internal

Erasure scandal now a farce

in

The controversy over school attendance erasures started out life with questionable reporting, layered with supposition and innuendo and is now descending into farce.

Unable to perform their own investigation after years of oversight failure, ODE passed the investigation over to the State Auditor. Now the State Auditor is having to fire his own investigative staff.

State Auditor Dave Yost warned Columbus schools leaders a month ago that contacting the district’s internal auditor as she investigates claims of data rigging could have serious consequences.

Yesterday, a member of Yost’s own staff resigned after he failed to take his boss’s advice. John Davis, who also volunteers as a member of the school district’s audit committee, urged the school district’s internal auditor, Carolyn Smith, to speak with an attorney for the school board who has been meeting with district officials to ask about data rigging.

This comes just days after William Zelei, Associate Superintendent of Accountability and Quality Schools at ODE, submitted his letter of resignation.

It seems more heads are rolling among the investigators than the investigated. The one person from a district that has been fired, the Superintendent of Lockland, is now filing a law suit

Former Lockland Schools Superintendent Donna Hubbard and her son, Adam Stewart, Wednesday sued to keep their jobs, alleging the school board last week violated Ohio’s Open Meetings laws.

The lawsuits are the latest salvo in a battle between Hubbard and Lockland, one of the smallest school districts in Ohio with about 700 students.

The school board Aug. 23 voted 3-to-1 to begin the termination process for Hubbard after a state investigation found she and Stewart, the district’s database coordinator, falsely listed 37 habitually truant students as withdrawn from the district.

This entire scandal has nothing to do with educating students, it has everything to do with corporate education reform policies that require increasing large amounts of data with which to slice and dice. Not one bit of any of this will have any impact on what is going on in thousands of classrooms across Ohio right now - but it sure makes good theater.

Teacher evaluations are becoming big business for private companies

in

New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually for companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools.

Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating another source of revenue for those in the business of education. More than half of states are changing their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations and adding requirements for the classroom observations used to rate teachers. The main intent of the new laws is to identify which teachers are doing a good, bad, or mediocre job and to help them improve. One early outcome of such recent legislation, however, is a booming market that sells services and products to help states and school districts scrambling to meet the new standards.

“It’s an incredibly heavy lift for states,” says Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. “Some have contracted out big pieces of it, whether it’s someone internal in the state or an outside provider.”

Nonprofit groups and for-profit companies alike are vying for contracts to design evaluations, train teachers and principals to use them, and set up online platforms to help sort the data that schools will be collecting. Private foundation money is subsidizing some of the contracts, but districts are also spending millions of public dollars, much of it from the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” initiative.

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Internal Spread Sheets on School Funding Cuts

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Innovation Ohio obtained school funding documents the administration didn't want anyone to see.

The district-by-district breakdowns of school funding cuts, including the reimbursement losses districts will incur from the discontinued business taxes contained in the Governor’s budget proposal can be found below.

Kasich administration internal documents:

Innovation Ohio calculations: