Voters: spend more on public education

Education Next released their 7th annual survey of the publics attitude towards a range of education issues. You can read their entire survey, here.

We want to draw your attention to the public attitude towards school funding

	Public	Parents
Greatly Increase	14%	26%
Increase	39%	35%
Stay About the Same	40%	28%
Decrease	6%	4%
Greatly Decrease	1%	1%

We can see from the results above that the majority of people (53%) want to see education funding increase, with a fully 2/3's of parents wanting that. Only 7% of the population want to see education funding cut - the actual policies being pursued by the governor and his legislative allies in the previous 2 budgets. This helps explain his collapsing poll numbers, once it is understood how unpopular this chosen course of action is. To further exemplify how out of the mainstream the governor's policies have been, the publics attitude towards teacher pay is in contradiction to the governor's preferred policy choices (such as SB5). When asked "Do you think that public school teacher salaries in your state should increase, decrease, or stay about the same?

	Public	Parents
Greatly Increase	10%	19%
Increase	45%	37%
Stay About the Same	37%	40%
Decrease	7%	4%
Greatly Decrease	1%	0%

A majority of the public want to see teacher pay increase. This should sound caution to some of the more extreme school boards around the state (we're looking at you, Fairborn) who are looking to boost their Tea Party bone fides

When looking at the year over year trends, Education next notes

Those supporting such performance pay policies remains at 49 percent, virtually unchanged from the last time we asked this question in 2011. However, resistance to the use of student performance information to evaluate teachers seems to have intensified. Opposition to basing teacher salaries in part on student progress has grown from 27 percent to 39 percent over the past two years.
Similarly, 27 percent oppose basing decisions about teacher tenure on how well students progress on standardized tests, nearly double the 14 percent opposed to the idea one year ago.
[...]
Growing resistance to reform extends to school voucher programs as well. Opposition to expanding school choice through a universal voucher initiative that “gives all students an opportunity to go to private schools with government funding” is higher in this year’s survey than a year ago. Whereas 29 percent of Americans expressed opposition to universal vouchers in the 2012 survey, 37 percent do so in this year’s survey.

The evidence is clear, the corporate reform movements efforts are running out of steam, and support

Kaisch trails in latest poll

If latest polling is any indication, the public is souring on Gov Kasich and his budget that did little to alleviate the financial stress on local communities and schools.

PPP, Just released their latest poll of Ohio, and after months of Ohioans having a positive opinion of the Governor's job, his approval is now underwater.

Do you approve or disapprove of Governor John Kasich's job performance?

42% Approve
47% Disapprove
11% Not sure

The news gets worse for the Governor. His likely opponent in next years election, Ed FitzGerald has taken the lead for the first time

If the candidates for Governor next year were Republican John Kasich and Democrat Ed FitzGerald, who would you vote for?

John Kasich 35%
Ed FitzGerald 38%
Undecided 27%

If anything should be clear it is that policies matter and the Governor has pursued unpopular ones, especially when it comes to financing local schools and communities.

Ohio Statewide Results by jointhefuture

e-schools with no standards

We have written many times about the catastrophe of Ohio's e-schools. Criticism of Ohio's e-schools has come from many quarters, including a scathing report from Education Sector, and Innovation Ohio. News that the Department of Education has green lit 3 more schools to open should cause concern for any student minded educator and parent.

The the Dispatch's credit they report on the shocking state of standards that e-schools in Ohio operate under

Ohio law first called for the creation of standards in 2003, but the legislature took no action on the proposals submitted, said Department of Education spokesman John Charlton. The budget bill from 2011 called for standards by 2012, which the governor and state school superintendent delivered to the legislature. But lawmakers didn’t adopt those standards, so a backup set — written by an association whose members include online charter schools — became Ohio’s standards on Jan. 1, Charlton said.

The legislature, always quick to impose tougher and tougher standards of public schools and their teachers punted on creating standards for the worst schools in the state, and instead allowed their for-profit operators to write their own rules. As you can imagine those standards lack vigor

Those standards, from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, differ from those submitted by the governor and state superintendent in that they make no mention of attendance-keeping or budgeting.

The standards that the legislature rejected said that students had to have functioning hardware and software before they could be considered enrolled in an e-school and that attendance policies must ensure that enrolled students are “engaged.” They also called for schools to have a process for what actions to take when students fail to participate, and truancy policies that “enforce compulsory education laws.” An e-school’s sponsor would be required to “have a budget which allocates sufficient resources” to support the school.

A new moratorium of e-schools is not enough. These catastrophically failing schools need to be closed down, and new e-schools only allowed to open when strong common sense standards are in place.

Build quality into education, not over measure it

An interesting article appeared on EdWeek noting that not all business ideas are making it through the corporate education reform movement

Many of the current education reform trends in America attempt to improve the quality of our public schools by applying various management strategies used in the business world. These model business lessons, heralded as tough, effective reform, don't always look like the strategies being seen in business-to-business advice about managing systems and working effectively with people, however.

Take, for example, the groundbreaking and very influential work of Edwards Deming. Deming is best known for his 14 points of quality management. Deming and his principles were instrumental in working to improve the quality of Japanese manufacturing after World War II. As companies in the United States began to see the improved quality of Japanese products, they too adopted Deming's principles.

For some reason, however, the Deming strategies of quality that businesses utilize are all but ignored when trying to improve education in America.

For example, consider Deming's third point of quality, "Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place." In the United States current education reform initiatives seem to be totally ignoring that Deming principle by our insistence of depending on inspection with standardized testing.

What are some examples of changes we could do to "build quality" into education? We could revamp the way teachers are trained. We could utilize the intern model used by the medical profession by having quality internships for new teachers. Doing so would also be honoring Deming's sixth point; "Institute training on the job." Instead, in most cases new teachers are given the most difficult teaching assignments and expected to perform alone.

We could "build quality" by questioning the idea of one teacher per classroom. We could "build quality" by redesigning the school year calendar and replacing it with a calendar that recognizes the quality benefits of time for teachers to plan and evaluate student work.

We could "build quality" by developing 21st century techniques of education that aren't built on a foundation of a standardized curriculum developed by 10 elite men in the 1890's. We could "build quality" by developing a support system in the education process that would reduce the high percentage of teachers that leave the profession within the first five years.

The article also points out some comments Demming made about education

• Quality goes down when ranking people.
• Cramming facts into students' heads is not learning.
• People talk about getting rid of deadwood (bad teachers), but there are only two possible explanations of why the dead wood exists: 1) You hired deadwood in the first place, or, 2) you hired live wood, and then you killed it.

It seems there are some lessons corporate reformers could learn from their own corporate world.

Evidence builds - corporate ed policies are failing

Lately, study after study, report after report is casting doubt on the efficacy of corporate education reform polcies. The ltest comes from The Broader Bolder Approach to Education

Pressure from federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, bolstered by organized advocacy efforts, is making a popular set of market-oriented education “reforms” look more like the new status quo than real reform.

Reformers assert that test-based teacher evaluation, increased school “choice” through expanded access to charter schools, and the closure of “failing” and underenrolled schools will boost falling student achievement and narrow longstanding race- and income-based achievement gaps.

KEY FINDINGS
The reforms deliver few benefits and in some cases harm the students they purport to help, while drawing attention and resources away from policies with real promise to address poverty-related barriers to school success:

• Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.
• Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination.
• Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
• School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.
• Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students.
• Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.
• The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance. Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient, and multipronged.

That's a troubling litanty of corporate education reform failure. You can read the report, here.

Teachers Digging Into Own Pockets to tune of $1.3 billion

Via

Roughly half the amount that the nation's public school teachers are spending on educational products is being covered with their own money, a new nationwide survey shows.

All told, teachers spent about $3.2 billion on various types of supplies and materials during the 2012-13 academic year, according to the survey, released recently by the National School Supply and Equipment Association. Half that total amount, $1.6 billion, came out of educators' own pockets.

The per-teacher breakdown is as follows: The average educator forked out about $198 of their own money on instructional materials, $149 on school supplies, and $139 on other classroom materials, for a total of $485 last academic year, according to the survey.

In total, nearly all teachers—99.5 percent—reported digging into their own pockets to cover the costs on classroom supplies or materials, according to the association. The portion of teachers doing so appears to have risen over time.

The report, "The 2010 NSSEA Retail Market Awareness Study," was based on a survey of 308 K-12 teachers, conducted by Perry Research Professionals.