• Almost one-third of American workers with a teaching degree were employed outside of the education field in 2020. —Washington Post
• Donda Academy, a K–12 private school founded by Kanye West and named in honor of his late mother, opens in California. —Rolling Stone
• In a sign of the city’s shifting demographics, several schools that serve Black communities in Oakland are closing due to low enrollment. —Washington Post
• The learning loss caused by pandemic-era shutdowns is a national crisis and all levels of government should be mobilized to fight it. —Michael R. Bloomberg
• “Redshirting” all boys by delaying the start of their first school year could yield academic and emotional benefits. —Richard V. Reeves

1. Fordham’s indispensable data publication Ohio By the Numbers is quoted and linked in this story about kids opting for a path other than college—think masonry or real estate—after graduating from high school. (Fox 8 News, Cleveland, 9/19/22)
   
   

2. While I might not normally love the previous clip due to its strong “college bad” vibe, it does feel like the two high schoolers interviewed were equipped with the skills to go either way. Which, I personally think, is the point of school. (And it’s not just me, either. See Item 5 below.) Those students simply chose the non-college path even though they could apparently have done either. But those options are not fully open for all of Ohio’s students, as I know you know. Here is another big-picture report card piece (which includes reference and links to Vladimir Kogan’s analysis as posted on the Ohio Gadfly blog) which seems pretty clear on whose students are getting the education they need to be able to make those post-graduation choices and whose students are not. (Dayton Daily News, 9/20/22)
   
   

3. Parma City Schools’ superintendent confesses that he is “mystified” by his district’s report card. He tries to explain his befuddlement here, but it doesn’t sound entirely accurate to me. And I’ll bet his families know just what all those ratings mean. (Cleveland.com, 9/21/22) Personally, I appreciate when school officials simply own up to bad report cards and don’t waste time with the usual bafflement and “snapshot” nonsense. Kudos to Dayton City Schools’ supe for doing just that here, although there is still some deflection as to the cause. Additionally, our new report card star rating system has allowed for a brand new nonsense response that even I didn’t expect: “It's still better than zero stars.” Hilarious. (Spectrum News 1, 9/19/22)
   
   

4. Anyone want to move to Steubenville? The principal of the high school there is touting a “near perfect” report card this year AND is promising to do even better next year. (WTRF-TV, Wheeling, 9/19/22) You can also, it seems, drink beer in the Steubenville public library upon occasion. See ya! (WDTN-TV, Dayton, 9/19/22)
   
   

5. We come back to where we began with this clip. Toledo City Schools’ superintendent said this week that he believes simply getting a diploma is “settling” and calls that mindset “drinking the old TPS Kool-Aid” (super yucky phrasing, IMO, for a number of reasons). At a luncheon event for community stakeholders, Dr. Romules Durant explained that college AND career readiness should be the goal for all of his students and he touted existing and forthcoming career academies as the solution to get to that desired outcome. While I concur with the sentiment, I have very little confidence in this district’s approach to supposedly get there (not that anyone asked me, of course). Please do note the supe’s use of concrete outcome data for Toledo Early College Academy (a tiny bright spot in the district) versus the vaguer language used and lack of data provided related to apprenticeships for students at other high schools. The district’s poor report card showing is also noted briefly here—a fly in the “new Kool-Aid”, perhaps?—but Dr. Durant noted that the new version of the state’s “Prepared for Success” measure was not rolled out this year. Thus, his effort to fill the information gap for folks. How very generous. (Toledo Blade, 9/20/22)
   
   

6. This story about future funding for tutoring in Ohio feels a little like looking ahead to when the ESSER money runs out to me. You? (Gongwer Ohio, 9/19/22) And finally, speaking of the state Board of Ed: How can we miss her if she doesn’t go away? (Toledo Blade, 9/19/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Helping students catch up from more than two years of school-closure-related learning loss will be an impossible task if they do not have regular access to grade-level work in their classrooms. While this may seem like a no-brainer, a new report from TNTP indicates that many of our neediest students may be missing out on this crucial opportunity.

TNTP partnered with ReadWorks, a free digital literacy resource used by more than 75,000 schools nationwide, to analyze how teachers were using the platform. Data in this analysis came from the 2018–19 to 2020–21 school years and included more than three million students in over 150,000 classrooms. ReadWorks offers K–12 teachers curated nonfiction passages they can assign to students as supplemental reading practice that can increase background knowledge and improve vocabulary across subjects. Each passage is accompanied by a text-dependent question set that provides practice in inferring, monitoring and clarifying, and questioning. Grade-level appropriateness is determined using qualitative and quantitative analyses of text complexity, and texts are aligned to Common Core State Standards. While the platform encourages teachers to assign grade-level passages to students, the choice is ultimately left up to teachers.

Overall, students working on the ReadWorks platform spent about one-third of their time engaging with below-grade-level texts and question sets, and teachers assigned 5 percentage points more below-grade-level content after pandemic disruptions than before. Students in schools serving more low-income students were assigned the most below-grade-level work. They spent about 65 percent more time on below-grade-level texts and question sets than did their peers in the most affluent schools. And while students overall were just as successful on grade-level work as they were on below-grade-level work, low-income students were given less access to grade-level work even after they had already shown they could master it. The TNTP analysts state, starkly, that “there seems to be nothing many students in high-poverty schools can do to ‘earn’ access to the grade-level work they need to be successful.”

It is important to note that this is supplemental work for students and the report should not be misinterpreted to be an analysis of what may or may not be going on in their actual classrooms. But pre-pandemic research already showed a troubling dearth of grade-level work for many of our neediest students, and poor pandemic era student achievement data clearly suggest that old patterns have persisted—and worsened.

The TNTP analysts are heartened to see that successful performance on grade-level work seems achievable for students—if only they could access it. Thus, they conclude with recommendations focused largely on school culture: Teachers and school leaders must give students as much high-quality grade-level work as possible, be well-prepared to support them in persisting and achieving, and must believe that their students will rise to the challenge.

SOURCE: “Unlocking Acceleration: How Below Grade-Level Work is Holding Students Back in Literacy,” TNTP and ReadWorks (August 2022).

Unless there’s a political or ideological controversy, curricular decisions in schools and districts rarely make headlines. That’s too bad because these choices are immensely important. Research shows that curriculum plays a critical role in student achievement, and that upgrading curricular materials can be a cost-effective intervention. That’s particularly the case with early reading, where the evidence base is especially strong. State-led efforts have also proved promising: Louisiana’s decision to incentivize schools to adopt and implement high-quality curricula was paying dividends prior to the pandemic, with students showing improvements on state tests, the ACT, and AP exams. Other states, like Tennessee, have followed suit.

Obviously, curriculum reform isn’t a silver bullet. But helping districts and schools make wise curricular choices can pay off in the long run without being prohibitively expensive. Over the last several years, Ohio leaders have implemented several initiatives aimed at making it likelier that schools adopt high-quality curricula and instructional materials. Let’s take a look at two of those efforts.

The Ohio Curriculum Supports Guide

The Ohio Curriculum Support Guide was developed by the Ohio Department of Education in partnership with Instruction Partners, an education nonprofit that works with teachers to “support great teaching and accelerate student learning.” As you’d expect from a nonprofit aimed at helping teachers, the guide is specifically designed for educators who are responsible for selecting curricula and materials for their school or district.

The bulk of the guide is based around a framework of “leadership actions” that educators should take as they work through the curriculum adoption process. The framework is divided into three phases—selecting materials, preparing to launch, and teaching and learning—and each phase contains several “key actions.” For example, phase one includes the following:

• Plan your process

• Establish the vision

• Develop the rubric and prepare for reviews

• Review, pilot, and decide

• Procure and distribute materials

Each key action comprises an overarching goal, an explanation about why it matters, and several steps that team members must take to complete it. For example, the second action listed above—establish the vision—includes two steps: train the selection team and review committee, and articulate the vision of instruction and core beliefs. Each of these steps is broken down even further into guiding questions, notes, and resources.

The framework is a thorough resource designed to take the mystery out of selecting high-quality curricula. But the details don’t stop with the framework. The guide also offers a sample implementation timeline that outlines how to progress through the framework, a workbook designed to help educators and administrators work through the process as a team, a diagnostic tool aimed at helping leaders determine the best place in the framework to begin, and solutions to common challenges.  

INFOhio

To understand INFOhio, it’s important to understand Information Technology Centers (ITCs). There are eighteen of these nonprofit public agencies in Ohio, and they are charged with providing technology and shared services to the state’s schools. These services include internet connectivity, fiscal systems, student information and EMIS services, and INFOhio.

The overarching vision for INFOhio is to ensure that every student in the state has “equal access to high quality digital resources.” This is accomplished by offering instructional and technical support to schools (mostly through professional development and training for teachers) and by providing educators and families with access to age-appropriate content and instructional materials. Whereas the Ohio Curriculum Support Guide helps educators select curricula for their school, INFOhio offers a digital and searchable library of materials that can be used for free by teachers, school staff, parents, and students.

INFOhio also offers curriculum and instructional reviews in several forms. This is a hugely important development, as these reviews can provide district and school staff with objective, third-party evaluations that are crucial for wise decision-making. INFOhio’s review resources include the Ohio Evidence-Based Clearinghouse, which helps school leaders identify evidence-based strategies for school improvement, as well as instructional reviews that evaluate submissions to Open Space, Ohio’s digital platform for open access and open educational resources. It also includes Ohio Materials Matter Reviews, a site that allows educators to search for high-quality instructional materials that have been reviewed by EdReports, a national organization that boasts a network of more than 300 experienced reviewers from forty-six states.

***

To outsiders, the development of the Ohio Curriculum Support Guide and the advent of INFOhio might not seem like much. But for teachers and administrators charged with selecting a new curriculum for their school, the support guide offers step-by-step guidance that can ease a complicated transition. For parents and teachers looking for supplemental materials, INFOhio offers a plethora of free digital resources. And for schools looking to upgrade their curriculum to improve student achievement, INFOhio offers rigorous reviews on the many, many options that exist. These are critical resources that Ohio didn’t have before—and that’s a huge win.

1. A little bit of report card hangover to start with today. After the blunt assessment of Cincinnati City School’s performance, the Enquirer decided to turn their full regional report card roundup into a post-Oscar style best/worst package…including, for some reason, the average teacher salary in each district. And while some districts who did well on the report card and all who did poorly repeated the usual line of “report cards don’t show everything our district is doing”, it comes across a little differently when said by a five-stars-across-the-board suburban district. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/16/22) And speaking of different tunes, Akron City Schools are sounding quite a bit less positive about their report card performance than they did in the data preview shared with the media before we all saw the numbers ourselves. While everyone seems super proud that they managed to recover nearly 70 percent of their pre-pandemic academic performance so far, superintendent Christine Fowler Mack now says that getting back the last 30+ percent may be harder to do. “It’s a challenging time to really make up ground and to get back on that path to thriving,” she told the ABJ. And her rhetoric turned to talk of “hope” and “possibility” after that. Have sympathy if you are so moved, but do realize that we’re talking about being unable to reach already-subpar pre-pandemic performance levels despite the full-court press, millions of dollars, and years of time already invested and still theoretically available. (I will try to ignore the fact that that low pre-pandemic performance was described as “thriving”, but it gets harder and harder, you know.) If this counts as a silver lining, there must have one heck of a black cloud inside it. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/19/22)
   
   

2. Feeling their oats after a successful day on the picket lines, the Columbus Education Association is ready to continue its work for the benefit of their students. No no no. Not like that, silly. By forming a new coalition of the parents and community members who supported them during the strike to “advocate” on “issues”. Although, their little Zoom echo chamber is supposedly open to everyone… Personally, I just hope the CEA “strike band” gets to continue honing its chops. With some steady practice, I could see them headlining one or more pre-K cookouts by next fall. (ABC6 News, Columbus, 9/18/22)
   
   

3. Finally today, a new series is set to launch on Cleveland.com, following two reporters who were embedded in CMSD schools for a year. This is hailed in a preview piece as something “unprecedented”, although I remember the series covering the family whose kids all went to charter schools in the city. That was about them as a family, though, and not about education specifically. So this will probably be a little different, likely focusing more on the system than the families. Buckle up, folks! (Cleveland.com, 9/17/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Editor’s Note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.

Earlier this month, the federal government released the latest batch of national test score data tracking changes in the achievement of nine-year-olds since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The announcement resulted in ominous headlines in nearly every major national news outlet, with the Washington Post reporting that “American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades” and the New York Times noting darkly that the pandemic “Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading.”

The trends documented in these articles are many ways old news, both because the national data merely confirmed what a wave of state assessments and low-stakes diagnostics had already shown a year earlier and because the new figures could not speak to the most policy-relevant questions: Has student achievement begun to recover from the initial pandemic disruptions? And if so, at what rate, in which subjects, and among which student groups?

Fortunately, my new report examining the results from Ohio’s spring state exams answers exactly these questions. The analysis focuses on student achievement in both spring 2021 and spring 2022, comparing each cohort to performance on the same exams among otherwise similar students prior to the pandemic. Overall, it shows both the impressive progress Ohio students made last year, as well as the considerable learning shortfalls that still remain, especially in the oldest grades.

On the positive front, the spring assessments confirmed the encouraging news revealed by the fall round of exams, which showed that English language arts (ELA) achievement among third graders had charted an impressive rebound a year after plunging in the early months of the pandemic. The spring ELA exams, which included many more grades, showed similar gains among most tested elementary and middle school grades. Although students remain between one-third and two-thirds of a year behind compared to pre-pandemic performance of similar peers, they are on track to make up the lost ground within the next two to three years—if the current pace of recovery can be sustained. (That is obviously a big “if.”)

The math results are far less impressive, however. The initial achievement decline in this subject was much larger than in ELA, and the recovery over the past year has been far more muted. Overall, students remain between one-half and one whole year behind in math, corresponding to a proficiency rate that is between 10 to 15 percentage points lower than prior to the pandemic in most tested grades.

In addition to contrasting the exam scores of current students to earlier cohorts, the new report also examines one-year learning gains between spring 2021 and spring 2022 relative to comparable pre-pandemic growth. This allows me to directly quantify the amount of learning “acceleration” taking place in Ohio schools over the past year. The analysis confirms the trends found in the aggregate achievement data, showing that test scores in ELA grew substantially faster than in the years prior to the pandemic (with an important caveat, discussed further below). These gains were broad-based. 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 math, one-year growth was only modestly larger than normal in elementary grades but was also modestly smaller than usual for most older students. Indeed, the data for the oldest students is most distressing. Overall, eighth graders showed no evidence of learning acceleration—meaning the initial learning shortfalls among these students first recorded in spring 2021 did not narrow over the subsequent year. And the test scores suggest that tenth graders may have fallen even further behind, at least in ELA. Since these students have only a few years left before graduation, prioritizing their academic recovery should be at the very top of the agenda for Ohio educational leaders and public officials.

Frustratingly, the assessment results cannot speak to which strategies and investments that districts have pursued over the past year are working and which should be ditched, because there is no consistent data collection being done on these efforts, aside from tracking district spending of federal Covid aid. (Such limited tracking is not particularly useful since money is and has always been fungible.) However, the spring assessments do offer one important—and concerning—hint.

Specifically, most third-grade students take the same ELA exam twice during the academic year, in both the fall and the spring. And although spring 2022 third-grade reading scores showed significant improvement from spring 2021, the exams also revealed no evidence that these students had learned more during the academic year compared to pre-pandemic cohorts. In fact, the fall-to-spring growth rate among third graders last year was approximately 15 percent lower than typical before the pandemic, perhaps due to the disruptions caused by the Omicron wave in January or the widespread bus driver shortages and transportation woes. This suggests that much of the observed gains recorded in the spring were due to expanded programming and services from summer 2021, not improved instruction or tutoring services delivered during the school year.

The message from the spring’s assessments should be loud and clear: Despite some recent gains, Ohio students remain behind academically, especially in math. With Ohio districts still sitting on hundreds of millions in unspent federal aid, it is more important than ever that we understand which interventions are having the greatest impact in moving the needle on student academic recovery, and that policymakers prioritize and target their spending on students and subject that need help the most. The future of Ohio’s students—especially our oldest students—depends on it.

Vladimir Kogan is Associate Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. The opinions and recommendations presented in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily represent policy positions or views of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, the Department of Political Science, or The Ohio State University.

More pushback

U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina last week led 21 of his colleagues in introducing Congressional Review Act legislation seeking to nullify the Biden administration’s new Charter School Program (CSP), deeming them “burdensome requirements” for charter schools seeking funding to open new schools or expand existing ones.

Charter mythbusting

Walter Myers III, a member of the board of the Discovery Institute and of the Orange County Classical Academy in California, penned a piece for Real Clear Education’s blog in which he sought to tackle “misconceptions” about charter schools. He doesn’t sugar coat the truth but definitely separates myth from reality.

Spaces still available…

Two new IDEA charter schools in Cincinnati, authorized by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, are open and still enrolling new students for the current school year. You can check out some of the the details here.

…but getting to the door may be hard

Not to sound like a broken record, but reliable bus transportation for charter school families continues to be hard to come by in Dayton. However, the outcry against busing woes in the Gem City took on a distinctly different tone last week when it turned out that a district school board member was also having difficulty getting transportation for her own son heading to a Dayton Public high school.

The view from Cleveland

It was announced this week that Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon will be leaving the job he has held for 11 years at the end of the current school year. The monumental change raised questions at a local public media outlet regarding possible changes to the “Cleveland Plan” that has guided both the district and partnering charter schools for more than 8 of those years. The local teachers union was quick to offer its opinion that many changes to the plan were warranted, starting with an immediate moratorium on new and expanded charter schools.

*****

Did you know you can have every edition of the Ohio Charter News Weekly sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

1. We’ll start today not with the obvious story, but with one that is near and dear to my dad heart: Fathers (and grandfathers and stepfathers and uncles) in Stark County walking (and driving) their kids to school in the morning. The awesome annual event took place yesterday. Yes, there are lots of adorable photos...and donuts too! But it is way past time to get some charter and private schools in on this, don’t you think? (Canton Repository, 9/15/22)
   
   

2. OK. Now onto the story of the week: school and district report cards were released yesterday. Our own Aaron Churchill was among the folks interviewed by Gongwer and he provides the general overview: “Today's report cards reveal the ongoing consequences of the pandemic, with more students than usual struggling to meet grade level expectations in math and English.” (Gongwer Ohio, 9/16/22) Aaron is also quoted in the Cleveland coverage and Fordham-provided stats are a centerpiece of the big picture, which remains focused on pandemic learning loss and whatever recovery toward pre-pandemic levels might have occurred: “Fourth-grade English language arts proficiency rates statewide fell from 63.3% during the 2018-19 school year to 56% during the 2020-21, but recovered to 62.5% last school year… Statewide fourth-grade math proficiency rates went from 74.3% in 2018-19 to 59.4% in 2020-21, then 63.6% in 2021-22.” Doesn’t sound so hot to me. How about you? (Cleveland.com, 9/15/22) Public media in Cleveland says “Schools across Northeast Ohio are seeing improved marks on key indicators of academic performance as pandemic-related school closures recede into the past, according to the Ohio Department of Education’s new report cards”. This piece focuses on the Cleveland and Akron districts whose efforts to re-attain the rather poor state they were in before the pandemic are depicted as positive. (Ideastream, Cleveland, 9/15/22)
   
   

3. One of the biggest aspects of the new report cards regards changes wrought to the way various measures are calculated. The Ohio Federation of Teachers still doesn’t seem to like ‘em. The results, she says, are “not indicative” of all the work going on in Ohio’s schools. (Norwalk Reflector, 9/15/22) The view from the Dayton area seems a bit clearer-eyed to me: Suburban districts faring better than urban ones, and many of both are still behind where they were in 2019. And this piece is literally only a chart! (Dayton Daily News, 9/15/22) The other big deal here is the replacement of A-to-F ratings with a star rating system. You know: like Yelp. In one of the pieces above, Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro is quoted calling the old system “misleading”, among other choice invectives. If you ask me, there is an irony in the fact that while we call this a “star rating” system, almost all of the media coverage simply lists numbers from 1 to 5 and they seem far more stark and obvious for it. And also like Yelp, star ratings for schools seem inevitably to lead to brutal—and brutally accurate—headlines like this one. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/15/22)
   
   

4. Meanwhile, what the heck is this “Cleveland Plan” thing that’s only been around and guiding everything in education in the city for eight years? (WKSU-FM, Kent, 9/14/22) While public media folks may not recall what the Cleveland Plan is (nor, indeed, the proper usage of “reins” vs. “reigns”, a virulent pet peeve of mine), teacher unions in northeast Ohio know just exactly what the Cleveland Plan is and how it has transformed education there. And they’re looking to get Mayor Bibb to make some changes to it in the next year or so. (News 5, Cleveland, 9/16/22)
   
   

5. Back in the real world, the outcry over transportation troubles in Dayton is getting louder. I mean, charter school kids not showing up on time day after day for weeks on end is one thing, but when the child of one of your elected school board members has trouble getting to school too…look out! (Dayton Daily News, 9/14/22) And finally today, for the real real: Here’s yet another look at the Greater Dayton School. It lives up to that adjective more and more for me every time I read about it. How about you? (WHIO-TV, Dayton, 9/14/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

A new Fordham Institute report authored by University of Texas professor Matt Giani finds that industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) are “mostly not transformative” for the high school students who earn them. But the truth is that it’s all about the context.

As a longtime statewide coordinator for career and technical education (CTE) in Texas, I see firsthand how CTE and IRCs can be transformative in students’ lives. For example, earlier this year, I visited a large school district on the border, and when I asked about their CTE program and its positive points, I heard eye-opening testimony from the superintendent. She passionately explained how much local parents and families loved IRCs. Why? Largely because earning an IRC could give the whole family an economic boost, providing hope for a better future and a way out of the poverty they were stuck in. Something as seemingly simple as a Certified Nursing Assistant certification (CNA) was viewed as transformative in the eyes of the community and its families. While a CNA is widely regarded by many experts as merely a “nice to have” or as a steppingstone entry-level piece to larger career opportunities, families may place much higher value on these credentials, based on their local context.

Another example of the importance of local context occurred in another site visit to a large urban district with a robust CTE program. One of the highlights of the three-day campus visit was the opportunity to talk to a number of CTE students in the school. They were, in many ways, just like the students quoted throughout the new Fordham report. These young people were refreshing, honest, and able to see things differently.

One young man told us he was in the Health Science career cluster because he and his parents wanted him to become a doctor. He told me that he had obtained the Certified Pharmacy Technician certification and was doing a paid practicum as a tech in a local pharmacy. It was a smart move because he was gaining valuable practical experience on the job in pharmaceuticals, and this knowledge would help him succeed in medical school down the road. He was also saving money to help pay for his further education. He acknowledged that he was taking a different path from the traditional “academic” one of his friends who had similar goals, but he thought he had it figured out.

This fresh approach to high school for students focused on academics is something CTE programs should build on and promote. In Texas, for example, we are considering how rigorous core courses such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate can be embedded into our programs of study, which will more clearly demonstrate how CTE programs truly integrate academic learning and technical skills and knowledge. Stay tuned for that important work.

CTE continues to trend upward. And on the ground here in Texas, we can see that IRCs are helping that along—and that, in many local contexts, they can transform students’ lives. School systems just have to continue making changes that help IRCs add to students’ educational outcomes, especially among low-income and minority groups, who have historically been underserved. IRCs should be integral to districts’ efforts to develop robust and industry connected programs of study. Texas, for example, has clearly identified and connected them to schools’ grades on the state’s A-to-F accountability system, and this has made educators and their leaders pay more attention to IRCs, since they’re a part of how their efforts are scored. Other states can and should follow suit. If they do, more lives will be transformed.

Today, the Ohio Department of Education released its annual report cards for the 2021-22 school year. For two decades, report cards have shined a light on pupil achievement and provided parents and communities with an important check on student progress. Following national trends, test scores in Ohio remained below pre-pandemic levels, though some recovery is also evident in this year’s data.

“The pandemic was a catastrophe for many Ohio students,” said Aaron Churchill, Ohio Research Director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Today’s report cards reveal the ongoing consequences of the pandemic, with more students than usual struggling to meet grade level expectations in math and English.”

The figures below display statewide proficiency rates in selected grades and subjects. Proficiency in math dipped more dramatically during the pandemic, and scores remain well below pre-pandemic levels. While proficiency in English language arts was less affected, scores in this subject also haven’t yet fully recovered.

Figure 1: Statewide proficiency rates in fourth and eighth grade and high school

​

“Ohio cannot afford to leave tens of thousands of students lacking the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to succeed in life,” continued Churchill. “State leaders need to set a faster pace for learning recovery—especially in mathematics—by restoring a focus on core academics and ensuring that schools are using highly effective practices.”

* * *

As usual, the report card offers insight into which schools are most effectively moving the achievement needle for students. While Ohio transitioned to a new school report card design this year—including, most visibly, a shift to a five-star system—the Progress rating continues to identify schools where students are making significant academic growth from year-to-year.

In Ohio’s Big Eight cities, 21 percent of urban district schools achieved a five-star Progress rating while 19 percent of public charter schools achieved this mark. Because the Progress rating looks at students’ growth over time (no matter their starting point) high-poverty schools can and do post solid ratings on this measure. Meanwhile, reflecting longstanding achievement gaps and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Ohio’s urban students, the vast majority of Big Eight schools struggled on the proficiency-based Achievement component.

Figure 2: Distribution of schools’ Progress and Achievement ratings in the Ohio Big Eight cities

​