Education News for 05-08-2013

State Education News

• Toddlers and tech - reasons to share your smartphone (Canton Repository)

A lot of things change when you become a parent. The shows you watch, the restaurants you go to and the concept of sleep as you once knew it all evolve when your family structure transforms from a "me" to a "we."…Read more...

• Security Concerns Raise Questions About Voting At Schools (Columbus Dispatch)

Polls were open at Licking Heights High School on Tuesday, and Superintendent Phil Wagner says security preparations were made far in advance…Read more...

• Ohio school buys eye control device to help students communicate (Newark Advocate)

Like most 6-year-olds, Algassimou Bah has a lot to say. However, living with cerebral palsy has made it difficult for Algassimou, known by his teachers…Read more...

• Maysville schools mull drug testing athletes (Zanesville Times-Recorder)

Maysville Local Schools will be the first district in the area to require athletes to be drug tested if a proposal submitted to the Board of Education…Read more...

Local Education News

• Columbus district sells old school buildings for $3.2 million (Columbus Dispatch)

The Columbus Board of Education sold three vacant school buildings last night, including a historical middle school a block from German Village’s Schiller Park that sold for about half what the county auditor says it’s worth…Read more...

• Hilliard sale odd for one board member (Columbus Dispatch)

Even before Paul Lambert was elected to the Hilliard school board more than three years ago, he raised concerns about residential development outpacing commercial growth…Read more...

• Ada School District voters approve 0.75% income tax (Findlay Courier)

Voters in the Ada School District approved a 0.75 percent income tax…Read more...

• Westlake schools prepare to make cuts (Sun Newspapers)

School officials will face some tough decisions on nearly $1 million in proposed cuts when they meet…Read more...

• Brookfield schools cautiously happy (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

A member of the Brookfield Board of Education said she was on "pins and needles"…Read more...

• Libraries may return (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

Voters in the Champion school district supported a 5.95-mill, 10-year additional operating levy for emergency requirements of the district…Read more...

• Columbus City Schools To Hire 300 For Transportation Positions (WBNS)

Columbus City Schools announced on Tuesday that it is hiring 300 people to drive buses for the district…Read more...

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.

Surprise! Charters want even more money.

In testimony before the House Finance committee, Charter school operators and their boosters expressed sadness at the Governor's education budget. Despite school districts having to deduct $824 billion this school year to fund charter schools (most of which are failing), they want more. They argued they should receive

• $5,704 per pupil, not $5,000, as the base amount (but would not answer the question of whether or not traditional public schools should receive a base amount higher than $5,000).
• Up to $1,000 per pupil (instead of he proposed $100) for buildings and that online charter schools should also receive building funds

Only 5% of Ohio's students go to a charter school, and much less than 1% go to a quality one, yet charter operators and their boosters want more than 10% of the funding. These aren't fair or tennable requests being made, it is greed at the expense of the majority of students who choose to go to a traditional public school.

Dispatch must apologize

The school attendance erasures issue continues to be a scandal that isn't. Despite finding nothing more than bureaucratic missteps in his first interim report, the State Auditor has now released a second interim report that has found no evidence of wrongdoing at a further batch of schools.

Just two weeks before school districts across Ohio ask voters for more money, state Auditor Dave Yost reported that his team has not uncovered any more evidence of scrubbing student attendance data.

In the latest update, Yost said auditors examined records at 81 schools in 47 districts and cleared all but eight of the 81. Testing at those eight buildings as well as 15 other buildings from the first interim report is still underway, Yost said. A final report is due sometime around Jan. 1.

Twenty of the 81 schools examined in this round had reporting errors but not enough to suggest scrubbing.
[...]
“Odds are most districts are reporting their attendance data accurately and they’re not scrubbing,” Yost said at a press conference Tuesday.

Again, simply some bureaucratic missteps caused by "the sheer complexity of the accountability system" as the Auditor himself describes it, in his conclusion.

This is a far cry from the irresponsible reporting and opinionating that the Columbus Dispatch has engaged in for a number of months now. Time and time again they have failed to wait for the evidence, and instead jumped to conclusions and made inferences that turned out to be incorrect.

Rather than bemoan the slipping away of a potential Pulitzer, they surely thought they were earning, they ought to have some serious introspection on how they could have gotten a story so very wrong and caused Ohio's schools systems so much trouble.

They have slandered and smeared thousands of public school employees up and down the state with their reckless allegations and accusations. They need to apologize and accept responsibility.

Second Interim Report on Student Attendance and Accountability System

Performance Index Ranking for Districts and Schools – A Preview

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has just released a preview of its new ranking of Ohio public school buildings’ performance.

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) is giving parents, educators and taxpayers a preview of a new approach for comparing academic performance among schools and districts. Effective September 2012, House Bill 153 requires all school districts and school buildings to be ranked using the Performance Index (PI) score. Such rankings will provide parents and taxpayers a new way to evaluate how local schools are performing while allowing educators to compare their performance with peers.

The school district list will include all city, local and exempted village school districts as well as joint vocational school districts, community schools and STEM schools. The school building list will include all schools that are part of city, local or exempted village school district as well as community schools, joint vocational schools and STEM schools

Preliminary Rankings
Buildings	Districts
All school buildings	All districts
High schools	Traditional districts only
Middle Schools	District Notes
Elementary Schools
Community Schools
Building Notes

Each school building in city, local and exempted village school districts, as well as joint vocational school districts, community schools and STEM schools are ranked using a Performance Index (PI) score. PI scores combine individual students’ results on all tested subjects in grades 3-8 on Ohio’s Achievement Assessments (OAAs) and on the 10th-grade Ohio Graduation Test (OGTs). The Performance Index score has been widely used and endorsed by Ohio educators since its adoption in 2003.*

The PI scores are not new, and it has been possible to create ranking lists with them using existing interactive tools on the ODE website. Such district and county rankings have been done frequently by independent groups, but this is the first statewide ranking completed and released by ODE.

The rankings are required under House Bill 153. The final ranking list is required to be released by September 2012.

*Calculating the Performance Index All assessments have five performance levels, which include: Advanced; Accelerated; Proficient; Basic; and Limited. The percentage of students scoring at each performance level is calculated, and then multiplied by the point value assigned to that performance level. The points earned for each performance level are totaled to determine each school’s Performance Index score, where applicable.

2011 District Preliminary Ranking List - All Districts

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