Fordham hides from facts

UPDATE: Fordham has now published our comment on their site, for which we are grateful. See the comments to this article for their explanation.

The Fordham Foundation, one of Ohio's more vocal charter school boosters, has a post on their website defending the high number of failing charter schools. The piece is written by Aaron Churchill, someone we have observed stretching facts and the truth before (Fordham loses its bearings). Like his previous piece's error addled analysis, his latest defense of failing charter schools goes to great lengths to obfuscate hard truths using indefensible "statistical analysis".

Rather than write a post here on JTF, we tried to leave a long comment pointing out just some of the errors in the post. Fordham has decided they would rather that comment be hidden and not be published, so we are publishing it below, in response to a Fordham reader asking us to

Aaron states "The chart shows that a nearly equal number of charters reside in the state’s bottom 111 schools"

Let's just assume that is correct. What if utterly fails to recognize is that there are orders of magnitude more traditional public school buildings than charter schools - so the fact that so many charter school buildings appear in the bottom 111 should be disturbing to everyone, not glommed onto as a point of false equivalence. As an overall percentage of school buildings charter schools dominate the bottom rankings.

Let's look at another claim made by Aaron...

"The fact of the matter is that taxpayers spend less on each child in a charter school then is spent on their district peers."

That claim is contradicted by the Ohio Department of Education (link here:http://www.scribd.com/doc/117636411/ODE-Analysis-of-Per-Pupil-Cost-of-Charters-and-Publics).

"The average of total expenditure per pupil for public districts is $10,110.72.

The average expenditure per pupil for community schools is $9,064. When broken out: For e-schools it’s $7,027. For non-eschool community schools it’s $10,165.

So only when one combines the cost of the laughably cheap (and ludicrously underperforming) e-schools do Ohio's charters look inexpensive - and that's using ODE as a source.

Aaron did a good job, as all charter school boosters do, of obfuscating the facts - which is that the vast majority of Ohio's charter schools deliver a poor quality education at an inflated cost.

Let's close them down and concentrate our energy on the schools that 95% of Ohio's students go to, and maybe learn some things along the way from the few charter schools that are getting it right, instead of this constant non-debate and excuse making about the terrible charter schools we all know exist in very high numbers.

Fordham likes to hide behind their advocacy for charter school accountability and quality, but whenever they are pressed on this, they obfuscate the difficult facts and revert to defending the rotten and the failing. They may talk a good game, but in the end they are no less a charter school booster as White Hat owner, David Brennan. Mr. Churchill's post and decision to avoid a discussion on it are further proof of that.

Delivering lower costs, higher quality

Innovation Ohio recently published a study that showed that states, like Ohio, that had collective bargaining for educators produced lower costs and higher quality than states that had weaker collective bargaining laws.

In fact, research shows that eliminating or effectively crippling the state’s collective bargaining system will be as likely to add to state and local budget woes as cure the
[...]
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Ohio’s kindergarten, elementary, middle school and high school teachers saw their salaries, on average, drop 3.8% between 2008 and 2009, the latest year BLS’s Occupational Employment Statistics are available. The national average was a 2% increase.
[...]
Even though states that limit teachers’ rights to collectively bargain make up less than one-third of all the states, they make up half of the top 10 salary increases in the contiguous 48 states, with reduced teachers’ rights states taking the top three spots (Wyoming at 11.2%, Texas at 7% and Louisiana at 5.9%).
[...]
In Education Week’s annual K-12 Student Achievement rankings, NO reduced teachers’ rights states scored in the top 10 states. In fact, the top 13 K-12 Achievement states were all states that require collective bargaining for its teachers. Meanwhile, Ohio scored better than 75% of the reduced teachers’ rights states on the K-12 Achievement measure.

While none of the top 10 achieving states were reduced teachers’ rights states, they did make up 7 of the bottom 10 K-12 Achievement states. That means that almost half of all reduced teachers’ rights states ranked in the bottom 10 states on their students’ achievement.

The results revealed by this report should come as no surprise to anyone who has been involved in, or observed, the collective bargaining process across Ohio's school districts. Teachers and education support professionals have consistently demonstrasted a commitment not only to delivering a quality education to their students, but to the communities they serve. Eliminating this important voice eliminates the ability to deliver these results.

Bad charter sponsors, bad policy

It comes as little surprise to anyone who follows the development of what some call Ohio education policy to learn that Ohio's charter school laws have serious flaws.

The Ohio Department of Education has just released their charter school sponsor rankings. As StateImpact notes

The sponsor role is different from the role of a charter school operator. Charter school operators, which include both for-profit and non-profit groups, manage schools’ day-to-day operations while sponsors are supposed to play more of an oversight role.

These rankings are important because under HB153, sponsors who fall into the bottom 20% cannot authorize any more charter schools until their schools improve. LSC (page 216):

(New R.C. 3314.016)
The act prohibits a community school sponsor from sponsoring any additional schools, if it (1) is not in compliance with statutory requirements to report data or other information to the Department of Education or (2) is ranked in the lowest 20% of all sponsors on an annual ranking of sponsors by their composite performance index scores. The composite performance index score, which must be developed by the Department, is a measure of the academic performance of students enrolled in community schools sponsored by the same entity. Presumably, if a sponsor is subject to the prohibition due only to its ranking, it may sponsor additional schools if it later raises its ranking above the lowest 20%.

We have published the ranking list below. People who posses the ability to think critically will already have concluded 2 things about this prescriptive law.

1. Marion City with a performance score of 69.2 is barred from authorizing any more charters, while Lorain City with a performance score of just 69.4 can continue to operate as it just misses the 20% cut.
2. No matter what performance sponsors have there will always be a bottom 20%

Why didn't the law specify an actual performance measure? The legislature saw fit to do exactly this for teachers under SB5, but not for sponsors of charter schools.

To complicate matters further, the Ohio Department of Education which is tasked by law to create these rankings, will also be getting back into the business of being a charter school sponsor. A task it once had taken away from it because of abysmal performance that made Ohio charter schools the laughing stock of the nation.

Now, under HB153, ODE will not only be responsible for sponsoring charters again - but producing the rankings - including their very own. This doesn't strike us at Join the Future as a very wise situation.

Will ODE be able to exert enough independence between its sponsorship role and its evaluation of sponsors, even if its own performance is substandard as it was in the past? That's an obvious question that should not have to be asked if state education policy was properly thought through and developed in a collaborative manner.

In the meantime, we can take solace in the fact (as the Disptach reports) that Mansfield, Marion, Ridgedale, Rittman, Upper Scioto Valley and Van Wert school districts; the Richland Academy; and the educational service centers in Hardin and Portage counties cannot open any more charter schools.

Ohio Charter School Sponsor Rankings

Substitute House Bill 153 COMPARISON DOCUMENT As Reported by Senate Finance

Here's the HB153 comparison document as reported out of the Senate finance committee yesterday. The full senate vote is expected later today. The bill still contains draconian cuts to public education, and provisions to retest teachers in the bottom 10% of schools. However, merit pay and for profit charter provisions, along with 12/12 STRS cost shifting is not included.

Substitute House Bill 153 COMPARISON DOCUMENT As Reported by Senate Finance

Citizens can lobby too!

We know that David Brennan and Michele Rhee hired lobbyists to get their agenda in front of the Republican controlled legislture, and inserted in SB5 and the budget bill. We also know that lawmakers hearing from teachers, and other concerned citizens, got many of the most eggregious provisions removed. But now there's pressure to perform a double-back-flip-U-turn and put these terrible measure back in the budget.

There's still time and opportunity for citizens to lobby their represenatives. If you are a member of OEA, tomorrow is a scheduled lobby day. (Link - bottom, left). If you want to attend, meet at Renaissance Columbus Downtown Hotel at 50 N. 3rd St., Columbus, Ohio – The briefing will start at 9:00 a.m.** (map).

JTF will be coming along, we hope to see you there. Together we'll change some minds!

**If you have a distance to travel, check with your local or regional association. Busing is being provided, along with parking and lunch if needed. Also, vallet parking at the hotel is available and a voucher for it will be given to you when you sign in.

Back to School for the Billionaires

The richest man in America stepped to the podium and declared war on the nation’s school systems. High schools had become “obsolete” and were “limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year.” The situation had become “almost shameful.” Bill Gates, prep-school grad and college dropout, had come before the National Governors Association seeking converts to his plan to do something about it—a plan he would back with $2 billion of his own cash.

[…]

“A lot of things we do don’t work out,” admitted Broad, a product of Detroit public schools and Michigan State who made a fortune in home building and financial services. “But we can take the criticism.”

The bottom line? The billionaires aspired to A-plus impact and came away with B-minus to C-minus results, according to the NEWSWEEK/CPI investigation, which was based on specially commissioned data and internal numbers shared by the philanthropists’ foundations.

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