House passes bill to reform Ohio charter schools

Attention on overhauling Ohio’s oft-criticized charter-school laws now turns to the Senate, where Democrats, state Auditor Dave Yost and charter supporters hope to see additions made to a bill that the House passed on Thursday with broad support.

House Bill 2 includes roughly three dozen changes aimed at transparency, accountability and oversight of charter schools that are spending upward of $1 billion a year in state taxpayer money to educate 100,000-plus students.

“There is no such thing as a perfect bill. But this is a good bill that moves us in the right direction,” said Rep. Mike Dovilla, R-Berea, a prime sponsor.

Dovilla said the bill is the most-comprehensive charter-school legislation in a dozen years. A wave of recent studies and media reports have highlighted issues with charter-school academic performance, attendance counts, lease deals and lack of transparency.

In addition to the House bill, Gov. John Kasich included charter-school provisions in his two-year budget, and Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, has held informal meetings with experts to craft legislation likely to be introduced early next week.

(Read more at Dispatch)

How money is corrupting charter school purpose

The new charter school movement is a compilation of money, marketing and the mistaken use of the free market theory, which is suppressing the schools’ founding ideology that supported innovative, energetic educational think tanks and lab schools to enrich and inform public education.

The new charter school movement lacks innovation, has minimal quality control, promotes conflicts of interest, is a breeding ground for fraud and makes for-profit corporations wealthy on our tax dollars.

I supported the creation of charter schools. However, the charter school movement has morphed into a money machine and is bad for altruistic charters as well as traditional public schools. I think parents deserve choice. However, I also believe we should strive for quality choice, which means we need a strong authorizing board that values quality and sets high standards.

The word has gotten out that charter schools are huge money-making machines. Corporate and education management companies are raking in millions from taxpayers. Taxpayers, regardless of whether they have children in schools, might want to start paying attention to the huge amount of taxpayer dollars these companies are consuming with absolutely no transparency and no accountability. Hard-earned dollars are disappearing into a black hole.

Read more here

Some fixes still needed

State lawmakers are on the verge of enacting significant, much-needed reform to Ohio’s weak and ineffective system of charter-school regulation.

A strong version of House Bill 2 could be remembered as the turning point at which the legislature got serious about making charter schools a high-quality educational alternative, rather than just an opportunity for certain donors to make hay.

Unfortunately, the bill, despite a number of excellent provisions, was set back on Tuesday by an amendment that reopens a loophole through which failing charter schools for years have clung to existence. The bill as introduced had language aimed at stopping “sponsor-hopping”; that’s when a bad school with a responsible sponsor knows the sponsor is about to shut it down for its poor performance and, to avoid that fate, quickly finds another, less-ethical sponsor.

The original bill would have stopped this by requiring a poorly performing school to seek approval from the Ohio Department of Education before changing sponsors. But that provision was removed. The amendment says that ODE permission to change sponsors would be required only in a school’s first four years of operation, or if it had changed sponsors any time in the previous five years. This means that a school established longer than four years could change sponsors at will, no matter how poorly the school is performing.

That could allow a badly run charter school to continue spending tax dollars to ill-serve students for years.

If this change isn’t undone by the House before it votes on the bill, the Senate should be sure to do so.

(Read more at the Dispatch).

Senate Passes Contentious Testing and K-12 Deregulation Bill

On March 25, the Ohio Senate passed SB3 along party lines. This omnibus education bill has a number of components. Testing, evaluations, deregulation and some other miscellaneous provisions.

Here's a breakdown of the major components

Deregulation

  • Exempts qualified school districts from several requirements of current law regarding teacher qualifications under the third-grade reading guarantee, teacher licensing, mentoring under the Ohio Teacher Residency Program, and class size restrictions.
  • Qualifies a school district for the above exemptions if, on its most recent report card, the district received (1) at least 85% of the total possible points for the performance index score, (2) an "A" for performance indicators met, and (3) at least 93% and 95% for the four-year and five-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, respectively.
  • Qualifies for an alternative resident educator license an individual who has not completed coursework in the subject area for which the individual is applying to teach.

The provisions are asinine. They eliminate all the regulations that made a district high performing in the first place. What parent wants to send their child to a high performing district where class sizes are very large and being taught by unlicensed amateurs? What district wants that? Even the President of the Senate admits as much in a Dispatch article

“I understand the angst of saying we’re going to open it up willy-nilly to let the superintendent hire his brother to teach physics,” he said. “The superintendent has got to be responsible. The school board that is elected needs to be responsible for that decision.”

Testing

  • Limits the cumulative amount of time spent on the administration of state assessments to 2% of the school year beginning with the 2015-2016 school year.
  • Limits the cumulative amount of time used for taking practice or diagnostic assessments used to prepare for state assessments to 1% of the school year beginning with the 2015-2016 school year.
  • Exempts from the time limitation assessments administered to students with disabilities, diagnostic assessments for students who fail to attain a passing score on the third-grade reading guarantee, assessments used to identify gifted students, and for alternatives to certain end-of-course examinations.
  • Eliminates the current requirement that school districts and schools administer diagnostic assessments to students in grades one through three in writing and mathematics, but retains diagnostic assessments for kindergarten students and reading assessments for students in grades one through three beginning with the 2015-2016 school year.
  • Requires that school districts and schools administer the English language arts assessment to third graders at least once annually, instead of twice as under current law, beginning with the 2015-2016 school year.

It's a pity that the Senate can't wait for their own panels investigation and recommendations on addressing the testing overload crisis before passing these vague measures.

Evaluations

  • Modifies the alternative framework for teacher evaluations, beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, by increasing (to 50%) the teacher performance measure, decreasing (to 35%) the student academic growth measure, and permitting districts and schools to use a combination of specified components for the remainder of each evaluation.
  • Prohibits student academic growth from accounting for more than 35% of each principal evaluation, beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, if the State Board of Education prescribes a state framework for principal evaluations.
  • Requires the State Board, by July 1, 2015, to take the necessary steps to modify any framework it prescribes for the evaluation of principals in order to comply with the bill's provisions.
  • Specifies that if the State Board prescribes an assessment for participants in the Ohio Teacher Residency Program, each district or school may (1) require the participant to pass that assessment, or (2) assess the participant using the participant's annual teacher evaluation.

These measures are heading in the right direction, but still less reliance on student growth measures is needed to create an evaluation framework that will improve educator quality.

Miscellaneous

  • Requires the School Facilities Commission, by December 15, 2015, to develop and submit to the General Assembly a legislative proposal assisting school districts to receive funding under the Classroom Facilities Assistance Program.
  • Increases the competitive bidding threshold for school building and repair contracts from $25,000 to $50,000.
  • Removes a requirement that the State Board adopt a measure, to be reported separately from the district's or school's report card, for the amount of extracurricular services offered to students.

In Teaching Experience Counts, Studies Find

Much of the impetus for new teacher evaluation systems has been based upon the belief that teaching experience is less important than demonstrating competence via student test scores. This belief has become popular among corporate reformers for providing a potential mechanism to remove older more expensive teachers and replace them with cheaper less experienced teachers.

We have published hundreds of articles and studies here at Join the Future pointing out the dangers of relying upon student test scores for the purposes of evaluating teacher quality. Study after study has found the measures to be unreliable and unfair. Worse, it exploded that amount of testing students are having to needlessly endure, and sapped the morale of educators dealing with an unfair system to the point where an exodus of talented educators form the profession is real and happening.

Now comes evidence that the premise itself, that experience doesn't add to quality over time, is fatally flawed.

The evidence comes in the form of 2 new studies. The first in a paper published by Harvard, titled Productivity Returns to Experience in the Teacher Labor Market: Methodological Challenges and New Evidence on Long-Term Career Improvement, the researchers conclude

We find consistent evidence across models that teachers improve most rapidly during their first several years on the job but also continue to improve their ability to raise student test scores beyond the first five years of their careers. This directly contradicts the standard policy conclusion that teachers do not improve after the first three to five years of their career. Finally, we find suggestive evidence across multiple modeling approaches that teachers continue to improve even later in their careers, particularly in mathematics.

The second in a working paper, published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), titled RETURNS TO TEACHER EXPERIENCE: STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT AND MOTIVATION IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, the author finds

We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers’ years of experience. The paper contributes to the literature by focusing on middle school teachers and by extending the analysis to student outcomes beyond test scores. Once we control statistically for the quality of individual teachers by the use of teacher fixed effects, we find large returns to experience for middle school teachers in the form both of higher test scores and improvements in student behavior, with the clearest behavioral effects emerging for reductions in student absenteeism. Moreover these returns extend well beyond the first few years of teaching. The paper contributes to policy debates by documenting that teachers can and do learn on the job.

These findings should come as no surprise. The claims that experience don't count beyond the first few years was always a spurious argument, running counter to most people's own working life experience and observations.

It is past time to discard corporate education policies designed to cheapen public education, and instead embrace quality through team working, professionalization, and ongoing career training

Value Subtracted

If the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of teaching, depending so much on highly unreliable scores is likely to be counterproductive. A much more effective and proven approach is to promote team-based, data-driven support systems to help teachers become better at their jobs, day in and day out.

Currently, teacher ratings are primarily based on principals’ evaluations, sometimes in combination with parent or student surveys. Few would argue for retaining the status quo, which provides minimal useful feedback to teachers. But embracing standardized test scores because of their purported objectivity is a false promise. Abundant research shows that test scores are a poor proxy for teacher quality and that adopting them will make it harder to implement changes that are proven to help student outcomes.

New York is running behind the national stampede toward incorporating “objective” measures of student performance in evaluating teachers. Drawing from the vernacular of economics and business, such “value-added” measures suggest that the worth of teachers can be derived from comparing how their students’ standardized test scores change over the course of a school year. The Obama administration has used its Race to the Top grants and waivers of No Child Left Behind requirements to push states to adopt value-added provisions, which are championed by well-heeled foundations as well as conservative critics of teachers’ unions. From 2010 to 2013, the number of states requiring that teacher evaluations include standardized test scores soared from 16 to 41, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. As of September 2013, 35 states’ and the District of Columbia’s public schools require that standardized test scores be counted as either a significant or the most significant factor in teacher evaluations.

(Read more at Slate).