The Education Gadfly Weekly

How do Ohio’s science standards stack up, in comparison to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)? What is the cost of teacher pensions? What’s your teachers’ value-added rating? And, what’s the latest on the Columbus reform plan? For answers to these questions, read the short notes below:

• Fordham issued a “C” grade to the recently released Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The NGSS are the result of a two-year effort by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve to develop world-class K-12 academic standards in the sciences. NGSS’ “C” grade is clearly inferior to those awarded to twelve states (including Ohio, whose standards received a “B”), as well as the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks, as rated in Fordham’s State of State Science Standards 2012. Nevertheless, the NGSS grade is clearly superior to grades given to the woeful science standards of sixteen states—and the PISA framework. In this video, Checker Finn provides a two minute break down of why Fordham does not support the implementation of the NGSS standards.

• Cleveland Metropolitan School District will save about $1,200 per pupil in pension costs by 2020 as a result of the Buckeye State’s recent changes to state law (Senate Bill 341 and 342, which passed in fall 2012). This is a key conclusion of Fordham’s recent report The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets, in which the district-level costs of teacher pension obligations were dissected. The analysis, conducted by Robert Costrell and Larry Maloney, looked at the retirement costs in three urban districts: Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. Costrell and Maloney found that, without substantial pension reform, teacher pensions will put a major squeeze on Philadelphia’s budget—forcing either painful cuts in classroom expenditures or tax increases. According to our analysts, Philadelphia could find itself spending a whopping $2,361 per pupil on teacher pensions by 2020. Meanwhile, Milwaukee and Cleveland have for now escaped a fiscal meltdown, as both the Wisconsin and Ohio state legislatures have recently enacted pension-reform legislation—though both districts’ per-pupil pensions costs will clock in at over $1,000 per pupil by 2020.

• The Cleveland Plain Dealer and StateImpact Ohio have released the value-added ratings for 4,200 Ohio teachers who teach English Language Arts and mathematics in grades 4 through 8. Based on standardized test scores, “value-added” is a statistical model that estimates how much academic growth teachers produce for their students. Value-added is one part of how Ohio will evaluate the effectiveness of its public school teachers. Publicizing teachers’ value-added ratings has been controversial: The Los Angeles Times, for example, disclosed teachers’ ratings after suing the Los Angeles Unified School District to obtain teachers’ names and their value-added ratings. The Los Angeles teachers union has pushed back. To head off criticism of the Plain Dealer’s public release of teacher ratings, Chris Quinn, assistant managing editor for the newspaper, contends that the release “seems like common sense . . . any parent sending a child off to school wants to know everything possible about what is ahead for that child. If public information exists about the quality of a teacher, who are we to deny that information to the parent?”

• It has been one year since the Columbus Dispatch began reporting on the data scrubbing scandal in Columbus City Schools, even though both internal and external knowledge of “scrubbing” goes back at least two years prior. The scandal has set into motion a major house-cleaning effort: superintendent Gene Harris has less than two weeks left before her forced retirement on July 1st and legislation is speeding through the Ohio General Assembly that will require the district to place a historic levy on the ballot by November (a portion of the levy will be shared with qualifying charter schools). In addition, if passed, the legislation would also enable Columbus to be one of just two cities in the country—Indianapolis being the other—to have its mayor authorize charter schools. Despite these upheavals, some on Columbus City Schools’ school board seem unconvinced of the need for wholesale reform. Said board member Mike Wiles recently in the Dispatch, “It was smooth seas, and all of a sudden the water got rough." Instead of ducking reform, however, Mr. Wiles and others ought to lead the reform efforts, or get out of the way of leaders who can accomplish the goal of reforming a broken school district. 

A report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) sheds light on the poor quality of school governance in the United States. The author, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education, argues that governance establishes two things: one, who is in charge of education policy (who makes and implements it), and two, how policy decisions are made (through a deliberative body or through a single executive). Ultimately, successful governance systems are able to determine what government agencies and what level of government has the ability to administer and implement education policy, as well as who is accountable for the quality of education. Tucker explains that the American system is hindered by having the local, state, and federal levels of government pushing forward policy independent of each other. This creates an incoherent governance system and diffuses accountability. So what is the Tucker’s suggestion to improve the current system? Governance, according to Tucker, should be centralized at the state level, limiting the roles that both local and federal agencies have on in creating and implementing education policies. Local governance of schools is resistant to policy reform because there are not many incentives to deviate from the status quo (e.g., the strength of unions at the local level and low voter turnout for school board elections). Meanwhile, central control from the federal government of local schools would not be supported by the public. In strengthening the capacity for states to create education policy and changing the roles at the local and national level, Tucker argues the U.S. can change the core structure of its governance, allowing it to better improve education across the nation.

SOURCE: Marc Tucker, Governing American Education: Why This Dry Subject May Hold the Key to Advances in American Education, (Washington D.C.: Center for American Progress, May 2013).

In recent weeks, some from the anti-Common Core crowd have insinuated that Ohio’s state legislators, the state board of education, and state officials were somehow duped into adopting, or worse yet, covertly adopted the Common Core standards in math and English language arts. This would be a fair argument, if only it were the case.

To debunk this myth, one might want to consider the public forums that Fordham and our partners across the state have organized in recent years. At these public events, a bipartisan group of state and local leaders participated and spoke knowledgably to the issue of Ohio’s learning standards and the need for the higher Common Core academic standards. Feel free to dig into our video and blog archives (linked below), and consider the evidence for yourself:

• “World-Class Academic Standards for Ohio” was an event held on October 5, 2009 in Columbus. The conference was aimed, in part, at helping the State Board of Education complete its overhaul in K-12 academic standards by June 2010. (The State Board later unanimously approved the Common Core standards in math and English language arts at that time.)  The leaders who participated and their titles at the time included: Deb Delisle (state superintendent, Ohio Department of Education), Eric Fingerhut (chancellor, Ohio Board of Regents), Jim Mahoney (executive director, Battelle for Kids), Stephen Dyer (Ohio House of Representatives), and John Husted (Ohio Senate). The video of the event can be viewed here.

• “Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive” was an event held in Columbus on February 15, 2012. This event addressed head-on the implementation plans and challenges that accompany the state’s transition to the Common Core. Nearly 400 people gathered to hear the remarks of keynote speaker, former state superintendent Stan Heffner. The panelists included Steve Dackin (superintendent, Reynoldsburg City Schools), Eric Gordon (chief executive officer, Cleveland Metropolitan School District), Debe Terhar (president, State Board of Education), Deb Tully (director of professional issues, Ohio Federation of Teachers). The video of the event can be viewed here.

• “What Does the Common Core Mean for Dayton and for Cincinnati” were two separate events, the first held in Dayton on May 23, 2012 and the second held in Cincinnati on August 29, 2012. The event in Dayton included a keynote address from former state superintendent Stan Heffner and comments from a panel that included David Ponitz, a Fordham Board member and president emeritus of Sinclair Community College and Ellen Belcher, former editor of the Dayton Daily News and author of Fordham’s report Future Shock: Early Common Core Implementation Lessons from Ohio. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati event drew roughly 100 community leaders and educators. The speakers and panelists at this event included former state superintendent Michael Sawyers, Mary Ronan (superintendent, Cincinnati Public Schools), and Katie Hoffmann (president, Cincinnati Federation of Teachers).

How do Ohio’s science standards stack up, in comparison to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)? What is the cost of teacher pensions? What’s your teachers’ value-added rating? And, what’s the latest on the Columbus reform plan? For answers to these questions, read the short notes below:

• Fordham issued a “C” grade to the recently released Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The NGSS are the result of a two-year effort by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve to develop world-class K-12 academic standards in the sciences. NGSS’ “C” grade is clearly inferior to those awarded to twelve states (including Ohio, whose standards received a “B”), as well as the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks, as rated in Fordham’s State of State Science Standards 2012. Nevertheless, the NGSS grade is clearly superior to grades given to the woeful science standards of sixteen states—and the PISA framework. In this video, Checker Finn provides a two minute break down of why Fordham does not support the implementation of the NGSS standards.

• Cleveland Metropolitan School District will save about $1,200 per pupil in pension costs by 2020 as a result of the Buckeye State’s recent changes to state law (Senate Bill 341 and 342, which passed in fall 2012). This is a key conclusion of Fordham’s recent report The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets, in which the district-level costs of teacher pension obligations were dissected. The analysis, conducted by Robert Costrell and Larry Maloney, looked at the retirement costs in three urban districts: Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. Costrell and Maloney found that, without substantial pension reform, teacher pensions will put a major squeeze on Philadelphia’s budget—forcing either painful cuts in classroom expenditures or tax increases. According to our analysts, Philadelphia could find itself spending a whopping $2,361 per pupil on teacher pensions by 2020. Meanwhile, Milwaukee and Cleveland have for now escaped a fiscal meltdown, as both the Wisconsin and Ohio state legislatures have recently enacted pension-reform legislation—though both districts’ per-pupil pensions costs will clock in at over $1,000 per pupil by 2020.

• The Cleveland Plain Dealer and StateImpact Ohio have released the value-added ratings for 4,200 Ohio teachers who teach English Language Arts and mathematics in grades 4 through 8. Based on standardized test scores, “value-added” is a statistical model that estimates how much academic growth teachers produce for their students. Value-added is one part of how Ohio will evaluate the effectiveness of its public school teachers. Publicizing teachers’ value-added ratings has been controversial: The Los Angeles Times, for example, disclosed teachers’ ratings after suing the Los Angeles Unified School District to obtain teachers’ names and their value-added ratings. The Los Angeles teachers union has pushed back. To head off criticism of the Plain Dealer’s public release of teacher ratings, Chris Quinn, assistant managing editor for the newspaper, contends that the release “seems like common sense . . . any parent sending a child off to school wants to know everything possible about what is ahead for that child. If public information exists about the quality of a teacher, who are we to deny that information to the parent?”

• It has been one year since the Columbus Dispatch began reporting on the data scrubbing scandal in Columbus City Schools, even though both internal and external knowledge of “scrubbing” goes back at least two years prior. The scandal has set into motion a major house-cleaning effort: superintendent Gene Harris has less than two weeks left before her forced retirement on July 1st and legislation is speeding through the Ohio General Assembly that will require the district to place a historic levy on the ballot by November (a portion of the levy will be shared with qualifying charter schools). In addition, if passed, the legislation would also enable Columbus to be one of just two cities in the country—Indianapolis being the other—to have its mayor authorize charter schools. Despite these upheavals, some on Columbus City Schools’ school board seem unconvinced of the need for wholesale reform. Said board member Mike Wiles recently in the Dispatch, “It was smooth seas, and all of a sudden the water got rough." Instead of ducking reform, however, Mr. Wiles and others ought to lead the reform efforts, or get out of the way of leaders who can accomplish the goal of reforming a broken school district. 

A report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) sheds light on the poor quality of school governance in the United States. The author, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education, argues that governance establishes two things: one, who is in charge of education policy (who makes and implements it), and two, how policy decisions are made (through a deliberative body or through a single executive). Ultimately, successful governance systems are able to determine what government agencies and what level of government has the ability to administer and implement education policy, as well as who is accountable for the quality of education. Tucker explains that the American system is hindered by having the local, state, and federal levels of government pushing forward policy independent of each other. This creates an incoherent governance system and diffuses accountability. So what is the Tucker’s suggestion to improve the current system? Governance, according to Tucker, should be centralized at the state level, limiting the roles that both local and federal agencies have on in creating and implementing education policies. Local governance of schools is resistant to policy reform because there are not many incentives to deviate from the status quo (e.g., the strength of unions at the local level and low voter turnout for school board elections). Meanwhile, central control from the federal government of local schools would not be supported by the public. In strengthening the capacity for states to create education policy and changing the roles at the local and national level, Tucker argues the U.S. can change the core structure of its governance, allowing it to better improve education across the nation.

SOURCE: Marc Tucker, Governing American Education: Why This Dry Subject May Hold the Key to Advances in American Education, (Washington D.C.: Center for American Progress, May 2013).