Education News for 05-22-2013

State Education News

• Little Miami regains its independence (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Today is Independence Day for the financially embattled Little Miami Schools. Once Ohio’s poster child for school district monetary woes, the Warren County school system will be autonomous…Read more...

• Coleman, Gee pitch Columbus school proposal to legislators (Columbus Dispatch)

State legislators drew attention to academic failures of the Columbus school district and to its ongoing data scandal last night in the first talks over a bill that…Read more...

• Special-needs aides still fighting dismissal (Columbus Dispatch)

Two Columbus special-needs aides who were fired last summer are still fighting to get their jobs back. The final day of hearings before the Columbus Civil Service Commission…Read more...

• Northridge out of fiscal caution, but levy needed (Newark Advocate)

The Northridge School District is out of fiscal caution. However, the district will have to renew its 8.86 mill levy by the end of 2014 to remain in the black long term…Read more...

• As prepared as we can be for Tornadoes (Portsmouth Daily Times)

An enormous tornado ripped through Moore, Okla., Monday, killing more…Read more...

Local Education News



• Families of the victims of Chardon School shooting are suing the United Way over access to Chardon (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

The families of the three Chardon High School students who were killed in 2012 are suing the United Way of Greater Cleveland and its Geauga County chapter…Read more...

• Reynoldsburg takes over charter e-school (Columbus Dispatch)

The Reynoldsburg school board is taking over the charter e-school that it placed on probation last year…Read more...

• Groveport Madison levy still losing by 12 votes (Columbus Dispatch)

Groveport Madison’s school levy gained four votes but is still behind after elections officials counted provisional ballots and added in an uncounted…Read more...

• Columbus school board votes to back report of Coleman’s education panel (Columbus Dispatch)

A resolution supporting the recommendations of the Columbus Education Commission passed a divided Columbus school board last night, after a lengthy debate that centered largely around whether…Read more...

• Brunswick school officials close all buildings in response to norovirus (Sun Newspapers)

Although symptoms of the condition itself last, in general, little more than 24 hours, a norovirus outbreak at the Brunswick City Schools this past week led to the closer of every building…Read more...

• Maysville students benefit from early college courses (Zanesville Times-Recorder)

Skylar Novaria might achieve his goal of becoming a business manager or CEO sooner than expected because of being a proactive teenager…Read more...

Choice, but for who

A couple of recent stories have highlighted how damaging the current school "choice" scheme is. Proponents of choice like to concentrate on the few that might benefit, but seem to willfully fail to acknowledge the many that suffer as a consequence. Only 5% of Ohio's students go to a charter school, yet they received 10% of the state funding.

This phenomena gets worse when one looks at the newly created special needs vouchers, as Stephen Dyer explains

The voucher is geared toward special education children and is not means tested. It provides up to $20,000 for a student to attend a private school. That money, by the way, comes out of the state aid meant for the child's district of residence.

The bill was introduced twice during my time in the House, and my argument was that it earmarked up to 1/3 of the state's special education money to serve 3% of the special needs children in this state. This, of course, left 97% of the state's special needs children with 2/3 of the money.

Does that sound right to anyone? Can even proponents of "choice" support this untenable situation? We suspect many of them do, because the agenda of many appears not to be about choice, but about subsidizing private education, and the data bears this out. In Cincinnati for example, 199 students were enrolled in this voucher scheme, yet

Cincinnati Public, for instance, said that only 15 of its Peterson voucher recipients are switching to a private school. Most of the other recipients live in the district but already attend private schools or are kindergartners, said Pat Cleveland, CPS’ manager of non-public schools special education services.

We are diverting millions of dollars of tax payer money to subsidize parents who have already enrolled their children into private schools. As a consequence, the children being served by their local public schools see their revenues drop, causing their educational opportunities to be diminished.

As if that isn't bad enough, one set of private school parents have decided to sue their local school district so their children can ride redirected public school buses to school. There seems no end to the entitlement of the few at the expense of the many.

But the problems don't stop there. The CATO Institute, a right wing think tank, has recently published a study that demonstrates the increase in "choice" via charter schools is having adverse effects beyond public schools.

Charter schools are changing public and private school enrollment patterns across the United States. This study analyzes district-level enrollment patterns for all states with charter schools, isolating how charter schools affect traditional public and private school enrollments after controlling for changes for the socioeconomic, demographic, and economic conditions in each district.

While most students are drawn from traditional public schools, charter schools are pulling large numbers of students from the private education market and present a potentially devastating impact on the private education market, as well as a serious increase in the financial burden on taxpayers.

Private school enrollments are much more sensitive to charters in urban districts than in non-urban districts. Overall, about 8 percent of charter elementary students and 11 percent of middle and high school students are drawn from private schools. In highly urban districts, private schools contribute 32, 23, and 15 percent of charter elementary, middle, and high school enrollments, respectively. Catholic schools seem particularly vulnerable, especially for elementary students in large metropolitan areas.

The flow of private-school students into charters has important fiscal implications for districts and states. When charters draw students from private schools, demands for tax revenue increase. If governments increase educational spending, tax revenues must be increased or spending in other areas reduced, or else districts may face pressures to reduce educational services. The shift of students from private to public schools represents a significant shift in the financial burdens for education from the private to the public sector.

Parents of private school students can save a lot of money by enrolling their children in quasi-private charter schools - placing additional burdens on public schools, tax payers and some private schools.

This system of the few benefiting at the expense of the many needs to be reversed. No child's education should come at the expense of others, yet that is exactly what is happening in Ohio right now, thanks to school "choice" proponents and their legislative supporters.

10 most inaccurate ed reform axioms

The Washington post has a list of the 10 most inaccurate and damaging statements that some school reformers toss around.

Here’s the list:

1. High-stakes standardized test data produce the fairest, most reliable, and least expensive evidence of student comprehension as well as teacher ability.

2. High-stakes standardized tests are updated routinely to eliminate confusing and/or culturally biased aspects, and questions on these tests are comprehensible by any child who can read on grade level.

3. Testing anxiety is rare, affects mostly low-achieving students, and has a minimal impact on test results.

4. High-stakes tests do not take an unreasonable amount of time for students to complete and test preparation does not take an unreasonable amount of instructional time throughout the year.

5. We would coddle and ultimately damage kids who receive special accommodations if we taught and/or tested them according to their ability to read and comprehend English. The fairest way to teach and test high-needs kids is in the same classroom, with the same curriculum, and with the same high-stakes tests (in addition to other high-stakes tests) as kids who don’t receive any special accommodations.

6. Poverty and high class size don’t matter when you have high standards.

7. The Common Core State Standards will significantly increase student achievement while saving taxpayer money.

8. Charter schools are more effective at instructing kids than nearby public schools and can do so for less money without putting financial burdens on nearby public school districts.

9. Parents have more decision-making power at charter schools than at public schools and the upcoming feature film, “Won’t Back Down” accurately depicts how parents are empowered to fix failing schools once parent trigger laws are in place.

10. Business leaders should run public schools and school systems because they are usually successful when permitted to apply a corporate model to public education.

Education News for 04-16-2012

Statewide Education News

• State to target achievement gaps among students (Dispatch)

If nothing changes, black fifth-graders won’t be reading on par with white fifth-graders in Ohio for another 303 years, the state estimates. For third-graders, it would be 90 years before black and white students pass reading exams at the same rate. State officials say those alarming estimates show that schools need to act quickly to make sure groups of students who are behind are catching up with their peers. Read More…

• Project learning 101 at Winton Woods (Enquirer)

In classrooms across the country, a pendulum is swinging. On one side is the predominant belief that students learn best through direct instruction – teachers lecturing and students listening, taking notes and proving on tests what they’ve learned. On the other side is what some say is a more progressive form of education, in which students collaborate on projects and problems and learn from each other by asking, doing and exploring. The teacher is merely a facilitator. This “project-based” or “problem-based” learning is where many schools should be heading, Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Stan Heffner told The Enquirer last week. Read More…

Local Issues

• Special ed spending soars in some districts (Hamilton Journal News)

In the past decade, the cost of educating special needs children has skyrocketed while the numbers of children with disabilities have shown only modest increases. An analysis of data from the Ohio auditor and the Ohio Department of Education shows that Butler County public school districts spent 158 percent more on special education between 2001 and 2010 while the number of special needs children has risen by 14 percent. Read More…

• Cleveland mayor takes on teacher union over reform (Associated Press)

CLEVELAND - The mayor wants to give his hand-picked superintendent the power to reassign bad teachers, reshape failing schools and stagger class times without union contract barriers. Mayor Frank Jackson, the only Ohio mayor who controls schools through an appointed board, angered fellow Democrats and the party's labor allies by challenging timeworn teacher union contracts. "What we will not accept is incremental change or the belief that everything is OK and we should continue down the same path," he said in a city hall interview. "That is not acceptable to us." Read More…

• Future cloudy for alternative school existence (Chillicothe Gazette)

CHILLICOTHE -- The Ross-Pike Educational Service District might shutter its alternative school after Ross County's school superintendents said they're unlikely to send students there in the future. "It's a possibility," Ross-Pike ESD Superintendent Steve Martin said of the rumored closure. "It's a possibility every year." Martin confirmed, at a recent meeting, the superintendents indicated they probably would stop using the alternative school as a disciplinary tool for disruptive students beginning with the 2012-13 school year. Read More…

• Westfall discipline case raises questions about public files (Chilicothe Gazette)

WILLIAMSPORT -- A principal is without a job and a teacher is on thin ice after a recent personnel investigation at Westfall High School that was conducted mostly behind closed doors. Tom Lehman, the school's principal since August 2008, agreed to resign April 5, ending an investigation that began in February with questions about his professional conduct. Superintendent Cara Riddel said she often had clashed with Lehman since joining the district in summer 2011, but it was his violation of part of the Licensure Code of Professional Conduct for Ohio Educators that led to his suspension Feb. 21 and ultimately his resignation. Read More…

Editorial & Opinion

• Hold charter schools to task (Warren Chronicle Tribune)

Charter schools - private institutions operating with subsidies from the government - can provide invaluable alternatives to public education in some areas. But they have to play by the rules, too. That has not been the case in Ohio for many years, to judge by revelations about financial mismanagement at some charter schools. Read More…

Parents want small class sizes

StateImpactOhio has an article on voucher expansion in Ohio, and they talked to a few parents of children with special needs using vouchers. But it was why these parents were choosing vouchers that caught our eye.

Corinn starts high school next year, and hopes that a small Catholic school like Villa Angela Saint Joseph on Cleveland’s East side will help her continue her progress.

“I picked the school because it was a smaller class size and they would have the extra help that I would need there,” she explains.
[...]
Youngstown Christian is not a big school by any means. There are just 475 students in grades K-12, and Pecchia says parents are drawn to the school’s small size.

Parents want small class sizes for their children, whether they have special needs or not. Vouchers are setting up a vicious economic cycle. Parents want smaller class sizes, so some choose to use vouchers to enroll their children into smaller schools, which subtracts money from the struggling public schools reducing their ability to maintain smaller classes, which in turn causes more parents to seek schools with smaller classes via vouchers.

If that seems unfair, it's not even the beginning as State Impact reports

That’s because public school districts have to write yearly special individual education programs, known as IEP’s, for special needs students even if they attend a private school. And it’s the public school, not the private school the child attends, that has to monitor the progress of the student and update the plan each year.

“My first thought is frustration because it puts some responsibility on the school for kids that they won’t really know,” says Dennis.

The private schools and parents are supposed to communicate regularly with the student’s home district through progress reports.

The public school district still has responsibilities for the student even after they have taken a voucher and left. Private and charter schools like to dubiously boast about how efficient they are, but rarely if ever acknowledge that that is because the public schools are picking up the hard work for them.

Why educators oppose SB5 and vote no on issue 2

Here are some of the reasons educators and educational support professionals are opposed to SB5 and will be voting no on Issue 2

Issue 2 is Unfair

"Teachers care deeply about our kids. When I discovered that special education students in my school district didn't have the books and resources they needed, I turned to my colleagues. The union contract helped my students get the tools they needed. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2. I know that without collective bargaining, my special needs students would fall through the cracks—and that's just not fair for them, or anyone else."

—Marjorie Punter, special education teacher, Dayton, Ohio

Issue 2 is Unsafe

"I take my job very seriously. After all, parents trust me to make sure their child is safe. It's a huge responsibility, and I'm afraid Issue 2 will put our kids' safety in jeopardy. For me, that's just too much to risk, which is why I am voting NO on Issue 2."

—Ian Ruck, bus driver, Pataskala, Ohio

Issue 2 Hurts Us All

“As a teacher and a mother, I worry about our children. Politicians may think they are fixing our schools, but they haven't spent any time in the classroom, and their one-size-fits-all reforms are risking our children’s future. Our kids are not widgets, and shortchanging them is not only irresponsible and shortsighted, but it hurts us all. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2.”

—Kyley Richardson, high school Spanish teacher, Continental, Ohio