Legislators will change Gov. Kasich’s school-funding plan

Legislators are going to change Gov. John Kasich’s proposed school-funding plan. The only question is how.

House Republicans have turned to a soft-spoken veteran legislator and former Supreme Court justice to take the lead in deciding which levers to pull inside a complex proposal that would spend an additional $459 million over two years but leave more than half of all school districts with a funding cut.

“We are in the very preliminary stages,” said Rep. Bob Cupp, R-Lima, who served on the state’s high court from 2007 to 2012. “The (district funding) printouts we’ve seen have some anomalies. Until you pull it apart to see why it’s doing that, it’s hard to say whether it’s working properly or not.”

For example, of the new money in Kasich’s proposal, 74 percent would go to midsize and large urban districts, while rural districts as a group would see almost no new money.

The governor’s plan would provide maximum 10 percent annual funding increases to some relatively wealthy districts such as New Albany, Westerville and Indian Hill near Cincinnati, but it would cut funding for every district in Appalachian Ohio’s Perry and Adams counties.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled four times starting in 1997 that Ohio’s system of school funding relied too much on local property taxes, to the point that it left some students with an inadequate education. The court dropped jurisdiction of the case (before Cupp became a justice), and disagreement remains over whether the order was ever met.

(Read more at the Dispatch).

School over-testing getting real in Ohio

The New Ohio Tests replace the Ohio Achievement Assessments (OAA) and the Ohio Graduation Tests (OGT). The OAAs were created to comply with the No Child Left Behind provisions to test all third- through eighth-students each year in reading and math. The OGTs (reading, writing, math, science and social studies) were added as a high school graduation requirement.

Let’s take a look at two questions surrounding the creation and implementation of the next generation of assessments in Ohio. First, what vetting process was used to select PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career) and AIR (American Institute of Research) tests? Second, are these new assessments developmentally appropriate for the students soon to be subjected to a three-months high-stakes testing cycle?

The vetting process starts with a decision the ODE made in 2009 to become a Common Core state. Initially, Common Core was a state initiative to create more rigorous standards in English and Math. Forty-five states, including Ohio, signed up. The federal government then created the Race to the Top program, nationalizing key aspects of a movement that had strictly stated the federal government would not be involved.

Race to the Top was a competition among states for federal funding, with strings attached. States had to promise to implement school reforms favored by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to cash in. The federal government then awarded two testing companies $360 million to develop the Math and ELA assessments. Pearson/PARCC was one of those companies.

In 2011 and 2012, the Ohio Department of Education decided, with very little public input, that PARCC and AIR tests would take over our schools starting in 2014-15. These mostly online tests have two, three and four parts to them, were not systemically field tested, and are written, according to many research measurement experts, two reading grade levels above the grade of the students subjected to this monolithic mess called national standardized testing.

The scores of the spring assessments will not be available until next fall, after students have moved on to the next grade. Effective testing is suppose to yield immediate results and used diagnostically to help students. The New Ohio Tests accomplish neither.

(Read more at cincinnati.com)

Testing based on Common Core standards starts this week

Sixth-grader Kayla Hunter considers herself pretty tech savvy. She has a computer at home unlike about half her classmates at her elementary school. And it matches up well with the one she'll use this week to take a new test linked to the Common Core standards.

Still, the perky 11-year-old worries. During a recent practice exam at her school in Ohio, she couldn't even log on. "It wouldn't let me," she said. "It kept saying it wasn't right, and it just kept loading the whole time."

Her state on Tuesday will be the first to administer one of two tests in English language arts and math based on the Common Core standards developed by two separate groups of states. By the end of the school year, about 12 million children in 29 states and the District of Columbia will take them, using computers or electronic tablets.

The exams are expected to be more difficult than the traditional spring standardized state exams they replace. In some states, they'll require hours of additional testing time because students will have to do more than just fill in the bubble. The goal is to test students on critical thinking skills, requiring them to describe their reasoning and solve problems.

The tests have multimedia components, written essays and multi-step calculations needed to solve math problems that go beyond just using rote memory. Students in some states will take adaptive versions in which questions get harder or easier depending on their answers.

But there's been controversy.

The tests have been caught up in the debate playing out in state legislatures across the country about the federal role in education. Although more than 40 states have adopted Common Core, which spells out what reading and math skills students should master in each grade, several have decided not to offer the tests — known as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. Some states are introducing other new state standardized tests this year.

The Common Core tests fulfill the requirement in the federal No Child Left Behind law for annual testing in reading and math in grades three to eight and again in high school. But as Congress seeks to rewrite the education law, there's debate over whether the tests should be required by Washington, and whether students are being tested too much. Parents in pockets of the country have joined a movement to "opt out" of these standardized tests.

Questions also have been raised about students' keyboarding skills and schools' computer capacities.

In the Appalachian foothills where Kayla attends Morgan South Elementary School, administrators and teachers worry that they don't have the bandwidth to provide reliable Internet connectivity on testing day. Both tests offer a paper option. PARCC officials anticipate that about a quarter of students will use the paper version; Smarter Balanced officials estimate roughly 10 to 20 percent will take it on paper.

Just eight days before the test, the Morgan Local School District in rural southeastern Ohio ordered 200 more Chromebooks, which worked best during the practice run.

The week before the test, Kayla and her classmates huddled in pairs sharing what devices were available at the school. "They'll be more comfortable with the technology, but it is a worry of mine that, as far as the content that's on it, there's still stuff I could be doing to prepare for the test," says their teacher, Carrie Young.

Eleven-year-old Colton Kidd says the screens on the Chromebooks are too small. Classmate Josie Jackson, 12, prefers pencil and paper. But Liam Montgomery likes computerized tests: "It's easier to get the answers down, because I don't have to flip back and forth."

In some places, school administrators and state leaders are only grudgingly moving forward.

(Read more at the Slate)

Education Officials Warn Of ‘Consequences’ If Parents Opt Out Of Standardized Testing

A number of central Ohio parents are considering opting their kids out of next week's new standardized testing for Ohio. The Ohio Department of Education says parents have every right to do so but warn there could be possible consequences.

There are some parents who CHOOSE to opt out their children from taking standardized tests, but one mom says she felt those tests were driving the education and felt home schooling was a better option.

Dorian Barnovsky's dining table serves as the classroom during the day for her two girls. The Worthington mom says she and her husband made the decision last year to home-school them after a year of state testing, she calls, developmentally inappropriate.

"It's not just the test, and the test taking, that is taking up a lot of hours of instruction time,” Barnovsky explains. “It is also the fact that now the instruction seems 100% geared toward the test."

Across town, Hilliard mom, Kristi Klise has similar concerns. "Each year when they take these tests they spend a lot of time in the classroom going over practice tests, reviewing practice tests and that is a lot of instructional time that is lost practicing for a test."

The parents aren't alone. A teacher in the Centerville School District wrote a letter to the Department of Education saying she encourages parents’ right to refuse to have their children take standardized tests.

(More at 10TV)

OEA urges lawmakers to move quickly to address problems associated with student testing

The following statement is attributed to Becky Higgins, president of the Ohio Education Association:

“As Ohio gets ready to implement the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests, a school superintendent recently told the Senate Education Committee what has been apparent to OEA members for some time – ‘Ohio is not yet ready for it.’ Matthew Miller, superintendent of the Mentor Schools in Lake County, described ‘fatal errors’ in the practice run of the PARCC assessments recently conducted at the Mentor Schools.

He said numerous students were booted off the system and ‘could not resume even after refreshing teacher screens.’ He also described bugs in the system that prevented students from submitting their answers even after responding to all the questions. Superintendent Miller told the Committee that if Mentor is having a problem with PARCC – with its ‘robust technology infrastructure’ – then “the rest of Ohio’s schools will be having issues as well.”

Other superintendents pointed to what teachers all across the state have been saying – the ‘lack of timely and firmly established guidance’ from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) in helping districts to get ready for the PARCC exams. Several superintendents agreed with another issue for which OEA has been advocating. It was articulated by Sue Lang, the superintendent of the Wyoming City School District in Hamilton County, who urged the Committee to ‘consider this year as a PARCC transitional year……do not count the PARCC on the state report cards and do not count scores against teachers and students.’

Well before this year’s implementation of PARCC, OEA has been urging state lawmakers to go beyond the ‘safe harbor’ provisions that were signed into law last year that placed a one-year hold on high-stakes decisions based on test scores. It is increasingly clear that ‘safe harbor’ protections must be extended beyond the current school year and should also be granted to students.

The urgency of addressing the problems associated with PARCC is also part and parcel of the need to do something about the overall excessive use of testing in our schools. More and more superintendents are echoing what professional educators in Ohio have been saying for some time – allow more instructional time, and less testing, to drive student achievement. The longer it takes for lawmakers to address the testing issue, the greater the likelihood is that more parents will choose to have their children ‘opt out’ of some of these tests.

The growing number of ‘opt-outs’ puts educators in an untenable situation. Not only could educators see their own evaluations adversely impacted by high-performing students who chose not to take a test, the results of which are a factor in measuring teacher performance, but as the Avon Lake Superintendent told the Senate Education Committee, he doesn’t want to have teachers placed in a position of lying to parents that all this is workable.

Changing the way students are tested and teachers are evaluated in Ohio cannot happen soon enough. OEA will continue to push hard for that to happen.”

The Ohio Education Association represents 121,000 teachers, faculty members and support professionals in Ohio's public schools, colleges and universities.

Ohio teachers’ union concerned about Kasich’s schools budget

The following statement is attributed to Becky Higgins, president of the Ohio Education Association:

“Any effort to increase funding to Ohio’s schools is a welcome development. However, like many lawmakers, we have questions about the basis for determining which districts are ‘needy’ and which districts have the ‘capacity’ to generate more local revenues for their schools. Under this plan, more than half of the school districts would receive less funding than in the previous budget. Additionally, money will continue to flow to charter schools at the expense of local school districts. A recent study estimated that one third of the school districts slated to receive an increase in state funding will see that funding wiped out because of the way the state funds charter schools.

All of this comes at a time when state revenues are growing. This is an occasion to make investments in Ohio’s future, and what could be a better investment than doing more for our students and schools?

As budget deliberations begin, legislators from both sides of the aisle are expressing concerns. These concerns include changes to the state funding formula, a reduction in tangible personal property payments to districts, and changes in transportation funding. We share the difficulty many are having in understanding why seemingly similar districts are treated differently and why the funding for so many struggling school districts is being cut. At this time there are more questions than answers.

OEA is committed to the principle that all children should receive high-quality educational opportunities regardless of where they live. This cannot happen without a school funding formula that provides adequate resources. Ohio's constitution makes it clear that the state has a responsibility to make sure our schools are adequately funded. We call on the governor and members of the legislature to pass a budget that fulfills this constitutional obligation. Furthermore, we urge elected officials to recognize the opportunity we currently have to strengthen our economy and secure our future by investing more in our children and their education.”

The Ohio Education Association represents 121,000 teachers, faculty members and support professionals in Ohio's public schools, colleges and universities.