Kasich to revamp Ohio laws on charter schools?

Gov. John Kasich pledged yesterday to crack down on shady Ohio charter-school operators in his upcoming budget proposal.

In a year-end speech to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the governor also threw out broad hints of possible tax changes, called for greater regulation on fracking wellheads and defended religious involvement in a new state-funded program with public schools.

“We are going to fix the lack of regulation on charter schools,” he said. “There is no excuse for people coming in here and taking advantage of anything. So we will be putting some tough rules into our budget.”

Two studies released this month blasted state laws and regulations that allow poor-performing Ohio charter schools to flourish and management companies to profit off the tax-funded privately operated schools. The studies showed that charter-school students receive fewer days of learning than youngsters at traditional public schools. Both reports were commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a pro-charter-school organization urging more accountability of charter schools.

Richard A. Ross, state schools superintendent, said court actions and “persuasiveness” have failed to fix problems with some charter-school operators.

The changes will seek to exert more state control over charter-school sponsors — “operationally, financially and educationally” — to ensure high-quality educations for charter students, Ross said.

“We know we have a lot of room for improvement, but one thing to remember as we work on those reforms is that for a lot of parents, community schools are their last chance for choice,” he said.

(Read more at the Dispatch)

New Teacher Recruitment is Collapsing

According to the latest Federal Title 2 data, enrollment into teacher prep programs has collapsed by 9.12% in Ohio. We're not the first to notice this trend, nor is it isolated to Ohio.

The Washington Post reports that Teacher for America may miss their recruitment goals by as much as 25%. Here's part of the memo sent out by the TFA CEO to partners

Dear Colleagues, With a few months to go in our recruitment season, we’d like to share an update on our work, including the patterns we’re seeing among the college seniors, graduate students, and professionals we’re working to recruit. As always, we’d welcome your advice and collaboration.

At this point, we’re tracking toward an incoming corps that may be smaller than the current one, and because demand for corps members has grown in recent years, we could fall short of our partners’ overall needs by more than 25 percent. We understand that this has very real implications for you and your students, and though we’ve still got nearly half our recruitment season to go, we wanted to keep you in the loop.

Today’s education climate is tough—fewer Americans rate education as a “top 2” national issue today, and teacher satisfaction has dipped precipitously in recent years—down from 62% in 2008 to 39% in 2012. Additionally, an increasingly polarized public conversation around education, coupled with shaky district budgets, is challenging the perception of teaching as a stable, fulfilling profession; in turn, we’re seeing decreased interest in entering the field nationwide. (You can read analysis of this trend here in Education Week.) We’ve felt some of this same polarization around TFA. At the same time, the broader economy is improving and young people have more job options than in recent years. Having experienced the national recession through much of their adolescence, college graduates today are placing a greater premium on what they see as financially sustainable professions. Teaching and public service have receded as primary options.

The same pattern of apathy towards teaching was highlighted by Ed Week in a recent article titled Steep Drops Seen in Teacher-Prep Enrollment Numbers

Massive changes to the profession, coupled with budget woes, appear to be shaking the image of teaching as a stable, engaging career. Nationwide, enrollments in university teacher-preparation programs have fallen by about 10 percent from 2004 to 2012, according to federal estimates from the U.S. Department of Education's postsecondary data collection.
[...]
"It is an alarming trend," said Mary Vixie Sandy, the executive director of the California Commission on Teaching Credentials, which enforces the state's teacher-preparation standards. "We are going to see it play out in this year and in the coming year with an increase in demand, and a not very deep pool of teachers to fulfill that demand."
[...]
If an uncertain economy is one likely explanation for the drop, analysts also point to other, less tangible causes: lots of press around changes to teachers' evaluations, more rigorous academic-content standards, and the perception in some quarters that teachers are being blamed for schools' problems.

Ed Week produced the graph below to show some of the trends

Corporate education reformers set about creating a climate of "accountability" to drive out "bad teachers" and replace them with "superstars". All they appear to have accomplished is creating a byzantine accountability system that doesn't work, isn't fair and is actively driving away tens of thousands of potential new teachers.

Stanford CREDO Director: Free Market Doesn't Work in Education

I was all prepared to summarize what Dr. Margaret Raymond had to say about Stanford's latest study from its Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), which Raymond heads, at today's City Club of Cleveland event.

How only in Cleveland does it appear that Ohio's charter school sector is providing meaningful, positive benefits to kids. Or how CREDO's methodology works (averaging kids in traditional public school buildings and comparing these "virtual" kids' performance with real charter kids). Or how Ohio's charter school sector has been making very minimal improvements over the years. Or that the state's charter reform initiatives over the last few years haven't had much impact on charter school performance. Or that Cleveland charters are doing a good job educating poor, minority kids. Or that 93% of Ohio charter schools' proficiency scores are below the 50th percentile in the state. Or that 44% of charter school kids are seeing low growth and performance.

But then, in response to a question from the audience nearly at the end of the event, Dr. Raymond dropped this on the crowd: She said she's a "free market kinda girl", but after decades of looking at the nation's charter school sector, she has come to the conclusion that the "market mechanism just doesn't work" in education. Here;s the podcast from the City Club. Her market comments start at 50:18. Here is the remarkable commentary:

I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed… The policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. We need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools. But I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.

Considering that the pro-market reform Thomas B. Fordham Foundation paid for this study and Raymond works at the Hoover Institution at Stanford -- a free market bastion, I was frankly floored, as were most of the folks at my table.

(Read more at 10th Period)

Report details changes needed to improve Ohio’s charter schools

A report released this morning recommends several changes in state law and policies aimed at improving the performance of students attending tax-funded, privately operated charter schools.

“Past changes to Ohio’s community school law haven’t been able to rein in low-performing sponsors and schools, grow high-performing schools, rehabilitate the sector’s reputation, or provide enough disadvantaged students with the high-quality schools they deserve,” the report said.

“In order to preserve the promise of high-quality public school choice, Ohio policymakers must re-examine the community school law.”

The analysis, done by the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners in conjunction with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a pro-charter-school group pushing for improved governance and accountability of charter schools.

Ohio lawmakers are expected to debate such measures next year.

The report recommends: clearly defining the powers and responsibilities of charter-school authorizers, governing boards and management companies; eliminating the ability of such groups to gain financially at students’ expense; and boosting state aid to charter schools.

Some specific suggestions include:

Prohibiting a school authorizer – the entity that regulates a charter school – from selling its services to that school. Ensuring charter-school boards have final say on terminating a management contract. Under current law, management companies can terminate board members which critics say undermines efforts to hold the companies accountable. Allowing only schools in good standing to seek new sponsors. Currently, if a board decides to close a poor performing school, the operator simply finds a new sponsor. Holding online schools to charter-school operating standards. In addition, the report recommends boosting charter-school funding in several ways. It calls for locally generated tax revenues to follow a student to the charter school of their choice. Currently, state aid goes to charter schools. Charters also should get funding for facilities and transporation.

“This report does a good job of pointing out where Ohio’s governance of community schools doesn’t work,” said state Auditor Dave Yost. “We can do a lot of good for our kids by seriously considering many of these ideas and best practices. I hope they will be among the General Assembly’s priorities in its next session.”

Yost has audited many of the charter schools and found, “lax oversight by boards, conflicts of interest, improper spending and even criminal conduct by some rogue schools and operators,” according to a release.

Ohio lawmakers approved the creation of charter schools in 1997 and currently about 124,000 students – 7 percent of those statewide – attend 390 schools statewide.

ACLU of Ohio says state can't "inject religious criteria" into Gov. Kasich's student mentoring program

COLUMBUS, Ohio, The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is researching possible legal action over a requirement for schools to have religious partners to be part of Gov. John Kasich's $10 million student mentoring program.

Christine Link, ACLU of Ohio executive director, said she is troubled that the new "Community Connectors" program requires that a "house of worship" or "faith-based" organization join with a business and a school before the school can qualify for grants from the program.

As The Plain Dealer reported last Friday, other non-profit organizations that want to mentor students can participate, but only if a business and a religious group are also in the partnership with the school. But the other non-profits are not eligible if no religious group is included.

In a letter this week to Kasich and State Superintendent Richard Ross, ACLU officials say they are "troubled" that the state has "injected religious criteria" into the program and that the requirement may be unconstitutional. Link said the government and schools can have religious groups work with students, just with strong limits, but not give them preferences or include them at the exclusion of other groups.

"The government is not supposed to prefer religion over non religion," said Link.

(Read more at Cleveland.com)

Ohio's charter school performance is "grim" and needs state attention, Stanford researcher tells the City Club

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Ohio's longstanding and "grim" problem with underperforming charter schools is improving, a Stanford researcher said at the City Club today, but the state needs to increase its quality control efforts.

Macke Raymond, director of Stanford's Center for Research of Educational Outcomes (CREDO), presented details from CREDO's just-released report on charter schools in Ohio to a lunchtime crowd, while also discussing policy changes that can improve charters.

Most of all, Raymond stressed, Ohio has an "expanded need for attention to quality" of charter schools to reduce the large amount -- about half -- whose students show both low ability and low improvement in reading and math.

"Year over year over year, (the students) are actually falling further behind," Raymond said, with chances of ever reading well or having basic math skills "virtually nil."

As we reported yesterday, and as Raymond told the City Club crowd today, CREDO found that students learn less in charter schools than in traditional districts – the equivalent of 36 days of learning in math and 14 days in reading.

The results for Cleveland are very different from the rest of the state, with charter schools here outperforming district schools by 14 days of learning in both subjects.

(Read more at Cleveland.com)