Education News for 05-03-2012

Statewide Education News

• Is Senior Year of High School a Waste of Time? (State Impact Ohio)

The Ohio Board of Regents and the Ohio Department of Education have teamed up to wipe out senioritis. Graduation season is upon us, but many high school seniors have been coasting for months. Ohio education officials hope to change that by revamping the senior year of high school and having students take college classes, do apprenticeships or get technical training. “We have to find a way to maximize the 12th– grade year,” said Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro on WCPN 90.3’s The Sound of Ideas this morning. Read More…

Local Issues

• Residents give input on future of Youngstown schools (Vindicator)

Conversations with small groups continue to gather opinions about the community’s aspirations for city schools. A town-hall meeting will be scheduled for late next month. Part of the academic-recovery plan for Youngstown schools adopted by the academic distress commission and approved by Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction, calls for a community-engagement process “focused on increasing community expectations and aspirations by all students.” Read More…

• Intermediate students 'on the move' this week with exams, exercise (Newark Advocate)

Granville Intermediate School students are having an unusual week this week. It started with exercise, followed by several days of testing and finishes with more exercise.

And two worthy causes are attached to the latter event. This past Monday, every student in the building did some Zumba, a combination of dance and aerobic elements with some Latin choreography, martial arts and hip-hop. It was led by Zumba fitness instructor Pamela Conn, of Columbus. Read More…

• Reynoldsburg schools pay $1.4 million to escape exotic investment (Dispatch)

The Reynoldsburg school district paid $1.4 million to terminate an interest-rate swap with a financially troubled European bank this year, the same step the New Albany district has taken to shed the exotic investment. The same investment adviser who placed the New Albany schools in a swap that they paid $6.2 million to terminate last month advised Reynoldsburg on its deal. Both deals were signed in 2007 and appear to have worked identically: Read More…

• Schools will have a choice on ‘pink slime’ (Springfield News Sun)

Starting next school year, districts won’t automatically get beef with the substance critics have called “pink slime.” And if districts get it, they’ll know it, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because they’ll have to ask for it. Grocery chains like Kroger and fast food giants like McDonald’s have stopped serving beef with the product after a public outcry in March. The substance isn’t harmful, according to food scholars and government regulators. Read More…

• State may take over Monroe schools’ finances (Hamilton Journal News)

The state could soon take over financial control of the Monroe School District. Officials with the Ohio Department of Education confirmed Tuesday that Monroe’s fiscal recovery plan was not accepted and they recommended to the state auditor’s office the district be placed into fiscal emergency, which would be a first for any Butler County school system. Read More…

A different kind of investment

Education is often referred to as an investment in our future, and undoubtedly it is, as we prepare our young people to enter the workforce with creativity, energy and entrepreneurship. However, modest investment increases in public education also have an immediate, and direct, beneficial effect upon those making the investments.

A recent study by the Brooking's Institute revealed

An analysis of national and metropolitan data on public school populations and state standardized test scores for 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 reveals that:
[...]
Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.

This is clear evidence that investing a few hundred dollars per year to increase your local schools performance will have a dramatic effect on your home values - typically $11,000 per year, according to this study. The reason is no secret of course, people with school age children want to live in areas that have excellent schools, and are prepared to pay a premium for it. These results have been found to be true over and over. The St Louis Fed found

Traditional empirical models of the capitalization of education quality on house prices have established that the quality of primary school education is positively correlated with house prices. Recent capitalization studies have used various approaches to address concerns about omitted variable bias induced by failing to account for the correlation between school quality and unobserved neighborhood characteristics. Most of these variations on the traditional hedonic approach (including the boundary discontinuity regression) have assumed that the house price premium is constant because in all these models the contribution from school quality on house prices is constrained to be linear.

In this paper, we propose an alternative formulation that allows for nonlinear effects of school quality. We show that this formulation is preferred by the data over a baseline linear boundary fixed effects model and that the rate at which the house price premium rises increases over the range of school quality. In other words, the standard linear specification for test scores overestimates the premium at low levels of school quality and underestimates the premium at high levels of school quality.

In the St. Louis metropolitan area, houses associated with a school ranked at 1 SD below the mean are essentially priced on physical characteristics only. In contrast, houses associated with higher-quality schools command a much higher price premium.

Interestingly, and in contrast to many studies in the literature, the price premium remains substantially large, especially for houses associated with above-average schools. This is true even in our most conservative estimates, which complement the boundary discontinuity approach by explicitly controlling for neighborhood demographics. These estimates also reveal that the racial composition of neighborhoods is capitalized directly into house prices.

This then makes the move to downgrade Ohio's schools based on some new, arbitrary standard all the more baffling. Not only will this move potentially produce lower school ratings, it may also destroy tens of millions of dollars worth of housing value at a time when house prices are already under extreme stress and the economy struggling to improve.

Consider this then, when they vote one levies. A few hundred bucks could add thousands of dollars to the value of you home. One can only imagine the added wealth that could be created if the state lived up to its constitutional responsibilities and invested properly in public education too.

THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT: IMPACT FOR OHIO

Here's some details from the Presidents recently announced "THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT", and how it will impact Ohio's education system specifically. The entire Docuent can be found here.

The President is proposing to invest $35 billion to prevent layoffs of up to 280,000 teachers, while supporting the hiring of tens of thousands more and keeping cops and firefighters on the job. These funds would help states and localities avoid and reverse layoffs now, and will provide $1,093,800,000 in funds to Ohio to support up to 14,200 educator and first responder jobs.

The President is proposing a $25 billion investment in school infrastructure that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools – investments that will create jobs, while improving classrooms and upgrading our schools to meet 21st century needs. Ohio will receive $985,500,000 in funding to support as many as 12,800 jobs.

THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT

Last night the President gave a speech and outlined his proposal to deal with the countries high unemployment. His plan is titled "THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT". You can read it all here, but we just wanted to highlight the sections dealing with education.

Putting Workers Back on the Job While Rebuilding and Modernizing America

Preventing Layoffs of Teachers, Cops and Firefighters: The President is proposing to invest $35 billion to prevent layoffs of up to 280,000 teachers, while supporting the hiring of tens of thousands more and keeping cops and firefighters on the job. These funds would help states and localities avoid and reverse layoffs now, requiring that funds be drawn down quickly. Under the President’s proposal, $30 billion be directed towards educators and $5 billion would support the hiring and retention of public safety and first responder personnel.

Modernizing Over 35,000 Schools – From Science Labs and Internet-Ready Classrooms to Renovated Facilities: The President is proposing a $25 billion investment in school infrastructure that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools – investments that will create jobs, while improving classrooms and upgrading our schools to meet 21st century needs. This includes a priority for rural schools and dedicated funding for Bureau of Indian Education funded schools. Funds could be used for a range of emergency repair and renovation projects, greening and energy efficiency upgrades, asbestos abatement and removal, and modernization efforts to build new science and computer labs and to upgrade technology in our schools. The President is also proposing a $5 billion investment in modernizing community colleges (including tribal colleges), bolstering their infrastructure in this time of need while ensuring their ability to serve future generations of students and communities.

Given the crippling impact of the recently passed budget on Ohio's public education system, this asistance would provide tremndous benefit to Ohio's students and teachers.

Ohio education budget and policy briefing

On August 29, 2011, The Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, the Columbus Urban League, and KidsOhio.org co-hosted a budget briefing. The new State Superintendent of Education, Stan Heffner, and other Ohio Department of Education staff explained the many budgetary and policy changes in the newly-enacted, two-year state budget.

We were going to write a report on this presenation, that covered a diverse range of issues from the move away from minimum competency to college readiness, accountability, the budget, common core standards etc. There was a lot of corporate speak in this presenation, including such turns of phrase as "return on investment" and even a graph that shows arrows going up and down that's intended to mask the drastic budget cuts.

But, rather than write that report we thought we'd take all the words in the presenation and produce this word scramble. The more a word was used, the bigger it is. It's clear to see where the emphasis is, and just as importantly, where it is not.

Here's the powerpoint of the presentation that was given

Ohio Education Budget 829

Here's the video of the presentation. You'll want to fast forward past the introductions to the 13 minute mark for the beginning of the actual presentation. The presentation ends at 1 hour 10 minutes, then there's a Q&A

Watch live streaming video from escofcentralohio at livestream.com