Last week was the first official week of classes at Columbus Collegiate Academy, a charter school authorized by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. CCA students notched gains on reading and math proficiency exams last year and everyone's ready for another excellent, energizing academic year.
Last week was the first official week of classes at Columbus Collegiate Academy, a charter school authorized by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. CCA students notched gains on reading and math proficiency exams last year and everyone's ready for another excellent, energizing academic year. Watch a back-to-school video featuring CCA here.
Terry Ryan, Fordham's vice president for Ohio programs and policy, talks about the recently released performance data for Ohio's urban district and charter schools. Watch here.
Following last week's release of local report card data by the state education department, the Fordham Institute conducted our sixth annual analysis of school performance in Ohio's major urban cities (see here). In addition to city-by-city analyses of charter and district performance in Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Toledo, we partnered with the North Carolina-based education and management consulting firm Public Impact to produce an in-depth report, Urban School Performance Report: An Analysis of Ohio Big Eight Charter and District School performance with a special analysis of Cyber Schools, 2008-09 (see here). Our analyses were featured in articles in Catalyst-Ohio (see here), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (see here), the Columbus Dispatch (see here), the Dayton Daily News (see here), the Cincinnati Enquirer (see here), Gongwer News Service Ohio (see here, subscription required), and The Hannah Report (see here, subscription required).
For all the alarming statistics illustrating that public education in America is in trouble (see Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr.'s discussion here on flat SAT scores, stagnant or falling NAEP scores, and bad news from the ACT), there are probably equal numbers of education reform solutions floating around the education policy stratosphere. But you would be hard-pressed to find many that simultaneously address two of the most formidable barriers to scalable reform: human capital challenges and the pressing budget deficits facing nearly all state and local governments.
The education reform community has become obsessed with the human capital variable (an article here by Ed Week calls the Gates Foundation's emphasis on teacher effectiveness the search for education's "magic pill"), yet our ability to improve it (or anything else in education, for that matter) has been seriously hampered by the current economic woes. Even the giant chunk of stimulus money recently handed to states is plugging holes in their budgets rather than launching or ramping up education reforms.
One innovative pilot promises to enhance teacher effectiveness, capitalize on the power of data to inform instruction, infuse schools with much-needed technological innovation, and improve student performance. All this, and it is estimated to cost about the same as what we spend to operate traditional schools.
Called School of One, it launched this summer out of New York City's Department of Education. Its mission is to "provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction" (see School of One's website here). Students engage in many types of instruction and learning: large group, small group, one-on-one tutoring, virtual tutors, and online educational games.
School of One leverages technology to accomplish its lofty mission, combining a wealth of data from students' personalized profiles (including academic diagnostic data as well as information on students' learning modalities and interests), and from a digital lesson bank containing over 1,000 lessons from professional educators. All of this goes into a learning algorithm, which then generates a unique daily schedule for each student based upon his/her specific academic needs and learning modalities. In short, each student has their own Individual Education Plan (IEP).
Now before your brain flags the word "algorithm" as either too math-y, confusing, or gimmicky to keep listening, be assured that the technology behind School of One is both straightforward and intuitive. Each student receives a "playlist" that lists the skills they need to focus on, and student schedules are displayed on a computer screen resembling an airport's flight monitor. Anyone who can work an i-pod or make it through an airport could function well in this classroom.
Perhaps most important to point out is that the intention of the technology is to complement the talents of the teachers, not supplant them. School of One allows teachers to provide all students with differentiated instruction.
Joel Rose, creator of the School of One and Chief Executive for Human Capital at the NYC Department of Education, has an interesting perspective on human capital challenges facing public education. Citing statistics that among NYC's eighth-grade teachers, only 13 percent can get 80 percent of their class to reach proficiency in math, and only six percent can do so in reading, Rose points out that teachers have to be almost "superheroes" in order to reach the needs of all students.
And these statistics-grim as they might be-are a snapshot of a city with a very competitive teaching pool (NYC has over six applicants for every teaching position the district fills). Among the three million teachers in America, how many superheroes can we reasonably expect? In other words, if human capital is the be-all and end-all variable, then American schools - and urban schools in particular - have to find new ways to maximize our teaching talent.
Hearing Rose speak and recalling my own teaching days (Rose is a fellow TFA alum), I can't think of a single educator who wouldn't appreciate the convenience of 1,000 sample lesson plans and built-in daily assessments. Even his teacher-as-superhero analogy isn't far off. If I'm honest, I realize that a significant reason I burned out during my stint in the classroom was because I took on the simultaneous roles of the teacher, the lesson bank, the technology, and the algorithm. It isn't impossible to reach all students' unique learning needs this way. But it certainly isn't easy.
Ohio's spending on primary and secondary education is forecast at $8.2 billion in FY2010 and $8.1 billion in FY2011. Even though the percentage of the state's budget spent on education will increase in both years, this represents a six percent decrease from 2009 spending. Stated simply - we're going to have to do more with less.
The premise of School of One - using technology as a tool to help teachers differentiate instruction - is one that we think many Ohio educators and politicians could get excited about. As Ohio works to improve student achievement during tight fiscal times, we think School of One is worth paying close attention to and learning from. The program's potential to enhance teacher effectiveness, improve student assessments and data collection, and garner political momentum - all while not breaking the bank - introduce powerful reform possibilities, not just for the Big Apple, but for states and districts across the nation looking for ways to give students the education they deserve and need.
While funding for most public schools will be flat - and schools will be lucky with that - for innovative schools at both ends of the state's pre-K-12 education ladder, the budget is nothing short of doomsday. For example, the state's Early Learning Initiative program provided major support for preschools and its demise has resulted in the abrupt closure of some of them throughout the state.
"We didn't foresee this happening. We thought there would be cuts but we didn't see the program going away completely," said Nancy Gazzerro, who had to close two preschools in two Dayton-area charter schools as part of the private Mini-University system (see here). In March, one of her schools was the first preschool in Montgomery County to receive the state's highest rating for preschools. "To turn around and have to close the doors was heart-breaking," she said. Gazzerro has reopened the schools but is only running one class in each school. She needs private funding to continue.
On the other end of the spectrum, the state's nine early college academy high schools are facing possible closure at the end of the school year. These schools offer an intense program to prepare at-risk, low-income, inner-city students for college. They lost a $12-million state subsidy.
In addition to Dayton, early college academies operate in Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, Elyria, Lorain, Toledo, and Youngstown. The state, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have invested more than $40 million in these schools over the last few years.
"This is a reform movement that has been touted across the state. It's disconcerting. Other states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Utah, and Texas are embracing the [early college] concept," said Judy Hennessey, principal of the Dayton Early College Academy. These states are embracing this as a workforce development conduit for underrepresented kids to college."
DECA's $750,000-a-year state subsidy amounts to about a quarter of the school's budget and, without it, the school will eventually fail, said Thomas J. Lasley, education dean at the University of Dayton. Lasley serves on the DECA board.
At DECA, where about 96 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches, achievement stacks up well. "The kids are walking out with not just high-school degrees but with substantial college coursework under their belts," he said, pointing out the irony of the state hurting schools that are successfully preparing students for higher education at the same time state officials are calling for a 230,000-student increase at Ohio colleges and universities.
"Overall, 80 percent of Ohio's early college students are leaving high school with a semester's worth of college credit," Lasley said. "That's the tipping point for success in completing a degree."
Terry Ryan, Fordham's vice president for Ohio programs and policy, talks about the recently released performance data for Ohio's urban district and charter schools. Watch here.
Last week was the first official week of classes at Columbus Collegiate Academy, a charter school authorized by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. CCA students notched gains on reading and math proficiency exams last year and everyone's ready for another excellent, energizing academic year. Watch a back-to-school video featuring CCA here.
