New From Fordham: What are the historical reasons for unmitigated school spending increases, as well as current practices and policies preventing a serious overhaul of spending in Ohio? Did you know that dollars spent on education reform are dwarfed by "status quo" spending? What are Ohio's school improvement guidelines doing to otherwise high-performing schools that miss AYP? Read this week's edition to find answers to these questions and more.

Headliner

Unraveling constant school spending growth

Editorial

"Reform dollars" for education are dwarfed by status quo spending

Short Reviews

Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card

Sounding the Alarm: A Wakeup Call with Directions

Capital Matters

High-flying schools starting to feel the pressure of NCLB, to what avail?

Ohio schools in need of foreign language 101

Flypaper's Finest

Columbus City Schools should be ashamed

Being honest about how tough ed reform is

Editor's Extras

Move over Bill Nye, the Dean of Invention has arrived

Announcement

New Fordham report weighs options for governance of Common Core standards

Headliner

Unraveling constant school spending growth
By Terry Ryan and Jeff Jacobson

Ohio’s impending budget crisis has been danced around by the state’s politicians during this election season, but there is no doubt that no matter the outcome on Tuesday education faces some tough cuts. Ohioans are finally coming to realize that unmitigated increases in school spending like we’ve seen in years past are no longer an option going forward.

But in order to understand Ohio’s school-spending situation and the difficult decisions the state now faces, it’s important to recognize the factors that drive school spending. Further, we need to appreciate the increasing disconnect between increased school funding and much more modest state revenue increases over the same period of time. Ohio has reached a point of unsustainable spending for a reason, and it’s important to understand why and to identify specific practices and trends that prevent a serious rethinking of spending.

A short history behind school spending in Ohio and what it’s bought
Since the first DeRolph decision 17 years ago, two questions have dominated the minds of state legislators and governors: How much additional money would be enough to satisfy the Ohio Supreme Court? And, How much would be enough to satisfy the “court of public opinion” (editorial boards and others)? The first question drove the policy debate in Ohio until the court, in DeRolph III in 2001, ordered the state to alter its funding methodology for determining the per-pupil base support and to accelerate the phase in of parity aid, upon which, the court said, the system would be constitutional. That was the end of the court’s consensus. It vacated itself from the issue and eventually left the playing field altogether in 2003.

The second question mattered because editorial writers and school-spending advocates were a vocal obstacle in the early 2000s to the Republican majority being able to simply declare victory and move on to other issues. Despite the opposition, Governor Bob Taft announced after the court’s dismissal in 2003 that the DeRolph case was over. But the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding and a number of Democratic lawmakers were frustrated by the outcome and wanted the state to send more money to public schools. This call for further spending came despite the fact that Ohio saw per-pupil funding in the state rise by over 60 percent from 1997 to 2010, using inflation-adjusted dollars, and that spending didn’t include the almost $6.5 billion spent on new school buildings over that same period of time.

What has all this new spending bought for Ohio? More jobs for adults, for starters. Though public school enrollment in the Buckeye State has slightly decreased over the past two decades (from 1.77 million in 1991 to 1.75 million in 2009), the number of adults employed by the system has shot up. According to the Ohio Department of Education, there were 181,020 public school employees working in Ohio’s public education system in 1991, when the DeRolph case was first filed, compared with 245,354 such public school employees on payrolls last school year. This increase of 35 percent over two decades came as enrollment dropped 1.4 percent.

Unfortunately, increased spending on schools hasn’t bought much in the way of improved academic performance. The percent of Ohio school children deemed proficient in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress – aka the Nation’s Report Card – has barely budged in the last decade. Likewise, high school graduation rates remain stagnant. The statewide graduation rate has inched up two percentage points, to 83 percent, since 2000. Further, there is evidence that those students who do graduate are not adequately prepared for college. The percent of Ohio graduates requiring remedial math coursework upon entering a state college or university has increased from 23 percent to 32 percent in the past two decades. (Results are better when it comes to remedial English language arts; the percent of students requiring that coursework has hovered around 20 percent for the last 20 years).

DeRolph and the politics of reaction
Since the first DeRolph decision in 1993, successive legislatures have increased school funding. Spending fatigue only set in during the past two budgets, as legislators gradually came to four realizations: 1) no amount of funding would satisfy the school spenders; 2) the public did not believe school funding had been fixed, because despite the massive increase in state funding, local districts were still regularly on the ballot for more local dollars; 3) the state could no longer afford to continue constant spending growth for education; and 4) all this new spending had little impact on overall student achievement (see above).

Despite these challenges, Governor Ted Strickland, Democratic lawmakers, and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding declared victory when House Bill 1 was signed into law in July 2009 as it promised billions more in annual state spending on K-12 education to be fully phased in over the next decade. The reality, as has been pointed out by the Columbus Dispatch and others, is that the new funding model will likely never be fully funded. Even worse, if it were to be funded it would still not fix the real problem with school funding in the Buckeye State.

The root of the school-funding problem
School funding is in trouble not because of insufficient revenue from the state but because school spending continues to outstrip revenue growth. In today’s troubled economy, the state is broke and so are local taxpayers. The money just isn’t there to keep the spending train on the track of steady and unremitting growth.

	School funding is in trouble not because of insufficient revenue from the state but because school spending continues to outstrip revenue growth.

To illustrate this disconnect, compare annual per-pupil revenue for K-12 education in Ohio over the past decade to the rate at which state revenue has changed over the same time. The black bars in chart 1, below, show real per-pupil K-12 revenue since 2000. The gray bars show what each year’s K-12 revenue would have been had school spending increased (or decreased) according to the growth of the state’s resources. The two aren’t far apart in the early 2000s, when Ohio’s economy was humming along and property values hadn’t plummeted. But by 2010, the gap between the two tops $2,700 and is widening.

Chart 1: Real Ohio K-12 Per-pupil Annual Revenue vs. Estimated Per-pupil Revenue Based on Growth Rate of State Resources


Sources: Ohio Department of Education, Ohio Legislative Services Commission

Personnel policies are barriers to getting costs under control
It’s clear that despite well-intentioned plans to increase school funding in the coming years, K-12 education will undergo some painful cuts in the upcoming budget cycle out of necessity if nothing else. But deciding where to cut isn’t as easy as it sounds.

There are several major obstacles to getting spending under control – specifically, personnel costs, which in most school districts represent upwards of 85 percent of school spending. It is the personnel budget and specifically teacher salaries that drive the unremitting cost increases. There are three significant ways in which personnel policies cement current school spending trends in place.

 1) Longevity-based step increases combine with regularly negotiated cost-of-living adjustments to make salary spending grow regardless of economic conditions
There are two major components to salary increases for teachers: cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) and regular longevity-based step increases. COLAs are well-understood and publicly discussed. Voters, school board members, and state policymakers can all understand the effect of raises over time to keep pace with inflation, and they can evaluate whether the proposed contract provisions seem reasonable. But at the same time there is little discussion—and less understanding—about the second component of salaries.

Every non-rookie teacher is paid higher than a new teacher on a set, longevity-based schedule because of “step increases”. For example, a second-year teacher in Columbus City Schools is paid four percent more than a first-year teacher in the district. The salary steps escalate through the first 15 years of a teacher’s career and then level off with occasional further bumps. By the 25th year of her career, a teacher will be paid 85 percent more than a first-year teacher, irrespective of her performance, the demand of her subject area, or the population she teaches. (We use the Columbus City Schools example to illustrate this phenomenon, but similar salary schedules apply to all Ohio districts.) Even if there is no COLA awarded in a given year, the district will pay more for its teachers because of automatic step increases.

What fewer people understand is that when COLAs are awarded, a returning teacher’s salary is increased by both the COLA and the step for her longevity cohort. So while some districts today are giving publicly disclosed COLAs in the range of two to three percent annually, a returning teacher in her first 15 years of service is getting roughly a six to seven percent annual raise in salary. Over her career Mrs. Jones will see an annual raise averaging between 4.2 percent and 5.2 percent for each of her 30 years in service. The results are similar across the state’s school districts.

2) A multi-year levy cycle in most districts leaves spending at the end of the cycle significantly higher than current revenue; thus another tax levy is needed whether or not spending is increased—and to get the levy passed, personnel cost increases will have to be promised.
School levies are generally designed to cover the spending needs of a district over five years. Property taxes increase by a flat amount in the first year, and spending ratchets up each of the five years of the levy. In years one and two, the new tax revenues exceed the new spending and that surplus is banked to be spent in years four and five. By the time year five comes around, there is a significant gap between the district’s revenue and its spending, a gap that is typically paid for with the early years’ surpluses.

So let us consider: What happens in year six? No one ever asks that question when levies are floated. In year six, the spending – even with no increases – starts at year five levels but unlike year five, there is no accumulated surplus to pay the difference. Though districts will try to economize, eventually the only option is a new levy. How much of a levy? Well, not just to fund year six levels. To gain the critical support of the employee unions, the tax usually must be high enough to fund additional benefits to employees (on top of the step increases they automatically receive) during the new five year levy term. That means that the tax rate in year six and beyond must be significantly higher than year six spending (which is higher than year five’s) so that a surplus can be built up to pay for the spending in later years. But the same problem will repeat again in year 11 when the surplus of year six runs out – and so on and so on—but each cycle the total tax burden grows so that the imbalance occurs at higher and higher spending levels.

3) Collective bargaining laws make a district’s “YES” to the union contract trump the taxpayers’ “NO”-- regardless of the fiscal circumstances.
The scene is all too familiar across Ohio. The school district says it is running out of money; taxpayers vote down a proposed levy, and then the district brings out the heavy guns. Threats are made to cut extra-curricular programs or art and music offerings. Reluctantly voters agree to a new tax increase. Management gratefully pledges careful stewardship, but the same scene repeats itself in the future.

While voters may be forgiven for blaming waste and mismanagement, and politicians will often cite unfunded mandates, the real culprit is the state’s collective bargaining laws. Ohio’s teacher collective bargaining agreements trump everything: both state law (at least many aspects of it) and the laws of economics yield to it. If the contract calls for a three-percent raise but the budget would allow only a one-percent raise, then something else must be cut, or additional revenues must be found. After all possible cuts have been made to non-personnel costs and to non-union personnel there is only one source for the new revenue needed: taxpayers, either at the state level or the local level.

The levy system gives taxpayers only an imperfect way to force spending restraints. In theory, taxpayers can reject levies until the district finds itself under the state’s fiscal control. But in reality, taxpayers are squarely behind the eight ball: either they pass the levy or lose services and programs they care about. They can do nothing about the ever-increasing personnel costs.

Because of Ohio’s collective bargaining laws and local school district levy cycles, all too often school-spending increases are unavoidable and higher taxes inevitable. But, things are different now in that Ohio’s budget pains aren’t going away in the next few years, and constant increases in spending for schools is not sustainable. Regardless of how the elections shake out Tuesday, this cycle of automatic spending increases is going to be a pivotal challenge for lawmakers as they struggle to craft a balanced biennial budget for 2012 and 2013.

Jeff Jacobson is a former state senator and is a consultant for the Fordham Institute.

Comment

Editorial

“Reform dollars” for education are dwarfed by status quo spending
By Jamie Davies O’Leary

The gravity of Ohio’s $6-8 billion dollar budget hole and its unavoidable impact on K-12 education is about to hit home. Ohio’s budget cliff has prompted much worry but also optimism as it forces the state to grapple with tough spending tradeoffs. With serious budget decisions looming over us, it’s a good time to recognize that money has real limits if not coupled with tangible policy changes and driven by bold leadership.

There have been remarkable investments in (and hype over) public education reform over the past year– landmark federal grant programs, statewide legislative changes, some gutsy edu-films, and the usual celebrity bandwagon-jumping. We have a president and secretary of education who are liberal Democrats yet support the expansion of great charter schools, teacher evaluations based in part on student growth data, and other initiatives that Democrats typically feel tenuous about, and have tied real dollars to these ideas. Initiatives like Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants (and i3, Teacher Incentive Fund, Promise Neighborhoods, etc. if you consider dollars to non-profit entities as well) are channeling federal dollars in a competitive fashion.

But, while these programs’ intentions are laudable, an analysis of how these “reform” dollars stack up against spending-as-usual is sobering.

Last spring, Andy Smarick examined the breakdown of federal stimulus dollars and pointed out in Education Next that the majority of these education allocations supported the status quo (not surprising in light of the piece by Terry and Jeff above). While Race to the Top garnered a lot of excitement and buzz, his analysis put into perspective just how inconsequential RttT dollars are, and probably will be, over the long haul.

A look at Ohio shows the same thing. Despite the state’s promises to enact some exciting reforms, the dollars we’ll spend on them shrink dramatically next to the other pots of federal money.

Take several Ohio urban school districts as examples. As charts one through four below show approximate funding allocations for “reform” activities in some of Ohio’s urban districts-- School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top, two sizeable programs directing money to schools and districts competitively and with strings attached. This is contrasted with “status quo” dollars – State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, the usual Title I and IDEA funds, and the recently passed federal jobs money to stave off teacher layoffs (“Ed Jobs”). (There are other notable “reform” pots of money such as the Teacher Incentive Fund, charter school grants, or i3- but those aren’t funneled exclusively to districts or schools. On the other end [status quo] there are other programs like funding for English Language Learners, but these are small in comparison and are not included the breakdown.)

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Note: These figures represent one year of funding and are meant to show how relative amounts compare to one another in a given year. SIG, a three-year program, was divided by three; RttT divided by four; EdJobs divided by two; IDEA, Title I, SFSF all represent one year of funding and are listed according to the most recent year’s worth of data on the Ohio Department of Education’s website.

Despite best efforts by some districts to institute bold reforms, you can see that reform dollars (at least those flowing from the federal government) are dwarfed by status quo dollars, with as much as 11 times more being spent on traditional programs and propping up current spending rather than on school turnarounds or Race to the Top-related reforms. In other words, even those K-12 initiatives considered most promising are dollar-store programs compared to typical funding streams.

This isn’t to say that increasing funds for such reforms would even be enough to make a dent in achievement gaps. Beyond this sobering portrait of federal money is the reality that the degree to which any reform attempts will lead to meaningful, lasting change depends on bold leadership from the state level and tangible changes to policy. Even though Ohio has won a combined $532 million from Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants, the state has done little to ensure that districts and schools move beyond business as usual. (See this article describing Ohio’s weak turnaround strategy, for example.)

	Even those K-12 initiatives considered most promising are dollar-store programs compared to typical funding streams.

In contrast, several other states have passed laws overhauling teacher evaluations, removing lifelong teacher tenure, or lifting charter school caps. Ohio has not.

Money – whether a tiny bit of or a whole lot if it – ultimately matters less than the manner in which we choose to spend it. Because of Ohio’s imminent budget problems, money weighs heavily on our collective conscience. This is ultimately a positive thing if it forces the state to rethink and reorder education spending. But dollars alone won’t do it. Figuring out how to adjust, cut, bolster, or merely shuffle education funding to various programs is worth a fraction of the effort that will be required to translate good ideas into state policy, move legislation, undo antiquated policies and regulations inhibiting reforms, and develop the political will necessary to pursue a reform path that will actually impact student achievement.

Comment

Capital Matters

High-flying schools starting to feel the pressure of NCLB, to what avail?
By Emmy Partin

With No Child Left Behind’s 2014 deadline for all students to reach proficiency looming on the horizon, and federal action to revamp the act seems unlikely anytime soon, state accountability systems, including Ohio’s, are ratcheting up expectations for public schools. NCLB requires states to raise the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress, the percent of students who must be proficient in math and reading at each grade level) bar annually until 2014, when 100 percent of students are expected to be proficient in math and reading according to the state’s tests. As a result, it is increasingly more difficult for schools to attain AYP, and more and more otherwise high-performing schools are missing AYP goals and facing state sanctions.

After missing AYP for two consecutive years, a school is placed in “School Improvement Status.” Some chronically low-performing Ohio schools have languished in this needs-improvement zone for a decade now. But the face of schools requiring such rehab is changing.

Of the state’s public schools in School Improvement Status Year One (meaning those that have missed AYP for two consecutive school years), 66 percent are rated Effective, Excellent, or Excellent w/ Distinction by the state – the state’s highest rating categories. Twelve percent had a Performance Index Score of 100 or better, which is the state’s overarching achievement goal for all schools. Further, ten of these schools met both the Performance Index goal andmet or exceeded the state’s value-added expectations, meaning their students are high-achieving and making annual academic progress, no small feat.

Nonetheless, these schools have been tagged as needing improvement. Under NCLB, they must send letters to parents notifying them of the school’s status (and offering the student an opportunity to enroll in a non-school-improvement-status building). And pursuant to Ohio's accountability system, they must develop improvement plans and dedicate significant time and resources to additional professional development and other initiatives called for in the Ohio Improvement Process.

So why are so many otherwise well-performing schools failing to make AYP? For one, there is a serious disconnect between Ohio’s rating system for schools and its accountability system. Take, for example, the varying goals schools are asked to meet.

The state aims for schools to get 75 percent of tested students to proficiency on each of the state’s tests, and that goal doesn’t change or increase with time. In contrast, by last school year Ohio’s AYP bar had risen as high as 80.6 percent proficient in sixth-grade reading and will continue to climb toward 100 percent across grades and subjects. The AYP goals for reading this school year have surpassed 75 percent and by next school year the AYP math goals will all top 75 percent, too. This means that come next year’s round of local school report cards, for the first time ever, a school will be able to meet every academic achievement indicator set for it by the state but still miss the AYP mark and face related state-imposed sanctions.

Significant state and local personnel and resources are tied up in these school-improvement efforts because of Ohio’s accountability, many of which have little to no track record of success. It’s a laudable, if lofty and perhaps impossible, goal to get all students to 100 percent proficiency. But in tough, and worsening, economic times, is it the smartest use of precious state and local resources to have inarguably good schools jumping through myriad regulatory hoops under the cloudy guise of accountability?

Comment

Ohio schools in need of foreign language 101
By Nick Joch

The Cincinnati Enquirer recently published an article about the poor performance of students at Ohio’s foreign language immersion schools. While poor test performance is unfortunately common in urban districts, as Fordham’s 2009-10 report card analysis shows, the article also touched on an important issue that gets a lot less attention: the status of foreign language instruction in Ohio.

From a national perspective, Ohio seems to be doing okay. Thirty-five percent of our students in grades 7-12 were enrolled in a foreign language class in 2000, compared to 34 percent nationally. More recent figures show that on average, Ohio’s districts required 1.6 years of foreign language courses for high school graduation in the 2007-08 school year. The national average was 1.4 years.

But these comparisons are incomplete. A better way to measure foreign language preparation in Ohio’s schools might be to look abroad, since our graduates are increasingly competing with young people around the globe.

In many other countries, nearly all students begin learning at least one, sometimes two, foreign languages in elementary school. Foreign language is often a required subject every year through high school graduation. In Ohio, only 20 percent of students in grades 6-8 and a mere three percent of our K-5 students were enrolled in foreign language classes in 2007, according to a recent state report. Most of Ohio’s students have little or no exposure to a language other than English until high school, by which time their ability acquire new languages is significantly reduced.

Of course, many contend that because English is currently the language of international commerce, learning a foreign language isn’t a necessity for our students. And the idea of making more language options available to our youngest learners is appealing, they would say, but Ohio’s looming budget deficit makes implementing it all but impossible.

Certainly, it’s unreasonable to look for increases in spending on foreign language instruction in the next year or two, but unless we begin to see the inadequacy of our current system, language classes will continue to be viewed as peripheral, non-essential “electives,” a perception that is putting our students at a greater and greater disadvantage with every passing year.

Consider for a moment the job market we face today. American businesses are expanding rapidly overseas, even as foreign companies expand on American soil (in 2006, foreign companies employed almost 200,000 Ohioans), producing an unprecedented need for people proficient in foreign languages and cultures. At the national level, the federal government is currently doing all it can to recruit foreign language speakers. The continuing shortage of language experts has already become a security risk that will grow in magnitude if qualified candidates continue to be unavailable.

In response to this rapidly growing demand for foreign language proficiency, Ohio has offered a mediocre response at best. The Ohio Department of Education recently began a two-year revision of Ohio’s foreign language standards, but preliminary reports on the proceedings indicate that more focus is being placed on re-categorizing wording than on raising language class requirements and providing more language study opportunities to students. Some districts in Ohio now offer foreign language immersion schools.

But as the Enquirer pointed out in its article, such schools tend to fall behind in non-language subjects. Further, stories like this one about a French immersion school in Columbus call into question how concerned these schools are about teaching even the target language they are built around. (The school hired four teachers with no French skills--much to the consternation of parents--because of the contract requirement that the first teachers laid off in a district be the first ones re-hired, regardless of the hiring school’s language requirements.)

In order for Ohio’s students to be prepared for competition in the global job market, such shenanigans must come to an immediate halt. They should be replaced with requirements that students begin learning languages earlier than grade 9 and that students take more than 1.5 years of language courses before graduating from high school. In the current budget crunch, expanding funding immediately for such programs may be unrealistic, but possibilities abound for the use of distance-learning technologies and programs like Rosetta Stone, as long as they incorporate substantial interaction with native speakers. The bottom line: If foreign language instruction in Ohio continues to receive only the scraps of district budgets and is held merely to the current paltry standards, our students will never acquire the proficiency they need to succeed in the modern world.

Comment

Short Reviews

Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card
By Bianca Speranza

This recent report from Rutgers University and the Education Law Center in New Jersey takes a look at states’ school funding systems and evaluates how adequately they serve the needs of all children, regardless of income or zip code, arguing that “sufficient” and “fairly distributed” funding is a prerequisite for high-quality education. The report looks at previous studies that attempted to analyze state school funding systems, and outlines areas where such methodologies fall short. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) rating of school funding systems failed to consider the differences in education costs across states, and studies by both Education Week and Education Trust left out regional differences in revenue that exists in small rural areas versus large urban districts. This report’s methodology builds on these shortcomings, and defines fair funding as:

A state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed within the state to account for additional needs generated by student poverty.

The authors measure the funding “fairness” of each state according to four measurements:

• Funding level: The overall level of state and local funding provided to school districts.
• Funding Distribution: The distribution of funding across local districts. This measure also tells whether states are providing more or less funding to high-poverty districts.
• Effort: A state’s spending on education compared to its state per-capita GDP.
• Coverage: The proportion of school-age children attending public schools compared to those attending private schools.

The report evaluated states by two methods. For measures that states have direct control over such as funding distribution and effort they were given a letter grade (A-F). For funding level and coverage the states are ranked against one another rather than graded because factors outside of their control such as state policy impact these measurements.

When it comes to the Buckeye State, the ratings are mixed. Ohio is considered a progressively funded state, meaning that poor districts get more money than wealthy districts. Ohio spent $11,821 on students in schools with high poverty, compared to just $9,054 on students in schools with no poverty. Ohio also has a higher than average per pupil funding amount. Ohio’s average per pupil revenue is $10,933, while the national average is $10,469. Check out how Ohio and various other states rank in terms of school funding here.

Comment

Sounding the Alarm: A Wakeup Call with Directions
By Nick Joch

Funding shortages are great catalysts for budget innovations. In “Sounding the Alarm,” a recent article published by Refocus Wisconsin, Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks articulate several creative proposals for states and districts struggling to remain in the black. Among them:

• Use district spending and achievement numbers to create a return-on-investment (ROI) measure that shows how much value in improved student achievement a given district is adding to its students’ education per dollar it spends.
• Offer excellent teachers the opportunity to add extra students to their classes and split the cost savings this brings with the district and state (also known as the “gold-star teacher” initiative).
• Require all would-be school turnaround organizations to post a bond before being given the reins of a failing school district. If the organization doesn’t fix the district’s problems in a set time period, the bond money goes to the district.
• Create K-12 Spending Accounts (KSAs) for each child so that parents can use portions of the state and district funds slated to be spent on their child to pay the costs of enrolling their child in supplementary programs and classes not available at their child’s school.

Hess also included their findings in his Education Week blog here. The original article is available here.

Comment

Flypaper's Finest
A selection of the finest offerings from Fordham's blog, Flypaper.

Columbus City Schools should be ashamed
By Jamie Davies O’Leary

As an authorizer of two charter schools in Columbus, we’ve heard our fair share of stories about the district not being very cooperative with them (in the way of busing, facilities, etc.). [Yesterday’s] Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed by the vice president of the Columbus Board of Education about the latest egregious example of the district undermining high-performing charter schools, one that involved Fordham-authorized – Columbus Collegiate Academy – the highest performing middle school in Columbus and the second best urban charter middle school in the entire state. If you care about educational opportunities for poor kids (94 percent of CCA’s students), this will make your blood boil. Read the rest here.

Read the rest on Flypaper.

- BACK TO TOP -

Being honest about how tough ed reform is
By Jamie Davies O’Leary

I know I’m the last one to the party on this one but I just got around to seeing Waiting for Supermanthis weekend. Fordham staff have already weighed in with lots of great insight (see here, here, here, and here) but I have one comment about the film positing “we know what works.” Read the full post here.

Read the rest on Flypaper.

- BACK TO TOP -

Editor's Extras

Move over Bill Nye, the Dean of Invention has arrived
By Nick Joch

• How do you attract great principals to failing schools? One North Carolina district believes it has found the answer. As Newsweek reports, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s superintendent implemented a competition among his principals, the winners of which are “rewarded” with an opportunity to turn around a failing school. If they accept, the principals are granted freedom from certain district rules, the option to choose an eight-person transition team, a 10 percent raise, and the right to forcibly transfer up to five teachers out of the school into which they are moving. Every winning principal has accepted the offer, and many once-dismal schools are now showing exceptional progress.
• Scratching your head about how to get your students interested in STEM-related subjects? The answer may be as close as your television. Dean of Invention, a new Planet Green program that debuted last Friday, explores the latest technological innovations (everything from robotic prosthetics to using human waste as an energy source) in a fun, easy-to-understand format the show’s creators hope will reach a broad age range of audiences. Check out USA Today’s article on the show here.
• New Orleans has been the site of a striking school choice revolution, but doubts are arising as to whether or not the train of reform has left some would-be passengers behind. This Newsweek article wonders if the outstanding achievement of New Orleans’s charter schools has less to do with better educational methods and more to do with an unwillingness to enroll special needs and disabled students.
• We’ve heard a lot recently about problems with teacher evaluation models, but Andrew J. Rotherham contends in his new TIME article “Paging Principal Skinner: Evaluating School Leaders” that principal evaluation models are equally flawed. Few school districts measure principals’ progress by clear standards, such as student achievement data, and agreements with principals’ unions makes it almost impossible to fire them. Rotherham asserts, though, that low-performing principals should not be blamed too much for their failures, as their ability to do anything substantive in their schools is generally limited severely by the power of budget rules and teachers’ unions.

Comment

New Fordham report weighs options for governance of Common Core standards

Now that Ohio and most other states have adopted Common Core’s English Language Arts and math standards, big-picture questions loom: who will be in charge of governing and “owning” these standards ten years down the road? Who will be in charge of implementation? In an effort to get some answers to the overarching question, “now what?” Fordham sought input from two-dozen education leaders and emerged with three possible scenarios for governing the standards implementation process. Read more about the report, Now What, Imperatives and Options for “Common Core” Implementation and Governance, here.