Education News for 10-26-2012

State Education News

• ACLU wants seclusion-room tactics halted at schools (Columbus Dispatch)

There’s no need for seclusion rooms in Ohio schools and they ought to be phased out within three years, the ACLU of Ohio says…Read more...

• FBI joins probe of schools’ records (Columbus Dispatch)

The FBI has launched its own investigation into the data-scrubbing probe that began with Columbus City Schools and has spread statewide…Read more...

• 2 city schools ranked excellent or above for first time (Springfield News-Sun)

For the first time, two Springfield City elementary schools were ranked as “Excellent” or above on the preliminary Ohio Department of Education report card…Read more...

• Revere BOE OKs new electronic device policy (West Side Leader)

Students with iPads, Kindles, Nooks and other electronic devices will now be able to use them at school for educational purposes…Read more...

Local Education News

• Coleman hears of employers' need for graduates to be 'work-ready' (Columbus Dispatch)

Companies that are developing business in Columbus are placing a higher premium on the talent of the work force…Read more...

• NC'town BOE terminates teacher's contract (New Philadelphia Times)

The Newcomerstown Board of Education voted Wednesday to terminate the teaching contract of sixth-grade teacher Scott Thomas, effective immediately…Read more...

• Riverside teachers earn $9,800 grant for robotics (Willoughby News Herald)

Students at two Riverside schools will spend their time playing with Legos after the Dominion Foundation awarded a grant to the district…Read more...

• City students celebrate programs that begin after dismissal bell rings (Youngstown Vindicator)

More than 150 city elementary- and middle-school students marched along Wood Street, chanting the praises of their schools and the Youngstown Afterschool Alliance…Read more...

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

[readon2 url="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

School rankings raise serious concerns

Last month the state released a preliminary look at their new school rankings list. After digesting this list and its construction, people are asking interesting questions and observing uncomfortable patterns.

Former state legislator and former State Board of Education member Colleen Grady actually calls these performance index rankings “the most confusing and least useful of the accountability ratings, lists and rankings” because:

• The PI calculation is based on passage rates of Ohio Achievement Assessments (grades 3–8) and the Ohio Graduation Test (grades 10 and 11). The proficiency “cut scores” are so low that students can be determined “proficient” even when they answer less than 50% of test questions correctly.
• The PI calculation gives schools and districts “partial” credit for students who fail to meet the proficient standard.
• The PI calculation does not include a growth component. Districts and schools can be highly ranked even if students are learning little from year to year. The PI is a clumsy instrument that does not allow the average person to distinguish the true performance of districts. For example, 50 districts have PI scores of 100.XXXX [with the X’s representing the digits after the decimal point]. Is there any real difference in performance between the district ranked 210 of 611 or 260 of 611 districts?

Indeed, with the somewhat arbitrary nature of the weightings of the PI calculation, how much of variation in these scores is a consequence of those design choices?

The most disturbing result however is this

Shocker: Poverty Hurts Ranking

In general, districts’ rankings are directly related to how many low-income students they enroll. Even just looking at the rankings of urban school districts, for most (but not all) of the districts in the top 25 percent, less than half of their students are from low-income families.

There's about twelves months before these preliminary results become real ones, and one can only hope that some of these design problems and errata are resolved by then, but we're not hopeful.

Teacher Pay: U.S. Ranks 22nd Out Of 27 Countries

A few months ago, the widely respected Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World, which analyzes how high-performing countries have created highly professional and effective teaching forces. Included in this report is a telling chart which shows that American teachers are paid less than teachers in many other countries.

For each participating nation, OECD calculated the ratio of the average salaries of teachers with 15 years' experience to the average earnings of full-time workers with a college degree. The U.S. ranked 22nd out of 27 countries on this measure. In the U.S., teachers earned less than 60% of the average pay for full-time college-educated workers. In many other countries, teachers earn between 80% and 100% of the college-educated average.

Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession

[readon2 url="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-jennings/teacher-pay-us-ranks-22nd_b_940814.html"]Continue reading...[/readon2]