Study: Ohio charter schools are worst in nation

The Center for Research on Education Issues (CREDO) has just published its 2013 report, "National Charter School Study". CREDO Researchers looked at test data from charter schools in 26 states plus DC. Ohio was one of the 26 states. This study follow up on their 2009 study which garnered a lot of attention for bringing to light the poor quality of the nations charter schools.

This new study finds, despite charter schools being able to screen for the best students, only marginal improvement over the past 4 years

25 percent of charters outperformed traditional public schools in reading while 29 percent of charters delivered stronger results in math. That marked an improvement over a similar 2009 study by the same research team.

But 56 percent of the charters produced no significant difference in reading and 19 percent had worse results than traditional public schools. In math, 40 percent produced no significant difference and 31 percent were significantly worse than regular public schools.

The marginal improvement comes not from improved quality of charter schools in general, but in the closure of more poor performing charter schools lifting the over all average performance.

In Ohio, the charter school experiment is failing miserably. According to the study, Ohio's charter schools got worse over the last 4 years, and now dwell at the bottom of the performance tables. Ohio students who attend charter schools are losing the equivalent of almost 3 weeks of instruction in reading, and an entire grading period in mathematics. That is astonishingly bad news for the 5% of Ohio's students who attend charter schools.

The following table was taken from table 14 (pg 52 of the study)

State	Reading Days	Math Days
Rhode Island	86	108
DC	72	101
Tennessee	86	72
Louisiana	50	65
New York	36	79
New Jersey	43	58
Massachusetts	36	65
New York City	0	94
Michigan	43	43
Indiana	36	14
Illinois	14	22
Missouri	14	22
California	22	-7
North Carolina	22	-7
Minnesota	14	-7
Georgia	14	-14
Colorado	7	-7
Florida	-7	0
New Mexico	0	-29
Arkansas	-22	-22
Utah	-7	-43
Arizona	-22	-29
Texas	-22	-29
Ohio	-14	-43
Oregon	-22	-50
Pennsylvania	-29	-50
Nevada	-108	-137

You can see from the following graphs of performance in 2009 vs 2013 that Ohio's charters are getting worse, and in math, much worse.

It is time to reassess Ohio's 15 year, billion dollar, charter experiment in light of these results and put an end to boosting charter schools at the expense of public schools. The experiement has not only failed, it is getting worse.

Tea partiers threaten public education

Not content with the Governor's $3 billion dollar state budget assault on public education, tea partiers, supported by the far right "1851 Center for Constitutional Law" - an offshoot of the right wing Buckeye Institute, are seeking to assault public education funding at the local level too.

Taxpayers for Westerville Schools, a group that opposed a 6.9-mill levy that voters approved in March, has begun collecting signatures to repeal an equal portion of an 11.4-mill levy approved in 2009.

The group is reaching back to that levy because state law bars the repeal of temporary tax issues, such as the five-year levy passed this year. The 2009 tax issue is permanent.

This is a move so radical and extreme that it has only ever been proposed once in the history of the state. If the "Center for Constitutional law" really cared about the Ohio constitution and public education it would be lobbying for a constitutional funding formula for our schools instead of trying to defund them. But rather than do that, they have published a document that contains the broad tactics groups can use to defund public education, a document that contains such information as

Warning: if you follow the advice in this guide, proponents of higher spending and taxation will assert, as always, that children will suffer unless new levies are enacted, while current revenue sources are maintained. However, if you’ve read this far, you and your neighbors (1) have likely already heard and dispelled this argument; (2) are aware that your local school district has a spending problem, not a revenue problem; and (3) simply want to keep more of what you have rightfully earned, and want to this seemingly endless cycle of tax hikes to stop.

Clearly they think every district has a spending problem, and every citizen is over taxed - regardless of whether voters in places like Westerville disagreed by passing a levy just months ago. Their roadmap even includes this nugget:

(6) Keep a low profile. Remember, only once every five years can an attempt be made to reduce any given levy. If your school district’s teachers union gets wind of your plans too early in the process, they may quickly gather signatures and place a .000001 mil reduction of the levy tax on the ballot before you are able to gather and submit signatures for your more significant reduction.

Wanting to operate in the shadows was evident yesterday when confronted over twitter

@jointhefutureOH @DispatchEteam @dougcaruso @cbinkley We are all WCSD residents concerned about our schools' future-NOT a tea party group.

We responded

@TFWS1 Really? All just a coincidence you're involved with the 1851 center? Same agenda as the tea party, same support. Same, same.

As did others

@TFWS1 @jointhefutureOH Sounds like the tenets of the Tea Party? Why fight the association to Tea Party? What's the difference?

At this point, this tea party group tried to make ridiculous claims about the 1851 Constitutional Law Center

@ascheurer @jointhefutureOH They're a non-proft, non-partisan legal ctr dedicatd to protctng the constitut rights of Ohioans from govt abuse

A quick survey of their agenda and their board of directors quickly dispels any notion this is a non-partisan group.

What is striking about this recent move by the tea party to attack public education is their unwillingness to embrace their agenda. Instead, as the 1851 center urges, they want to "keep a low profile". We're going to see to it that that doesn't happen.

Science Fact

Corporate education reform science fiction, is having an unintended(?) science fact effect.

First the science

If VAM scores are at all accurate, there ought to be a significant correlation between a teacher's score one year compared to the next. In other words, good teachers should have somewhat consistently higher scores, and poor teachers ought to remain poor. He created a scatter plot that put the ratings from 2009 on one axis, and the ratings from 2010 on the other axis. What should we expect here? If there is a correlation, we should see some sort of upward sloping line.

There is one huge takeway from all this. VAM ratings are not an accurate reflection of a teacher's performance, even on the narrow indicators on which they focus. If an indicator is unreliable, it is a farce to call it "objective."

This travesty has the effect of discrediting the whole idea of using test score data to drive reform. What does it say about "reformers" when they are willing to base a large part of teacher and principal evaluations on such an indicator?

That travesty is now manifesting itself in real personal terms.

In 2009, 96 percent of their fifth graders were proficient in English, 89 percent in math. When the New York City Education Department released its numerical ratings recently, it seemed a sure bet that the P.S. 146 teachers would be at the very top.

Actually, they were near the very bottom.
[...]
Though 89 percent of P.S. 146 fifth graders were rated proficient in math in 2009, the year before, as fourth graders, 97 percent were rated as proficient. This resulted in the worst thing that can happen to a teacher in America today: negative value was added.

The difference between 89 percent and 97 percent proficiency at P.S. 146 is the result of three children scoring a 2 out of 4 instead of a 3 out of 4.

While Ms. Allanbrook does not believe in lots of test prep, her fourth-grade teachers do more of it than the rest of the school.

In New York City, fourth-grade test results can determine where a child will go to middle school. Fifth-grade scores have never mattered much, so teachers have been free to focus on project-based learning. While that may be good for a child’s intellectual development, it is hard on a teacher’s value-added score.

These teachers are not the only ones.

Bill Turque tells the story of teacher Sarah Wysocki, who was let go by D.C. public schools because her students got low standardized test scores, even though she received stellar personal evaluations as a teacher.

She was evaluated under the the D.C. teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT, a so-called “value-added” method of assessing teachers that uses complicated mathematical formulas that purport to tell how much “value” a teacher adds to how much a student learns.

As more data is demanded, more analysis can be done to demonstrate how unreliable it is for these purposes, and consequently we are guaranteed to read more stories of good teachers becoming victims of bad measurements. It's unfortunate we're going to have to go through all this to arrive at this understanding.

Meet The Billionaires Who Are Trying To Privatize Our Schools

Via

– Dick DeVos: The DeVos family has been active on education issues since the 1990′s. The son of billionaire Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, Sr., DeVos unsuccessfully ran for governor of the state of Michigan, spending $40 million, the most ever spent in a gubernatorial race in the state. In 2002, Dick DeVos sketched out a plan to undermine public education before the Heritage Foundation, explaining that education advocates should stop using the term “public schools” and instead call them “government schools.” He has poured millions of dollars into right-wing causes, including providing hundreds of thousands of dollars into seed money for numerous “school choice” groups, including Utah’s Parents for Choice in Education, which used its PAC money to elect pro-voucher politicians.

– Betsy DeVos: The wife of Dick DeVos, she also coincidentally happens to be the sister of Erik Prince, the leader of Xe, the mercenary outfit formerly known as Blackwater and is a former chair of the Republican Party of Michigan. Mrs. DeVos has been much more aggressive than her husband, pouring her millions into numerous voucher front groups across the country. She launched the pro-voucher group All Children Matter in 2003, which spent $7.6 million in its first year alone to impact state races related vouchers, winning 121 out of 181 races in which it intervened. All Children Matter was found breaking campaign finance laws in 2008, yet has still not paid its $5.2 million fine. She has founded and/or funded a vast network of voucher front groups, including Children First America, the Alliance for School Choice, Kids Hope USA, and the American Federation for Children.

- American Federation for Children (AFC): AFC made headlines recently when it brought together Govs. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Tom Corbett (R-PA) and former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee at a major school choice event in Washington, D.C. AFC is perhaps the most prominent of all the current voucher groups, having been founded in January 2010 by Betsy DeVos. Working together with its PAC of the same name and the 501c(3) organization also lead by DeVos, the Alliance for School Choice, it has served as a launching pad for school choice legislation across the country. AFC made its mark in Wisconsin by pouring thousands of dollars into the state legislative races, donating $40,000 in the service of successfully electing voucher advocate Rep. Kathy Bernier (R) and donating similar amounts to elect Reps. Andre Jacque (R), John Klenke (R), Tom Larson (R), Howard Marklein (R), Erik Severson (R), and Travis Tranel (R). DeVos front group All Children Matter also donated thousands to many of these same voucher advocates. Altogether, AFC spent $820,000 in Wisconsin during the last election, making it the 7th-largest single PAC spender during the election (behind several other mostly right-wing groups with similar agendas).

- Alliance for School Choice (ASC): The Alliance for School Choice is another DeVos front group founded to promote vouchers and serves as the education arm of AFC. In 2008, the last date available for its financial disclosures, its total assets amounted to $5,467,064. DeVos used the organization not only for direct spending into propaganda campaigns, but to give grants to organizations with benign-sounding names so that they could push the radical school choice agenda. For example, in 2008 the organization gave $530,000 grant to the “Black Alliance for Educational Options” in Washington, D.C. and a $433,736 grant to the “Florida School Choice Fund.” This allowed DeVos to promote her causes without necessarily revealing her role. But it isn’t just the DeVos family that’s siphoning money into the Alliance for School Choice and its many front group patrons. Among its other wealthy funders include the Jaquelin Hume Foundation (which gave $75,000 in 2008 and $100,000 in 2006), the brainchild of one of an ultra-wealthy California businessman who brought Ronald Reagan to power, the powerful Wal Mart Foundation (which gave $100,000 in 2005, the Chase Foundation of Virginia (which gave $9,000 in 2007, 2008, and the same amount in 2009), which funds over “supports fifty nonprofit libertarian/conservative public policy research organizations,” and hosts investment banker Derwood Chase, Jr. as a trustee, the infamous oil billionaire-driven Charles Koch Foundation ($10,000 in 2005), and the powerful Wal Mart family’s Walton Family Foundation (more than $3 million over 2004-2005).

- Bill and Susan Oberndorf: This Oberndorfs use their fortune, gained from Bill’s position as the managing director of the investment firm SPO Partners, to funnel money to a wide variety of school choice and corporate education reform groups. In 2009, their Bill and Susan Oberndorf Foundation gave $376,793 to AFC, $5,000 to the Center for Education Reform, and $50,000 to the Brighter Choice Foundation. Additionally, Bill Oberndorf gave half a million dollars to the school choice front group All Children Matter between 2005 and 2007. At a recent education panel, Bill Oberndorf was credited with giving “tens of millions” of dollars of his personal wealth to the school choice movement, and said that the passage of the Indiana voucher law was the “gold standard” for what should be done across America.

- The Walton Family Foundation (WFF):The Wal Mart-backed WFF is one of the most powerful foundations in the country, having made investments in 2009 totaling over $378 million. In addition to financing a number of privately-managed charter schools itself, the foundation showered ASC with millions of dollars in 2009. It also gave over a million dollars to the New York-based Brighter Choice Foundation, half a million dollars to the Florida School Choice Fund, $105,000 to the Foundation for Educational Choice, $774,512 to the Friends of Educational Choice, $400,000 to School Choice Ohio, and gave $50,000 to the Piton Foundation to promote a media campaign around the Colorado School Choice website — all in 2009 alone. WFF’s push for expanding private school education and undermining traditional public schools was best summed up by John Walton’s words in an interview in 2000. An interviewer asked him, “Do you think there’s money to be made in education?” Walton replied, “Absolutely. I think it will offer a reasonable return for investors.” (He also did vigorously argue in the same interview that he does not want to abolish public education).

As teacher merit pay spreads, one noted voice cries, ‘It doesn’t work’

Merit pay for teachers, an idea kicked around for decades, is suddenly gaining traction.

Fervently promoted by Michelle A. Rhee when she was chancellor of the District’s public schools, the concept is picking up steam from a growing cadre of politicians who think one way to improve the country’s troubled schools is to give fat bonuses to good teachers.

The Obama administration has encouraged states to embrace merit pay, highlighting it as one step that states could take to compete for more than $4 billion in federal funds through the Race to the Top program. Indiana and Florida passed legislation that requires merit pay for teachers; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced a few weeks ago that he wants the same.

The most recent convert: New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I). “This is an idea whose time has come,” Bloomberg declared at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting last month. “I’m confident that if the teachers are allowed to decide the matter for themselves, they’ll support it in New York City just the way they did here in Washington, D.C.”

What if they’re all wrong?

Meet Daniel Pink, author of the 2009 bestseller “Drive.” He’s a former White House speechwriter, a student of social science, a highly sought-after lecturer and an influential voice when it comes to what motivates Americans in the workplace.

What does he think of merit pay for teachers?

“It doesn’t work.”

[readon2 url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/as-teacher-merit-pay-spreads-one-noted-voice-cries-it-doesnt-work/2012/02/14/gIQAtRpsFR_story.html"]Continue reading[/readon2]

This Daniel Pink TED talk from 2009 has more than 1,000,000 views on YouTube.com. In it, Pink discusses how traditional incentives aren't effective in the modern workplace.

EdChoice Program Designated Public Schools list

The Ohio Department of Education has just released their EdChoice Program Designated Public Schools list.

The following is a list of schools that have either:
1) been in Academic Emergency or Academic Watch for two of the past three school years (2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011) or
2) ranked in the lowest 10% of public school buildings by performance index score for two of the past three school years and are therefore designated for the EdChoice Scholarship Program.

The following students are eligible to apply for an EdChoice scholarship:

• Students currently enrolled in and attending EdChoice-designated public school buildings in their district of residence
• Students enrolled in a community school who would otherwise be assigned to one of the EdChoice-designated public school buildings, or;
• Students currently enrolled in a regular public school in their district of residence or community school who would be assigned to attend one of the EdChoice-designated public school buildings for the upcoming school year. This provision is for students moving from one level of school to the next. For example, public school students moving from elementary to middle school would be eligible to apply if the middle school that they would be assigned to in the fall is designated for EdChoice;
• Students eligible to enter kindergarten in the next school year who would be assigned to one of the EdChoice public school buildings.

Ed Choice Eligible Public Schools