Charter school performance crisis

The Ohio Department of education finally released their complete set of school ratings data, so we can once again take a look at the performance of traditional public schools and Ohio's charter schools. Keep in mind as you look at these results that charter schools in Ohio cost $54 more per pupil than traditional public schools, and that 90% of the money going to charter schools that are rated in Ohio go from better performing school districts to poorer performing charter schools on the Performance Index.

So, with that in mind, how do these schools stack up against each other?

The answer is, that charters do not stack up well against traditional public schools at all. Less than 10% of Ohio's charter schools rate excellent or better, compared to 54% of Ohio's traditional public schools. Worse still, at the bottom end, almost 40% of Ohio's charter schools are in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with just over 11% of Ohio's traditional public schools.

These results make it very difficult to justify diverting over $820 million from traditional schools delivering a quality education to charter schools delivering failure.

Standards are now so low in some Ohio charter schools that an investigative report by State Impact has found

Can’t pass the Ohio Graduation Tests? No problem, some charter schools say. You can still graduate.

At some Ohio charter schools, if a student can’t pass Ohio’s five graduation exams — in reading, writing, math, science and social studies — the schools enroll them in a series of correspondence courses through an Illinois-based school. The student then earns a high school diploma from the state of Illinois. Illinois does not require students to pass a state test to graduate.

If there's an education crisis in Ohio, it's with Ohio's charter schools first, and most.

Fordham Exposed Part II

In part I of Fordham Exposed we introduced you to the conservative corporate education reform organization running some Ohio charter schools, and two of its biggest boosters, Terry Ryan and Michael Petrilli. Now let us take a closer look at this Foundation.

You can see the list of Fordham's charter schools here. We knew a short while ago that Fordham was publicly talking a good game, but playing a weak one, when the Ohio Department of Education released the ranking of charter sponsors. Of those 38 ranked sponsors, Fordham was down in a lowly 24th position. You don't rank that low by running quality schools and delivering quality education to students.

This view was further confirmed when ODE released their preliminary school rankings in mid November. The following table is the performance of Fordham's Ohio charter schools from that ODE report, the ranking is out of 3456 schools, and sorted with best first.

2011 RANK	SCHOOL NAME	SCHOOL CLASS TYPE	2011 LRC RATING
1792	Columbus Collegiate Academy	Middle School	Effective
2661	Sciotoville	High School	Cont. Improve.
2687	Phoenix Community Learning Ctr	Elementary School	Effective
2716	Dayton Leadership Academies-Dayton View Campus	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.
2840	Sciotoville Elementary Academy	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.
2977	KIPP: Journey Academy	Middle School	Effective
3052	Springfield Acad Of Excellence	Elementary School	Academic Watch
3188	Dayton Leadership Academies-Dayton Liberty Campus	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.

Almost 2,400 students are in Fordham charter schools that rank in the bottom half of all of Ohio's schools. Why hasn't Fordham been able to translate SB5 like tools into educational success in the many years they have been sponsoring these charters?

They are unencumbered by unionized teachers, state mandated regulations, all the things that should add up to a corporate education reformer's brightest dream. Yes their results are poorer than the majority of Ohio's traditional public schools, who allegedly are held back by unions, bad teachers, and outdated rules.

How can Fordham possibly have any credibility on the issue of education reform when their corporate reform ideas when implemented are delivering such real world lackluster results? When their performance is worse than the majority of traditional schoold they would seek to supplant.

It surely cannot be on account of money. The Fordham Foundation spends an inordinate amount of money on education reform. According to the latest publicly available tax return - their 2009 IRS form 990 from Guidestar, Fordham has over $37 million on hand, and spends over $4 million a year on its programs and advocacy.

Indeed, in 2009 alone, according to the same document, Fordham spent $485,000 on management of its Ohio charters, $745,000 on "National reform efforts", $163,000 on Ohio specific education "reform efforts" and a further $571,000 on Ohio legislative lobbying and what even they deem as "provocative analysis".

But lobbying and "provocative analysis" aren't the only largesse that Fordham spend their vast resources on. As employees of Fordham such as Mr. Ryan and Mr. Petrilli rail against education associations and teacher pay they have both been significant recipients of the Foundation's generosity.

Name	2007 (link)	2008 (link)	2009 (link)
Mr. Terry Ryan	$73,905 for 20 hours per week	$83,700 for 20 hours per week	$91,100 for 20 hours per week
Mr. Michael Petrilli	$73,905 for 20 hours per week	$83,700 for 20 hours per week	$91,100 for 20 hours per week

Their annual increases, for this part-time work, represent 13.2% and 8.8% up to 2009. One can only imagine what these two gentlemen are earning in 2011 for the part-time work of railing against teachers and their unions. But when you're earning almost twice that of the average Ohio teacher, and doing so for part-time work, all the while receiving up to double digit increases in pay, year on year, these kinds of comments are hard to swallow.

And to be sure, you can find examples of unions—of police, firefighters, even teachers—who have agreed to freeze wages or reduce benefits in order to protect the quality of services or keep colleagues from being laid off. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

They hare hardly the exception to prove any rule, real or as is the case here, imagined. Ohio public employees, especially teachers, have been responsible for saving taxpayers over 1 billion dollars in wage and benefit concessions.

So where does all this leave us? It leaves us wondering why an organization that espouses corporate education reform ideas cannot successfully implement them in their own lackluster schools, and why they biggest and most vocal boosters think the gravy tastes better on their plate than on any others. It is this then, that is the pure essence and purpose of corporate education reform.

If education quality actually mattered to Fordham they would expend more energy figuring out why their schools are under performing so as to use those lessons to actually benefot the debate over educstion reform. Instead what we have is "provocative analysis" to defend failing ideas while attacking public school teachers and their union, who in the majority are producing far high quality results at a fraction of the cost.

Delivering lower costs, higher quality

Innovation Ohio recently published a study that showed that states, like Ohio, that had collective bargaining for educators produced lower costs and higher quality than states that had weaker collective bargaining laws.

In fact, research shows that eliminating or effectively crippling the state’s collective bargaining system will be as likely to add to state and local budget woes as cure the
[...]
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Ohio’s kindergarten, elementary, middle school and high school teachers saw their salaries, on average, drop 3.8% between 2008 and 2009, the latest year BLS’s Occupational Employment Statistics are available. The national average was a 2% increase.
[...]
Even though states that limit teachers’ rights to collectively bargain make up less than one-third of all the states, they make up half of the top 10 salary increases in the contiguous 48 states, with reduced teachers’ rights states taking the top three spots (Wyoming at 11.2%, Texas at 7% and Louisiana at 5.9%).
[...]
In Education Week’s annual K-12 Student Achievement rankings, NO reduced teachers’ rights states scored in the top 10 states. In fact, the top 13 K-12 Achievement states were all states that require collective bargaining for its teachers. Meanwhile, Ohio scored better than 75% of the reduced teachers’ rights states on the K-12 Achievement measure.

While none of the top 10 achieving states were reduced teachers’ rights states, they did make up 7 of the bottom 10 K-12 Achievement states. That means that almost half of all reduced teachers’ rights states ranked in the bottom 10 states on their students’ achievement.

The results revealed by this report should come as no surprise to anyone who has been involved in, or observed, the collective bargaining process across Ohio's school districts. Teachers and education support professionals have consistently demonstrasted a commitment not only to delivering a quality education to their students, but to the communities they serve. Eliminating this important voice eliminates the ability to deliver these results.

Time for Governor Kasich to listen

We became aware of the Governor's office standing up some central Ohio teachers yesterday, for what was supposed to be a meeting to discuss new school funding formulas.

Columbus teachers who were present have a great write up of the incident. More troubling that some meeting mix-up however is the ongoing pattern of trying to avoid real meaningful teacher input

While the anatomy of the new school funding formula has yet to be determined, the governor’s spokesperson has gone on record saying the new model will be contain the “over-arching principal of driving more money into the classroom.” Mattei-Smith scheduled five meetings over a two-week period inviting teachers, superintendents and principals, but failed to include teacher-leaders from the Ohio Education Association or the Ohio Federation of Teachers until much later in the process.

This meeting information was initially only shared with administrative groups and not with the teacher organizations (OEA and OFT). Information about these series of meetings was only received after “prodding” Barbara Mattei-Smith for it.

What is currently passing for education policy and its development is a shambles. There simply cannot be any meaningful progress without serious consultation with teaching professionals. Attempts to craft policy without broad consultation is going to lead to terrible policy being made that is harmful to public education in Ohio, and the students who are served by it.

It's time for the Governor to personally meet with teachers associations and spend some time listening to professionals who are on the front lines of delivering quality public education every day. He then needs to take what he hears seriously.