The Ohio House of Representatives recently unveiled its version of the state budget bill (Substitute House Bill 33). Among its proposals is the elimination of state retention requirements when third graders struggle with significant reading deficiencies. Enacted in 2012 as part of the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, this provision requires schools to provide intensive interventions to third graders who fall well short of state literacy standards, while delaying their promotion to the fourth grade.
“Far from guaranteeing that all Ohio children can read fluently, the House’s short-sighted proposal would subject thousands of students to years of frustration and disappointment,” said Aaron Churchill, Ohio Research Director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Make no mistake: If this provision is removed, schools will relapse into ‘social promotion,’ a harmful practice that sets up students for long-term academic failure, and social and emotional stress. Too many will eventually drop out of school and struggle to find jobs as adults; some will become entangled in the criminal justice system.”
Rigorous studies from Florida, Indiana, and Mississippi indicate that early-grade retention and intervention significantly boost student achievement, and help prevent academic failure and costly remediation later in high school. No study of similar rigor has been undertaken in Ohio, but pre-pandemic data indicate progress in third-grade reading achievement since the Third Grade Guarantee’s enactment.
“More than ten years ago, Ohio lawmakers decided it was better to intervene early than to wait until it’s too late,” continued Churchill. “That made sense then, and it still makes sense today. Unfortunately, the House has flinched when it comes third grade retention, backing down under pressure from adults instead of doing what’s right for kids. Lawmakers should reverse this misstep, and continue to ensure that all students have the foundational skills needed to become strong, lifelong readers.”
In fall 2022, the Ohio Department of Education released state assessment results from the 2021-22 school year. The data continue to reveal the massive learning losses that occurred during the pandemic, along with the uneven recovery in its wake. This report offers a close look at Ohio's achievement data from the 2018-19 to 2021-22 school years, and concludes with four recommendations that can help accelerate student learning across the Buckeye State. Download the full report or read it below.
Executive summary
Too many Ohio students are academically adrift. Without serious help, many will falter when trying to tackle college or launch careers. This situation has existed for decades, but it’s worse today—far worse—due to the pandemic. Consider just a few alarming numbers from the 2021–22 state assessments. Compared to 2018–19, just prior to the pandemic, statewide math proficiency rates are down ten percentage points in fourth and sixth grade and down fourteen points in eighth grade. Proficiency rates in high school algebra and geometry exams are down twelve and eight points, respectively. Reading proficiency rates, while recovering in fourth and sixth grade, are down five points in both eighth grade and high school.
The declines are steeper among economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, English learners, and Black and Hispanic students—thus widening achievement gaps that were already unacceptable before the pandemic hit. Compared to 2018–19, the math proficiency rate of economically disadvantaged students slid by fourteen percentage points in grades 3–8—a larger decline than nondisadvantaged students (ten points). Math proficiency rates for Black and Hispanic students in those grades fell by thirteen points, while rates decreased by ten and eight points for White and Asian students, respectively.
Plummeting proficiency rates translate into larger numbers of students with severe math and reading deficiencies. According to the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), students scoring at the “limited” achievement level—the lowest mark on state exams—demonstrate “minimal command” of grade-level standards. Stated bluntly, students in this category are failing academically, and unless they receive swift and serious help, they are on a pathway to functional illiteracy and innumeracy. Yet alarming percentages of Ohio students are now scoring at this level. In the Big Eight urban districts, about one in every two students—roughly 90,000 students—were “limited” in 2021–22.
Figure ES-1: Percentage of students scoring “limited” on state exams in Big Eight districts
Academic catastrophe is not just a “big-city problem,” either. Figure ES-2 indicates that more than two in five students in midsized districts such as Middletown, Marion, Springfield, and Lorain scored at the lowest achievement level on state exams last year. And statewide, about one in four Ohio students—some 400,000 children—are now struggling to grasp even the most basic grade-level concepts.
Figure ES-2: Percentage of students scoring “limited” on state exams in selected midsized districts
Ohio is not alone, of course, in racking up terrible Covid-related learning losses, but the bad news keeps coming.[1] Last October, just a month after the release of state exam results, came the release of the 2022 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. the “Nation’s Report Card.” These test data reveal yet again the massive learning losses among students in Ohio and across the nation. It also indicated that Ohio’s Black and Hispanic students fared even worse than their national counterparts during the pandemic.[2]
This situation can be reversed but only if state and local leaders push for aggressive recovery efforts in Ohio schools. There is some evidence that students made more academic progress in 2021–22 than in a typical pre-pandemic year, likely reflecting schools’ ramped-up efforts to remediate learning losses. Progress, however, has been uneven: older students seem to be recovering at slower rates than their younger peers, and progress in math has been more muted than in reading.
Ohio still has much work ahead to ensure that the state’s Covid generation gets back on track. This report concludes with four policy recommendations that could bolster these efforts. They include ideas that aim to directly address the impacts of the pandemic (e.g., tutoring and summer school), as well as broader reforms that would strengthen the state’s K–12 education system as a whole and support higher achievement across Ohio.
Here’s the short version, with more detail to be found starting here.
Provide parents with more timely information about their child’s achievement on state exams.
Insist on strong quality measures for state-administered tutoring and summer school grants, while prioritizing programs that serve older students and those from less-advantaged communities.
Require schools to use evidence-based curricula and support implementation through reimbursements for high-quality instructional materials and professional development.
More effectively allocate state dollars to support low-income students through more accurate identification.
***
Everyone knows the tumult and setbacks brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses closed, schools were shut, and millions of Americans “sheltered in place.” Far too many took ill and died. Yet even without schools to attend—and often slipshod experiences with the online replacements—time ticked on for Ohio students. The vast majority will still end their high school journey—ready or not—at the age of eighteen. Therein lies the challenge. Can Ohio restore to those learners what they lost while schools were closed and their lives were disrupted? Of course it can. But will it? The answer to that question hinges on the actions of today’s leaders.
Where students stand academically, and their post-pandemic progress
In March 2020, with the pandemic bearing down on the entire nation, schools across Ohio shut their doors and struggled to shift to remote learning. State assessments scheduled for that spring were cancelled, and accountability policies such as school report cards were suspended. The disruptions continued into the fall, as schools dealt with the public health crisis in various ways—some offering only a remote option, others a hybrid model, and still others opening for full-time, in-person instruction. With most Ohio schools returning to a semblance of normalcy by spring 2021, the state restarted its annual exams and released test results (though it again paused report card ratings for the year).[3]
Test participation that year was spotty. As table 1 shows, 93.6 percent of Ohio students took exams in 2020–21, though rates were lower among economically disadvantaged, special-education, and Black students. Nevertheless, the assessments gave an early picture of the learning losses that had occurred. One study by Ohio State University professors Stéphane Lavertu and Vladimir Kogan estimated losses of one-third to a full year of learning, depending on grade level and subject.[4] Sharp declines in student proficiency rates were also visible (see figures 1 and 2 below).
By fall 2021, Ohio schools had reopened for in-person instruction. Participation in state assessments rose in 2021–22, almost reaching the near-universal rates seen prior to the pandemic. Statewide, 98 percent of Ohio students took state exams last spring, though slight differences in participation still appear by student group. The state also rebooted its school report card system and assigned school ratings, though it continued to suspend policies that require certain state actions as a result of poor performance on report card measures.[5]
Table 1: Statewide participation rates in state assessments, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Note: The spring 2020 state assessments were cancelled.
Thanks to more accurate data from spring 2022 state testing, a clearer picture of where Ohio students stand academically—and how much progress is being made—has emerged. The following offers four takeaways.
Takeaway 1: Mixed recovery in student achievement
The latest data reveal a mixed picture of academic recovery in Ohio. In the earlier grades, there is some evidence of improvement post-pandemic. Figure 1, for instance, shows a fairly strong rebound in fourth- and sixth-grade English language arts (ELA) and math. In ELA, fourth- and sixth-grade proficiency rates in 2021–22 actually track closely with the pre-pandemic rates from 2018–19. Fourth- and sixth-grade math proficiency rates also increased relative to 2020–21 yet remain well below pre-pandemic levels.
Figure 1: Student proficiency in fourth- and sixth-grade math and ELA, 2017–18 to 2021–22
Unfortunately, recovery is stagnant in the higher grades. Figure 2 shows no gains in proficiency in eighth-grade math nor in ELA. Proficiency in both subjects remains well below pre-pandemic rates. There is also little evidence of recovery in high school. Proficiency on the state’s Algebra I and English II exams actually slid by one percentage point relative to 2020–21, while it ticked up just one point in geometry. On all three of these high school end-of-course exams, proficiency rates remain well below pre-pandemic rates.
Figure 2: Student proficiency in eighth grade and selected high school end-of-course exams, 2017–18
to 2021–22
Takeaway 2: Large and widening achievement gaps
For decades, education analysts have documented wide and worrying achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and their peers. While these gaps have slightly narrowed over time,[6] substantial disparities remained in the years just prior to the pandemic. In Ohio, for example, just 28 percent of economically disadvantaged students achieved proficiency on their eighth-grade exams in 2018–19, while 59 percent of their nondisadvantaged peers—more than twice the proportion—did so.
Disadvantaged students were at greater risk of serious learning loss during the pandemic. Their schools were more likely to stay closed longer, and many had fewer at-home resources to compensate. The figures below clearly show that the pandemic took a greater toll on Ohio’s neediest students, thus widening the preexisting achievement gaps. Figure 3 shows that the Black-White gap in third- through eighth-grade math widened from thirty-seven to forty percentage points between spring 2019 and spring 2022. The results are similar in ELA, with the Black-White gap growing from thirty-two to thirty-four percentage points in these grades (though not directly reported on the figure, the Black-Asian and Hispanic-Asian/White gaps grew, as well).
Figure 3: Proficiency rates in third through eighth grades by race/ethnicity, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Similar gaps are seen in high school. On the two math exams, large gaps of thirty-five percentage points or more emerge between Black and White students, with the gap slightly widening in algebra but narrowing by one point in geometry. The achievement gaps on the high school English II and U.S. History exams are similar and grew by three and five percentage points in the respective subjects.
Figure 4: High school math proficiency rates by race/ethnicity, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Figure 5: High school English and U.S. History proficiency rates by race/ethnicity, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Large disparities in math and reading proficiency also exist between economically disadvantaged students and their nondisadvantaged peers. Figure 6 shows that differences in math proficiency by disadvantaged status grew by four percentage points in grades 3–8, while increasing by one point in ELA. Gaps in high school were unchanged to slightly wider, depending on the subject. Disparities by special-education and English-learner status are substantial and generally grew larger during the pandemic; those data appear in Appendix A.
Figure 6: Proficiency rates third through eighth grades by economic disadvantage, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Figure 7: High school proficiency rates by economic disadvantage, 2018–19 to 2021–22
Takeaway 3: Severe academic challenges are widespread
Another way to look at the academic challenges facing Ohio is to examine the number of students who score in the lowest of the five achievement levels on state tests, which is somewhat politely called “limited.” Such students are clearly struggling to achieve even the most basic grade-level standards. ODE says they “demonstrate a minimal command” of grade-level standards, and this is the level reached by students who earn just 25 to 35 percent of the points possible on their state tests.[7] Without serious help and supports, students scoring at this level are highly likely to face functional illiteracy and innumeracy later in life.
The problems in math and reading are greatest in Ohio’s high-poverty urban schools, but they are not confined to them. Figure 8 first shows the percentage of students scoring at the limited level in the state’s Big Eight districts. Prior to the pandemic, about two in five students in those cities scored at the “limited” level, but by spring 2022 that number had risen to roughly half. The highest rate of academic failure was in Youngstown, where a staggering 59 percent of students scored at this level, while Cincinnati had the lowest percentage (41 percent). With 182,000 students attending school in these eight districts, the data indicate that roughly 90,000 students are having serious difficulties achieving grade-level standards. And that, once again, is in just eight cities.
Figure 8: Students scoring “limited” on state exams, Big Eight districts, 2018–19 and 2021–22
Note: For context, the statewide percentage of students scoring limited was 19 and 24 percent in 2018–19 and 2021–22, respectively.
Growing numbers of low-achieving students are also enrolled in the public charter schools that operate in these cities. Figure 9 shows that nearly half of Big Eight charter pupils scored at the “limited” level in 2021–22, a percentage that tracks closely with their district counterparts.
Figure 9: Students scoring “limited” on state exams, Big Eight charter and district, 2018–19 and 2021–22
Serious academic deficiencies are also evident in Ohio’s inner-ring suburbs and higher-poverty small towns. Figure 10 shows the significant proportions of limited students in several districts surrounding Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton. In the 2,500-pupil district of Trotwood-Madison, for example, 54 percent of students scored at “limited” in spring 2022, while 61 percent of students in East Cleveland did so.
Figure 10: Students scoring limited on state exams in selected suburban districts, 2018–19 and 2021–22
Note: East Cleveland, Euclid, Garfield Heights, and Warrensville Heights are suburbs of Cleveland; Mt. Healthy and North College Hill are suburbs of Cincinnati; Groveport Madison is a suburb of Columbus; and Trotwood-Madison is a suburb of Dayton.
Finally, we see that two in five students in several of Ohio’s small-town districts scored in the limited category last year. Forty-two percent of students in Lima, Middletown, and Marion scored at that level in 2021–22, while nearly half of those in Springfield and Lorain did so.
Figure 11: Students scoring limited on state exams in selected small-town districts, 2018–19 and 2021–22
Takeaway 4: Acceleration is uneven by grade, subject, and subgroup
Given the large learning losses discussed above, schools need to “accelerate” student learning faster than the pre-pandemic pace of academic growth. Such acceleration is especially critical for disadvantaged students who already face significant learning gaps and struggled most during the pandemic. But how fast did student learning grow from 2020–21 to 2021–22? Was it any faster than during pre-pandemic years? And are disadvantaged students making quicker progress than their peers?
To examine the “pace” of learning, we rely on an in-depth analysis of state assessment results that was published by Professor Vladimir Kogan of Ohio State University. His analyses, which track students’ learning trajectories over time, compare math and ELA growth from 2020–21 to 2021–22 to pre-pandemic growth rates between 2017–18 and 2018–19. Here’s what he found.
Figure 12 displays growth results by grade and subject in grades 3–8. Positive values indicate that students in a particular grade and subject made more growth from 2020–21 to 2021–22 than pre-pandemic cohorts; conversely, negative values indicate slower growth. On the positive side, students in grades 4–8 made more than typical progress in ELA. However, stronger-than-usual growth in math was less consistent, with slightly more than typical growth seen in grades 4 and 5 but less growth than usual occurring in grades 6–8. It’s hard to be sure what’s behind the stronger growth in the earlier grades, but it’s possible that greater participation in summer learning opportunities may be playing a role. Based on an analysis of third-grade test scores, which—unlike other grades—are administered in both fall and spring, Kogan suggests that the gains in that grade were made largely over the summer.
Figure 12: Annual growth from 2020–21 to 2021–22 versus pre-pandemic
Source: Vladimir Kogan, Assessing the Academic Recovery of Ohio Students. How to read the figure: Positive results indicate that students made more academic progress between 2020–21 and 2021–22 than in a typical pre-pandemic year. Conversely, negative results indicate that students made less-than-typical progress between 2020–21 and 2021–22.
As for the achievement growth of historically disadvantaged students versus their peers, the results are somewhat disappointing. Looking at the fourth-grade data, for example, we see that disadvantaged students made somewhat less progress in both ELA and math than other student groups. Although disadvantaged students made more-than-usual progress last year, their nondisadvantaged peers posted even stronger gains.[8]
Figure 13: Fourth-grade annual growth from 2020–21 to 2021–22 versus pre-pandemic by subgroup
The results in eighth grade are more mixed. In ELA, historically disadvantaged student groups made less progress than their peers, but in math they made more progress.
Figure 14: Eighth-grade annual growth from 2020–21 to 2021–22 versus pre-pandemic by subgroup
Based on his analyses of the growth data, Kogan concludes as follows:
Unfortunately, there was no consistent evidence that student groups who suffered the most pronounced initial declines in the first year of the pandemic—particularly Black students, economically disadvantaged students, and those attending districts that remained remote the longest—have recovered any faster than their peers. In other words, the achievement gaps that expanded early in the pandemic largely remained last year.
In the end, the data are clear: Ohio students lost significant ground during the pandemic—and recovery remains too slow and uneven, with disadvantaged students struggling most to get back on track.
Conclusion and recommendations
Student achievement in Ohio suffered greatly during the pandemic. Remote education was mostly a disaster, and many schools and students lost their academic edge. Thankfully, schools have returned to normal, and some academic rebound is evident in the data. Yet the persistent learning losses, wide achievement gaps, and uneven post-pandemic progress call for policy actions that can ensure that all Ohio students get back on track. To move the needle faster, we offer four recommendations for state policymakers. The ideas include more targeted initiatives, such as increased use of high-dosage tutoring, that schools should implement to directly address the impacts of the pandemic, as well as broader reforms that would position Ohio’s overall K–12 education system for greater success over the long term.
Provide parents with more timely information about their child’s achievement on state exams. Surveys indicate that parents are underestimating the pandemic’s impact on their child’s academic progress. One national survey found that more than 90 percent of parents in spring 2022 said their child is reading and doing math at or above grade level.[9] Given this misunderstanding—influenced by frequently inflated course grades given by teachers—it’s no surprise that another survey found lukewarm parent interest in tutoring or summer school.[10] State exam results provide essential, sometimes more candid, information for parents about their child’s academic standing. But these results aren’t useful if they arrive too late, aren’t easy to understand, or don’t make it home at all. To ensure parents receive information in a timely manner, lawmakers should require schools to either mail, or post in a secure online portal, students’ test-score reports by June 30th.[11]
Insist on strong quality measures for state-administered tutoring and summer school grants, while prioritizing programs that serve older students and those from less-advantaged communities. Intensive tutoring and summer programs have been the two most-discussed ways to boost achievement in the wake of the pandemic. To their credit, Ohio policymakers have implemented grant programs, using federal Covid-relief funds, to support these initiatives.[12] Governor DeWine has proposed (in his FY 2024–25 budget) to spend another $15 million in state dollars to continue support for high-dosage tutoring. Yet poor quality and inconsistent participation can diminish the impact of such programs. While Ohio should continue to support these types of efforts, policymakers need to ensure that grantees meet clear quality requirements. Tutoring grantees, for instance, should be required to implement “high-dosage” programs—i.e., during the school day, at least three days per week, with five or fewer students, and led by a trained tutor.[13] Summer school providers should be required to offer programs that run at least five weeks with a minimum of three hours per day of academic instruction and that use high-quality curricula.[14] In such grant programs, the state should prioritize funds for schools and educational providers that support older students and those from less-advantaged communities. As discussed in the present report, students in middle and high school have struggled most to catch up in the wake of the pandemic—and they also have the least amount of time to do so before exiting high school. Students living in less-advantaged communities were also more likely to lose ground during the pandemic, and many continue to struggle to achieve at basic levels.
Require schools to use evidence-based curricula, and support implementation through funding for high-quality instructional materials and professional development. Even the best tutoring or summer school program will be hard-pressed to overcome ineffective classroom instruction. Though the state has traditionally deferred to local schools on matters of curriculum, it should take a stronger stance as research has made clear—especially in reading—that certain approaches are better for students than others.[15] Researchers have also documented that instructional materials matter, too, with certain textbooks proving to be more effective at raising achievement.[16] Ohio policymakers should make sure that all schools are implementing proven practices and effective curricula and have the supports neededto rigorously implement them. Ohio should follow the lead of Louisiana, which created a state-funded reimbursement program for when schools adopt high-quality materials; it should also follow North Carolina, which now requires teachers to receive professional development in the science of reading.[17] To his credit, Governor DeWine recently made such steps part of his budget proposals. The full legislature should embrace these ideas, and if passed, ODE should ensure strong implementation of these initiatives.
More effectively allocate state dollars to support low-income students through more accurate identification. Ohio policymakers have long understood the need to devote additional resources for low-income pupils. Today, the state directs about $500 million per year in supplemental aid for districts and charter schools based on their percentage of economically disadvantaged students via a component known as Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid (DPIA). Yet the state misallocates a significant portion of these funds, the result of a federal policy shift that now allows certain schools to identify all students as economically disadvantaged—even when some are from higher-income households.[18] As a result, the inflated rates dilute the funding available to students who are truly low income. To target these dollars more effectively, the state needs a more accurate count of disadvantaged students. One possibility is shifting to “direct certification,” which identifies low-income students when their families participate in programs such as TANF or SNAP.[19] If funding were based on this head count, more dollars would flow to schools that actually have the greatest needs, thus increasing their capacity to implement programs such as high-dosage tutoring or raise the pay of effective teachers. This change would also make dollars available to increase the base per-pupil amount in the DPIA component, reducing the likelihood of reductions to districts and enhancing the funding for schools that are truly serving large proportions of low-income students.
The unprecedented events of the pandemic knocked tens of thousands of Ohio students off-track. But Ohio’s Covid generation will still need the same knowledge and skills that their predecessors acquired to succeed in life after high school. Their employers aren’t going to give free passes if they can’t compose a coherent email or keep count of expenses. A less-skilled workforce will be a drag on Ohio’s economy, leaving the state with a diminished capacity for innovation and scientific progress.[20] The good news, however, is that state leaders can avoid these consequences by taking action today on behalf of Ohio’s students. Are they up for this a once-in-a-lifetime challenge? Let’s hope so. Students and families are counting on it.
[3] State exams are given in grades 3–8 math and ELA, grades 5 and 8 science, and high school Algebra I, Geometry, English II, Biology, U.S. History, and U.S. Government. Save for one of the high school math exams as well as the U.S. History and U.S. Government exams, all of these assessments are required under federal education law.
[4] Kogan and Lavertu, How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Student Learning in Ohio.
[5] Ohio’s revamped report-card system and the ratings from 2021–22 are discussed in Aaron Churchill, Fine-Tuning Ohio’s School Report Card (Columbus, OH: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, January 2023). The main consequences for schools that were put on hold include identification of districts for academic distress commissions and automatic closure for low-performing charter schools.
[15] In reading, effective instruction has become known as the “science of reading,” an approach that emphasizes phonics, vocabulary, and background knowledge for fluent reading. For accessible coverage, see Emily Hanford’s work at American Public Media.
[18] Ohio bases economically disadvantaged identification on eligibility for subsidized meals, which has historically been open to students from families with incomes at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level. Under a 2010 federal policy change known as the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), certain districts and schools may offer all students subsidized meals, regardless of their income. This results in inflated—100 percent—economically disadvantaged rates across many Ohio schools. For more on CEP, see ODE’s web page, “Community Eligibility Provision.”
Career pathways are emerging as a promising, bipartisan solution to help adolescents and adults secure well-paying jobs and support employers searching for skilled workers. Although their design varies from state to state, these pathways are intended to help participants develop knowledge and skills in a particular career field, typically one that’s considered in-demand. Pathways often include secondary and post-secondary career and technical education (CTE) programs, work-based learning opportunities like internships or apprenticeships, and the opportunity to earn at least one post-secondary credential.
Career pathways programs can be especially promising for young adults. That’s because they’re typically more affordable than a traditional four-year university and don’t take as long to complete. They also offer myriad benefits—including on-the-job learning experience and job-related classroom training, boosted income, and valuableindustry-recognized credentials—and they can open the door to well-paying jobs and in-demand careers. Amidst rising higher education costs and an economy that’s roiling in the wake of the pandemic, many advocates view investing in high-quality career pathways programs as an effective strategy to help young adults transition to the workforce.
To shed additional light on how career pathways programs can help young adults, Bellwether recently published a report that examines efforts in three states: Colorado, Texas, and Ohio. These states—which were chosen because they are geographically, politically, and demographically diverse—approach career pathways in vastly different ways. By interviewing policymakers, district leaders, and program administrators in each state, Bellwether was able to identify some common themes. This piece focuses on a few of the big takeaways for Ohio.
Ohio’s case study includes a brief overview of the state’s career pathways landscape—which the authors call “one of the nation’s most complex.” Like other states, Ohio uses Area Technical Centers, or ATCs, to deliver CTE at both the secondary and post-secondary level. The Buckeye State has over 100 ATCs.
At the secondary level, ATCs take the form of career-technical planning districts (CTPDs), which administer CTE programming to middle and high school students. There are currently ninety-two CTPDs in Ohio, and there are three types:
Compact/contract CTPDs are a group of districts that work together to offer CTE programming at high schools within member districts. For example, the Six District Educational Compact in northeast Ohio serves the districts of Cuyahoga Falls, Hudson, Kent, Stow-Munroe Falls, Tallmadge, and Woodridge. Students who are enrolled in these districts can participate in CTE programs run by any of the districts within the CTPD.
Joint vocational school districts (JVSD) serve two or more adjacent school districts but are governed by their own board of education and thus operate as their own independent district. JVSDs primarily offer CTE programming. They can also serve adult learners.
At the post-secondary level, the state has Ohio Technical Centers, which are independent CTE providers that offer training and credentials for in-demand jobs. These institutions primarily focus on career and credential attainment, which separates them from community colleges that typically focus more on degree attainment, and the centers are eligible for federal financial aid authorized under Title IV. OTCs often partner with CTPDs, and may even be co-located. This makes them more efficient, but also adds another layer of complexity to an already intricate system.
In recent years, Ohio lawmakers and leaders have prioritized the growth of pathways programs to help meet the state’s workforce needs. This increasing emphasis and the accompanying investment of state funds makes Ohio a model for other states. According to Bellwether, here are two of Ohio’s strengths and two areas for growth.
Strength: Bipartisanship
One of the common themes identified by Bellwether is that policymakers in all three states have leveraged bipartisan support to expand and improve career pathways initiatives. Ohio, for example, serves as a “striking example of bipartisanship” because of its long history of providing designated funding specifically for career pathways programs in the state’s biennial budget. Even when Ohio’s last Democratic governor had to slash government spendingvia the budget in the wake of the Great Recession, CTE programsand initiatives remained (and some even saw slight funding bumps). This year’s budget is no different. CTE spending has risen consistently during Republican Governor DeWine’s tenure, and he recently recommended additional increases. His proposal—which is currently working its way through the General Assembly—also charges the Ohio Department of Education with increasing the number of in-demand CTE programs and aims to incentivize schools and businesses to offer work-based learning opportunities to more students.
Strength: Partnerships
Another key factor that explains Ohio’s thriving career pathways sector is state leaders’ efforts to prioritize meaningful public-private partnerships. Bellwether highlighted Youngstown State University’s innovative partnership with IBM, which allows students to participate in a training program that helps them build skills and earn credentials in in-demand fields like cybersecurity, data science, and information technology. But Ohio has plenty of other examples, as well. Business Advisory Councils, which are locally focused bodies aimed at getting education and business leaders to work together to ensure that students have relevant learning experiences, have helped foster partnerships. There are also several statelawsand grants aimed at funding collaboration between businesses, education and training providers, and community leaders.
Area for growth: Fighting stigmas
Bellwether notes that in all three states, career pathways programs “often suffer from longstanding stigma about their quality and purpose.” That’s because, in the past, teachers and administrators used them to track students they didn’t think were “fit for college,” and tracking efforts were often steeped in bias against low-income, Black, and Hispanic students. Bellwether acknowledges that although “extensive effort” has gone into addressing these issues and improving programs, stigmas persist. In fact, the Ohio policymakers, advocates, and stakeholders they interviewed identified persistent stigmas as one of the state’s most significant barriers to equitably expanding access and participation. Although Ohio has an “established history” with CTE, many students and families remain unaware of the myriad opportunities that are available to them or are misinformed about what career pathways are and aren’t. Advocates argue that the best way to overcome the public’s lack of knowledge (and persistent skepticism) is to provide state funding to raise awareness about available programs and their positive outcomes.
Area for growth: A lack of data
Of course, Ohio can’t effectively raise awareness without consistent and accurate data. Bellwether notes that, like many other states, Ohio has “fragmented data systems” that prevent leaders from connecting the dots across sectors and getting a full and accurate picture of the state’s career pathways landscape. Without program quality and longitudinal outcome data, it’s difficult to know whether students who earn credentials succeed in securing a job in their field of study, and what kind of wages those jobs pay. And while the impact on students is obviously the most important missing data piece, it’s also crucial to know which pathways have the best return on investment. To take its CTE sector to the next level, Ohio must invest in a robust data system than can help answer questions like these.
***
Over the last year, Ohio’s career pathways programs have been the subject of plenty ofresearchandanalysis. Rightfully so, as these programs give Ohioans the opportunity to earn credentials and access well-paying jobs in growing industries. Bellwether’s latest report finds plenty of strengths in the Buckeye State, including state-level efforts to foster partnerships and capitalize on bipartisan support. But Bellwether also identified some opportunities for growth, namely the urgent need for better data on longer-term outcomes. Overall, Ohio has a lot to be proud of—but there’s also plenty of work left to be done.
Is Springfield City Schools’ School of Innovation a choice? A punishment? A diversion? Current principal says choice: “I do not have kids that are here because of trouble. These are kids that just don’t want to be in a school with 1,700 kids.” Is it all about hands-on learning with a career track toward welding or drone piloting? We are told that SOI has “normal classes” in all of the core areas, but also provides programs for students to get experience and to work with local employers. Is it just about acquiring seals and credentials from a list or is it more targeted than that? We hear that SOI came about when the district asked the current principal to start some programs where kids can earn points for state seals that are part of current graduation requirements. Is this an example of proper intradistrict school choice in Springfield or a new package for the same old “dropout recovery” model? Read the description and decide for yourself, because I’m stumped. (Springfield News-Sun, 4/17/23)
All of the foregoing is, as I know you know, politically-charged hot air masquerading as sage advice for those who might be on the fence about vouchers. (As if!) While there is some of that involved in discussion of making the science of reading the law of the land here in Ohio, including this Vindy editorial cautiously in favor of it… (Vindy.com, 4/17/23) …it seems pretty brazen to me to ignore education professionals—like these reading teachers and intervention specialists in Heath City Schools who are super happy that their schools have switched away from balanced literacy, three-cueing, and the like—just for the sake of not wanting the governor to be right about something. This is especially true since these folks made the switch willingly long before Mike DeWine was talking about it and have seen some amazing, quantifiable improvement in reading proficiency in just a few short years. The argument for staying the course against such evidence seems a little weak to me. Just sayin’. (Newark Advocate, 4/17/23)
The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:
Identify and discuss major authors and works of three periods of English and American literary history, including key themes and stylistic features.
We have the same content in grade twelve, with the activity rising from “Identify and discuss” to “Compareand contrast.” In earlier grades, the breadth shrinks to two periods (ninth and tenth) and to one period (sixth to eighth). I was an advisor on the project and pushed hard for precisely this literary-historical thread. By “period,” we mean Romantic poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, Shakespeare and his time, Victorian women novelists—any identifiable era or movement or collection of writers with historical affiliation.
Browse further and you’ll see standards on old “myths and stories” that have influenced modern writers (say, Lincoln drawing on the Gospels), plus an entry in every grade that has students perform this task:
Build background knowledge by reciting all or part of significant poems and speeches as appropriate by grade level. (This standard is listed under “Practices,” not “Texts.”)
In putting literary-historical-oratorical expectations into the standards, not in supplementary materials or as recommendations, in citing “background knowledge” in every grade, Georgia educators have given English a broad and distinct disciplinary content, a domain of its own. The customary notes on grammar, composition, reading comprehension, and research remain, and they greatly outnumber the knowledge elements. Here we have a subject matter, too, one that grows from year to year, leaving teachers latitude to choose periods and genres (Georgia wants to preserve local control), but still requiring an impressive degree of coverage, not to mention a dozen texts memorized and performed by graduation time.
It is true that many states that adopted Common Core specified some literary content and today have students read a Shakespeare play and an American play, foundational documents such as the Declaration of Independence, plus “foundational works of American literature” from the eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. (See, for instance, Maryland’s ELA standards for grades eleven and twelve.) Common Core itself included this demand: “Students in K–5 apply the Reading standards to the following range of text types, with texts selected from a broad range of cultures and periods.” This is a worthy practice, but in pulling discrete texts from other times and cultures, it doesn’t ensure a holistic understanding of periods and contexts. Georgia’s model builds better background knowledge, the “Big Picture” wholeness that the umbrella term “period” solicits, and the construction of tradition in the heads of the kids. Maryland has students show how “a modern work of fiction draws on...myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible”—again, a good exercise, but in beginning with the single text, it gets the process backward. The knowledge gained from such a piecemeal method doesn’t stick as well. Georgia asks sixth to eighth graders to study “myths and stories (fictional or historical)” first, to develop background knowledge of ancient gods, the Bible, legends, tall tales, and archetypes, to compare different creation myths, track various Cain figures over time, or other such “collectivizing” exercises that students may call upon when they encounter Song of Solomon three years later.
Assessment won’t be difficult. Give students a variety of passages that have been identified by author and date, and ask test-takers to pick one and draft a constructed response detailing the themes and styles that make the passage illustrative of its period. Options will be spread out enough for all students to find at least one from periods they have studied. And as for the recitations, they could be handled through a contest on the model of the National Spelling Bee, which is exactly what the National Endowment for the Arts created fifteen years ago with its Poetry Out Loud project, which students have loved as intensely as they do sports (in 2009 alone, more than 300,000 students participated).
In sum, Georgia has crafted a literary formation to go along with the skills acquisition. There, the tradition will thrive, as befits a state with cities named Athens, Sparta, Smyrna, Rome, Augusta, and Atlanta. Five years from now, after Georgia students spend a few semesters undergoing his formation, reading scores will rise. I’m sure of it. More importantly, they will have absorbed the words of the best writers of the language that they speak.
The two pillars of democracy—trust and truth—are now cracked. Many Americans believe the political system is corrupt (e.g., rigged, racist), and some don’t believe the results of elections, even certifiably fair ones. Related, we have lost a shared standard of truth and, with it, shared criteria for distinguishing fact from falsehood.
The trust crisis has been brewing at least since the Vietnam War. The truth crisis is newer and due mainly to the splintering effects of cable news and social media (each pod with its own reality). This has blurred the distinction between journalism and gossip. Making matters worse, we suffered a president who lied brazenly and relentlessly, redefining the way citizens talk about public policy.
The crises are linked. As sci-fi author Neal Stephenson observed, “The ability to talk in good faith about a shared reality is a foundational element of civics that we didn’t know we had until we suddenly and surprisingly lost it.”
Civic education at school should do what it can, and here are two fundamentals that are well within its wheelhouse.
First, teach democracy. We can start by revitalizing the high school government course. Alongside courses in U.S. history, this is the main site of civic education at school now. Most students in the country take it, often in their senior year as they reach voting age. And in Washington the course is required for graduation.
This is a nonpartisan course where the central ideas of American democracy are taught: individual rights and liberties, equality, justice and the rule of law, limited government, federalism, interest groups, and checks and balances.
Revitalizing the course means deepening students’ learning of these concepts, which takes learners beyond memorizing definitions to applying the concepts in real cases. It also involves experiential learning, such as role playing in political simulations and tackling community problems of interest to them.
But there’s an obstacle: If students are to succeed in the high school course, a robust social studies curriculum needs to be restored to the lower grades. Later learning grows in a garden of earlier learning; knowledge begets knowledge. The recent testing frenzy in reading and math pushed social studies to the sidelines in elementary schools, uprooting the garden and wrecking the sequence. We must bring it back.
Second, teach discussion. When children first come to school, they step out of the private world of babyhood and family. Familiar routines and relationships give way to a hodgepodge of strangers and new ways of interacting “in public.” This makes the school ideal for teaching students to communicate with others whether one likes them or not, to form and express opinions, to learn to wrestle with competing perspectives and to search for compromise.
Teachers who regularly plan and lead discussions do so because they know their effects. Students hone the ability to comprehend what they’ve read and learn to reason. These are not bull sessions. Discussion affords students the opportunity not only to express their knowledge but to determine if what others are saying requires them to change their opinions. This is civic discourse.
Schools can teach democratic knowledge and discussion in tandem. Schools have the needed assets: a curriculum, a diverse student body, and teachers. They have primary grades for planting seeds and upper grades for cultivating them. And schools are places where language is king—where speech, not violence, is mobilized to settle disputes.
Knowledge of democracy and the ability to dialogue with others are the fundamentals of civic education at school. Neither is easy to achieve, but the needed resources are right there.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the Seattle Times.
Join School Choice Ohio, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and The Buckeye Institute virtually on Monday, May 1, from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET, as EdChoice’s Marty Lueken, Director of Fiscal Research and Education Center, and Mike McShane, Director of National Research, discuss their recently published report “K-12 Without Borders: Public School Students, Families, and Teachers Shut in by Education Boundaries,” which examines what a K-12 education system with fewer school district borders would mean for students, teachers, and taxpayers. Register today!
Thumbs up to the editorial board of the Toledo Blade for opining (sort of) in favor of retaining third graders who cannot read proficiently, but thumbs down to them for supporting the district’s characterization of summer school as yucky broccoli that must be eaten for kids’ own good. That is wrong and counterproductive, as is their characterization of the multiple attempts available for third graders to pass the state test as “lucky”. It’s all part of the plan, folks, as long as the adults actually do their jobs. (Toledo Blade, 4/12/23)
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A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.
I’ve described countless times how teaching fifth grade in a low-scoring New York City public school made me a Hirsch disciple and a Core Knowledge enthusiast. Hirsch’s work—and only Hirsch’s work—described uncannily what I saw every day in my South Bronx classroom: children who could decode written text but struggled with reading comprehension.
My school’s staff developers, district consultants and coaches, ed school professors, and the literacy gurus they assigned us to read and study had different explanations for students’ reading struggles: Children were bored by required texts that didn’t reflect their interests and personal experiences. If we let them read what they wished, it would be more pleasurable and they’d spend more time at it. Classroom instruction was built around an all-purpose suite of reading “skills and strategies” that students could apply to any book. We were to “teach the child not the lesson,” make them fall in love with books and develop a “lifelong love of reading.” When students who appeared to be successful under this “child-centered” vision of literacy struggled on standardized tests, there was an answer for that, too: test anxiety and “inauthentic” assessments.
For more than four decades, Hirsch has responded to all this with a simple, cognitively unimpeachable, hiding-in-plain sight rejoinder: No, it’s background knowledge. Sophisticated language is a kind of shorthand resting on a body of common knowledge, cultural references, allusions, idioms, and context broadly shared among the literate. Writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. When those assumptions are correct, when everyone is operating with the same store of background knowledge, language comprehension seems fluid and effortless. When they are incorrect, confusion quickly creeps in until all meaning is lost. If we want every child to be literate and to participate fully in American life, we must ensure all have access to the broad body of knowledge that the literate take for granted.
The effects of knowledge on reading comprehension are well understood and easily demonstrated. The oft-cited “baseball study” performed by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie showed that “poor” readers (based on standardized tests) handily outperform “good” readers when the ostensibly weak readers have prior knowledge about a topic (baseball) that the high-fliers lack. We also know that general knowledge correlates with general reading comprehension. University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham, a co-author of the study, put it best in a video he made years ago: Teaching content is teaching reading. What has been more difficult to prove is that a specific curricular intervention aimed at systematically building students’ background knowledge can raise reading achievement. What the new study suggests is that not only is Hirsch’s theory solid, so is his prescription.
The six-year randomized control trial followed over 2,300 students who applied for kindergarten to one of nine oversubscribed Core Knowledge charter schools in the Denver area. Nearly 700 students who won seats in the lottery were compared to students who applied but ended up matriculating elsewhere. Researchers looked at state test results from third through sixth grade. The cumulative long-term gain from kindergarten to sixth grade for the Core Knowledge students was approximately 16 percentile points. Grissmer and his co-authors put this into sharp relief by noting that if we could collectively raise the reading scores of America’s fourth graders by the same amount as the Core Knowledge students in the study, the U.S. would rank among the top five countries on earth in reading achievement. At the one low-income school in the study, the gains were large enough to eliminate altogether the achievement gap associated with income. Eliminate it.
What’s critical to note about the study is that the effects of Core Knowledge are revealed slowly, over time, exactly as Hirsch’s theory predicts. He frequently observes that language comprehension is a slow-growing plant. One of the reasons for the dominance of bland, bloodless skills-and-strategies reading instruction is surely the idea that it can be employed immediately and on any text like a literacy Swiss Army Knife. But we must see language proficiency for what it is, not what we wish it to be: Reading comprehension is not a transferable skill that can be learned, practiced, and mastered in the absence of “domain” or topic knowledge. You must know at least a little about the subject you’re reading about to make sense of it. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes.
I called Don (the “D” in E.D. stands for Donald) earlier this week expecting him to be reveling in the study’s findings. He was indeed gratified. But having just turned 95 and congenitally modest, he’s not one for victory laps. Moreover, he’s American education’s Sisyphus, having pushed this rock up the hill many times only to see it roll back down as we get distracted by each shiny new thing. We talked for half an hour about the study, and how its outcomes might be even more powerful and replicable now that the Core Knowledge sequence has been codified in a language arts curriculum that hadn’t even been published when the researchers began following the Denver cohort. We talked about the power of literate culture to unite disparate people, the damage done to disadvantaged children when American education embraced progressive education ideas, and how misguided notions of social justice that make us reluctant to be prescriptive about what children should know end up imposing a kind of illiteracy on those we think we’re championing.
No single study is definitive, and even if it were, changing classroom practice is hard and faces stubborn resistance, particularly if the evidence shows things we would rather it didn’t. Hirsch has long had to face knee-jerk charges of Eurocentrism or worse, and that his object is to force-feed children a dead white-male curriculum and canon. It’s simply not so. Language—any language—bears the weight of its origins, which evolve over time, but cannot be stripped away. Not for nothing was Hirsch’s landmark work titled Cultural Literacy. The standard anti-Hirsch critique has always misunderstood entirely what his Core Knowledge project is about: It’s not an exercise in canon-making at all, but a curatorial effort, an earnest attempt to catalog the background knowledge that literate Americans know so as to democratize it, offering it to those least likely to gain access to it in their homes and daily lives. We are powerless to impose our will on spoken and written English and to make it conform to our tastes. Our only practical option is to teach it.
There has never been a fairer, more equitable, and frankly progressive effort to ensure that our least fortunate students have access to the same knowledge that affluent Americans seem to absorb through their pores. Hirsch’s work offers knowledge have-nots the language of power. That some might seek to deny access to it has long seemed to me among the greatest and most unforgivable of educational crimes. And now there’s a powerful proof point that makes continuing in that obstruction even less forgivable than it was yesterday.
I’ve said for years that if you’re not serious about literacy, you’re not serious about equity. I’ll go one step further: If you’re not serious about Hirsch, you’re not serious about literacy, or about equity.
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of education reform. To wit, in Tennessee and in reform circles, there are those who believe that bipartisanship is for losers—and that Republicans can and make more progress without Democrats than with them. Practitioners of this brand of negative partisanship are likely to see such a strategy come back to bite them.
In Tennessee, it’s hard to see how House Republicans gained anything but applause from their rabid base. They didn’t win a policy debate, and they didn’t even succeed in removing the two Black lawmakers for long, as local officials thankfully reinstated both men after massive outcry from their base.
What they lost, though, was credibility in communities of color, whose citizens now have more reason to believe that Republicans stand for disenfranchisement and division. That’s particularly a shame in Tennessee, what with its longtime record of bipartisanship—in education and beyond—having built and sustained a reform coalition that has held together for the greater part of two decades across Democratic and Republican governors, along with three capable education commissioners.
But it’s not just Tennessee. Anywhere in the country, it’s a dangerous game for conservatives or libertarians—mostly White, mostly Republican—to push through policies like Education Savings Accounts without the support of the families—mostly Black and Brown, mostly Democratic—who have the most to gain or lose. To be sure, advocates such as Jay Greene are right that Democratic politicians can be fair-weather friends, given their loyalty to the unions. Maybe it’s possible to enact laws without Democratic votes (at least in red states). But if the reform movement loses Black and Brown Democratic voters, too, we’re toast. And antics like those in Tennessee don’t help.
While it’s true that Republicans are passing more ESA bills into law in red states, keeping Democrats on board—both elected officials and the voting public—should remain an ongoing aspiration and priority if we care not only about kids in red states, but also about kids in blue states, to say nothing of kids in blue cities in red states!
The importance of bipartisanship is also important if we’re concerned, which we should be, about installing good policies that live beyond any single administration or swing of the political pendulum. Today’s strain of “smash-and-grab” reform, which I’ve written about previously, is detrimental to any serious discussion about improving schools:
One has to hope that more pragmatic figures within today’s GOP can eventually steer the party away from its angry and resentful fringes and towards an education agenda that offers something for conservatives, progressives, moderates, and others to unite around. While this should certainly include school choice, a serious discussion must also extend to raising standards and improving teacher salaries...
Based on assessment data, millions of children are now behind, many perhaps irretrievably. Almost a quarter-million children across twenty-one states are missing entirely from schools. Teen mental health has reached crisis levels. It remains to be seen how effectively federal relief dollars have been deployed to address these pandemic-induced gaps, though there’s no shortage of expenditures to scrutinize, based on early reports. With the reform movement, as it were, already despairingly balkanized, we need policies that bring more people together to help tackle these pressing issues. Which is to say, education reform shouldn’t be reduced to throwing culture war grenades.
The alternative is to invite the scorn of Americans far and wide, as GOP lawmakers in the Volunteer State just managed to do. Instead of channeling their energy and effort into responsible solutions, Tennessee House Republicans looked inward and thought they could use nothing but raw power to divorce themselves of their opposition and muscle their way through to their desired ends. The ploy backfired, and in the process, those on the right found a way to undermine much, if not all, of their credibility when it comes to defending kids. Reformers of all stripes might do well to consider the perils of this ugly example.
