Failing charter schools are growing in Ohio

Innovation Ohio has produced an analysis showing that while the latest budget continues to starve traditional public schools of funding, it is giving ever increasing aid to Ohio's failing charter schools.

The new two-year budget also raised the level of funding for Ohio’s existing charter schools by $30 million, from $824 million in 2012-2013 to $854 million in 2013-2014.

Year	Charter Deducation
2012-13	$824,421,026
HB 59 forecast	$854,482,608
New eSchools	$10,683,200
New Charters	$82,909,478
2013-14 total (proj.)	$948,075,286

When all these effects are combined — more base funding, lifting the eSchool moratorium and 49 new brick and mortar charter schools, the amount of funding deducted for charter schools in Ohio could increase by as much as $124 million this year, bringing the total that is redirected from traditional public schools to $948 million. (“as much as” because this analysis assumes that new eSchools and charters are pulling kids from traditional public districts and not other charters)

A billion dollar boondoggle.

Poll: Majority reject high stakes testing

American policy makers are forging ahead with education initiatives, but they may be leaving Americans behind and out of the loop.

Since 1969 Gallup and Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK), a global association of education professionals, has conducted the annual Poll of the Public’s Attitude Toward the Public Schools. This years poll continues to show the public is rejecting the corproate education reform agenda

The poll notes that

Results of the poll come in a time of unsettledness in the American education franchise. Recent major reform efforts — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards — face uncertain futures even as the poll lays bare a significant rift between policy makers and ordinary citizens and parents. For example:
• Fewer than 25% of Americans believe increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools.
• A majority of Americans reject using student scores from standardized tests to evaluate teachers.

Q: Some states require that teacher evaluations include how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests. Do you favor or oppose this requirement?

	2013	2012
Favor	41	52
Oppose	58	47
Don't Know/refused	1	1

As you can see from the table above, the oppostion is growing larger. There is also large opposition to newspapers publishing teachers value-added scores, something the Plain Dealer and NPR did in Ohio this year, and which JTF condemned.

Q: Some newspapers are releasing information about how the students of individual teachers perform on standard- ized tests. Do you favor or oppose the release of this informa- tion to the public?

	2013	2011
Favor	37	51
Oppose	63	48
Don't Know/refused	0	1

The poll also finds that

• More than 70% of Americans have “trust and confidence” in public school educators.
• A majority give public schools in their community an ‘A’ or “B’ – the highest rating every recorded by the poll.
• Seventy percent of Americans oppose private school vouchers —another high mark for the Gallup survey.
• Overwhelmingly, Americans do not worry about their child’s safety while attending school. Asked about ways to promote school safety, respondents preferred greater access to mental health services over the hiring more security guards.
• Americans chose critical thinking skills as the most important 21st Century skill, followed closely by communications skills.

You can read the entire poll here

Is high stakes testing of young children harming their brains?

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) reports that Washington DC, the center of the corporate education reform world, is about to being high stakes testing of 3 and 4 year olds.

...all of the city’s Pre-K and lower elementary charter school programs will forthwith be ranked according to a weighted formula that assigns between 60 and 80% of a school’s overall performance to student reading and math scores. And although the proposal includes the possibility for schools to “opt-in” to adding an assessment that measures the social and emotional (SEL) growth of children, it would count for just 15% of the total for Preschool and PreK, and 10% for Kindergarten.

On the face of it, this is testing gone mad, but the problems might be much more severe for the well-being of the young students themselves

This sort of weighted formula squares neatly with the latest trends in education policy. It does not, however, align with the latest research on the brain.

“Everything that happens to us affects the way the brain develops,” says Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the author of The Whole Brain Child. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship. What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

Where we direct our attention, then, matters greatly when it comes to determining what our children will practice doing, and how their brains will develop. And what scholars like Siegel are saying is that the worst thing we can do is disproportionately weight one piece of the developmental puzzle. “We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way,” he explains. “We want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of the brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival.”

The testing mania, especially for younger students, needs a timeout.

Using Value-Added to Compare Teachers Who Work in Different Schools

The Carnegie Knowledge Network have an interesting brief looking at what we know about value-added variation among educators who teach at different schools, the correctly note that

Some schools are more effective than others by virtue of their favorable resources, leadership, or organization; we can expect that teachers of similar skill will perform better in these more effective schools.

This then adds a new wrinkle to using value-added to evaluate the efficacy of individual teachers. Not only can value-added scores be dramatically affected by the socioeconomic conditions in the community and student body, but significant variation can exist between schools in the same communities. Carnegie notes

This brief has considered sources of potential bias when we use value-added scores to compare teachers working in different schools. A growing body of evidence suggests that schools can vary substantially in their effectiveness, potentially inflating the value-added scores of teachers assigned to effective schools. Schools also vary in contextual conditions such as parental expectations, neighborhood safety, and peer influences that may directly support learning or that may contribute to school and teacher effectiveness. Moreover, schools vary substantially in the backgrounds of the students they serve, and conventional statistical methods tend to break down when we compare teachers serving very different subsets of students.

Carnegie recommends much more study and analysis, and concludes that the possible stratification of teachers into sub-groups serving similar students, complicate value-added analysis and may not be congruent with policymakers’ wish to compare all teachers in a district.

You can read their short brief, here.

Voters: spend more on public education

Education Next released their 7th annual survey of the publics attitude towards a range of education issues. You can read their entire survey, here.

We want to draw your attention to the public attitude towards school funding

	Public	Parents
Greatly Increase	14%	26%
Increase	39%	35%
Stay About the Same	40%	28%
Decrease	6%	4%
Greatly Decrease	1%	1%

We can see from the results above that the majority of people (53%) want to see education funding increase, with a fully 2/3's of parents wanting that. Only 7% of the population want to see education funding cut - the actual policies being pursued by the governor and his legislative allies in the previous 2 budgets. This helps explain his collapsing poll numbers, once it is understood how unpopular this chosen course of action is. To further exemplify how out of the mainstream the governor's policies have been, the publics attitude towards teacher pay is in contradiction to the governor's preferred policy choices (such as SB5). When asked "Do you think that public school teacher salaries in your state should increase, decrease, or stay about the same?

	Public	Parents
Greatly Increase	10%	19%
Increase	45%	37%
Stay About the Same	37%	40%
Decrease	7%	4%
Greatly Decrease	1%	0%

A majority of the public want to see teacher pay increase. This should sound caution to some of the more extreme school boards around the state (we're looking at you, Fairborn) who are looking to boost their Tea Party bone fides

When looking at the year over year trends, Education next notes

Those supporting such performance pay policies remains at 49 percent, virtually unchanged from the last time we asked this question in 2011. However, resistance to the use of student performance information to evaluate teachers seems to have intensified. Opposition to basing teacher salaries in part on student progress has grown from 27 percent to 39 percent over the past two years.
Similarly, 27 percent oppose basing decisions about teacher tenure on how well students progress on standardized tests, nearly double the 14 percent opposed to the idea one year ago.
[...]
Growing resistance to reform extends to school voucher programs as well. Opposition to expanding school choice through a universal voucher initiative that “gives all students an opportunity to go to private schools with government funding” is higher in this year’s survey than a year ago. Whereas 29 percent of Americans expressed opposition to universal vouchers in the 2012 survey, 37 percent do so in this year’s survey.

The evidence is clear, the corporate reform movements efforts are running out of steam, and support

Kaisch trails in latest poll

If latest polling is any indication, the public is souring on Gov Kasich and his budget that did little to alleviate the financial stress on local communities and schools.

PPP, Just released their latest poll of Ohio, and after months of Ohioans having a positive opinion of the Governor's job, his approval is now underwater.

Do you approve or disapprove of Governor John Kasich's job performance?

42% Approve
47% Disapprove
11% Not sure

The news gets worse for the Governor. His likely opponent in next years election, Ed FitzGerald has taken the lead for the first time

If the candidates for Governor next year were Republican John Kasich and Democrat Ed FitzGerald, who would you vote for?

John Kasich 35%
Ed FitzGerald 38%
Undecided 27%

If anything should be clear it is that policies matter and the Governor has pursued unpopular ones, especially when it comes to financing local schools and communities.

Ohio Statewide Results by jointhefuture