Catch Ohio angles on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog (see here). Last week Mike Lafferty commented on U.S. Sen. George Voinovich's decision to retire on Jan. 12; Emmy Partin blogged about the Ohio Board of Regents plan to streamline computer software and technology services to save money on Jan. 13; Terry Ryan commented on peace feelers between the traditional education sector and the charter school world on Jan. 14; and Mike Lafferty commented on what strings the feds should attach to education bailout money on Jan. 16.

Ohio Grantmakers Forum
January 2009

Editor's note: The Ohio-based Fordham Institute staff participated in the development of the Ohio Grantmakers Forum's (OGF) report Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today's Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come, which was released today. We were one group among 33 stakeholder organizations, and 43 people, involved in the months-long process to generate 11 recommendations for improving Ohio's K-12 public schools. As the introduction to the OGF report notes, "With a common commitment, this diverse group of Ohioans worked together for six months. There was give and take on many issues, but they pushed themselves to steer away from the lowest common denominators."

We signed our names to the report and endorsed it because we agreed with the goals of the report, and with the majority of the eleven recommendations. We agree fully with our OGF colleagues that Ohio needs to 1) significantly increase education attainment levels for all of its citizens, 2) align much more closely the knowledge and skills of its high school graduates with the expectations of college and the workplace, 3) close persistent achievement gaps, 4) better prepare its young people to compete internationally, and 5) make learning more relevant to young people's lives.

Where we respectfully disagree with the report relates to the recommendation that Ohio should "Reevaluate and revise its academic standards." Fordham's president Chester (Checker) E. Finn, Jr. explains why Ohio's lawmakers should march down this path with great caution, and indeed trepidation. Raising red flags about this specific recommendation is in no way meant to diminish the value of the rest of this report. In fact, it reflects the spirit of debate, dialogue, and respectful disagreement that went into the making of it in the first place. We share the critique of the perils of re-engineering standards and assessments in that spirit with our readers while also urging you to read the full OGF report for yourselves. It is available here.

The perils of re-engineering standards and assessments
Today, the Ohio Grantmakers Forum released its report Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today's Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come. This report offers education-reform "action recommendations" for Gov. Ted Strickland, the Ohio General Assembly, and the State Board of Education. The Ohio Grantmakers Forum struggled heroically with how to improve the Buckeye State's K-12 academic standards and the statewide testing-and-accountability system that is supposed to be aligned with those standards. That system includes the contentious Ohio Graduation Tests as well as all manner of subject-specific statewide tests that students take in the primary and middle grades-and the results of which substantially determine their schools' ratings on the state report card.

Changing any state's standards, testing, and accountability system is an enormously complex and time-consuming project. Usually, it involves multiple, massive committees and panels of teachers, subject-matter experts, innumerable education "stakeholders," and many drafts of proposals. Right now, it is also complicated by several other endeavors. In Ohio's case, Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut has issued an ambitious strategic plan indicating that the state's public university system will rely heavily on ACT tests for purposes of placing students in college-level courses. Several other states have adopted it as their universal high-school test. This raises the obvious question of whether the ACT should become a key metric at the secondary level in Ohio, too.

But there's more. Ohio also participates in the American Diploma Project (ADP) sponsored by Achieve, a national group led by governors and CEOs, which is currently reworking its own recommended high-school exit standards for math and English. Also, the ADP-updating process includes efforts at "international benchmarking" (a nebulous concept, to be sure) and is enmeshed with a Gates-funded joint venture of Achieve, the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers to establish common or multi-state standards that, everyone understands, are sort of a backdoor path toward the national standards that many people think the U.S. needs.

With all of this and more underway, only the brave and optimistic would embark upon a hasty makeover of a single state's own standards. One also must be confident that the good to result from this exercise surpasses the bad that predictably accompanies any disruption of established trend lines. For example, many Ohioans take seriously the state ratings-from "excellent with distinction" to "academic emergency"-bestowed upon their schools and school systems, largely on the basis of the results of current tests. Many also have high hopes for the state's new "value-added" calculations based on those tests. Reworking the standards and tests means there will be no continuity in those rankings and ratings.

For such a makeover to be feasible, embarking upon it must focus intently on what exactly is wrong with the current standards and tests and how exactly the next round should be different. Regrettably, though the Ohio Grantmakers Forum did a nice job in other parts of Beyond Tinkering, in the standards-and-assessment sphere their product reminds me of the Hindu religion: far too many gods to worship any one with conviction. Though the short statements in the executive summary read well, as soon as you get into the detail you realize that the authors tried bravely to accommodate far too many semi-discordant voices and competing values. The five pages that start on page 18 amount to a hodgepodge of commendable hopes and incompatible objectives that provide no focused guidance for state leaders. Three examples illustrate the problems:

• "Standards will continually be benchmarked against international standards and expectations in high-performing countries and states, and to cutting-edge, emerging knowledge." Sounds great, but read it again. Besides the challenge of knowing exactly what "emerging knowledge" has lasting value, much less "cutting-edge" significance, is the impossibility of "continual benchmarking". Standards are valuable to educators (and parents, test-builders, and policy makers) primarily insofar as they're sufficiently solid and long-lasting that it makes sense to create curricular materials, prepare teachers, and organize course sequences to attain them. If standards are continually in flux, they end up having little or no effect on what is actually taught or learned.
• "The new assessment system must inform and improve the quality and consistency of instruction and learning....Ascertain whether students are meeting certain mileposts....Motivate students to take their education more seriously....Hold schools accountable...for ensuring that students are meeting challenging academic expectations...." Sorry, folks. If I've learned anything from four decades in this field, it's that no assessment system has ever been devised that can successfully carry those multiple burdens. Improving instructional quality, commonly known as "formative assessment," is simply not the same thing as external, results-based accountability, commonly known as "summative assessment". You can wish they were the same but they're not. 
• "Ensure alignment of entire K-12 assessment system" while "develop(ing) end-of-course exams (grades 9-12) to replace the Ohio Graduation Tests." End-of-course exams is an idea with merit but it takes the uniformity out of the graduation testing requirement and ends up saying that a youngster must pass the end-of-course exams in whichever courses he/she takes. Which, of course, are not necessarily the same courses for everyone-despite the new "Ohio Core." If the exams (and their passing scores) differ from student to student, all one can be sure that the high-school diploma represents is passing the exams in the courses one signed up for. That's not an "aligned" system and it's not clear what that diploma means from the standpoint of colleges and employers.

Alas, there's plenty more. My point, however, isn't to beat up on the earnest, thoughtful folks who produced this mishmash (including some of my own colleagues at Fordham). It's simply to point out that, while their well-intended project demands the focus of monotheism, they, instead, erected temples to every educational deity I have ever encountered. And, Ohio policymakers should ask themselves if they want to embark, solo, on an enormously complicated, costly, and ambitious undertaking at the very point in time that the entire country may be starting to shift its approach to standards and assessments under pressure of the world economy and the need to give No Child Left Behind its own comprehensive makeover.

The Washington Post reported Sunday on Bush's plans to start a new think tank, the Freedom Institute, which will include an education component:

Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation, said the policy institute will be built around several key themes, including "freedom, compassion, opportunity and individual responsibility."

"It's really a place where you're trying to advance effective policy solutions above a partisan level," Langdale said. "He's made clear that history will be a judge of his legacy. The purpose of the institute is to be more forward-looking."

Margaret Spellings, Bush's education secretary and longtime friend, said in an interview last week that she expects the policy center to focus on "game-changing" initiatives such as the schools testing program called No Child Left Behind. "There will be a dimension of trying to keep these policies current and in context with whatever is happening at the time," she said.

So he apparently will join brother Jeb in the education think tank world. I'll be curious whether they collaborate or compete on this issue, and I submit that any scorecard should show Jeb Bush in the lead--in Florida, ??No Child Left Behind proved inferior to the state-level reforms already in place.

Around the country, school districts are urging officials to crack down on charter school growth--and on existing charter schools--because, they assert, there isn't enough money in strapped state budgets to pay for this sector--and of course the districts must come first.

I'm seeing this in Ohio, in Utah and in Massachusetts and do not doubt that it's happening all over the place.

But of course it's completely cockeyed. If every public-school pupil in America attended a charter school, the total taxpayer cost would be 20-30% LESS than it is today. That's because charters are underfunded (compared with district schools) and thus represent an extraordinary bargain--even if their overall academic performance isn't much different from that of district schools. Think of it as the same amount of learning at three-quarters of the price.

What's really going on here are two bad things. First, as we've known for decades, school systems are great at expanding their budgets but absolutely dreadful at shrinking them. So they reach for every imaginable excuse and alternative--federal bailouts, state bailouts, county bailouts, the "Washington monument strategy" ("if you make us cut our budget we'll have to eliminate art and football and Advanced Placement"), teacher RIFS, and more.

Second, school systems never liked charter schools--they don't care for competition, they hate losing students, etc.--and are opportunistically using the economic downturn as a new cudgel to hit at them. In effect, they're trying to redefine charters as a luxury good that possibly the country (or state) could afford during flush times but surely cannot afford today.

To repeat, the surest way that American education could weather the present economic storm is to enroll every single pupil in a charter school.

It's no surprise that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and nearly every other governor in the country have a hand out for a hand out from Washington. Democrats want to spend $825 billion on all kinds of programs from roads and energy efficiency to welfare and education. States have real pressing needs to pay for all these items and not enough money to do it. Strickland, looking at least a $7 billion budget deficit has asked for $5 billion from the federal government. Whatever Ohio gets, presumably, a billion or so will go to education.

The question is whether the feds will use the bank bailout philosophy or the auto bailout philosophy in handing out the money. With the banks, it was shovel it out the door and ask questions later. With the auto execs, it was run them through the ringer a few times and demand a realistic plan. The later method is probably the best way to treat state aid.???? This awful economic mess arrives when Ohio education is at a crossroads--either to make it stronger, more academically focused and accountable or, perhaps to turn back against meaningful reform. President-Elect Obama has already indicated he's into education reform. Obama, who was in Ohio Friday to talk up his stimulus plans, likes charter schools, accountability, standards and better-trained teachers. Congressional Democrats already have rolled out an ambitious plan of educational spending that includes tens of billions for education. Unfortunately, this plan seems to simply throw money at a problem. Ohio's governor owes too much to labor unions for us to believe that he will think any differently. Union-backed education reform means simply spending more money, not changing the system and Strickland mainly has been focused on how the state will pay for education. And that brings us back to the federal bailout. Federal money should be tied to results, such as better teachers, strengthening accountability mechanisms and getting good teachers and principals into schools. Maybe it also should be tied to No Child Left Behind goals. The idea, however, that it will simply go to perpetuating an education system littered with broken programs that work more for the benefit of adults than children is scary.

I've heard from several friends, particularly those on the left, who are perplexed by the arguments made by me and others that budget cuts can be good for education reform. Sure, they concede, it's theoretically possible that difficult times would give local leaders the political cover to make tough decisions that would otherwise be politically impossible, such as releasing their most ineffective employees. But most often, superintendents and school boards do the politically expedient thing instead, such as laying off all their young teachers, or cutting art and music, or eliminating school counseling programs.

This issue is brought into stark relief in the city of angels. Los Angeles Unified has announced plans to lay off 2,300 teachers. And guess which approach to layoffs the district is pursuing? The most junior teachers will be gone, including most (maybe all?) of the city's Teach For America teachers. This even though those recruits have been found to be just as effective as more veteran instructors, and even though they earn much lower salaries.

This is an outrage. A crisis. And crises are good times to push for policy changes. The L.A. Times, local foundations, community organizations, everyone should be up in arms at the prospect of a mass firing of the city's young, enthusiastic teachers because district leaders don't have the courage to tackle corrupt union policies and weed out incompetent or burned-out staff.

According to Wikipedia, LA Unified employs over 80,000 people. Just assume that 2 percent of these people are no longer doing a bang-up job. (Hard to imagine, right?) That's 1,600 people. Assuming that many of these folks are long-timers and thus make more money than starting teachers do, you could probably close the same budget hole by firing those 1,600 as you could be letting go of 2,300 teachers. Is anyone within the district willing to stand up and say that the worst 2 percent of employees don't deserve to lose their jobs instead of bright young teachers? That the district couldn't survive without them? In fact, that the district wouldn't be better off without them?

It's not hard to understand why a group like Teach For America would want to see districts such as L.A. get a bailout from the feds, so that its recruits don't end up on the street. But such an outcome would amount to winning the battle and losing the war. Eventually, the bailouts are going to come to an end. So too will the days of regular budget increases for the schools; with Boomers retiring, almost all new public dollars are going to be sucked up by Social Security and Medicare. Budget crunches will be the norm, not the exception. And then how are we going to keep young, energetic teachers like TFAers from losing their jobs? Eventually, we have to beat back the "last hired, first fired" madness. So again, if not now, when? If not us, who?

It's great news that Tom Nida, chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, has been exonerated by the District Attorney General, for allegations raised by the Washington Post that he was improperly mixing his day job as a banker with his volunteer job overseeing D.C. charter schools. (Thanks to eduwonk for the tip.)

Much has already been written (also see here and here and here) about the unfair treatment the Post gave him, with its Sunday front-page headline ("Public Role, Private Gain") worded to sell newspapers, and to its credit, the Post editorial board did take Tom's side. But it's a shame that this good news is relegated to the Metro section, and it's disappointing that one won't read an apology from the reporters and their headline writers for dragging his name through the mud unnecessarily.

Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, what say you?

I ran across an informative interview with Washington Post's Jay Mathews about his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America. The book explores in depth the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and tracks the career paths of founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. The interview with Jay was conducted by EducationNews.org. Check it out!

That's what it's starting to look like, at least if the rumors swirling around Washington have any merit. While I strongly doubt that Arne Duncan will put Wendy Kopp, Jon Schnur, and Andy Rotherham in his 1, 2, and 3 spots , it's conceivable that the reform crowd will win the "personnel is policy" game (just not by a landslide). But even more interesting is the news that the "stimulus" package will include an $80 billion fund for education--on top of the $100 billion or so of state bailout funds that will find their way to local school coffers. This sounds like the "education community's" dream come true. It's like fully funding NCLB, IDEA, and then some, all in one fell swoop.

So the reformers get to make "policy" for the next four years. That's small potatoes compared to the stimulus-driven federal largesse, which has the potential to retard reform bigtime. (Reformers who doubt that are kidding themselves.)

If I ran the teachers unions and the other edu-blobby groups, I'd take this deal in a heartbeat.

Our favorite podcast hosts, Mike and Rick, will be discussing President Bush's education legacy at an American Enterprise Institute-hosted event in February. Take a look at the agenda:

Thursday, February 5, 2009, 1:00-2:30 p.m.

Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI

1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Please register for this event online at www.aei.org/event1872.

With a new administration taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and George W. Bush's centerpiece No Child Left Behind Act up for reauthorization, Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI, and Michael J. Petrilli, vice president of national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, consider the education legacy of the Bush administration in their forthcoming article "Left at the Altar." They note that the administration found common cause with progressive reformers by pursuing ambitious policies focused on narrowing achievement gaps-but often at the expense of its own conservative principles. They also find that the po litical environment created in the past eight years presents not only challenges, but also surprising opportunities for reform.

Petrilli and Hess will be joined at this event by Williamson M. Evers, the Bush administration's assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development; Dianne M. Pich??, the executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights; and Andrew J. Rotherham, the co-director of Education Sector, an education policy think tank. Hess will moderate.

12:30 p.m.

Registration and Luncheon

1:00

Presenter:

MICHAEL J. PETRILLI, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Discussants:

WILLIAMSON M. EVERS, Hoover Institution

DIANNE M. PICH??, Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights

ANDREW J. ROTHERHAM, Education Sector

Moderator:

FREDERICK M. HESS, AEI

2:30

Adjournment

Please register online at www.aei.org/event1872 or by faxing this form to 202.862.7171. Shortly after the event occurs, a video webcast will be available on the AEI website at www.aei.org/eventvideos.

For more information, please contact Rosemary Kendrick at [email protected].