Many costs to attendance investigation

The farce that has become the investigation into the school attendance erasures gained a price tag yesterday

Ohio’s Auditor said on Monday that his staff has spent 7,000 hours and more than $140,000 on an investigating into whether Columbus City Schools officials manipulated attendance records.

That price tag is certain to climb as it became obvious that the investigation has barely begun

Ohio Auditor Dave Yost was hoping to wrap up his investigation into attendance rigging at schools statewide well before the November elections.

It looks like that won’t happen.

Many Ohioans will be asked to vote on school levies this fall, and schools worry that uncertainty surrounding accusations of falsified attendance data may hurt their chances at the polls. But state Auditor Yost says he may not complete his investigation until the new year.

You'll notice from the articles and TV pieces we have linked to here, words like "rigging" and "scandal" being thrown around, despite any widespread evidence to date that anything like that has happened. This is a problem when one considers the number of school that are a potential target of the Auditors investigation

Ohio officials looking into potential tampering with school attendance numbers are focusing on 100 schools around the state.

The state auditor’s office tells The Dayton Daily News that investigators are concentrating on schools that have raised concerns based on data that shows they had a high number of student withdrawals.

A great many of those schools are going to be found totally innocent of any kinds of untoward data manipulation, and as the Fordham Foundation points out, even the innocent are being harmed.

Less than one month ago...

Releasing Ohio’s school report cards this month simply wouldn’t be fair, the state’s education leaders have decided.

They'll vote on changing that decision today...

Releasing delayed state report cards on school progress won't hamper an investigation into potential tampering with school attendance numbers, Ohio's state auditor told education leaders Monday.

Time the knee-jerk decision making ended, and some calm contemplation began.

Erasures demonstrate huge sensitivity in ratings

The Dispatch had another speculative piece of reporting on the attendance erasure issue. We'll leave educator Greg Mild at Plunderbund to go over the substance, or lack thereof, of the article itself. We want to concentrate on something else mentioned in the article which stood out.

At the heart of the controversy is this

Though 7 percent [number of deleted records] may not sound like a lot, it could have a big effect: There are students behind those numbers, and some of their standardized test scores were likely discounted when their attendance records were deleted. That means Columbus’ school grades could have been artificially inflated because of records-tampering.

From this, the Department of Education had a remarkable comment

“The math indicates that removing one student could affect the overall rating,” said John Charlton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education. “In some districts, it could be one kid. It’s about dropping the right kid.”

Can this be true? Can the ratings of an entire district truly be affected by just a handful of students, or even one? We have an actual true life example, that yes, small numbers of students can indeed cause an entire districts rating to be changed

In Lockland near Cincinnati, removing 36 kids from the rolls — about 5 percent of their student population — lifted the district from a C to a B on the state report card.

Can a school rating system that is so sensitive to just a handful of students truly be measuring the district as a whole? This growing controversy over attendance data is revealing a lot more than people realize.

Union members spotlight - State Senate

Last week we took a look at the union members who have decided to run for the Ohio House of Representatives. With so many there's a good change you have a union member running to represent you! You can check them out at the following links.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5

Today, the day before the primary, we turn our attention to the four union members running for the Ohio Senate. Where the Ohio House has 99 seats, the Ohio Senate has only 33, with only half up for reelection every two years. This year those districts with even numbers are up for reelection.

It should be noted that the districts listed below are new as a consequence of the legislative redistricting process that happened last year.

Senate district 6 - Rick McKiddy (D)

Rick is a retired member of the UAW. Rick is running unopposed in the primary. Paul Isaacs is challenging Lehner for the GOP nod to face Rick in November. Lehner was appointed to succeed State Sen. John Husted when he assumed the office of Ohio Secretary of State. Sen. Lehner voted for SB5 and the budget.

Senate district 20 - Teresa Scarmack (D)

Teresa is a member of OEA. Recognized as a Master Teacher, with 23 years of teaching experience, she is running uncontested in the primary and will face Troy Balderson in the general election. Sen. Balderson was appointed to the Senate in 2011 form the House, where he voted for SB5 and the budget.
You can learn more about Teresa, here.

Senate district 24 - Tom Patton (D)

Tom is a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States (IATSE), President of Treasurers and Ticket Sellers Local 756 and AFL-CIO delegate. He was one of the few Republican senators to vote against SB5. He faces Jennifer L. Brady in the general election.
You can learn more about Tom, here.

Senate district 26 - Tanyce Addison (D)

Tanyce is a member of OEA. Tanyce is a recently retired Elgin teacher of the year. Her opponent, David Burke, voted YES on SB5. He was appointed to Karen Gillmor's Senate seat after she voted YES on SB5. You can learn more about Tanyce, here.

SB5 Social media by the numbers

As we close out the SB5/Issue 2 campaign we thought we would take a look at the final social media numbers

	We Are Ohio	BetterOhio
Twitter Followers	1,722	1,332
Facebook Followers	97,717	4,569
Youtube Views	2,472,242	84,087

The winner by a long way is the We Are Ohio social media team. They produced enough Youtube video views to account for over 1 in 2 likely voters today. Social media was a failed afterthought for the BetterOhio team, who, it turned out weren't better at all.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

There is so much rich depth and thought provoking information in this NCEE paper, it would be hard to digest it in a single sitting. EdWeek:

The NCEE report is the latest salvo in a flurry of national interest in what can be gleaned from education systems in top-performing or rapidly improving countries. It pushes further than other recent reports on the topic by laying out an ambitious agenda for the United States it says reflects the education practices in countries that are among the highest-performing on international assessments.

Among other measures, the report outlines a less-frequent system of standardized student testing; a statewide funding-equity model that prioritizes the neediest students, rather than local distribution of resources; and greater emphasis on the professionalization of teaching that would overhaul most elements of the current model of training, professional development, and compensation.

To whet your appetite, and encourage you to read it, here's some snippets. Nothing in the current reforms even hints that this is the direction we are going in. Indeed, it would be easy to argue we are going in the opposite direction with ill-thought out corporate reforms

Three things directly affect the quality of the pool from which a nation recruits its teachers: 1) the status of teaching in the eyes of the potential recruit, relative to the status of other occupations to which he or she aspires, 2) the compensation offered, relative to other possible choices, and 3) the conditions of work, meaning the degree to which the way the work is organized makes it look more like professional work than blue-collar work.

The results of these corporate reforms are becoming increasingly evident, as large numbers of prospective teachers instead choose alternative career paths

Furthermore, analysts are now noticing a large falloff in applications for admission to teachers colleges all over the country, a result of the financial crisis. Potential candidates, who used to view teaching as almost immune from the business cycle and therefore one of the most secure of all occupations, are noticing that teachers are being laid off in very large numbers and now see teaching as a very risky bet.

NCEE - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Budget News for March 31st, 2011

What readers of JTF have known for some time, that the budget cuts proposed for K-12 education are reckless and devastating, are starting to come into stark relief in media reports around the state.

Broken Promises are what the Dispatch reports

Numerous central Ohio schools are reeling from what several education leaders call "a broken promise" that has districts losing more money than they expected from the state.
[...]
"It's catastrophic," Marysville Superintendent Larry Zimmerman said. "These were local dollars at one time that the state took away, and now we're not going to get reimbursed."

Plunderbund, in an article worth reading in full, looks at the confusing mess of information release that has plagued this budget rollout

Yesterday, knowing that the media would be focused on the latest developments on SB 5, the Kasich Administration did a massive budgetary document dump finally releasing both the statutory language of the entire budget and more accurate school district funding impact projections yesterday.

Except it’s a patchwork of projections that require you to examine two separate sheets on the business property tax reimbursement raid and then two other separate sheets on the utility tax reimbursement raid. You then have to take those numbers and compare them to the foundation aid projects they made last week.

The Plain Dealer went all out and produced a map of schools getting cuts

The governor's administration released the details of this plan as five separate tables, making it difficult for many people -- including district administrators, parents and other taxpayers -- to figure out how it would affect their communities and others around the state.

So on Wednesday the newspaper calculated the impact for other districts across Ohio. These findings can be viewed below in an interactive map and on a chart.

It's becoming obvious why the method of disseminating K-12 funding numbers is so opaque. When the true calculations are made the cuts are savage.

This leads to headlines like: Ohio gov, school districts differ on budget math, and West M levy talk postponed until July

Board members and Superintendent Sharon Smith agreed that now was too soon to determine what type of levy should be placed on the ballot because the numbers of the new budget released by John Kasich might change between now and June.

"I just don't see how we can put a levy out there in August when we don't have the numbers," said Don Riley, a board member. "We may not be asking for enough or we may ask for too much. I agree we're going to need a levy at some point."

Quite. This is going to take some time to sort out, and the budget needs to be complete by the end of June, so expect to see lots of stories like this one - Districts learn how deep state cuts might be

Exactly what school funding will be for the next two years seems to change daily, said Jay Tingle, treasurer for the Ridgewood Local School District.

“There are just too many projections out there right now,” Superintendent Rick Raach said.