Ohioans still can’t see how their tax dollars will be divided among local school districts under Gov. John Kasich’s school-funding plan.
Although Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols had said on Friday that the information likely would be released yesterday, it turns out there was a problem with some of the data and “it’s still being worked on.”
Kasich adviser Barbara Mattei-Smith compiled and used the data to help the administration formulate its funding plan, which was released on Thursday, Nichols said.
The administration initially said such a record didn’t exist, then said it was merely her “notes” and didn’t have to be made public, before now saying the information Kasich relied on in the $15.1 billion education plan apparently was wrong.
The Ohio Department of Education said it fired its chief operating officer after learning he was under investigation for possessing child pornography and then finding such images on his work computer.
John T. Childs, 47, of 2239 Planetree Court on the Northwest Side, was fired on Nov. 2, said John Charlton, an Education Department spokesman. Childs had been on paid administrative leave since around Oct. 15.
“He was under investigation by local law enforcement for child pornography on his home computer. We put Childs on paid administrative leave until we could investigate the alleged charges and we could look at his work computer as well,” Charlton said.
The department turned Childs’ work laptop computer over to the State Highway Patrol, which found thumbnail images "of pornographic nature."
The Governor's education team is out of control. We wish we were just talking about bureaucratic incompetence, but sadly we are now well into the realm of serious failures of ethics and criminal behavior.
Fewer Ohio students getting free lunches (Columbus Dispatch)
For the first time in six years, the number of Ohio students qualifying for free or reduced- price lunches has dropped. Still, a celebration seems premature…Read more...
Funding data for Kasich school plan not ready yet (Columbus Dispatch)
Ohioans still can’t see how their tax dollars will be divided among local school districts under Gov. John Kasich’s school-funding plan…Read more...
State education official fired after child porn found on computer (Columbus Dispatch)
The Ohio Department of Education said it fired its chief operating officer after learning he was under investigation for possessing child pornography and then finding such images on his work computer…Read more...
Be on your best behavior, schools chiefs told (Columbus Dispatch)
More than 500 school leaders heard Gov. John Kasich reveal his new school budget and reform plan at a meeting in the Polaris Hilton Hotel last week…Read more...
Local Education News
School model catches on in New York (Cincinnati Enquirer)
About two years ago, a steady stream of out-of-town educators – school leaders, nonprofit agencies, education groups – started visiting Cincinnati…Read more...
Berea High School students demonstrate the dangers of distractions when driving (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Berea High classmates Caleb Samol and Justin Harris discovered their reflexes suffered while trying to hit a flashing target…Read more...
Figure in Columbus schools data-rigging to resign (Columbus Dispatch)
The man whose name was uttered again and again in connection with Columbus schools’ student-data scandal — Steve Tankovich — resigned yesterday…Read more...
TRECA part of shared service, resource center (Marion Star)
The boards of directors of the Tri-Rivers Education Computer Association and Northwest Ohio Computer Association recently authorized creation of a collaborative shared service and resource center…Read more...
College rules the day at Oyler School (Marketplace)
There’s a parade of cute coming down the hallway -- a gaggle of first graders, walking single file, each one wearing a construction paper crown with a Penn State…Read more...
ABLE testing procedure changes upcoming (Portsmouth Daily Times)
Scioto County ABLE (Adult Basic Learning Exam), announced this week that the current version of the GED test will expire at the end of 2013…Read more...
The Chicago Teachers Union has a different vision: it wants smaller classes, more social workers, air-conditioning in the sweltering buildings where summer school is conducted, and a full curriculum, with teachers of arts and foreign languages in every school. Some schools in Chicago have more than forty students in a class, even in kindergarten. There are 160 schools without libraries; more than 40 percent have no teachers of the arts.
What do the teachers want? The main sticking point is the seemingly arcane issue of teacher evaluations. The mayor wants student test scores to count heavily in determining whether a teacher is good (and gets a bonus) or bad (and is fired). The union points to research showing that test-based evaluation is inaccurate and unfair. Chicago is a city of intensely segregated public schools and high levels of youth violence. Teachers know that test scores are influenced not only by their instruction but by what happens outside the classroom.
The strike has national significance because it concerns policies endorsed by the current administration; it also raises issues found all over the country. Not only in Chicago but in other cities, teachers insist that their students need smaller classes and a balanced curriculum. Reformers want more privately-managed charter schools, even though they typically get the same results as public schools. Charter schools are a favorite of the right because almost 90 percent of them are non-union. Teachers want job protection so that they will not be fired for capricious reasons and have academic freedom to teach controversial issues and books. Reformers want to strip teachers of any job protections.
If you read a lot of corporate education reform "studies" as we do, there's one common theme running through most of them. Much like Mitt Romney, they would really like to fire people, teachers specifically.
The rate at which they want to fire teachers varies, some only want to fire 1 in 20, others would really prefer to fire 1 in 5. The Governor himself would like nothing more than to fire some teachers too (though taking his axe to the states education budget is already doing the heavy lifting)
"We pay good teachers more, but I'm going to suggest that we hold all teachers accountable. Teachers who can't teach shouldn't be in the classroom. ... If we've got teachers who can't do the job there's no excuse for leaving them in the classroom."
The New York Times published an article on a new National Bureau of Economic Research study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers on their students [...] After a discussion on the costs of keeping a minimally effective teacher, one of the authors, John N. Friedman, remarks, “the message is to fire people sooner rather than later.” His co-author, Raj Chetty, goes further: “Of course there are going to be mistakes—teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.”
That's an uncharacteristic moment of truth. In the desire to fire lots of teachers using unproven data models and evaluation rubrics, there's going to be some collateral damage. Sure you may have spent tens of thousands of dollars, and years of your life earning your degrees so you can pursue your passion, but if some secret proprietary data model says you've got to go, well, them's the breaks, and besides, there's always some casino dealer TFA recruit with 5 weeks of training to ride to the rescue on their white horse.
Nobody want's to see chronically bad teachers in the classroom, but why don't these corporate backed studies and reforms first turn to employing policies to improve struggling teachers abilities, instead of immediately reaching for the ejector cord? Where are the think tank studies on what an effective intervention program would look like? Where's the money for professional development? The Governor, in his own words says he wants to pay good teachers more, when is that going to happen? It's all stick and no carrot.
When it comes to increasing the effectiveness of the teacher workforce, school districts should first give an ineffective teacher a chance and the necessary supports to improve. If the teacher does not improve, the district should fire her. But if a teacher can be fired—or believes that she could be— due to a statistical error, the impact on the quality of teaching workforce could be disastrous. Why would a bright young professional choose a career where she could be the mistake?
That's a big important question. It's also a question we have an answer to. Michelle Rhee's legacy of firing "ineffective teachers" is now in plain view, and the view isn't pretty
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Washington Post reporter Bill Turque's analysis of Michelle Rhee's legacy one year after she left the D.C. public schools. Turque writes about the "churn and burn" in the D.C. teacher corps since the introduction of the controversial new IMPACT teacher evaluation and merit pay system: One-third of all teachers on the payroll in September 2007 no longer work for the district, and inexperienced teachers are more clustered than ever in low-income schools and neighborhoods. We know this is problematic because DC's own data shows that 22 percent of teachers with six to 10 years of experience are rated "highly effective," compared to just 12 percent of teachers with less than six years experience.
Policies the describe the need to fire lots of people will have a significant, negative, first order effect on the entire workforce. In the end, perhaps like Mitt Romney, those proposing such solutions just like to fire people.
Collaboration with veteran teachers is exactly what is missing in the current reforms. It is refreshing to see that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also supporting this idea.
Our current debate about the failures in education has spent far to much time demonizing teachers and their contributions and they are the "frontline" of improvement.
It is not surprising that Michelle A. Rhee would find collaboration an "overrated" concept. Many of her recommended interventions shared around the country have divided school personnel and made it far more difficult to work together in unity for the same goal, student achievement.
Viewing teacher tenure as the central problem in our schools completely contradicts collaborative efforts. Tenure was written to protect the voice of teachers, not poor teachers.
Some leaders lack the skills and experience to adequately build a case in dismissing poor teachers, that is not the fault of tenure. 75 teachers fired by Michelle Rhee were returned to work with full back pay and not because of tenure. The courts determined the teachers were fired on a whim, for "arbitrary and capricious" reasons.
Ridding the schools of veteran teachers unable to express their voice if not in conformity while replacing them with the inexperience of "Teach for America" candidates is no solution to real problems in the urban classroom.
It is refreshing to see we are discussing the idea of working together to find amicable, reasonable solutions. This should go a long way in building teacher morale which is dissapating by the day, half are gone in the first few years.
Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.
Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.
The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.
Ohio's new system involves each teacher receiving two 30 minute in-class observations also. Education Sector, a non-profit think tank recently produced a paper on IMPACT and took at look at some of the ways this new system has affected Washinton DC teachers. We urge you to read the paper in full, below, but we've also pulled out some of the interesting pieces to entice you.
The observations take 30 minutes—usually no more and never any less—and all but one of the administrator visits are unannounced. Based on these observations, teachers are assigned a crucial ranking, from 1 to 4. Combined with other factors, they produce an overall IMPACT score of from 100 to 400, which translates into“highly effective,” “effective,” “minimally effective,” or “ineffective.” A rating of ineffective means the teacher is immediately subject to dismissal; a rating of minimally effective gives him one year to improve or be fired; effective gets him a standard contract raise; and highly effective qualifies him for a bonus and an invitation to a fancy award ceremony at the Kennedy Center.
It is a measure of how weak and meaningless observations used to be that these pop visits can fill teachers, especially the less experienced ones, with the anxiety of a 10th-grader assigned an impromptu essay on this week’s history unit for a letter grade. The stress can show up in two ways—the teacher chokes under the pressure, thereby earning a poor score, or she changes her lesson in a way that can stifle creativity and does not always serve students. Describing these observations, IMPACT detractors use words like “humiliating,” “infantilizing,” “paternalistic,” and “punitive.” “It’s like somebody is always looking over your shoulder,” said a high school teacher who, like most, did not wish to be named publicly for fear of hurting her career.
[…]
“Out of 22 students, I have five non-readers, eight with IEPs [individual educational plans, which are required by federal law for students with disabilities], and no co-teacher,” says the middle school teacher. “The observers don’t know that going in, and there is no way of equalizing those variables.”
[…]
Bill Rope is not young, or particularly bubbly, but he is a respected teacher who sees this unusual relationship from the confident perspective of an older man who went into education after a 30-year career in the foreign service. Rope, who now teaches third grade at Hearst Elementary School in an affluent neighborhood of Northwest D.C., was rated “highly effective” last year and awarded a bonus that he refused to accept in a show of union solidarity.
But a more recent evaluation served to undermine whatever validation the first one may have offered. In the later one, a different master educator gave him an overall score of 2.78—toward the low end of “effective.”
[…]
So how did it all shake out? At the end of IMPACT’s first year, 15 percent of teachers were rated highly effective, 67 percent were judged effective, 16 percent were deemed minimally effective, and 2 percent were rated ineffective and fired.
[…]
Theoretically, a teacher’s value-added score should show a high correlation with his rating from classroom observations. In other words, a teacher who got high marks on performance should also see his students making big gains. And yet DCPS has found the correlation between these two measures to be only modest, with master educators’ evaluations onlyslightly more aligned with test scores than those of principals.
