Corporate money vs the people

The campaign to support Issue 2 has been one of the most opaque campaigns in Ohio election history. In order to circumvent transparency laws and campaign finacne reports, Better Ohio created a Rube Goldberg like non profit system whereby donors could donote to a non profit that didn't have to expose who those donors were, or how much they donated. They they turned right around and donated that secret stash to their campaign.

If you look at their campaign financne reports it shows just one donor "BUILDING A BETTER OHIO INC" making all the contributions. That said, they did, under pressure release a list of who donated money to "BUILDING A BETTER OHIO INC", though not the amounts. In total 46 businesses and 950 individuals gave some amount of money to the BetterOhio campaign.

If that hasn't been unfair enough, a host of other corporate backed entities also provided financial heft to the Governor's campaign to hurt working people. Via PR Watch

Alliance for America’s Future

The Alexandria, Virginia-based Alliance for America’s Future (AFAF) has spent over seven figures in an effort to flood millions of Ohio voters’ mailboxes with fliers encouraging a “yes” vote on Issue 2 to uphold the bill. Heading the AFAF is Mary Cheney, the daughter of former vice president’ Dick Cheney, and Barry Bennert, former chief of staff to Ohio Congresswoman Jen Schmidt (R-2nd District). The Alliance does not disclose its corporate donors.

Ohio is just one of 30 states, including Wisconsin, in which the AFAF has become involved. Their official website offers no information on staff or current projects, but instead offers a single webpage stating the AFAF is “dedicated to educating and advocating sound economic and security policies that will foster growth, prosperity, and peace for America’s future.”

The group's fliers include lines such as “OBAMA wants us to do things HIS WAY? Yes on Issue 2 is our chance to do things OUR WAY,” and “Yes on Issue 2 will get POLITICIANS to do the right thing on spending.”

Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks

FreedomWorks, the D.C.-based group affiliated with the Tea Party and led by Dick Armey, has distributed tens of thousands of door hangers and yard signs in Ohio that read “Yes on Issue 2 & 3.”

FreedomWorks, which is led by people who previously worked for David Koch's "Citizens for a Sound Economy," FreedomWorks' predecessor group, does not disclose its corporate donors, and its leaders are drawn heavily from the leadership of the Republican Party and right-wing operatives. FreedomWorks asserts that it is not affiliated with any Issue 2 or 3 Campaign or Committee.

The FreedomWorks website encourages visitors to download and print available door hangers (pdf) with a promise that “tens of thousands more [are] on the way.” 

The group also created the website YesForJobs.com, which allows Ohioans to download absentee ballots and provides information on where to send them. 

Ohio Liberty Council

The Ohio Liberty Council (OLC), a Tea Party group headed by 12 council board members, has released two television ads in support of Issue 2. The OLC claims group leaders and “private citizens” fund it. President, Tom Zawistowski and Vice President, Jason Mihalick lead the OLC, which does not disclose its donors.

In one OLC ad, the narrator states that Issue 2 is not one of “pro-union” or “anti-union” but rather about “taxpayers rights.”

A second television ad, “The Story of a Broke Ohio,” states that we will be in a deficit because “96 percent of schools tax revenue will go toward staff compensation,” and what they call “Gold-plated pensions and benefits.”

This statistic was pulled from a study by The Buckeye Institute, a conservative 501 (c)(3) “research organization” that has been used in a number of campaigns and as an “expert” on SB5. The Buckeye Institute “study” highlights the projected deficits of nineteen Central Ohio School Districts, and concludes that Central Ohio School Districts will have a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion by 2015 unless compensation packages are realigned or taxes are raised.

The “study” was released as an ad that appeared in twenty-two suburban news weeklies across central Ohio. The ad on its own does not mention SB 5, but it is used in a number of pro SB 5 campaigns.

The “study” places the burden of responsibility for the deficit on government employees, and ignores the fact that Ohio union officials agreed to pay more for insurance and accept wage cuts and freezes.

Americans for Prosperity

The Americans for Prosperity Ohio branch is organizing support for SB 5. AFP Ohio has scheduled more than a dozen town hall meetings across Ohio, organized phone banks and is currently urging supporters of the bill to defend Building a Better Ohio’s “Life or Death” ad featuring great-grandmother Marlene Quinn.

Americans for Prosperity is chaired by oil billionaire David Koch and funded by Koch money and other undisclosed sources. The group includes both a 501(c)(3) that received over $10 million in 2009, and a 501(c)(4) that received over $16 million that year. Neither the national AFP nor its state arms disclose their donors.

Americans for Prosperity’s Ohio branch received a web endorsement from Gov. Kasich in June. In a web-only video, Gov. Kasich praises AFP-Ohio. He refers to the group as “fighters for freedom” and thanks them for their “support to the effort to get Ohio back on track.”

Make Ohio Great

Make Ohio Great is spending thousands to aid Gov. Kasich in his defense of SB 5. Make Ohio Great is a group founded and funded by the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which spent over $9 million to elect Gov. Kasich in 2010. The RGA is funded by billionaires like David Koch and Rupert Murdoch, as well as numerous large corporations. The RGA spent tens of millions on advertisements in the 2010 election year. In August 2010 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation donated $1 million to the RGA, along with David Koch and others. Make Ohio Great disputes claims that they are a group set up for secret cash to flow in defense of SB 5.

Make Ohio Great reportedly bought $48,100 in airtime with WBNS-TV.

In the ad, titled “Kasich Getting the Jobs Done,” Kasich asks Ohioans to “take a new path,” and boasts that he has balanced the budget without raising taxes.

Kasich may be speaking too soon, as his economic plan for Ohio depends in part on SB 5 becoming law. The cost-savings come from requiring employees pay more for health insurance, and limiting their vacation and sick time, some of which unions had agreed to voluntarily. Ending collective bargaining, though, saved the state no money -- despite messaging to the contrary by out-of-state right-wing organizations, balanced budgets need not come at the expense of collective bargaining.

Like an untested drug?

If there was a new drug that had shown some promise in curing the flu in lab trials, but there were also some indicators that it had some nasty, in some cases fatal, side effects, do you think that drug required more testing and trials, or should be rushed into production and given out as widely as possible?

That's basically the scenario we have with using value add scores for high stakes decision making when it comes to teachers. Sure no one is actually going to die, but if corporate education reformers have their way, many might falsely lose their jobs, and the money wasted will never be used to actually educate a student, and what of the opportunity cost of missing out on getting effective reforms into the classroom being missed?

Given the context-dependency of the estimators’ ability to produce accurate results, however, and our current lack of knowledge regarding prevailing assignment practices, VAM-based measures of teacher performance, as currently applied in practice and research, must be subjected to close scrutiny regarding the methods used and interpreted with a high degree of caution.

Methods of constructing estimates of teacher effects that we can trust for high-stakes evaluative purposes must be further studied, and there is much left to investigate. In future research, we will explore the extent to which various estimation methods, including more sophisticated dynamic treatment effects estimators, can handle further complexity in the DGPs.

The addition of test measurement error, school effects, time-varying teacher effects, and different types of interactions among teachers and students are a few of many possible dimensions of complexity that must be studied. Finally, diagnostics are needed to identify the structure of decay and prevailing teacher assignment mechanisms. If contextual norms with regard to grouping and assignment mechanisms can be deduced from available data, then it may be possible to determine which estimators should be applied in a given context.

We must be able to prove that evaluations and the metrics that make them up are fair, accurate and stable, and if they are to have any real benefit they must ultimately demonstrate a cost effective way to improve student achievement and education quality. We're simply not there yet and pretending we are is dangerous and carries some very real risks.

Experienced educators are critical

Here at JTf we try to bring attention to as much of the latest reputable education policy research as possible. You can check our scribd account for the back catalogue. What consistently comes to light are the following observations

• Education policy covers a vast area of issues
• A lot of research is paid for by organizations with an agenda
• Most research is in a state of relative infancy
• There's a lot of contradictory research

As we have been delving into one policy area, namely teacher attrition, we came across 2 studies. The first form the National Center for Education Statistic, titled "Beginning Teacher Attrition and Mobility: Results From the First Through Third Waves of the 2007–08". One of the questions this study is looking at is the impact of early career mentoring and its impact on attrition. This study has tentatively found

Among beginning public school teachers who were assigned a mentor in 2007-08, about 8 percent were not teaching in 2008–09 and 10 percent were not teaching in 2009–10. In contrast, among the beginning public school teachers who were not assigned a mentor in 2007–08, about 16 percent were not teaching in 2008–09 and 23 percent were not teaching in 2009–10 (table 2).

In other words, having a senior teacher mentor a younger teacher has quite a dramatic effect on the attrition rates of new teachers. This is an important finding for many reasons, but especially important to understand if we were to move away from collaborative work places to a more merit based system where competition rules.

A second study, from the US Department of Education titled "Impacts of Comprehensive Teacher Induction Final Results from a Randomized Controlled Study", had a different finding regarding the question of mentoring

Neither exposure to one year nor exposure to two years of comprehensive induction had a positive impact on retention or other teacher workforce outcomes
[...]
-There was no impact on teacher retention over the first four years of the teachers’ careers. This was true of retention in the original school, the original school district, and the teaching profession.

These are the kinds of problems that need to be wrestled with, in order to produce the most effective education system possible.

For the record, mentoring does produce important positive results, as the Dept. of Ed study found

• For teachers who received two years of comprehensive induction, there was no impact on student achievement in the first two years. In the third year, there was a positive and statistically significant impact on student achievement.

- In the third year, in districts and grades in which students’ test scores from the current and prior year are available, students of treatment teachers outperformed students of the corresponding control teachers on average. These impacts are equivalent to effect sizes of 0.11 in reading and 0.20 in math, which is enough to move the average student from the 50th percentile up 4 percentile points in reading and 8 percentile points in math.

- These results are based on the subset of data for which students’ test scores from the current and prior year are available. If the analyses are conducted without requiring test scores from the prior year, we do not find an impact on math or reading scores. This alternative approach nearly doubles the available sample of study teachers but the lack of data on students’ prior achievement results in a less precise estimate. This means that we are less likely to detect a true impact if it exists, despite the larger sample size.

We can't build a strong education system without experienced educators prepared to mentor young teachers, and that mentorship requires multiple years of effort to show results.

A primer on corporate school reform

“Corporate education reform” refers to a specific set of policy proposals currently driving education policy at the state and federal level. These proposals include:

• increased test-based evaluation of students, teachers, and schools of education
• elimination or weakening of tenure and seniority rights
• an end to pay for experience or advanced degrees
• closing schools deemed low performing and their replacement by publicly funded, but privately run charters
• replacing governance by local school boards with various forms of mayoral and state takeover or private management
• vouchers and tax credit subsidies for private school tuition
• increases in class size, sometimes tied to the firing of 5-10% of the teaching staff
• implementation of Common Core standards and something called “college and career readiness” as a standard for high school graduation:

These proposals are being promoted by reams of foundation reports, well-funded think tanks, a proliferation of astroturf political groups, and canned legislation from the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC).

Together these strategies use the testing regime that is the main engine of corporate reform to extend the narrow standardization of curricula and scripted classroom practice that we’ve seen under No Child Left Behind, and to drill down even further into the fabric of schooling to transform the teaching profession and create a less experienced, less secure, less stable and less expensive professional staff. Where NCLB used test scores to impose sanctions on schools and sometimes students (e.g., grade retention, diploma denial), test-based sanctions are increasingly targeted at teachers.

A larger corporate reform goal, in addition to changing the way schools and classrooms function, is reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining and teacher unions and in the permanent crisis of school funding across the country. These policies undermine public education and facilitate its replacement by a market-based system that would do for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and employment: produce fabulous profits and opportunities for a few and unequal outcomes and access for the many....

Standardized tests have been disguising class and race privilege as merit for decades. They’ve become the credit default swaps of the education world. Few people understand how either really works. Both encourage a focus on short-term gains over long-term goals. And both drive bad behavior on the part of those in charge. Yet these deeply flawed tests have become the primary policy instruments used to shrink public space, impose sanctions on teachers and close or punish schools. And if the corporate reformers have their way, their schemes to evaluate teachers and the schools of education they came from on the basis of yet another new generation of standardized tests, it will make the testing plague unleashed by NCLB pale by comparison.

[readon2 url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-primer-on-corporate-school-reform/2011/10/26/gIQAyWrUKM_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Are we serious about evaluations?

We were reaing an interesting article on development of teacher evaluations in California, that has this passage

The Los Angeles Unified School District rolled out its technology-based teacher evaluation system in August. Seven hundred fifty “pioneer” teachers volunteered to test the new system, featuring a newly-negotiated set of teaching and learning standards. The new framework was devised with input from over 1,000 educators working in small groups. To begin the process, teachers grade themselves (from “ineffective” to “highly effective”) on 63 teaching standards, then fill in a lesson plan template, identifying which of the 63 standards their lesson addresses, and to what degree. Trained observers download the lesson, observe the teacher using it, and enter their own data. Everything but the observation itself is managed online.

Teachers at the September conversation showed a real willingness to reform their own approach to evaluation; not one spoke up to say they would not participate, or be against the new system. Of course, many stated historical concerns: did we really expect that a new system would foster collaboration, when the current system supposedly depends on collaboration but doesn’t produce enough of it? What about principals who are not experts in the teacher’s content area? Are we really going to continue using standardized test scores, when there is so much evidence that many learning gains happen in ways the tests cannot measure?

Cue the screech to a halt sound effect. "The new framework was devised with input from over 1,000 educators working in small groups"

In Ohio, the evaluation system has been half crafted in closed door, smoked filled legislative chambers, with the rest done through a half-baked online comment form and just 18 "meetings" with hand picked teachers.

Are we serious?

Teacher attrition and education policy

One of the genuine major issues facing education is one of teacher attrition. Each year significant numbers of teachers leave the profession. From a human capital perspective, this is hugely expensive and impacts education delivery. A large number of studies have been performed to asses this problem. A recent study, published by the american Education Research Association looked at all the major studies in this area. The study can be found here (pdf). What follows are come of the concluding remarks.

This literature review provides a summary and critical evaluation of the recent published research on the topic of teacher recruitment and retention. We reviewed studies that examined (1) the characteristics of individuals who enter teaching, (2) the characteristics of individuals who remain in teaching, (3) the external characteristics of schools and districts that affect recruitment and retention, (4) compensation policies that affect recruitment and retention, (5) pre-service policies that affect recruitment and retention, and (6) in-service policies that affect recruitment and retention.

The reviewed research offered several consistent findings. The strongest results were those relating to the influence of various factors on attrition due to the widespread availability of longitudinal data sets that track the employment of teachers. Below, we summarize the findings that emerged in the recent empirical research literature.

1. Results that arose fairly consistently regarding the characteristics of individuals who enter the teaching profession were as follows:
• Females formed greater proportions of new teachers than males.
• Whites formed greater proportions of new teachers than minorities, although there is evidence that minority participation rose in the early 1990s.
• College graduates with higher measured academic ability were less likely to enter teaching than were other college graduates. It is possible, however, that these differences were driven by the measured ability of elementary school teachers, who represent the majority of teachers.
• A more tentative finding based on a small number of weaker studies is that an altruistic desire to serve society is one of the primary motivations for pursuing teaching.
2. Several findings emerged with a strong degree of consistency in empirical studies of the characteristics of individuals who leave the teaching profession:
• The highest turnover and attrition rates seen for teachers occurred in their first years of teaching and after many years of teaching when they were near retirement, thus producing a U-shaped pattern of attrition with respect to age or experience.
• Minority teachers tended to have lower attrition rates than White teachers.
• Teachers in the fields of science and mathematics were more likely to leave teaching than teachers in other fields.
• Teachers with higher measured academic ability (as measured by test scores) were more likely to leave teaching.
• Female teachers typically had higher attrition rates than male teachers.
3. Regarding the external characteristics of schools and districts that are related to teacher recruitment and retention rates, the empirical literature provided the following fairly consistent findings:
• Schools with higher proportions of minority, low-income, and low-performing students tended to have higher attrition rates.
• In most studies, urban school districts had higher attrition rates than suburban and rural districts.
• Teacher retention was generally found to be higher in public schools than in private schools.
4. The following statements summarize the consistent research findings regarding compensation policies and their relationship to teacher recruitment and retention:
• Higher salaries were associated with lower teacher attrition.
• Teachers were responsive to salaries outside their districts and their profession.
• In surveys of teachers, self-reported dissatisfaction with salary was associated with higher attrition and decreased commitment to teaching.Teacher Recruitment and Retention
5. Rigorous empirical studies of the impact of pre-service policies on teacher recruitment and retention were sparse. In general, few results emerged across studies, and the following findings were therefore not particularly robust:
• Graduates of nontraditional and alternative teacher education programs appear to have higher rates of retention in teaching than national comparison groups and may differ from traditional recruits in their background characteristics.
• There was tentative evidence that streamlined routes to credentialing provide more incentive to enter teaching than monetary rewards.
• Pre-service testing requirements may adversely affect the entry of minority candidates into teaching.
6. Findings from the research on in-service policies that affect teacher recruitment and retention were as follows:
• Schools that provided mentoring and induction programs, particularly those related to collegial support, had lower rates of turnover among beginning teachers.
• Schools that provided teachers with more autonomy and administrative support had lower levels of teacher attrition and migration.
• A tentative finding was that accountability policies might lead to increased attrition in low-performing schools. The entry, mobility, and attrition patterns summarized

One can see from the results of these studies, creating a lower paid, less secure profession as some current corporate education reform policies would do, would create a situation of worse renention, to the determiment of students. The importance of workplace conditions, classroom resources, and support are also critical, and may be lost without the ability to bargain for them.

Clearly, delivery of high quality education at an affordable cost is a complex subject with many complex variables at play. SB5 and HB153's highly prescriptive, and simplistic appoaches to reform without any broad expert consultation are bound to produce sub-optimal results. Ohio should take advantage of it's localized control and delivery of education, and its vast expert resources in education and pedagogy to experiment in reform before committing to a one size fits all simplistic approach.

A second literature review on teacher attrition an be found here.