Mixed messages from legislature

Greg Mild at Plunderbund delves into the 3rd grade reading guarantee and discovers that it's provisions could potentially cost teachers $17,000 out of their own pocket.

The same Ohio legislators who sought to reduce teacher compensation through Senate Bill 5 last year and who have cut public school funding (including to the Ohio Department of Education), included a requirement in the 3rd Grade Guarantee that will cost individual teachers over $17,000 each — most likely an out-of-pocket expense.
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Absent the revisions (where was ODE when this law was being passed in the first place?), all teachers working with students who fall under this law’s provisions will be required to have a reading endorsement as part of their teaching license.

Greg goes on to detail the costs.

But, let's back away from the details for a moment to look at the underlying policy itself. If the legislature truly believes that licensure is not one of the best ways to measure a teachers effectiveness, why then are they relying upon a license in the case of the 3rd grade reading guarantee?

Why are they not instead mandating that a principal assigns the most highly rated teacher to the task of providing 3rd grade reading remediation, rather than some potential slacker with a license?

Talk about mixed messages. Why would any teacher bother to go to the time and expense of getting this license, when there is clear policy that it bares no relationship to pay in the eyes on the legislature?

Ohio Voters’ Checklist

Via www.866ourvote.org

Election Protection and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights have released voter rights checklists for all 50 states. These one-page guides explain polling times, what IDs may be required to vote, rights to provisional ballots and more and include the phone number for a toll-free Election Protection Hotline you can use if you encounter problems trying to cast your vote.

If you have any questions or need further information, please call the Election Protection Hotline 4842-6987-3167\2 at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) or go to www.866OurVote.org. For Spanish-language assistance, call 1-888-Ve-Y-Vota.

1. On Election Day, EACH POLLING PLACE WILL BE OPEN BETWEEN 6:30 A.M. AND 7:30 P.M. A voter in line by 7:30 P.M. HAS THE RIGHT TO VOTE.

2. Ohio law requires that each polling place be accessible to physically disabled voters, unless exempted. If exempted, the disabled voter must be required to vote curbside in your vehicle.

3. If you cannot read or write, or you are blind or otherwise disabled, and need assistance voting, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RECEIVE HELP WITH VOTING and may designate someone of your choice, other than an employer or an officer or agent of your union, to provide such assistance. Election officials may also provide assistance.

4. If you do not have photo identification at the polls, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE a provisional ballot that should be counted as long as you are properly registered to vote and in the right precinct, which is where you reside on Election Day. For your provisional ballot to count, you must show, either at your precinct or at the county Board of Elections within ten (10) days either the last four digits of your social security number, driver’s license number, sign an affirmation or show a valid form of identification. To vote a REGULAR ballot, you must show: a current and valid Ohio driver’s license, a current and valid photo identification issued by Ohio or federal government, a military identification (if it can be ascertained by the poll worker that the person is who they say they are), or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or another government document

5. If you have moved within the same precinct, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE a regular ballot upon completing a change of residence at the polls.

6. If you have moved to a different precinct in the same county prior to the election, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE at the polling place of your NEW residence upon updating your registration. If you do not update before Election Day, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE a provisional ballot on Election Day.

7. If you have moved to a different county prior to the election, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE a provisional ballot at the new polling place that corresponds to your new address in your NEW COUNTY, or at the Board of Elections, on Election Day upon completing a change of residence at the polls.

8. If you make a mistake or “spoil” your ballot, and have not cast the ballot, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RECEIVE UP TO TWO REPLACEMENT BALLOT after returning the spoiled ballot.

9. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO WAIT TO VOTE (OR TO VOTE) without anyone electioneering or trying to influence your vote within the area marked by small U.S. flags, or within ten feet of you if you are in line outside that area.

10. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT to take up to five minutes in the voting booth, if all booths are occupied and voters are waiting in line. If all booths are not occupied and there are not voters waiting in line, you may take longer than five minutes.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE THIS CHECKLIST INTO THE VOTING BOOTH WITH YOU.

You can download a copy of this checklist, here.

Kasich cuts bite deep locally

A new report finds that the loss of teachers and other education staff is forcing communities into difficult choices that harm our children’s education and future, including increasing class sizes and shortening school years and days. The report shows that more than 300,000 local education jobs have been lost since the end of the recession – a figure that stands in stark contrast to previous economic recoveries. As a result, the national student-teacher ratio increased by 4.6 percent from 2008 to 2010, rolling back all the gains made since 2000. Increased class sizes have negative consequences for the future of America’s children at a time when education has never been more important to finding a good job and maintaining our competitiveness as a nation.

In Ohio, as Plunderbund notes, the effects of the Kasich budget have been similar and dramatic, as we now find local communities being asked to pick up the budget pieces

Over 63% of the school levies on the general election ballot are Kasich levies seeking to increase property tax funding for schools to replace the lost of state funding.

We catalogued the full list of school levies on the November ballot, here.

Governor John Kasich enacted Ohio's most draconian education cuts in the state's history, and as a consequence is now causing either local taxes to increase to meet the serious shortfalls, or degrading educational quality with increased class sizes, cuts in programs, nutrition, busing and sport.

He will have a chance to reverse this in his up coming budget, we urge him and the legislature to do so, our future, as the report below indicates, depends upon it Investing in Our Future Report

Where the polls stand - 1 week to go

With the debates behind us, and just a week of swing state campaigning ahead, the race for the Presidency is once again a close, polarized affair, between two very different choices.

Real Clear Politics has Mitt Romney falling back slightly from their previous weeks projection, with Obama favored to win 201 electoral college votes, Mitt Romney 191 (down from 206), and 146 up for grabs.

President Obama maintains a small but persistent lead in Ohio, of around 2%

The NYT calculates that this persistent lead is now projecting a 74.9% chance of President winning Ohio next Tuesday.

538 projects Obama to win 296.6 electoral college votes to Mitt Romeny's 241.4

2 new studies question value add measures

Evidence is overwhelming, as yet more studies show that using value add to measure teacher quality is fraught with error.

Academic tracking in secondary education appears to confound an increasingly common method for gauging differences in teacher quality, according to two recently released studies.

Failing to account for how students are sorted into more- or less-rigorous classes—as well as the effect different tracks have on student learning—can lead to biased "value added" estimates of middle and high school teachers' ability to boost their students' standardized-test scores, the papers conclude.

"I think it suggests that we're making even more errors than we need to—and probably pretty large errors—when we're applying value-added to the middle school level," said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, whose study examines the application of a value-added approach to middle school math scores.

High-school-level findings from a separate second study, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., complement Mr. Harris' paper.

"At the elementary level, [value-added] is a pretty reliable measure, in terms of predicting how teachers will perform the following year," Mr. Jackson said. "At the high school level, it is quite a bit less reliable, so the scope for using this to improve student outcomes is much more limited."

The first study mentioned in this article concludes(emphasis ours)

We test the degree to which variation in measured performance is due to misalignment versus selection bias in a statewide sample of middle schools where students and teachers are assigned to explicit “tracks,” reflecting heterogeneous student ability and/or preferences. We find that failing to account for tracks leads to large biases in teacher value-added estimates.

A teacher of all lower track courses whose measured value-added is at the 50th percentile could increase her measured value-added to the 99th percentile simply by switching to all upper-track courses. We estimate that 75-95 percent of the bias is due to student sorting and the remainder due to test misalignment.

We also decompose the remaining bias into two parts, metric and multidimensionality misalignment, which work in opposite directions. Even after accounting for explicit tracking, the standard method for estimating teacher value-added may yield biased estimates.

The second study, replicates the findings and concludes

Unlike in elementary-school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding tracks effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, algebra teachers have modest effects and there is little evidence of English teacher effects.

Unlike in elementary-school, value-added estimates are weak predictors of teachers’ future performance. Results indicate that either (a) teachers are less influential in high-school than in elementary-school, or (b) test-scores are a poor metric to measure teacher quality at the high-school level.

Corporate education reformers need to begin to address the science that is refuting their policies, the sooner this happens, the less damage is likely to be wrought.

Dispatch must apologize

The school attendance erasures issue continues to be a scandal that isn't. Despite finding nothing more than bureaucratic missteps in his first interim report, the State Auditor has now released a second interim report that has found no evidence of wrongdoing at a further batch of schools.

Just two weeks before school districts across Ohio ask voters for more money, state Auditor Dave Yost reported that his team has not uncovered any more evidence of scrubbing student attendance data.

In the latest update, Yost said auditors examined records at 81 schools in 47 districts and cleared all but eight of the 81. Testing at those eight buildings as well as 15 other buildings from the first interim report is still underway, Yost said. A final report is due sometime around Jan. 1.

Twenty of the 81 schools examined in this round had reporting errors but not enough to suggest scrubbing.
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“Odds are most districts are reporting their attendance data accurately and they’re not scrubbing,” Yost said at a press conference Tuesday.

Again, simply some bureaucratic missteps caused by "the sheer complexity of the accountability system" as the Auditor himself describes it, in his conclusion.

This is a far cry from the irresponsible reporting and opinionating that the Columbus Dispatch has engaged in for a number of months now. Time and time again they have failed to wait for the evidence, and instead jumped to conclusions and made inferences that turned out to be incorrect.

Rather than bemoan the slipping away of a potential Pulitzer, they surely thought they were earning, they ought to have some serious introspection on how they could have gotten a story so very wrong and caused Ohio's schools systems so much trouble.

They have slandered and smeared thousands of public school employees up and down the state with their reckless allegations and accusations. They need to apologize and accept responsibility.

Second Interim Report on Student Attendance and Accountability System