Education Week released its Quality Counts 2008 report today. This influential and objective annual report gives Ohio another B-minus. Here are some key takeaway points:Ohio's children start school less prepared for school success than their peers across the country;The state's assessment and accountability system is one of the nation's best;
Education Week released its Quality Counts 2008 report today. This influential and objective annual report gives Ohio another B-minus. Here are some key takeaway points:
Ohio's children start school less prepared for school success than their peers across the country;
The state's assessment and accountability system is one of the nation's best;
The state, despite the cries of many, does a fairly decent job of investing in its children and has high marks for educational equity;
The state's greatest challenge continues to be the education gap between rich and poor; and whites and minorities; and
Ohio's teachers are paid well in comparison to comparable Ohio workers.
Check out the report here.
Since 2005, Ohio has ramped up its charter school accountability. The General Assembly took the lead here with legislation like H.B. 66 in 2005 and H.B. 79 in late 2006. This legislation increased accountability on charter schools, capped new school start-ups so only those operators with a track record of success can open schools in Ohio, and created an academic death penalty for persistently failing charter schools.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has followed step with a renewed focus on charter-school quality, as evidenced in its fifth annual report about the condition of the state's charter school program that was submitted to the governor last month. But the march toward quality is not complete, as illustrated in the compliance section of ODE's report. The report's final table, "Sponsor Assignment of Community School Legal Compliance," makes clear that the state has too many lax sponsors. This, if it continues, will result in lawmakers further usurping sponsors' powers through new legislation and increased regulation.
The ODE compliance table, which is truly the most enlightening part of the report, summarizes charter-school compliance in education, finance, governance, and academic assessment and accountability. Sponsors must rate schools as overall compliant, partially compliant, or non-compliant in each area and submit these ratings to ODE each fall. As many as 17 sponsors did not submit an annual report at all, and just five sponsors--our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, among them--rated any school as noncompliant.
Obviously, this table does not paint an accurate picture of the state of Ohio's charters. For example, one school that made headlines last year for being unable to make payroll was rated partially compliant by its sponsor in the finance category. Another school that has languished in academic watch and academic emergency for most of its existence is rated overall compliant in both the education and academic assessment categories.
To its credit, ODE speaks at length in its report about the importance of good sponsorship to the success or failure of charter schools and the charter school initiative. But the bulk of ODE's work toward monitoring sponsors and increasing their capacity to support schools is futile until, as noted in the report Turning the Corner to Quality issued by Fordham, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in late 2006 (see here):
Currently, there are 65 charter school sponsors operating in Ohio. Of those 65 sponsors, only 15 have been approved by ODE and are contractually obliged to perform or face ODE sanctions. The remaining 50 sponsors (many of them traditional school districts that treat charter schools as district programs), which include the two biggest in Ohio, are accountable to ODE in a voluntary fashion alone.
What Ohio and the students in Ohio's charter schools are left with, therefore, are 65 different interpretations across 300+ charter schools of how those schools are faring in the four areas that ODE examines: academic accountability, delivery of a school's education plan to students (for example: mission and curriculum), fiscal health, and organizational viability (governance).
Kudos to ODE for attempting to bring transparency to the performance of charter schools and their sponsors and for shedding light on the continuing need for uniform standards of quality and accountability amongst Ohio's sponsors. Unfortunately, this information was buried deep in the report and is apt to be read by few and considered by fewer.
See: "2006-2007 Community School Annual Governor's Report," Ohio Department of Education, December 31, 2007. To access each sponsor's annual report to ODE, click on the hyperlinked sponsor names in the first column.
Last month, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released the value-added achievement test data for the state's public schools. This data, from the 2006-07 school year, shows student academic growth (in math and reading, grades four through eight) over time. ODE rates buildings and districts in three categories: green (exceeds state-level growth expectations), yellow (meets state-level growth expectation), and red (does not meet state-level growth expectations). Beginning this August, with two full years of data available, the value-added measure will appear on state report cards for schools and districts, and this growth metric will have an impact on a school's overall academic rating. Schools or districts with two consecutive years of growth that exceeds state expectations will move up a rating, while schools with three consecutive years failing to meet growth expectations will move down a rating.
In the meantime, there are at least three takeaways from the first round of data.
First, value-added data reaffirms that the ability to attain academic gains is independent of poverty or minority status. While these factors may be challenges to educating students, they are by no means excuses for failure. For example, "rural poor" districts are outpacing other types of districts in overall value-added gains, and charter schools outpace their traditional counterparts, especially in adolescent literacy. (Charter advocates are making hay of these inaugural results, as seen here.).
Second, this data raises questions about how to define "success" in a school. Some schools with high levels of overall achievement, many of these are schools in wealthy districts, are failing to show adequate growth over time; while some lower achieving schools are showing gobs of growth (kudos to the Columbus Public Schools, for example). Schools showing no achievement and no growth over time ought to be exposed, and schools showing high value-added gains should be studied for promising practices for replication elsewhere. All teachers, students, parents, and taxpayers would benefit from knowing what is happening in their schools.
Finally, it is fair to ask--as a few State Board of Education members did at this month's meeting--whether the state's achievement tests are too easy or too difficult in certain grades or subjects? And, might these discrepancies lead to poor value-added results? For example, fully 50 percent of districts, and 30 percent of charter schools, are rated "red" in fifth-grade math. At first blush this could be cause for alarm, but an October report by Fordham argued that Ohio's math tests peak in difficulty at grade five and are unevenly calibrated across the grades. While encouraging schools and teachers to reevaluate their instructional strategies based on value-added data in order to improve student achievement, state policymakers ought to take a fresh look at test cut scores and the calibration of the test across grades in light of this new information.
Ohio is to be commended for its leadership on moving toward a richer view of student achievement, and it is right to go slow here and to make improvements along the way. Much will be learned in the coming years from this data that will reshape our thinking about student performance, school performance, and even the impact of poverty on student achievement. This is all for the good.
The Pew Charitable Trusts
December 2007
There has been much written lately, accompanied by serious teeth gnashing, about the sustainability of public-pension systems in the United States (see here and here). This past summer, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute joined the discussion by issuing a report on the health of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS) and its impact on the decision making of current and future teachers about when to retire or, on the other end of the career spectrum, to even get into teaching at all (see here).
The Pew Charitable Trusts has now chimed in with the release of its report "Promises with a Price." This report looks at the bills coming due in the next few decades, $2.73 trillion over the next 30 years, for public employee pensions. For Ohio, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the state's unfunded liability for its public employee pension systems (the state has four) is only $26 billion, which compares well with other states. Illinois's public pension systems, for example, have a cumulative unfunded liability of $41 billion.
However, Gadfly readers will know that the STRS unfunded pension liability is $19.4 billion of the $26 billion facing the state, even though STRS's membership is little more than one-third of the state's three other public pension systems.
According to Pew, public-pension expenses facing the 50 states are staggering, although Ohio has done a comparatively decent job of preparing itself to meet these costs. The really worrying news from Pew relates to the ballooning cost of health-care benefits promised to public employees who retire. Pew estimates the cost in Ohio alone is about $21 billion.
Fordham was able to learn from STRS over the summer that its system expects its health-care cost liability to be about $10 billion. It is these expected health-care costs that have led STRS to recently propose legislation (H.B. 315) that would obligate the system to assume retiree health-care liabilities and to fund these benefits in the same way that STRS now funds the pension liability. Money for these costs will have to come out of the budgets of hard-pressed local school districts (funded by taxpayers) and/or the paychecks of their hard-pressed teachers.
Before locking these costs in as nondiscretionary spending, the General Assembly should consider three observations in the Pew report. First, consider generational equity. Does it make sense to burden future generations with the costs of their parents and grandparents? Second, once granted, a defined benefit is very difficult to take away. Third, a growing gap between public- and private-sector benefits will fuel political debate as taxpayers notice that they are contributing to government employee retirement benefits that are increasingly unavailable to taxpayers at large (see here). The Pew report is timely and important reading for anyone worried about the future economic health of Ohio. View a copy of the report here.
Last month, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released the value-added achievement test data for the state's public schools. This data, from the 2006-07 school year, shows student academic growth (in math and reading, grades four through eight) over time. ODE rates buildings and districts in three categories: green (exceeds state-level growth expectations), yellow (meets state-level growth expectation), and red (does not meet state-level growth expectations). Beginning this August, with two full years of data available, the value-added measure will appear on state report cards for schools and districts, and this growth metric will have an impact on a school's overall academic rating. Schools or districts with two consecutive years of growth that exceeds state expectations will move up a rating, while schools with three consecutive years failing to meet growth expectations will move down a rating.
In the meantime, there are at least three takeaways from the first round of data.
First, value-added data reaffirms that the ability to attain academic gains is independent of poverty or minority status. While these factors may be challenges to educating students, they are by no means excuses for failure. For example, "rural poor" districts are outpacing other types of districts in overall value-added gains, and charter schools outpace their traditional counterparts, especially in adolescent literacy. (Charter advocates are making hay of these inaugural results, as seen here.).
Second, this data raises questions about how to define "success" in a school. Some schools with high levels of overall achievement, many of these are schools in wealthy districts, are failing to show adequate growth over time; while some lower achieving schools are showing gobs of growth (kudos to the Columbus Public Schools, for example). Schools showing no achievement and no growth over time ought to be exposed, and schools showing high value-added gains should be studied for promising practices for replication elsewhere. All teachers, students, parents, and taxpayers would benefit from knowing what is happening in their schools.
Finally, it is fair to ask--as a few State Board of Education members did at this month's meeting--whether the state's achievement tests are too easy or too difficult in certain grades or subjects? And, might these discrepancies lead to poor value-added results? For example, fully 50 percent of districts, and 30 percent of charter schools, are rated "red" in fifth-grade math. At first blush this could be cause for alarm, but an October report by Fordham argued that Ohio's math tests peak in difficulty at grade five and are unevenly calibrated across the grades. While encouraging schools and teachers to reevaluate their instructional strategies based on value-added data in order to improve student achievement, state policymakers ought to take a fresh look at test cut scores and the calibration of the test across grades in light of this new information.
Ohio is to be commended for its leadership on moving toward a richer view of student achievement, and it is right to go slow here and to make improvements along the way. Much will be learned in the coming years from this data that will reshape our thinking about student performance, school performance, and even the impact of poverty on student achievement. This is all for the good.
Since 2005, Ohio has ramped up its charter school accountability. The General Assembly took the lead here with legislation like H.B. 66 in 2005 and H.B. 79 in late 2006. This legislation increased accountability on charter schools, capped new school start-ups so only those operators with a track record of success can open schools in Ohio, and created an academic death penalty for persistently failing charter schools.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has followed step with a renewed focus on charter-school quality, as evidenced in its fifth annual report about the condition of the state's charter school program that was submitted to the governor last month. But the march toward quality is not complete, as illustrated in the compliance section of ODE's report. The report's final table, "Sponsor Assignment of Community School Legal Compliance," makes clear that the state has too many lax sponsors. This, if it continues, will result in lawmakers further usurping sponsors' powers through new legislation and increased regulation.
The ODE compliance table, which is truly the most enlightening part of the report, summarizes charter-school compliance in education, finance, governance, and academic assessment and accountability. Sponsors must rate schools as overall compliant, partially compliant, or non-compliant in each area and submit these ratings to ODE each fall. As many as 17 sponsors did not submit an annual report at all, and just five sponsors--our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, among them--rated any school as noncompliant.
Obviously, this table does not paint an accurate picture of the state of Ohio's charters. For example, one school that made headlines last year for being unable to make payroll was rated partially compliant by its sponsor in the finance category. Another school that has languished in academic watch and academic emergency for most of its existence is rated overall compliant in both the education and academic assessment categories.
To its credit, ODE speaks at length in its report about the importance of good sponsorship to the success or failure of charter schools and the charter school initiative. But the bulk of ODE's work toward monitoring sponsors and increasing their capacity to support schools is futile until, as noted in the report Turning the Corner to Quality issued by Fordham, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in late 2006 (see here):
Currently, there are 65 charter school sponsors operating in Ohio. Of those 65 sponsors, only 15 have been approved by ODE and are contractually obliged to perform or face ODE sanctions. The remaining 50 sponsors (many of them traditional school districts that treat charter schools as district programs), which include the two biggest in Ohio, are accountable to ODE in a voluntary fashion alone.
What Ohio and the students in Ohio's charter schools are left with, therefore, are 65 different interpretations across 300+ charter schools of how those schools are faring in the four areas that ODE examines: academic accountability, delivery of a school's education plan to students (for example: mission and curriculum), fiscal health, and organizational viability (governance).
Kudos to ODE for attempting to bring transparency to the performance of charter schools and their sponsors and for shedding light on the continuing need for uniform standards of quality and accountability amongst Ohio's sponsors. Unfortunately, this information was buried deep in the report and is apt to be read by few and considered by fewer.
See: "2006-2007 Community School Annual Governor's Report," Ohio Department of Education, December 31, 2007. To access each sponsor's annual report to ODE, click on the hyperlinked sponsor names in the first column.
Education Week released its Quality Counts 2008 report today. This influential and objective annual report gives Ohio another B-minus. Here are some key takeaway points:
Ohio's children start school less prepared for school success than their peers across the country;
The state's assessment and accountability system is one of the nation's best;
The state, despite the cries of many, does a fairly decent job of investing in its children and has high marks for educational equity;
The state's greatest challenge continues to be the education gap between rich and poor; and whites and minorities; and
Ohio's teachers are paid well in comparison to comparable Ohio workers.
Check out the report here.
