Education News for 01-23-2013

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State Education News

  • State budget’s unknowns frighten advocates (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Faced with a “poker-faced” Kasich administration that won’t divulge new budget details until Feb. 4, a coalition of critics yesterday took a stab at things…Read more...

  • Democrats want state school-board head out over Facebook post (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The head of the Ohio Democratic Party yesterday called for the resignation of Ohio Board of Education President Debe Terhar for a Facebook posting that appeared to compare…Read more...

  • Columbus school board decides to assist review by mayor’s panel (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The Columbus Board of Education relented last night and decided to allow Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s Education Commission to conduct a management review of district non- academic operations — and without a written agreement…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Referee will intervene in duct-taped students case (Canton Repository)

    • A referee is going to hear the case of a northeast Ohio teacher who may be fired over an allegation that she posted a Facebook photo of her students with their mouths covered with duct tape…Read more...

  • After-school program takes holistic approach Chillicothe Gazette)

    • When the last school bell rings, things are just getting started at the Salvation Army’s after- school program…Read more...

  • Schools sweat out decision to delay start due to cold (Columbus Dispatch)

    • The decision to delay classes at Canal Winchester schools in yesterday’s frigid weather wasn’t an easy one, Superintendent Jim Sotlar said…Read more...

  • Bexley mayor rejects speed traps, student tax ideas (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Bexley’s mayor opposes the use of speed cameras and taxing students to help the city offset projected losses in state funding, both ideas proposed by a citizens group to raise new revenue…Read more...

  • Finalists make pitch to RV public (Marion Star)

    • River Valley Local Schools gave the public a chance Tuesday evening to meet the finalists as it prepares to choose the district’s next superintendent…Read more...

  • TPS won’t place levy renewal on spring ballot; Board cites too little time to mount solid campaign (Toledo Blade)

    • A Toledo Public Schools levy renewal won’t be on the May ballot after all. The Toledo Board of Education was set to vote Tuesday on a board finance committee recommendation…Read more...

  • Youngstown school board discusses money woes (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • Schools Superintendent Connie Hathorn is meeting with his staff to devise recommendations to address a projected $48 million deficit by fiscal year 2017…Read more...

Editorial

  • Uneasy money (Akron Beacon Journal)

    • Ohio schools will receive $38 million from the first distribution of the state’s tax on casino gambling. Have they hit the jackpot? Hardly. The amount boils down to about $21 per pupil…Read more...

HB555 FAQ for teacher evaluations

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We've just got our hands on this document put out by the Ohio Department of Education. It's an updated framework for teacher evaluations based on the changes that were slipped into HB555 in the dead of night.

Is there a more ridiculously convoluted and complex framework for evaluating any other professions job performance? How is any teacher expected to understand all this enough to know where to focus improvement efforts, especially since the Value-added formula itself is secret and proprietary.

HB 555 FAQ with regard to teacher evaluations by

10 Education Reform Tactics That Hurt Students and Don’t Improve Education

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We write almost exclusively about education reform here at JTF, and there's been an awful lot to write about in recent years. At the very core of our support and objections to various reforms has always been whats best for students. This post from LAProgressive captures a lot of the problems with the current direction corporate education reform is taking us, and the negative effect it has on students

1. Deluging schools with tests in every grade and every subject beginning with pre-kindergarten, to the point where little else goes on in school but preparing for tests.

2. Pushing the arts out of a central role in the life and culture of public schools.

3. Demoralizing teachers, especially the most talented and experienced teachers, by subjecting them to evaluations based on junk science

4. Discriminating against special needs and English Language Learner (ELL) students by giving favorable treatment to charter schools which exclude or drive out such students, and forcing such students to take tests that are developmentally inappropriate for them

5. Destabilizing communities by closing schools that have been important community institutions for generations.

6. Undermining the mentoring and relationship building that are at the core of great teaching, especially in poor and working class communities, by raising class size and substituting online learning for direct instruction without thinking through the consequences of such policies on young people who need personal attention and guidance.

7. Creating such unrealistic pressure on schools, and on administrators and teaching staffs, that cheating on tests becomes endemic.

8. Giving billionaire philanthropists, and wealthy companies which provide services to schools such power over education policy smothering the voices of teachers, parents and students.

9. Replacing veteran teachers, often teachers of color, with poorly trained Teach for America Corps members,most of them white, who go through a 5 week training period before being given their own class, and often leave for other professions after their two year teaching commitment is completed.

10. Adding to mental health problems of students by spending so much on testing that school districts have to fire school counselors, and to the physical problems of students by transforming gym and recess and after school programs into test prep removing opportunities for exercise and play.

There's a lot to recognize in that list, and be worried about.

Education News for 01-22-2013

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State Education News

  • Ohio now restricts school’s use of seclusion rooms, physical restraint (Athens Messenger)

    • For the first time, Ohio has a policy that limits a school’s use of seclusion and restraint for difficult students. Schools must now adopt positive behavior interventions and support…Read more…

  • School rules guide whistle-blowers (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Amid a statewide investigation into data manipulation in schools, districts are creating rules to guide employees if they want to report workers who violate laws or ethics.…Read more…

  • Schools await Kasich’s funding model (Lima News)

    • They want more money and a school-funding system that is fair. But area school officials also just hope for a little honesty.…Read more…

  • Turning the page (Mason HS Chronicle)

    • More third graders than ever before could be held back next year. Due to recent legislation that alters current reading level standards for the 2013-14 school year.…Read more…

  • Ranking brings school funding model under scrutiny (Middletown Journal)

    • Ohio recently was ranked 17th in the nation for its school finance, despite the fact that Ohio’s school funding model has been declared unconstitutional three times since 1997.…Read more…

Local Education News

  • Could shared services save Ohio districts $1B a year? (Cincinnati Enquirer)

    • State leaders are urging school districts, like other local government agencies, to share services and costs, operate more efficiently and reserve more tax dollars for core purposes.…Read more…

  • Board, referee clash over teacher firing (Findlay Courier)

    • A Liberty-Benton veteran teacher, fired this week by the school board, should not have been terminated because the board failed to provide documented evidence for its claim that he had a history of classroom management problems…Read more…

  • School patrols increase (Lisbon Morning Journal)

    • Ever since last month's school shooting in Newtown, Conn., sheriff's deputies have been performing security checks during the school day at five school districts.…Read more…

  • Safer schools start with information (New Philadelphia Times)

    • School districts in Tuscarawas, Carroll, Harrison and Belmont counties are being offered free technology that would assist first responders dealing with emergencies at area schools.…Read more…

  • Kiwanis takes stand against bullying (Portsmouth Daily Times)

    • The Kiwanis Club of Portsmouth has taken a stand against bullying and did so with a recent presentation by club president John Johnson.…Read more…

  • Deputies could be added to help with Clark schools (Springfield News-Sun)

    • New Clark County sheriff’s deputies could be hired as part of a program to boost security in schools, a local response to the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shootings.…Read more…

  • Boosters, PTO slate reception for new superintendent (This Week News)

    • The Northridge Academic Boosters and Northridge PTO invite the community to a "Welcome to Northridge" for new Superintendent Dr. Chris Briggs.…Read more…

  • Chardon Schools' installation of security cameras now almost complete (Willoughby News Herald)

    • Chardon School District’s goal of installing technologically advanced security cameras in and around all of its buildings is nearing completion.…Read more…

  • Liberty schools expecting another audit (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • Liberty schools are awaiting another report from Ohio Auditor David Yost, after a 2011 financial audit was released earlier this week, schools Superintendent Stan Watson said.…Read more…

Editorial

  • Alert to danger (Akron Beacon Journal)

    • Last week, at the first of five regional training sessions, educators and law enforcement officers received graphic and sometimes emotional lessons about how to respond to the kind of shooting incidents that have gripped the nation’s attention.…Read more…

  • Alone in school (Akron Beacon Journal)

    • Think of isolation rooms and physical restraints, and the mind goes not to schools but to prison cells for violent criminals or to efforts to prevent mentally unstable patients from hurting themselves or others.…Read more…

  • Right direction (Columbus Dispatch)

    • With a new State Board of Education policy limiting the use of “seclusion rooms” for students whose behavior is out of control, Ohio schools and students will be better off than they were before.…Read more…

  • Good start (Findlay Courier)

    • Limiting access to Findlay's elementary buildings won't stop all unwelcome visitors. But it should help. …Read more…

Debe Terhar breaks Godwin's law

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The State Board of Education President Debe Terhar, in all her professional glory

State Board of Education President Debe Terhar said she was not comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler when she posted a photograph of the Nazi leader on her Facebook page with a message critical of the administration’s new gun-control efforts.

But she does say we “need to step back and think about it and look at history” to see that tyrants have disarmed their citizens.

Terhar, a Cincinnati Republican elected last week by the 19-member school board to a second term as its president, recently posted the picture with this commentary: “Never forget what this tyrant said: ‘To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.’ — Adolf Hitler.”

The photograph apparently originated with the Facebook page of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, which features a variety of anti-Obama, pro-gun posts and photos, such as scantily clad women hoisting large guns, a polar bear with the words “Holy f*** I’m glad I’m white,” and another saying “Where’s Lee Harvey Oswalt when you need him?”

When the Sipatch asked her about her Facebook post she said, “I’m not comparing the president to Adolf Hitler, it’s the thought of disarming citizens, and this has happened throughout history. What’s the true intention of the Second Amendment? It was to protect us from a tyrannical government, God forbid.”

Why is the State Board of Education President trolling racist Facebook pages in the first place, let alone making offensive comparisons to a genocidal maniac?

In one simple Post, Debe Terhar shows herself to:

  • Have a serious lack of professionalism
  • Questionable judgment
  • The inability to apologize
  • Lacking in historical understanding
  • A belief that we are stupid enough to believe she wasn't comparing the President to Hitler

Apparently in Terhar's world, only educators are to be held accountable.

The Science of Value-Added Evaluation

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"A value-added analysis constitutes a series of personal, high-stakes experiments conducted under extremely uncontrolled conditions".

If drug experiments were conduted like VAM we might all have 3 legs or worse

Value-added teacher evaluation has been extensively criticized and strongly defended, but less frequently examined from a dispassionate scientific perspective. Among the value-added movement's most fervent advocates is a respected scientific school of thought that believes reliable causal conclusions can be teased out of huge data sets by economists or statisticians using sophisticated statistical models that control for extraneous factors.

Another scientific school of thought, especially prevalent in medical research, holds that the most reliable method for arriving at defensible causal conclusions involves conducting randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, in which (a) individuals are premeasured on an outcome, (b) randomly assigned to receive different treatments, and (c) measured again to ascertain if changes in the outcome differed based upon the treatments received.

The purpose of this brief essay is not to argue the pros and cons of the two approaches, but to frame value-added teacher evaluation from the latter, experimental perspective. For conceptually, what else is an evaluation of perhaps 500 4th grade teachers in a moderate-size urban school district but 500 high-stakes individual experiments? Are not students premeasured, assigned to receive a particular intervention (the teacher), and measured again to see which teachers were the more (or less) efficacious?

Granted, a number of structural differences exist between a medical randomized controlled trial and a districtwide value-added teacher evaluation. Medical trials normally employ only one intervention instead of 500, but the basic logic is the same. Each medical RCT is also privy to its own comparison group, while individual teachers share a common one (consisting of the entire district's average 4th grade results).

From a methodological perspective, however, both medical and teacher-evaluation trials are designed to generate causal conclusions: namely, that the intervention was statistically superior to the comparison group, statistically inferior, or just the same. But a degree in statistics shouldn't be required to recognize that an individual medical experiment is designed to produce a more defensible causal conclusion than the collected assortment of 500 teacher-evaluation experiments.

How? Let us count the ways:

  • Random assignment is considered the gold standard in medical research because it helps to ensure that the participants in different experimental groups are initially equivalent and therefore have the same propensity to change relative to a specified variable. In controlled clinical trials, the process involves a rigidly prescribed computerized procedure whereby every participant is afforded an equal chance of receiving any given treatment. Public school students cannot be randomly assigned to teachers between schools for logistical reasons and are seldom if ever truly randomly assigned within schools because of (a) individual parent requests for a given teacher; (b) professional judgments regarding which teachers might benefit certain types of students; (c) grouping of classrooms by ability level; and (d) other, often unknown, possibly idiosyncratic reasons. Suffice it to say that no medical trial would ever be published in any reputable journal (or reputable newspaper) which assigned its patients in the haphazard manner in which students are assigned to teachers at the beginning of a school year.
  • Medical experiments are designed to purposefully minimize the occurrence of extraneous events that might potentially influence changes on the outcome variable. (In drug trials, for example, it is customary to ensure that only the experimental drug is received by the intervention group, only the placebo is received by the comparison group, and no auxiliary treatments are received by either.) However, no comparable procedural control is attempted in a value-added teacher-evaluation experiment (either for the current year or for prior student performance) so any student assigned to any teacher can receive auxiliary tutoring, be helped at home, team-taught, or subjected to any number of naturally occurring positive or disruptive learning experiences.
  • When medical trials are reported in the scientific literature, their statistical analysis involves only the patients assigned to an intervention and its comparison group (which could quite conceivably constitute a comparison between two groups of 30 individuals). This means that statistical significance is computed to facilitate a single causal conclusion based upon a total of 60 observations. The statistical analyses reported for a teacher evaluation, on the other hand, would be reported in terms of all 500 combined experiments, which in this example would constitute a total of 15,000 observations (or 30 students times 500 teachers). The 500 causal conclusions published in the newspaper (or on a school district website), on the other hand, are based upon separate contrasts of 500 "treatment groups" (each composed of changes in outcomes for a single teacher's 30 students) versus essentially the same "comparison group."
  • Explicit guidelines exist for the reporting of medical experiments, such as the (a) specification of how many observations were lost between the beginning and the end of the experiment (which is seldom done in value-added experiments, but would entail reporting student transfers, dropouts, missing test data, scoring errors, improperly marked test sheets, clerical errors resulting in incorrect class lists, and so forth for each teacher); and (b) whether statistical significance was obtained—which is impractical for each teacher in a value-added experiment since the reporting of so many individual results would violate multiple statistical principles.

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