Yesterday morning I visited McGregor Elementary, a school in Canton, Ohio, serving students in preschool through sixth-grade, and doing it very well. The building sits practically across the street from the sprawling Timken Co. steel plant, nestled in a neighborhood you might describe as working class.
Yesterday morning I visited McGregor Elementary, a school in Canton, Ohio, serving students in preschool through sixth-grade, and doing it very well. The building sits practically across the street from the sprawling Timken Co. steel plant, nestled in a neighborhood you might describe as working class. Even if you’ve never been to a northeastern Ohio city, the surroundings immediately feel familiar. It reflects the quintessence of old industrial cities, the kind whose rapid job loss and demographic shifts leave them looking worn and a little forgotten. Read the full post here.
On primary-secondary education, as on most topics, Mr. Obama stayed at 30,000 feet [in his State of the Union address]. The main themes he sounded, however, are fine: use federal education dollars to reward success, not failure; apply Arne Duncan’s “race to the top” reform priorities to the mega-bucks Elementary/Secondary Education Act; and keep a “competitive” element in this rather than simply distributing dollars via formula. All extremely hard to do but all worth doing…Four points here bear noting…Read it here.
Alliance for Excellent Education
January 2010
The commonly cited phrase that an investment in kids is an investment in our collective future is no understatement. This report by the Alliance for Excellent Education examines the potential impact of increased high school graduation rates on local economies, individual earnings, and home sales.
In 2008, an estimated 600,000 students from the fifty largest US cities and surrounding metropolitan areas made the decision to forego high school graduation. The authors, perhaps realizing that achieving a 100 percent graduation rate isn’t realistic, determine the economic impact of reducing that rate by just half (300,000 students).
The predicted gains are noteworthy. For the forty-five metropolitan areas included in the model, graduating 300,000 high school students would result in: $4.1 billion in additional earnings over the average year; 30,000 new jobs and increased local GDP by up to $5.3 billion by the midpoint of graduates’ careers; increased local and state tax revenues -- up to $536 million during an average year; and home purchases totaling $10.5 billion. All of this, from 300,000 additional high school diplomas.
For Columbus alone, the benefits would be $39 million in earnings and economic growth of $49 million. For Cleveland, earnings would increase by $52 million and overall economic growth by $66 million. These figures clearly spell out the benefits students and society as a whole would reap from increasing graduation rates.
Unfortunately, despite the obvious returns of reducing the dropout rate, Ohio’s fiscal perils probably mean that education could take a back seat to issues of unemployment, broken pensions systems, or filling budget holes, especially considering that our current budget is plugged with about $8 billion of one-time federal stimulus money.
While the report presents useful data showing the cost of the dropout crisis –count on economists to drum up forecasts about the relationships between graduation rates and economic growth or earnings –this doesn’t guarantee action or even tell us the best policies by which to reduce the dropout rate. Although increasing Ohio’s graduation rate is a laudable goal, education strategies to achieve this will surely be costly. With an unemployment rate of 11 percent and a looming deficit of $8 billion, Ohio simply can’t pay for it all. Read the full report here.
Learning Point Associates & Public Agenda
Jane Goggshall, Amber Ott, & Molly Lasagna
January 2010
What happens when teachers and policymakers don’t see eye to eye? On issues like performance pay, standardized tests, teacher tenure, and termination, there is a rift between what many teachers and decision-makers think, and this report argues that addressing it is necessary if there’s any hope to build enough support and legitimacy to truly change the teaching profession.
The third release from the Retaining Teacher Talent study, this report presents survey data from 890 public school teachers and six focus groups, and highlights where teachers’ opinions parallel or depart from what policymakers and researchers think. Where they are at odds is perhaps most interesting. The vast majority of teachers (92 percent) say that student engagement in coursework is an excellent or good measure of their effectiveness; meanwhile, only 56 percent say standardized test scores are a good or excellent indicator of teacher success. (In fact, “too much testing” was the most frequently cited drawback of teaching, ahead of discipline problems and low salary.)
This general antipathy among teachers toward testing, as well as toward eliminating teacher tenure (only nine percent view it as a “very effective” way to improve teacher quality), performance pay tied to test scores (just eight percent), and terminating poor performers (34 percent), threaten to undermine national and statewide efforts to improve the performance of the students who need it most.
What policies do teachers rally behind? Smaller class sizes, reducing student discipline problems, and professional development. While the report correctly points out that research on nearly all education reforms is thin, it misses the mark when it laments that ideas advanced by Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, etc. don’t represent the most popular ideas to teachers (since when does popularity mean good policy?) and suggests that policymakers take teachers’ advice (sometimes that’s okay, but what about when teachers thwart reform?)
In Ohio, teachers are lucky. Some favorite policies (smaller class size, professional development) are currently en vogue, and the more controversial reforms that made teachers in this survey bristle haven’t really been brought to the table, at least not yet. Still, those caring about future education reform in the Buckeye State might want to familiarize themselves with teachers’ perceptions on key issues. Read it here.
Ohio is facing roughly an $8 billion deficit as it heads into a new biennium, so it should come as no surprise that Governor Strickland is lobbying for whatever federal money might be available to help fill the hole. The Buckeye State is not alone. As the New York Times reminds us, many states will see staggering deficits in their education budgets as early as the end of this school year as one-time stimulus money dries up.
Last week Strickland pushed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to approve Ohio’s Race to the Top application. On the one hand, Strickland’s effort here seems futile: Duncan alleges RttT is an apolitical competitive grant program with a “very high bar;” and there are hundreds of reviewers deciding which applications are of merit. Such a request seems a little misplaced (unless we’re in the dark and RttT awards will be based on politics).
Still, even though Ohio’s application may be less than sterling (especially as it comes to support for charter schools and school turnarounds), you can’t blame Strickland for trying to get badly needed dollars for Ohio’s schools. It is in the interest of Ohio’s children, especially the neediest among them in urban and rural schools, for the state’s leaders to advocate for more federal K-12 funds, and to capitalize on existing federal funding streams.
A recent report from Center for American Progress, Bitter Pill, Better Formula, lays out a new formula for distributing Title I, Part A funds. Title I-A is the largest elementary and secondary program operated by the federal education department and allocates funds to districts with concentrations of low-income students.
Bitter Pill makes the case for replacing the current funding mechanism with one that is simpler and fairer. While the details of the proposed Title I-A formula change are quite complex (for example, the authors explain why existing measures of states’ “fiscal effort” are incomplete and biased toward wealthy states), the rationale is simple and one that all Ohio leaders should become familiar with.
Stated simply, revising the Title I formula would not only serve low-income students better (the correlation between districts’ allocations per poor child and their actual concentration of poor kids would rise from .19 to .32 under the new formula) but would reap larger funding allocations for Ohio.
In fact, the report shows that Ohio stands to gain more than all but five other states, and estimates that Ohio’s Title I-A allocations would grow by six percent between FY2009 and FY2010 with the new formula. In FY2008, Ohio districts received $512 million in Title I-A funds; under the revised formula, then, poor children in the Buckeye State could receive approximately $30.7 million more annually.
Bitter Pill doesn’t gloss over the political challenges to revising the Title I-A formula (not all states stand to gain from it). But with painful budget cuts looming, Ohio can’t afford not to maximize any and every federal funding opportunity.
Admittedly, $31 million is pennies compared to Race to the Top’s $400 million. But Race to the Top funds are one-shot and are no panacea for states’ long-term fiscal problems; conversely, a revised Title I-A formula would result in stable annual increases for Ohio’s poorest students, and with no costly requirements attached.
Robin Lake, Ed.
Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington at Bothell
January 2010
This paper is the fifth of an annual series from the National Charter Research Project and provides a timely look at critical challenges facing charter sector (including a chapter by Fordham’s Terry Ryan). This series is best known for its yearly update on the charter landscape.
Noteworthy is the considerable growth charters have experienced – charter enrollment nationwide grew from approximately 900,000 to more than 1,400,000 between 2004 to 2009 (an increase of 55 percent). Ryan’s chapter on the importance of strong school leaders is particularly relevant in light of the current administration’s efforts to turn around 5,000 of the country’s lowest-performing schools. He highlights the clear need for strong leadership in turnaround efforts, based on Fordham’s experience as a charter authorizer working to turn around a failing charter school in Dayton. Another interesting chapter looks into the relationship between unions and charters. The AFT represents about 80 charters nationwide, and while this is a relatively small number, it raises many interesting questions on the future relationship between charters and unions. The report also highlights the dilemma faced by high performing charters as they face a gap between test score achievement and college readiness.
Well worth the read as it covers a broad depth of topics as charter schools mature. You can find it here.
On primary-secondary education, as on most topics, Mr. Obama stayed at 30,000 feet [in his State of the Union address]. The main themes he sounded, however, are fine: use federal education dollars to reward success, not failure; apply Arne Duncan’s “race to the top” reform priorities to the mega-bucks Elementary/Secondary Education Act; and keep a “competitive” element in this rather than simply distributing dollars via formula. All extremely hard to do but all worth doing…Four points here bear noting…Read it here.
Yesterday morning I visited McGregor Elementary, a school in Canton, Ohio, serving students in preschool through sixth-grade, and doing it very well. The building sits practically across the street from the sprawling Timken Co. steel plant, nestled in a neighborhood you might describe as working class. Even if you’ve never been to a northeastern Ohio city, the surroundings immediately feel familiar. It reflects the quintessence of old industrial cities, the kind whose rapid job loss and demographic shifts leave them looking worn and a little forgotten. Read the full post here.
