Kasich Has Pushed Ed Beyond Breaking Point

At the onset of the great recession, Ohio employed 107,047 classroom teachers according to the ODE Teacher Information Report for 2008-09. The figure for 2012-13 stands at 100,156. That's a decline of 6,891 teachers during Governor Kasich's tenure. Barely less than the number of teachers in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati - combined.

Beyond this massive attrition due to austere budget cuts made by the Governor and his legislative allies has also come onerous new requirements, most of which have been unfunded.

The implementation and execution of an evaluation system so crippling that the Ohio Senate recently passed a bill to fix it - unanimously, before OTES has even fully come online. A 3rd grade reading guarantee, common core, PARCC assessments - all with little or no money to fund implementation.

Not satisfied with draconian cuts to districts forcing a reduction of almost 7,000 teachers, the Governor and his allies have also expanded the choice failure. Combined, failing charter schools and unaccountable for-profit private schools are now draining over $1 billion dollars a year from traditional public schools.

If the Governor's goal was to push Ohio's public education system to the breaking point, he has succeeded.

Agenda Driven Charter Boosters

The National Alliance for Public Charters, like so many charter school boosters appears to care more about the quantity of charter schools than they do the quality.

This is clearly evident when looking at their state rankings for charter laws

Nicole Blalock, PhD a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University writes

In four of the states with a statistical difference between charter school students’ NAEP scores and public school students’ NAEP scores, statistical differences were observed for all grade/subject pairs tested. This occurred in the states of Alaska, Maryland, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

On average, in Alaska, students attending charter schools outperformed students in public schools by approximately 10 points in most grade/subject area tests and by more than 20 points in reading in grade 4. However, the National Alliance for Public Charters that ranked the 42 states with charter schools and the District of Colombia as per their charter school laws, ranked Alaska nearly the lowest (i.e., 41st of 43) for the “best” charter laws (“Measuring up to the model”, 2013). Put differently, the state whose charter school students performed among the best as compared to their public school peers just happened to be one of the worst charter states as externally ranked.

Otherwise, public school students outperformed charter school students in the other three states (i.e., Maryland, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) with consistent and significant score differences across the board. Maryland was one of two states to be ranked lower than Alaska for the “best” charter laws overall (i.e., 42nd of 43), and Ohio and Pennsylvania ranked in the middle of the pack (27th and 19th of 43 respectively). Each of these states demonstrated charter school student performance that lagged behind public school students by an average of 23 points.

Until charter school boosters begin to care more about quality than they do quantity, we're going to continue to have horribly performing charter schools in Ohio that are not serving our students. We cannot continue to focus on quantity over quality. The National Alliance for Public Charters state charter law ranking are absurd. Ohio should be ranked dead last, based on quality.

If a teacher was simply a babysitter

According to the Ohio Department of Education, the average teacher salary in 2013 was $56,715. For employees with advanced degrees, this doesn't crack the top ten industries when just looking at starting pay

1. Computer science: Average starting pay: $73,700
2. Business administration/management: Average starting pay: $69,200
3. Mechanical engineering: Average starting pay: $66,800
4. Electrical/electronics and communications engineering: Average starting pay: $66,100
5. Finance: Average starting pay: $64,300
6. Nursing: Average starting pay: $63,800
7. Economics (business/managerial): Average starting pay: $63,400
8. Health and related sciences: Average starting pay: $62,900
9. Accounting: Average starting pay: $62,300

Teenage babysitters could earn more. Literally.

That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and planning -- that equals 6-1/2 hours).
So each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585 a day.
However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET'S SEE....
That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).
What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6-1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here!

$56,715 turns out to be quite the deal.

Teacher performance incentives have negative impact

A recently published study from the Journal of Labor Economics looked at performance incentives for teachers in the NYC school system. The results should cause corporate reformers to pause

Providing financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper describes a school-based randomized trial in over two-hundred New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives on student achievement. I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of theories that may explain these stark results.

As Margarita Pivovarova, Assistant Professor of Economics at Arizona State University notes

The estimates from the experiment imply that if a student attended a middle school with an incentive in place for three years, his/her math test scores would decline by 0.138 of a standard deviation and his/her reading score would drop by 0.09 of a standard deviation.

Not only that, but the incentive program had no effect on teachers’ absenteeism, retention in school or district, nor did it affect the teachers’ perception of the learning environment in a school. Literally, the estimated 75 million dollars invested and spent brought zero return!

How much variance in test scores is due to variance in teachers?

Via Larry Ferlazzo

It’s not uncommon to hear someone inaccurately state that the teacher has the biggest influence on student achievement — period. Of course, the true statement is that — of the in-school factors — teachers have the biggest influence. On top of that, research has shown that over two-thirds of the factors that influence student achievement occur out of school.

To illustrate this, here's a pie chart

Lots of good links ot dem,onstrate the evidence behind this pie chart at the link.

If we're primarily focusing on teacher quality to increase student achievment, we're focusing on the wrong place. It's why corporate education reforms are doomed to failure.

Can Value-Added Measures Be Used for Teacher Improvement?

Susanna Loeb, Professor of Education Stanford University and Faculty Director for the Center for Education Policy Analysis, has a brief published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The question for this brief is whether education leaders can use value-added measures as tools for improving schooling and, if so, how to do this. Districts, states, and schools can, at least in theory, generate gains in educational outcomes for students using value-added measures in three ways: creating information on effective programs, making better decisions about human resources, and establishing incentives for higher performance from teachers. This brief reviews the evidence on each of these mechanisms and describes the drawbacks and benefits of using value-added measures in these and other contexts.

The brief concludes

Value-added measures are not a good source of information for helping teachers improve because they provide little information on effective and actionable practices.
• School, district, and state leaders may be able to improve teaching by using value-added to shape decisions about programs, human resources, and incentives.
• Value-added measures of improvement are more precise measures for groups of teachers than they are for individual teachers, thus they may provide useful information on improvement associated with practices, programs or schools.
• Many incentive programs for staff performance that are based on student performance have not shown benefits. Research points to the difficulty of designing these programs well and maintaining them politically.
• Value-added measures for selecting and improving programs, for informing human resource decisions, and for incentives are likely to be more useful when they are combined with other measures.
• We still have only a limited understanding of how best to use value-added measures in combination with other measures as tools for improvement.

The use of value-added measures to evaluate individual teachers, especially when connected to high stakes personnel decisions is impossible to defend if one is guided by the research evidence, and the disastrous practical applications.

The full brief can be read below.

HOW CAN VALUE-ADDED MEASURES BE USED FOR TEACHER IMPROVEMENT?