As Ed Reforms Fail, Legislators Admit They Don't Understand What They've Done

If the the latest results from NAEP testing is to be any guide, Corporate Education reformers have more evidence that their reforms have failed. If test and punish was supposed to raise test scores, their approach is failing miserably.

The average performance of the nation’s high school seniors dropped in math from 2013 to 2015, but held steady in reading, according to results of a biennial test released Wednesday.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also showed a drop in the percentage of students in private and public schools who are considered prepared for college-level work in reading and math. In 2013, the last time the test was given, 39 percent of students were estimated to be ready in math and 38 percent in reading; in 2015, 37 percent were judged prepared in each subject.

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The lower-grade results were released last fall, and they showed a similar decline in math.

The math tests are scored from zero to 300, and in 12th grade, the average dropped to 152 in 2015 from 153 in 2013, a statistically significant decline. The 2015 average was two points higher than in 2005, the first year a comparable test was given.

Corporate education reform booster, Frederick Hess noted on twitter

As we noted in response, more time testing, less time teaching hasn't been a roadmap to student success. Which brings us nicely to the latest nonsense from the Ohio General Assembly - the architects of much of the test and punish policies Ohio has been enamored with. 

You probably only need to read the headline in this Dispatch article to have your frustration levels rise. "Ohio legislators hope to pin down ‘value added’ rating for student progress". Legislators have been crafting education reform policy based largely on flawed Value-Add systems that to this day, they do not understand.

Ohio’s value-added measure is a major part of its system for evaluating student progress and teacher effectiveness, but some lawmakers admit they have too little understanding of how it works.

They hope to change that soon.

Reps. Ryan Smith and Bob Cupp, two of the more influential House Republicans on education issues, introduced a one-paragraph bill last week that calls for a review of the value-added system.

Each said there is no plan right now for changes, but they want an in-depth discussion about it. For such a major component of district report cards and teacher evaluations, there appears to be a lack of understanding of the value-added measure both inside and outside the Statehouse.

“I don’t particularly understand it. I think it will be an opportunity to inform,” said Cupp, R-Lima. “I think there’s a lot of broad-based questions about it.”

They could start by doing a search of the JTF archives for VAM and Value Add to begin to understand that this measure has been, is and will continue to be a wholly inappropriate measure currently used. 

While ignorant legislators have ignored education experts and instead listened to the profiteers, students have learned less and teacher retention and recruitment has hit crisis levels. 

High Stakes Causing Teacher Enrollments Crisis

A crisis has been brewing in education since 2008. Teacher-preparation programs have been seeing declining numbers of enrollments, and declining number of graduates, all at a time when record number of experienced teachers are leaving the profession either through retirement or seeking second careers. 

The national problem shown in the chart above is also being replicated here in Ohio. According to Federal title 2 data, in the 2011-2012 academic year, 6768 individuals completed teacher preparation programs at one of 51 Ohio institutions. In the 2015 report, just 6066 individuals completed teacher preparation programs.

Even the Dispatch has noticed

The number of newly awarded bachelor’s degrees in education has dropped by more than one-fourth in Ohio since the 2003-04 school year, challenging the state’s reputation as a fount of new teachers.

Given the historical surplus, that might be OK, except that the prospective new teachers aren’t seeking degrees in the specialties in which they’re needed most. That leaves school districts scrambling for teachers each year, especially in middle and high school math and science, plus foreign languages, physical education and other areas.

In 2003-04, Ohio’s public and private, nonprofit colleges and universities awarded 55,207 bachelor’s degrees, and 6,759 of them, or 12.2 percent, were in education. By 2014-15, the number of bachelor’s degrees had risen to 69,592, but only 4,983 were in education, shrinking the share of education degrees to 7.3 percent.

It is no surprise that enrollments and hence graduations are down. For a while corporate education reformers could blame the great recession, but now, years after recovery, the problem continues to deteriorate. Corporate reformers have created a less attractive work environment that is clearly unable to recruit enough high quality individuals. 

Nobody went in to education to suffer the joys of high-stakes anything. That much should now be obvious to everyone. What good does having high stakes do, when it drives away the very educators who are desperately needed to do the work?

Olmsted Falls Superintendent to ODE “We Will Not Waste Our Teachers’ Time”

Another letter to ODE from a Superintendent expressing concern with the report card based on unreliable test results

Via

In a recent letter to the leaders of the Ohio Department of Education and the president of the State Board of Education, Olmsted Falls City Schools Superintendent Jim Lloyd wrote that his school system will be taking full advantage of “safe harbor” enabling districts to exclude student progress as part of teacher evaluations. Dr. Lloyd’s letter was blunt and to the point:

 “While we did our very best to provide an online testing environment for our students that would not yield confounding results, the online testing experience for our students in 2014-15 represented an epic fail due to the online platform that was utilized by the testing company.  

As a result, we firmly believe that our students’ performances do not fairly represent their achievement or growth…Therefore, as the leader of the Olmsted Falls City School District, I cannot in good conscience require my building principals to use student test results to evaluate our teachers in any form or fashion.  

Moreover, we will not waste our teachers’ time by creating last minute district or building level student learning objectives in order to retro-fit a growth measure into a teacher evaluation computer programming system that we did not create nor do we want to use.”