Will the Straight A Fund board shoot straight?

This years state budget introduced the Straight A Fund, a scaled down version of the Federal Race to the Top. The fund will distribute $100 million this year and $150 million in 2015. Individual school districts, charter schools, STEM schools, and JVS districts can apply for grants of up to $5 million while partnerships between schools and colleges, universities and private groups can get up to $15 million.

The application process will soon open, and the first round of winners and losers are expected to be announced in late December.

The winners and losers will be decided by a small board of people hand picked by the Governor, The Speaker and the Senate President. Those appointments have just been finalized, so the board will look like this

Dr. Richard A. Ross, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ohio Department of Education
Representative Gerald Stebelton, Ohio House of Representatives
Colleen Grady, Education Policy Advisor at the Ohio House of Representatives
Alex Fischer, President and CEO of the Columbus Partnership
Kristina Phillips-Schwartz, Director of Education Initiatives at the Cincinnati Business Committee.
Superintendent John Scheu, Sidney City School District

As you can see, it is packed with ideologues and corporate reform supporters, and meets for the first time on September 11th, 2013.

What can we expect?

We expect that a significant number of grant applications from traditional public schools to focus on meeting unfunded mandates such as the 3rd grade reading guarantee, and technology needed to implement the Common Core testing regime, we don't expect too many "innovative" plans to be submitted, given the nature of the one-time money and the inability to sustain any non capital projects. Indeed, with the exhaustion of much of the RttT money we are seeing and hearing a lot of scaling back on projects that program created for the same reason.

We also expect to see a large number of charter schools apply for this money, and we suspect given the nature of the Straight A Fund Board, they will enjoy an oversized share of the money.

Scoring of grant applications will therefore be an important part of the process. ODE has this to say about scoring Straight A Fund applications

As awards from the Straight A Fund are competitive in nature, it is also anticipated that scorers will be necessary to read and review applications. As directed by the enabling legislation, Straight A Fund applications must be sustainable, have substantial value and lasting impact, and meet one of three programmatic goals: student achievement; spending reduction in the five-year fiscal forecast; and/or use of a greater share of resources in the classroom.

If you are interested in being a scorer, and we encourage you to do so, you can signup to find out more here.

Update

The Department of Education will post applications online by the end of the week with submissions due Oct. 25. The governing board will meet Nov. 12 and Dec. 3 to make final decisions on what will be funded. The money is slated for Controlling Board approval Dec. 16 with awards delivered in January

How much value add do you need to lift performance?

Building off the Fordham Foundations analysis of the 2012-13 school report card data, and interesting question arises. Two of the measures receiving letter grades are the Performance Index and Value-add. Here's how Fordham describes the two

The performance index (PI) rating is a gauge of student achievement within a school or district. The performance index is a scale from 0 to 120, and schools or districts earn more points when students achieve at higher performance levels on Ohio’s standardized exams.
[...]
The second key indicator of school performance is its overall value-added rating, a measure of a school or district’s contribution to or impact on student learning progress. While the performance index takes a snapshot of student achievement—a one-year look—value-added takes a multi-year view of achievement. Value-added forecasts the achievement level that a student should reach by the end of the year, relative to her peers, and is determined by her previous years’ test scores (as many as available, starting with 3rd grade). Then on the basis of her actual performance that year, it determines whether she falls short, meets, or exceeds the projected achievement level.
[...]
Both approaches to viewing a school’s performance have pros and cons. Zeroing in on achievement alone risks mislabeling a school as failing academically, when it may be doing a great job helping students make big gains after starting out far behind. At the same time, focusing only on student progress, while ignoring achievement, may conceal the fact that students, even those making solid gains, remain far below the academic standard necessary to enter college or to obtain gainful employment upon graduating from high school. After all, we don’t just want students to make progress every year; we also want them to be “college and career ready” by the end of their K-12 experience.

That seems reasonable on its face. Here's what Fordham found in some instances

The picture blurs, however, when schools have mixed ratings. A small slice from the 2012-13 report card data in Dayton illustrates the problem.

School Building	Public School Type	Performance Index (Achievement) Rating	Value-Added (Progress) Rating	% Economically Disadvantaged
Kemp PreK-8 School	District	D	A	>95.0
World of Wonder PreK-8 Schoo	District	D	A	>95.0
Klepinger Community School	Charter	D	A	>95.0
Horizon Science Academy Dayton	Charter	D	A	>95.0
Dayton Leadership Academies- Liberty	Charter	D	A	>95.0

These schools, according to the data, are producing very healthy learning gains within distressed student populations, but are still unable to promote these students in to a successful academic career. Just how much extra learning, and for how long does a school need to provide A rated value add in order to lift achievement from a D to an A?

Here's the Fordham report

Parsing Performance Analysis of Ohio's New School Report Cards

Charter schools 2013 performance woes

According to analysis by the Fordham Foundation, a right leaning supporter of corporate education reform policies and sponsor of a number of Ohio charter schools, Ohio's charter schools continue to underwhelm in performance. Fordham analyzed the data from this years newly released and revamped school report cards. Here's what they found

As can be seen from the charts above, the vast majority of traditional public schools in Ohio are scoring either at or well above a C grade.

Almost the opposite is true when one looks at Ohio's charter school performance index. Even Fordham notes

When achievement and progress ratings are joined to examine overall performance, it is clear that there are more low-performing than high-performing charters

The data is more favorable to charters than on first examination too, because 25% of charter schools are exempt from these performance ratings. Dropout recovery charter schools, if included, would drag the aggregate charter school performance in to the gutter. A skeptic might be forgiven for thinking that the legislature had this in mind when they made the exemption.

At the end of the day, and after 15 years of experimentation, just 2 percent of Ohio's charter schools earned an A on achievement. Is that really worth a continued $1 billion investment?

Moratorium Needed From More Tests, Costs, Stress

Fairtest.org has produced a factsheet looking at Common Core testing. Whatever you believe about the Common Core State Standards themsevles, the tests continue to be a problematic area. Fairtest's list highlights many of the issues

Myth: Common Core tests will be much better than current exams, with many items measuring higher-order skills.
Reality: New tests will largely consist of the same old, multiple-choice questions.
Proponents initially hyped new assessments that they said would measure – and help teachers promote – critical thinking. In fact, the exams will remain predominantly multiple choice. Heavy reliance on such items continues to promote rote teaching and learning. Assessments will generally include just one session of short performance tasks per subject. Some short-answer and “essay” questions will appear, just as on many current state tests. Common Core math items are often simple computation tasks buried in complex and sometimes confusing “word problems” (PARCC, 2012; SBAC, 2012). The prominent Gordon Commission of measurement and education experts concluded Common Core tests are currently “far from what is ultimately needed for either accountability or classroom instructional improvement purposes” (Gordon Commission, 2013).

Myth: Adoption of Common Core exams will end NCLB testing overkill.
Reality: Under Common Core, there will be many more tests and the same misuses.
NCLB triggered a testing tsunami (Guisbond, et al., 2012); the Common Core will flood classrooms with even more tests. Both consortia keep mandatory annual English/language arts (ELA) and math testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school, as with NCLB. However, the tests will be longer than current state exams. PARCC will test reading and math in three high school grades instead of one; SBAC moves reading and math tests from 10th grade to 11th. In PARCC states, high schoolers will also take a speaking and listening test. PARCC also offers “formative” tests for kindergarten through second grade. Both consortia produce and encourage additional interim testing two to three times a year (PARCC, 2012; SBAC, 2012). As with NCLB, Common Core tests will be used improperly to make high-stakes decisions, including high school graduation (Gewertz, 2012), teacher evaluation, and school accountability.  

Myth: New multi-state assessments will save taxpayers money.
Reality: Test costs will increase for most states. Schools will spend even more for computer infrastructure upgrades.
Costs have been a big concern, especially for the five states that dropped out of a testing consortium as of August 2013. PARCC acknowledges that half its member states will spend more than they do for current tests. Georgia pulled out when PARCC announced costs of new, computer-delivered summative math and ELA tests alone totaled $2.5 million more than its existing state assessment budget. States lack resources to upgrade equipment, bandwidth and provide technical support, a cost likely to exceed that of the tests themselves (Herbert, 2012). One analysis indicates that Race to the Top would provide districts with less than ten cents on the dollar to defray these expenses plus mandated teacher evaluations (Mitchell, 2012).

Myth: New assessment consortia will replace error-prone test manufacturers.
Reality: The same, incompetent, profit-driven companies will make new exams and prep materials.
The same old firms, including Pearson, Educational Testing Service and CTB/McGraw-Hill, are producing the tests. These firms have long histories of mistakes and incompetence. The multi-national Pearson, for example, has been responsible for poor-quality items, scoring errors, computer system crashes and missed deadlines (Strauss, 2013). Despite these failures, Pearson shared $23 million in contracts to design the first 18,000 PARCC test items (Gewertz, 2012).

You can read their entire factsheet, here.

Ohio’s charter schools: Costlier and worse

When charter schools burst onto Ohio’s education scene about 15 years ago, proponents claimed they could educate at-risk children better and more cheaply than traditional public schools. Today, the reality is quite different — and alarming.

Charter schools cost the state more than twice as much per student as traditional schools do. And with a handful of exceptions, their academic performance is worse.

Ohio’s system of deducting charter-school funding from the amount of state aid to school districts gives charters more money than they spend.

Meanwhile, students in traditional schools — who account for 90 percent of Ohio’s school population — get, on average, 6.5 percent less funding than the state says they need and are entitled to receive.

Most of the money transferred to charters goes to schools whose students’ performance scores are worse than in the school districts from which that money and those students came. Clearly, reform is in order.

Since Gov. John Kasich and the General Assembly are developing a new school funding system as part of the 2014-15 state budget, there couldn’t be a better time for change.

Continue reading...

Dispatch finally reports on failing charters

The Columbus Dispatch took a brief break from its constant haranguing of Columbus City Schools to report on the terrible state of charter schools in the city. It took some haranguing of JTF and others to make this happen. On August 26th we wrote to the Dispatch education reporters via Twitter:

@jointhefutureOH: Isn't it about time the Dispatch starting reporting the poor quality of Columbus charters as vigorously as you do CCS? @jsmithrichards

We continued to press the Dispatch to report on the sorry state of charter schools in Columbus and around the state.

1/3 of cities students go to charters, paper of record needs to do a much better job of holding charters accountable too. @jsmithrichards

On Sunday, the Dispatch finally reported on the sorry state of charter schools with a piece titled "Charter schools’ failed promise"

But what started as an experiment in fixing urban education through free-market innovation is now a large part of the problem. Almost 84,000 Ohio students — 87 percent of the state’s charter-school students — attend a charter ranking D or F in meeting state performance standards.

“Measured up against the hype of the proponents early on, this adds to the accumulation of what has to be regarded, measured (through proficiency tests), as disappointing results,” said Jeffrey Henig, a Columbia University political-science and education professor who has studied the school-reform movement.

“There were proponents who believed there was a fundamental flaw in the public system that led them to be resistant to change,” Henig said. “Charters were going to unleash this energy and responsiveness, and they haven’t done that as a sector.”

The whole piece is worth a read. For the Dispatch to finally recognize that the charter school experiment has failed is a surprising but much overdue development.

However, as Steve Dyer notes, while the Dispatch highlights the poor charter performance on the new report cards, they failed to understand just how bad charters truly are

Are Charters really comparable to Big 8 urban buildings? The most basic question I could think to ask was, "How many kids from the Big 8 schools actually make up the populations of Big 8 Charters?"

Dyer goes on to demonstrate the charter schools in urban areas are not populated by just urban students, but also attract very large numbers of students from the suburbs. Students that data shows come from improved socioeconomic backgrounds.

For example, Columbus Preparatory Academy, which routinely ranks high on accountability measures, only took 49% of their children from Columbus City Schools. The school took about 42% from South-Western, another 5% from Hilliard and kids from Bexley, Dublin, Olentangy and Westerville. So is it fair to hold up Columbus Prep's performance and compare it with Columbus City's?

No, it is not. The problem goes even deeper than Dyer points out. Charter schools also screen students using a variety of techniques, many of which we documented here - How "top charters" screen students.

So when you put this all together you have

• Charters that underperform traditional public schools in a head-to-head match up
• Despite being able to pull in students from suburban districts where poverty is a lesser factor in learning
• Despite attracting students with the most engaged parents
• Despite being able to use many techniques to screen for students they believe might perform higher
• Despite receiving more money per student from the state than traditional public schools

When you look at the full range of failure of charter schools, you can see that the urgent plan required in Columbus and Cleveland and across the entire state, is a plan to deal with the explosion of poor quality charter schools that are failing tens of thousands of students every year.

Welcome to the real conversation, Columbus Dispatch.