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1. Only one clip to give you today and, sadly, you can’t even read it without a subscription. Sorry about that! The Gongwer squad were in Louisville, Kentucky most of last week, covering as much of the annual National Conference of State Legislatures as they could. On Friday, they discussed a panel on the state of K-12 education in the aftermath of the pandemic, whose participants included Fordham’s big boss Mike Petrilli. Among the areas of concern that Mike would like legislators everywhere to act on soon: Academic recovery (“We’re not even making up the learning loss,” says Mike. “We’re going in the other direction.”), student misbehavior (“We don't want to get back to suspending kids willy-nilly,” he said, but emphasized that disruptive students make the classroom environment bad for peers and teachers.), and limiting cellphone use by students during the school day. On the other hand, Mike’s been so upfront about all these issues, you really only need Google to see what he’s said about all of them recently. (Gongwer Ohio, 8/9/24)

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Probably not good news

In their annual “school year readiness” report, Columbus City Schools’ administrators this week noted that their bus driver corps is only 75 percent staffed and warned that students who rely on yellow bus transportation will experience late buses and other problems for at least the first few weeks of the upcoming school year…and maybe longer. Charter, private, and STEM school students in Columbus can rest assured that they will experience their fair share of those problems…and maybe more.

To stabilize or not to stabilize

The superintendent of Dayton City Schools says that transportation in his district went so well last year that there will be no changes to the plan this year. “Any moves to do something else might destabilize the work we’ve already put in,” he says. There’s no discussion of how well transportation went for charter, private, and STEM school families last year, so we’ll have to take his word for it for now. But it is interesting to learn that the district has quietly settled with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce for all the past infractions for failing to properly transport those students in previous years and did not have to pay any of the millions of dollars in fines it had incurred. Stabilization indeed!

Leadership

Lee Strang, co-founder and board president of the Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, was recently hired as the executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University. The Chase Center is one of the five intellectual diversity centers, to be launched at state universities—intended to bridge political and ideological gaps between Ohioans—after being created via the state budget bill last year. Strang told the Ohio Capital Journal that the centers are “part of the solution to how Americans of all backgrounds and viewpoints, together, will renew our common civic life.” If all goes well, the Chase Center should be fully up and running by fall of 2025.

One family’s important story

The Advocate, a newspaper serving all of southern Louisiana, recently featured the story of the Bethley family of Baton Rouge. Mom Katherine struggled to find support for her first grade daughter, who struggled with reading and other aspects of school. She eventually enrolled the youngster in Louisiana Key Academy where a long-delayed dyslexia diagnosis was immediately followed up with strong instruction and intensive supports that made all the difference. “She has soared. She learned how to read within the first two months of being there,” Katherine Bethley said. “She enjoys reading now. She has gone from coming home depressed and crying to wanting to read and being very animated when she does so. It was a true transformation for us. She is going into the sixth grade, and her teacher told me that she is reading almost on a ninth-grade level.” Fantastic!

Good research findings, with some lingering questions…

A recent research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that charter school students in Massachusetts are significantly more likely to enroll in a four-year college after graduation and to obtain a degree than their non-charter peers. This held true in both urban and suburban charter schools. However, urban students earned higher state test scores than their non-charter peers while suburban students actually earned lower scores than their non-charter peers. What could possibly account for such a discrepancy? “The whole premise of test-based accountability is that test-scores predict longer-term outcomes. And that is likely still the case, writ large,” lead researcher Sarah Cohodes told The 74. “But this situation shows it is not always the case, and other things are going on in schools.” Interesting stuff. The full report can be found here.

*****

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1. The Dayton Daily News gives us a roundup of legislatively-mandated changes to K-12 education coming up this year. Chad is here, discussing a provision that limits monitoring of and access to a large swath of student data, especially electronically. “There’s going to be a higher bar for protecting student privacy and the use of student data,” he says, “It will be really important for school districts to work with their general counsel to make sure that they are properly protecting student information.” (Dayton Daily News, 8/8/24)
   
   

2. Speaking of technology changes (were we, really?), Columbus City Schools announced this week it is drastically curtailing its take-home Chromebook and WiFi-hotspot programs for the new school year. Chromebooks will be for in-class use only for grades K-8, except for some limited “check out” units if students really need them. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi hotspot devices have been demoted from “a bit of a necessity” for students when someone else was paying for them during the pandemic to a “much more targeted” commodity for students with “demonstrable need” for internet access. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/9/24)
   
   

3. No changes in Dayton City Schools’ transportation system this year. That’s because, the supe says, things went so well last year that “any moves to do something else might destabilize the work we’ve already put in.” To prove that everything’s great, we have two pieces of information: The supe’s word, and the fact that the district settled with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and did not have to pay any fines for all of the times it failed to properly transport charter and private school students in the past. (Dayton Daily News, 8/7/24)

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The specific connection between increased school funding and student outcomes remains unclear—regardless of whether the added dollars are blanket or targeted—and the mechanisms at work remain elusive. Perhaps the historical record could shed some light on modern times. A new working paper offers a window into the past that might just show us the way for the future.

A quartet of researchers from the United States and Finland dig into data from Mississippi between 1940 and 2000, attempting to trace the impact of a school funding tweak implemented there in 1920. The so-called “equalization fund” was intended to provide more state dollars to districts whose expenses outpaced the combination of their base state revenue and their local tax revenue. Prior to 1920, districts with a majority-Black student population received higher funding than those with majority-White populations, largely because Black schools were fewer in number and geographically clustered, resulting in crowded buildings. Having more students meant receiving more money via the state’s base per capita formula. However, individual schools could be advantaged or disadvantaged as a result of allocation decisions made at the central office by White leaders who generally favored schools with more White students. That also meant that equalization funds ended up going to districts with a significant population of White students because, on paper, they received less from the state formula. Thus the unwritten rules of the Jim Crow South allowed almost-completely-separate and almost-completely-unequal school funding via every possible mechanism.

What changed when the equalization funds started flowing? The researchers fast-forward to 1940 and find that Mississippi schools were spending, on average, $5 per year per Black student versus $26 per White student (which translates to $107 versus $557 in today’s currency). For schools with a high concentration of Black students, this represents a decrease of about 4 to 6 cents for every percentage point increase in Black population share between 1920 and 1940.

They also zoom in to a subsample of school districts that did or did not receive equalization funding in 1940. Since there were instances of schools with a mix of Black and White students in both categories, they were able to create thirty-six district pairs for direct comparison. These districts were all relatively rural, with three-quarters of both their Black and their White students living on farms. Families were somewhat more disadvantaged relative to the broader population (for example, only 16 percent of Black families in the subsample owned their homes versus 24 percent in the larger group of districts). These districts included about 20 percent of all Black fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds from the larger group and roughly 9 percent of Whites.

Estimates indicate that higher levels of spending, where they occurred, had a positive effect on Black students’ educational attainment. Specifically, a $1 increase in annual instructional spending per Black student from the base average of $5 per year increased the fraction of fourteen- to sixteen-year-old Black students who completed at least sixth grade by around 1.5 percentage points (from a base of 45 percent) and increased mean completed years of schooling by around a tenth of a year (from a base of 5.28 years). Interestingly, the impact of increased marginal spending on White students was essentially null, but both outcome statistics were far higher for White students to begin with.

The researchers also go on to extrapolate these impacts over sixty years, using Census data to identify a sample of nearly 6,000 Black individuals who were between the ages of four and sixteen in Mississippi in 1940 and were still alive in 2000. Their analysis confirms that each dollar of additional instructional spending (as of 1940) was associated with a 0.09 year increase in completed education. This echoes the single-year estimate from 1940. Additionally, they find that higher school resources in 1940 were associated with significantly higher household and family income in 2000—an increase in $1 in school funding was associated with a 3 percent increase in income. This is a large effect relative to the size of the effect on completed schooling, suggesting that higher spending increased both the years of schooling of Black Mississippians and their returns per year of schooling. It’s worth noting that there were many other influences on the economic trajectory of all individuals between 1940 and 2000, including cycles of economic boom and bust, family migration, civil rights victories (along with unrealized goals), and numerous efforts to connect educational inputs and outcomes directly with a dedicated goal of fixing past injustices. Any or all could have influenced the economic outcomes of individuals in the study to greater or lesser degree, even if the researchers’ main point still stands.

The research team goes on to highlight the other side of the coin revealed by their initial analysis: what Black students who did not receive extra funding lost out on over the intervening years and how much better life might have been for them at the dawn of the twenty-first century if Black student funding in the state had equaled that of White students from 1940 onward. They (and others) discuss that long term analysis here.

Jim Crow–era Southern White leaders used every possible lever to keep Black people down and to raise up their own White sons and daughters. But data and analysis from recent years indicate that those sorry days are largely gone, although there is still work to be done. As my colleague Adam Tyner discusses in depth in his 2023 “Think Again” publication on school funding, research shows that, nationally, as of 2022, Black and Hispanic students were receiving $514 and $115 more per pupil, on average, than White students, respectively. “It is true, however, that funding gaps based on race/ethnicity are more common than those based on SES,” he writes. “Whereas Lee et al. find only a handful of states where total school-level funding is even slightly regressive, they identify more than twenty states where Black or Hispanic students are funded at lower levels than their White counterparts, although only a few of those differences are statistically significant.” One of those states is Texas, another place whose Black residents suffered under Jim Crow regimes for decades after the Civil War. “Although equity advocates shouldn’t exaggerate the problem,” Tyner concludes, “the persistence of racial disparities should prompt action in the places where they still exist.” This window on Mississippi’s past—especially the multi-decade impacts of a single school funding decision—provides a light by which to clearly see the consequences of inequity and gives us incentive to end those inequities wherever they may still exist once and for all.

SOURCE: David Card et. al, “School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi circa 1940,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers (June 2024).

Cheers

• Twenty-one-year-old Louie Leonardo’s decision to forego a traditional college education in favor of becoming an HVAC apprentice is indicative of a growing interest among young people in alternative pathways. —Wall Street Journal
• A voucher-eligible Catholic school for boys will open in Cincinnati this month, reviving a building that has gone unused for more than thirty years. —Catholic News Agency

Jeers

• In Massachusetts, “unions want to revoke a state test required for high-school graduation.” —Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
• School accountability, once a priority for Democrats and Republicans alike, has seemingly been abandoned by both parties. —Paul E. Peterson, Education Next
• Critics of Massachusetts vocational schools argue that they should all be less selective, ignoring the fact that not every school has to or ought to serve every kind of student. — Boston Globe

• Students and colleagues of former public school teacher and current Governor Tim Walz speak highly of his skill and charm. Could he be just as popular as Vice President Harris’s running mate? —The Washington Post
• “In troubling shift, English learners outpace peers in chronic absenteeism in California.” —The 74
• Tim Walz’s work in education includes both time spent in the classroom and the passage of a slew of progressive education policies as governor. —Chalkbeat
• Tim Walz’s history as a public school teacher may appeal to the rural and blue-collar voters Harris needs, though his individual education policy positions likely won’t have a prominent place in the campaign. —Education Week

Just over a year has passed since Ohio’s science of reading initiative was signed into law. Under these new provisions, all public elementary schools must align their literacy instruction to the science of reading. This evidence-based approach emphasizes phonics along with vocabulary- and knowledge-rich content to support students’ reading comprehension. Schools that weren’t already doing this must transition to the science of reading during the upcoming school year, and $168 million in state funding is being spent to support these changes.

Putting these reforms into law was a necessary first step. But as we at Fordham have stressed, it won’t work without faithful and rigorous implementation, both at the state level (through the work of state agencies) and local level (under district and school leadership). How these key players handle the Science of Reading provisions will determine how effectively they are put into practice.

As detailed in my recent report, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) has done a fine job with a critical early implementation step—creating a solid list of fifteen core reading curricula from which elementary schools may choose. But that’s just a start. Several other important aspects of implementation are also underway, so as to get the literacy initiative off to a strong start. Here are three.

Approving reading intervention programs

Promoting high-quality core curricula is crucial, as these programs guide the reading instruction that all students receive. But another vital element of the initiative is ensuring that interventions intended to help struggling readers are also aligned to the science of reading. To this end, the legislature wisely tasked DEW with vetting and approving intervention programs, much as it did for core curricula.

By the end of July, the department had approved sixty intervention programs. This is far more than the fifteen approved core curricula, but the lengthier list likely reflects the greater number of intervention programs available, as well as the fact that scientifically-based interventions apply to all grade levels, not just the early elementary grades. Among the approved interventions are two endorsed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in a Fordham report last year (UFLI Foundations and SIPPS). Wisely, DEW did not approve interventions that use disproven, non-scientific methods (e.g., Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention).

Launching a professional development (PD) course

In addition to overhauling curricula, lawmakers recognized the need to bolster educators’ capacity to apply the science of reading. By July 2025, all school administrators and teachers (grades K–12), as well as specific support staff, must complete a state-designed course in the science of reading unless they have already received comparable training (e.g., LETRS or Wilson Language Training). To help develop the course, DEW partnered with Keys to Literacy, a respected national group with experience providing literacy guidance for educators in Colorado and Massachusetts.

The new online course, which is already available and consists of roughly twenty hours of training,[1] includes a broad overview of the science of reading, along with targeted modules that cover areas like instruction in phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Course completion requires passing a post-test, which should encourage closer attention to and engagement with the content. Teachers and support staff receive state-funded stipends when they finish the course.

The new statewide course should serve as an excellent introduction to the science of reading, but some educators will want or need more. Many Ohio schools—perhaps supported by additional state investments—will need to further boost their efforts to strengthen educators’ proficiency in this realm via curriculum-specific support or promoting effective teacher collaboration.

Increasing funding for teacher-prep audits

Another essential piece of the literacy puzzle is ensuring that the state’s colleges of education thoroughly prepare prospective teachers in the science of reading. As analyses from NCTQ indicate, many teacher-prep programs—in Ohio and nationally—have not been doing this well. To improve teacher preparation, lawmakers required colleges to align their programs with the science of reading. They assigned the Ohio Department of Higher Education the job of auditing the alignment of those programs, with reviews slated to begin in January 2025. But the legislature did not initially set aside sufficient funding for the task—just $150,000 to review more than fifty programs—but recently-passed legislation added $2 million to support this effort.

* * *

All these steps—from vetting core literacy curricula to supporting teacher-prep audits—lay the groundwork for strong classroom implementation, while also signaling that state leaders are taking these reforms seriously and striving to ensure that the science of reading takes root across Ohio. Rigorous implementation is a heavy lift, but the payoff has the potential to be great: a more literate and well-prepared next generation of Ohio students.

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1. The Franklin County judge (Unicorns 4ever!) overseeing the legal case against the EdChoice vouchers program is currently pondering a summary judgment which will either stop the case with a dismissal or clear it to proceed to trial later this year. This is an excellent summation (see what I did there?) of the positions each side has taken on the various constitutional matters at issue. Wonky and a bit dry, but worth a read. No idea when a decision to stop or go will be rendered. (Ohio Capital Journal, 8/5/24)
    
2. The elected school board that runs Akron City Schools this week approved a transportation plan for students with disabilities and students experiencing homelessness after several previous stalls over the last few months. Somehow, the new deal will supposedly save the district nearly $3 million, despite the fact that it’s nearly identical to last year’s plan and addresses none of the problems with that plan that were outlined previously as needing to be fixed. (Cleveland.com, 8/6/24) The elected school board that runs Columbus City Schools last night congratulated district administrators for providing one of the best school readiness analyses they say they have ever heard. Among the important nuggets: The district is only 75 percent staffed up in terms of bus drivers and everyone in charge wants to assure families that many buses will be late (among other likely problems not noted in the piece, I reckon) for at least the first couple of weeks. I’m no transportation planner, but you know what might help with that bus problem? Fewer half-empty schools to stop at. But the elected board members kicked a decision on that question down the road to a future meeting…again. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/7/24)

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Despite the growing diversity of American students, the teaching workforce remains disproportionately White. A recent study uses twelve years of administrative data from Maryland to examine the factors contributing to the state's chronic shortage of Black teachers.

The study highlights the alarming attrition rates of teaching students of color, who are more likely to discontinue their pursuit of the teaching profession than their White counterparts due to financial challenges, lack of support, and discriminatory hiring practices (the study did not comment on academic challenges).

Data from the study shows that 37 percent of K–12 students in Maryland are Black, versus only 21 percent of teachers. For a further breakdown, 35 percent of high school graduates, a third of college enrollees, about a quarter of college graduates, and 16 percent of certified teachers are Black. In contrast, White individuals comprise 44 percent of the student body, 46 percent of high school graduates and college enrollees, more than half of college graduates, nearly 7 in 10of certified teachers, and 66 percent of the teacher workforce. Notably, these disparities are more pronounced in affluent districts, indicating systemic barriers to entry, less advancement for potential teachers of color, and so-called “leaks” in the teacher pipeline.

To address these challenges, the authors recommend several steps: The first is implementing race-conscious strategies to strategically distribute the limited number of Black teachers to ensure that at least one is teaching between kindergarten and third grade at each school to ensure that Black students experience representation. Prior research suggests that having a Black teacher increases Black students’ high school graduation and college enrollment rates by 13 percent and 19 percent, respectively, and is associated with improved academic performance, higher graduation rates, and increased aspirations for higher education among all students.

A second suggestion is to increase teachers of color through early teacher residency programs. For example, the study includes related research on the impact of the Teacher Academy of Maryland (TAM), a program that provides early exposure to teaching and the opportunity to earn college-level credits toward an undergraduate degree in teaching. That analysis found that the initiative was especially effective in increasing Black girls' entry into teaching—boosting numbers by more than three quarters compared to 38 percent for White girls.

One component missing from the study that could help forge more teachers of color is ensuring they have the preparation and support (financial or otherwise) to complete all the steps necessary to enter the profession. Promising strategies include providing scholarships and financial incentives for aspiring teachers and creating supportive, robust teacher preparation programs. Another effort that could make huge strides for creating diverse teachers is funding specifically for HBCU and MSI teaching programs. A similar program available now is the Augustus F. Hawkins Center for Excellence under the U.S. Department of Education, however they have only supported ten institutions.

Another effort that mentioned by the study that could disproportionately benefit teachers of color is a renewed National Teacher Corps. While the programs in the 1970s were efficient in recruiting teachers from low-income communities for low-income schools, it lacked the financial incentive and scholarships that its replacement, Teach For America, provides now. A Teacher Corps with the same goals and an increased bandwidth to each state with a combination of stipends and tuition coverage could be the major shift required. These programs are making great efforts, but they must be expanded to transform the workforce.

Ultimately, this study focuses on Maryland’s teacher pathways over the course of twelve years to explore the gaps on recruiting more teachers of color. Based off the data, researchers suggest that strategies, such as representation, dual enrollment, and financial incentives are efforts that should be expanded and can significantly shift teacher demographics.

SOURCE: David Blazar, Max Anthenelli, Wenjing Gao, Ramon Goings, Seth Gershenson, “Disparate Pathways: Understanding Racial Disparities in Teaching,” Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper (April 2024).

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1. I’m probably missing something here, but does anybody else think that the idea of a well-funded Education Services Center holding a “flea market” to sell classroom supplies (“This includes books, decorations, games, and more.”) to teachers—who are paying from their own pockets here—seems a little odd? Especially since the event, brand-new this year, seems to have been targeted at first-year teachers who, I suspect, have no idea in the first week of August how much money their own schools will provide for them to stock their classrooms…or indeed if their well-funded schools might already have giant piles of “anything a teacher could need” in the back room. While the data may show that teachers nationwide always spend some amount of their own money buying such things, it feels like a messy message to have the ESC be the ones taking a chunk of that change, rather than finding some way to mitigate or fully obviate any such spending, perhaps using their own very full coffers to do just that. Your humble clips compiler hopes that this is also the last annual edition of this shady-sounding shindig. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 8/2/24)
   
   

2. We’ve talked about this already, but it’s worth repeating for a couple of reasons: Xavier Jesuit Academy is a brand new private school opening in Cincinnati in a matter of weeks. It is able to provide an expansive educational experience (all boys, grades 3 through 5 for the first year of operation) for a maximum out-of-pocket expense of $1,000 per year per student due to the contributions of major corporate and private donors as well as the expansion of the EdChoice Scholarship Program to near-universal eligibility status. Let me say that again: The expansion of vouchers in Ohio created a new school where none previously existed. This includes an extended day program, “designed for kids whose parents work beyond school hours” (which is, of course, almost all working parents) and a free summer program. Extracurriculars include athletics, fine arts, culinary arts, and service opportunities. And the curriculum is “designed to engage and encourage young learners during their formative years so they grow up to be great men who serve God and others.” Even better, all 45 boys accepted for the inaugural year were informed in person, at their homes, by staff members bearing balloons, certificates, and a backpack filled with swag. If we’re grading on messaging today, feels to me like ESC 0, Catholic Diocese of Cincinnati 45. (Catholic News Agency, 8/2/24)
   
   

3. Also in the messy messaging category: Columbus City Schools. So says OSU professor and Fordham friend Vlad Kogan in this very long piece on the topic of school closures, focusing closely on one building—West Broad Elementary. “The district has really struggled to articulate the need for the closures, the motivation for the closures,” says Kogan, “and I think the way that the task force process was set up didn't help with the communication side of it.” This is obviously true, because nowhere in this 2,000-word grouch fest—even after all these months of the closure saga—did anyone note that West Broad’s enrollment is only 65 percent of capacity, that nearly 70 percent of the school’s 360 students are chronically absent (which means that the building is far less than half occupied most days), and that it received just 2.5 stars out of 5 in its latest report card. And that’s just the start on how the district missed out on a chance to address concerns, both legitimate (parents worried about busing) and not (historic preservationists). (Columbus Dispatch, 8/4/24) While they were not included in the main piece, those data on West Broad Elementary, and on the other district buildings identified by the facilities taskforce for possible closure, are included in this companion piece. Might also be interesting to see what the staffing levels are in these very empty buildings, but that’s probably too much to ask. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/4/24)

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