you know there must be something wrong. Rep Stabelton, who is sponsoring the legislation (HB555) revealed his partisan purpose when he had this to say

"This will work both ways. Someday when you get back in the majority, our people won't be on it and you folks will."

Of course, due to extreme gerrymandering, Rep Stabelton knows full well that Democrats can never be back in the majority no matter how many Ohioans vote for them. The other real problem with this ridiculous proposal was also repeatedly noted

She (Rep. Denise Driehaus) also raised issues with the lack of presence of local education officials on the panel. "As the committee stands now there are some guarantees that some local representative and folks with education backgrounds, people that are participating in our system now" will be on the committee.

The Ohio General Assembly needs more not less expertise advising it, they have been making an awful mess of education policy these last few years listening to partisans with no education expertise like Rep Stabelton.

Education News for 11-13-2012

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State Education News

  • GED test to triple in price (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Angela Surles can barely afford to buy diapers and clothes for her 1-year-old daughter. The 22-year-old single mom from the Short North quit her job at Sears to enter a six-week course to help her get her high-school equivalency certificate…Read more...

  • Groups get ready to fight for schools (Columbus Dispatch)

    • More than 15 years after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the way the state funds public education is unconstitutional, state leaders continue to tinker with the school funding.…Read more...

    


  • State Board to Vote Against Additional Funding for Pre-K, Reading Instruction (State Impact Ohio)

    • Sunday-Wednesday: School board members, administrators and friends gather in Columbus for the annual Ohio School Boards Association conference. Expect the launch of the Strong Schools Strong Communities public education advocacy coalition.…Read more...

  • Colleges need to do more to ensure students stay in school and graduate, task force says (The Plain Dealer)

    • Unless Ohio's two- and four-year public colleges ensure that every student who enrolls is able to graduate and find a job, the state will be unable to compete in a global economy…Read more...

    


  • Rossford schools treasurer reappointed to Ohio school retirement position (Toledo Blade)

    • James Rossler, treasurer of the Rossford schools, has been reappointed to the board of the School Employees Retirement System of Ohio.…Read more...

    


  • Ohio Lawmaker Wants To See Metal Detectors At Every School (WBNS-TV)

    • Knives, box cutters and screwdrivers would never clear an airport security scanner. But those items, along with guns and other weapons, could pass through the doors of most Ohio schools without detection.…Read more...

Op/Ed

  • Now let's talk about real education innovations (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

    • The Plain Dealer's coverage of blended learning provides a glimmer of hope that, now that elections are over, we will soon come to the realization that having the money follow the child is the only way to provide quality education for all children.…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Nelsonville-York teacher receives national recognition (Athens Messenger)

    • A Nelsonville-York elementary school teacher who was the first from Southeastern Ohio to receive the state’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Teacher of the Year award also received national recognition for her efforts.…Read more...

  • School board looks at cost cutting options (The Review)

    • EAST LIVERPOOL - With a five-year forecast predicting budget deficits beginning in the 2015- 2016 school year, the city's board of education this week discussed belt-tightening measures that could be implemented to cut costs.…Read more...

  • South-Western may join Central Ohio Compact (This Week News)

    • The South-Western City School District Board of Education will be considering whether the district should join the Central Ohio Compact.…Read more...

    


  • Rossford officially begins superintendent search (Toledo Blade)

    • The search for a new Rossford schools superintendent has begun in earnest.…Read more...

    


  • Ohio school awards WWII veteran posthumous diploma (WFJM)

    • AKRON, Ohio (AP) - As it marks Veterans Day, a northeast Ohio school district is awarding a posthumous diploma for a man who was drafted into the military for World War II and died in Germany in 1944.…Read more...

Teacher Turnover Affects All Students' Achievement

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In light of the Kasich education cuts, and the looming sequestration that will lead ot large education cuts, this article appearing in Education Week should be bourne in mind by law makers.

When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student achievement.

But a couple years back, two researchers did an analysis that showed, counter-intuitively, it's actually the less- effective teachers, rather than the more- effective ones, who tend to leave schools with a high concentration of low-achieving, minority students. It raised the question of whether a degree of turnover might be beneficial, since it seemed to purge schools of underperforming teachers.

When reporting on that study, I played devil's advocate by pointing out that it didn't address the cultural impact of having a staff that's always in flux. The recently released CALDER paper suggests I may have been right in probing this question.

Written by the University of Michigan's Matthew Ronfeldt, Stanford University's Susanna Loeb, and the University of Virginia's Jim Wyckoff, the new paper basically picks up on the same question. Even if overall teacher effectiveness stays the same in a school with turnover, it's well documented that turnover hurts staff cohesion and the shared sense of community in schools, the scholars reasoned. Could that have an impact on student achievement, too?

To find out, they looked at a set of New York City test-score data from 4th and 5th graders over the course of eight years. The data were linked to teacher characteristics.
(All the usual caveats about limitations of test scores apply, of course.)

Among their findings:

• For each analysis, students taught by teachers in the same grade-level team in the same school did worse in years where turnover rates were higher, compared with years in which there was less teacher turnover.
• An increase in teacher turnover by 1 standard deviation corresponded with a decrease in math achievement of 2 percent of a standard deviation; students in grade levels with 100 percent turnover were especially affected, with lower test scores by anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of a standard deviation based on the content area.
• The effects were seen in both large and small schools, new and old ones.
• The negative effect of turnover on student achievement was larger in schools with more low-achieving and black students.

Read the whole piece here.

A decade-long crisis of democracy

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We highlighted that despite Ohio voters in the aggregate preferring Democrats over Republicans in the 2012 election, the Republicans will hold a probable super majority 60-39 as a consequence of extreme partisan gerrymandering. The Dispatch was prompted by this result to produce an article about redistricting

Issue 2 is dead, buried deep by Ohio voters last week.

But over and over again, opponents of the redistricting plan, be they Republicans or editorial-page writers, noted that their opposition was not based on the belief that the current system of drawing legislative and congressional districts is good.

In fact, most acknowledged that it remains badly in need of an overhaul.

But if was this paragraph in the article that prompted us to take an even deeper look

Republicans now control 75 percent of the U.S. House seats and nearly two-thirds of the legislative seats in a state that has leaned Republican but is a key battleground state

We analyzed Ohio House of Representative results for each of the past 6 election cycles. By aggregating the votes for Democrats and Republicans in contested races we found a systematic, and extreme disenfranchising of Democratic representation in Ohio

Year Democratic Republican D Seats R Seats
2012 2,418,815 2,362,310 39 60
2010 1,447,949 1,696,064 40 59
2008 2,296,678 1,982,281 53 46
2006 1,832,548 1,605,801 46 53
2004 1,869,051 2,036,398 38 60
2002 1,243,671 1,364,656 36 63
Total 11,108,712 11,047,510

Based upon the preferences of voters, Democrats should have controlledthe General assemblies after the 2012, and 2006 elections - but were denied by partisan gerrymandering. Furthermore, the majorities that Republicans did earn in all of their successful years should have been much, much smaller - and never reacher super majority status.

Indeed when one looks at the sum total of votes in contest races over the past decade, rather than being center right, the results indicate a center to center left leaning electorate.

It is simply not possible to conclude that Ohioans have been legitimately represented in the 21st century by their preferred choices, either in actuality or in scope. We have a crisis of democracy in Ohio.