News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

1. The main point of this story is that Dayton City Schools will be discontinuing its two-teachers-in-one-classroom model for next school year. It was an inevitable no-brainer that this would happen as soon as the federal Covid funding for it dried up, but that doesn’t stop district leaders from giving us lots of details around it to otherwise explain/justify the move…and more besides. Since we don’t have much else to talk about today, let’s dig in. A) Supposedly, preliminary test score results for this past school year show a lot of growth in lower elementary grades, which is good news if true, but is directly related to the teaching model being discontinued. The good old one-teacher, one-classroom model is what they will be embracing going forward, because it is the bedrock of education—“We’re rallying around the single-teacher model”—whether it works for their students or not. B) No money will actually be saved with the switch, since no teachers were let go. C) Preliminary test score results also show that middle school performance this year is really bad, especially in math. The reason for this, we are told, is that “multiple long-term substitute teachers who did not have licenses” were the ones teaching middle school classes, especially math. To combat this problem, we learn that district middle schoolers will be getting virtual math teachers next year (provenance unknown) to provide support for the long-term substitutes, who will remain. D) The district’s maniacal focus on keeping current families from leaving and attracting families away from other school options remains steadfast—“[middle school] is where we often see students transfer to other districts”—but at least they seem to recognize that providing a quality education might actually help them with their problem in this regard. Which is a nice change. Can’t wait to see how it all goes. (Dayton Daily News, 7/15/24)
   
   

2. Meanwhile, expansion of the Dayton Regional STEM school—in both size and down into elementary grade levels—took a step forward this week with some help from the Dayton-Montgomery County Port Authority, which issued more than $21 million in bonds to kick their construction project into high gear. Seems like we’re hearing a lot these days about various port authorities in Ohio getting involved in school facilities projects, and perhaps a little odd. But it’s really nothing new. We are told here that the Dayton-Montgomery Port Authority was instrumental in helping the STEM school get started ten years ago in the very same way. To which this landlubber says, “Yo ho ho and shiver me timbers! Thank ye for the wise use o’ yer treasure chest, yer honors! Feel free to keep the booty a-comin’!” (Dayton Daily News, 7/16/24)

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

This is the fifth in a series in which I examine issues in K–12 education that Ohio leaders should tackle in the next biennial state budget. Previous pieces covered the science of reading, funding for low-income pupils, interdistrict open enrollment, and guarantees. This essay looks at funding for public charter schools.

For more than two decades, Ohio’s charter schools—nonprofit public schools that operate independently—have served families and students seeking non-district options. In 2023–24, approximately 85,000 students, mostly from urban communities, attended one of the state’s 318 brick-and-mortar charter schools. Studies have shown that charter students learn more in math and reading than similar students who attend nearby district schools.

Despite their value to parents and students, Ohio has—until recently—significantly underfunded its charter schools. An analysis of FYs 2015–17 data found that charters received on average just 68 percent of what nearby traditional districts received in total funding, a shortfall that hamstrung charters when it came to paying competitive teacher salaries and providing student services. It was also a fundamentally unfair system to charter students, who are disproportionately poor and from communities of color, and whose education was funded at lower amounts simply by virtue of their choice in public school.

To their credit, state policymakers have taken steps to move charter funding closer to parity with districts. The effort began in 2019 when Governor DeWine proposed a new funding supplement for high-performing charters. His initiative sailed through the legislature and was launched in FY 2020. In last year’s historic budget bill, lawmakers doubled down on this program by significantly increasing the per-pupil allotments. They also created a new “equity supplement” that supports all brick-and-mortar charters, not just those qualifying for high-quality funding. Lastly, in the realm of school facilities—an area in which charters have also been shortchanged—lawmakers doubled the state’s facilities allowance in the last budget. Table 1 below summarizes these funding initiatives.

Table 1: State programs that help to narrow charter-funding gaps

These additional dollars empower charters to compete for educator talent and provide extra student supports—factors that are critical to supporting higher student achievement. They make it possible for charters to expand and replicate, thereby providing even more students and families with quality options. And the push towards equitable funding has also made Ohio a more attractive locale for high-performing national charter networks. Texas-based IDEA Public Schools and classical charters affiliated with Hillsdale College (MI), for example, recently launched their first schools in Ohio.

Thanks to Governor DeWine and recent General Assemblies, charter funding has come a long way in a short time. But there is still work to do to erase funding gaps and ensure that recent gains aren’t temporary. Excluding the facilities aid, I estimate that high-quality charter schools are now receiving roughly 90 percent of what local districts receive, while other charters are funded at approximately 75 percent.[1] That’s better but not good enough. In the next biennial budget, state lawmakers should pursue the following items.

1. Build on the equity supplement to move all brick-and-mortar charters towards fairer funding.

Ohio’s push to improve charter funding has focused heavily on schools achieving strong marks on their state report card. This year, fifty out of 318 brick-and-mortar charters met the quality funding program’s performance criteria. Policymakers should continue to support quality charters and maintain a high bar for receiving those dollars. But they also need to continue to move towards equitable funding for all charter students, including those attending non-qualifying schools. Remember that many of their students are high-needs: low-income, students with disabilities, or—in the case of dropout-recovery charters—adolescents who have fallen significantly behind in their education. Furthermore, a boost in funding is one of the surest ways to help these schools go from mediocre to good or from good to great.

As noted earlier, lawmakers created a $650 per pupil equity supplement that supports all brick-and-mortar charters in the last biennial budget. This is an excellent foundation upon which legislators can build. During last year’s budget discussions, we at Fordham and others recommended a $1,000 per pupil equity supplement. Reaching that amount in the next budget would further narrow the funding gap for brick-and-mortar charters statewide.

2. Ensure the facilities allowance keeps pace with inflation, while pursuing new charter facility initiatives.

Historically, charters have been unable to access the capital resources that districts can tap into. For example, charters do not receive proceeds from local bond levies and are ineligible for the state’s main school construction program. To help cover charters’ facility costs, lawmakers introduced a charter-specific facilities allowance during the Kasich administration. Thanks to steadily increasing per-pupil allotments, a recent analysis by ExcelinEd finds that Ohio now covers roughly half of charters’ facility needs. In the next budget, lawmakers should increase the $1,000 per-pupil facilities aid to adjust for inflation. Beyond a boost in the per-pupil facilities aid, policymakers should also pursue additional initiatives that would allow charters to address their building needs, such as credit-enhancement and revolving-loan programs and revisions to state law that would make it easier for charters to access unused district facilities.

3. Cement the high-quality funding, equity supplement, and facilities aid into charter schools’ permanent funding formula.

Currently, all three programs are funded through appropriations language in the state budget bill, which means they are not technically part of Ohio statute. This particular method of funding sends a signal that these programs are temporary and increases the risk that future General Assemblies will eye them for cuts. In the next budget bill, lawmakers should make these programs part of charter schools’ funding formula, which is established in statute. While it wouldn’t make them impervious to legislative change, formally including them in the formula would make it clear that the programs are crucial components in Ohio’s charter funding model. Moving these programs into the formula would also protect the per-pupil amounts set forth in bill language from reductions necessitated by funding these initiatives via line-item appropriation—something that occurred to the high-quality funding in FYs 2020–23 and the facilities allowance in FY24.

* * *

Students attending Ohio’s public charter schools deserve fair funding, just like their peers attending traditional district schools. Fortunately, Ohio’s policy leaders have recognized this imperative and have taken important steps forward that narrow funding gaps. More work remains to ensure equitable for all charter students, and the next budget cycle is another opportunity for lawmakers to move further in this direction.

One reason why parents choose to enroll their children in schools other than their assigned district is the opportunity to access alternative educational models. The question of whether these models benefit students academically is difficult to answer empirically, given the “selection effects” which make apples-to-apples comparisons between non-traditional schools and their traditional district counterparts hard to come by. But a new report from Frontiers in Education tries to cut through some of the differences and directly compare one well-known non-traditional model to its public school counterparts.

The pedagogy in question is Waldorf education. This 100-year-old schooling model is based on the teachings and principles of German artist and scientist Rudolf Steiner. It focuses on the developmental progress of children and their intellectual needs at various stages, with a heaping helping of art, music, and creative exploration built into all subject areas. According to Waldorf precepts, its teachers “are dedicated to generating an inner enthusiasm for learning within every child. This eliminates the need for competitive testing, academic placement, and rewards to motivate learning and allows motivation to arise from within.” Digital technology is also absent.

Waldorf schools in the United States are usually private—thereby facilitating the decreased emphasis on testing—but some of them are public. In fact, sixteen Waldorf institutions in California are public charter schools that must adhere to state testing requirements. Researcher Kimberly Telfer-Radzat of the University of California, Irvine, leverages the existence of these schools to compare their student achievement results to those from two other student groups: non-Waldorf charter schools in the state, and all other public schools combined (which includes the non-Waldorf charters and traditional districts). Achievement is measured by the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASSPP) for grades three through eight in both ELA and math. Data come from spring test administrations between 2015 and 2019. In fact, the data here are all “archival” and not part of a specific experiment. The paper uses the terms “treatment” and “control”, but these are not really apt. More on this methodology in a moment.

In the final analysis, compared to the universe of non-Waldorf public schools (both district and charter), the Waldorf charters significantly underperformed in both ELA and math every year between third and sixth grade. For example, while more than three quarters of non-Waldorf third graders met or exceeded state standards in math, only half of Waldorf third graders did so. For third grade ELA, 73 percent of non-Waldorf students met or exceeded state standards, compared to 61 percent of Waldorf students. However, the picture changes in seventh grade, with Waldorf students notching big gains in both subjects and outscoring the non-Waldorf comparison group by a small margin. The observed Waldorf advantage expands to nearly five percentage points in eighth grade, both because the Waldorf student group continues to improve and because the non-Waldorf group’s proficiency declines. When the comparison is restricted to charter schools only—Waldorf versus non-Waldorf—a similar pattern emerges: sizeable lags in both subjects for Waldorf students in the early grades until a reversal begins in seventh grade, though the gaps between groups are generally smaller.

Telfer-Radzat notes several limitations of her methodology, including the fact that there are significantly fewer students in grades seven and eight than in the lower grades at the Waldorf schools. These droppers could easily be the students performing least well in the school, which could skew the results in such a model. More importantly, though, is the model itself. Telfer-Radzat is able to control for classroom size and low-income status of students in her final equations, but that’s the extent to which the widely-varying nature of the schools in question can be compared. For just one likely-relevant example, the Waldorf charters enrolled a mere 4 percent English learners (EL). By comparison, details from EdData show EL students comprising nearly 20 percent of California’s K–12 population in 2019–20. Those are big differences between schools wholly unaccounted for in the math.

Impacts of the unconventional pedagogy could be part of the mechanism driving the observed outcomes, but there’s plenty of room to question the findings. Still, one imagines that Waldorf practitioners, devotees, and inquisitive non-believers will come away from this report feeling positively disposed to the unusual pedagogy. And while it does seem to bear fruit for many of its initiates, the experimental jury is still out on the Waldorf vision of a quality education.

SOURCE: Kimberly Telfer-Radzat, “Exploring alternative education: a comparison on 3 levels—Waldorf charters, non-Waldorf charters, and local public schools, as measured by the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress,” Frontiers in Education (June 2024).

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

1. I’m a little late to this piece that started making the national rounds last week, discussing the Republican National Committee’s proposed platform plank calling for “universal school choice”. Fordham’s own Chad Aldis is quoted within, tossing some cold Ohio water on a hot national discussion by noting that declaring something a policy goal and actually carrying it out are two different things. (Associated Press, 7/11/24)
   
   

2. One of Chad’s wise implementation questions in the above piece is where all the money will come from to expand school choice of any variety. Maybe a conundrum for other states, but luckily not for us here in Ohio it seems. On Friday, we learned that Ohio Lottery sales during the fiscal year just ended totaled $4.5 billion, which is more than $80 million higher than the previous fiscal year. Sales were boosted by strong interest in Powerball drawings and scratch off tickets, as well as the first full fiscal year of sportsbook availability in the state. As a result of all this, the Lottery Commission transferred a record $1.514 billion into the education fund. Amazing! And the real winners are the kids of Ohio. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/12/24)
   
   

3. Staying on the topic of education funding (when aren’t we on that topic, really?), Governor DeWine on Friday announced a new incentive program to encourage active duty service members, veterans, and military spouses to work in Ohio’s public schools. The Military Recruit Award program is open to traditional district, charter, independent STEM, and joint vocational schools. Those hiring military personnel will receive a $1,500 signing bonus and an additional $3,000 via reimbursement from the state if the hired individual stays on the job for a year. “Individuals from our military exemplify service, leadership, collaboration, and many other skills that translate to and strengthen the education profession,” said Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Director Steve Dackin. “The Military Recruit Award will boost Ohio’s education communities by attracting and retaining these revered individuals to careers in education.” Nice! (Spectrum News 1, 7/12/24)
   
   

4. Finally today, I’m quite late to this story too, but to be fair it’s not from one of my typically-perused sources. Future Nurse Academy is a summer camp for high schoolers in northeast Ohio. Sounds like some great hands on experiences—and some very good networking opportunities—for any young person potentially interested in pursuing the nursing profession in the future. It is open to any rising high school sophomore, junior, or senior from any school (you know what I mean) and is not only free but provides a small stipend for kids who complete the program. Wow. No wonder it’s become super popular in only its second year of operation. If you’re interested in next summer, best get started now! (Becker’s Hospital Review, 7/3/24)

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

Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full.

The letter and the spirit of the law

In the midst of a piece on Columbus City Schools’ effort to right-size their facilities footprint, the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch seemed to give full understanding to districts that wish to flout state law and deny charter schools the opportunity to acquire their underutilized buildings due to concerns over "competition". This thinking is counter to everything the ed board wants and, if followed by district leaders, would ensure increasingly-inefficient use of dozens of properties and the continued waste of millions of taxpayer dollars annually.

New charter coming to the Dublin area

No such facilities problems for the Heart of Ohio Classical Academy, getting ready to open this August in the northerly part of Columbus just outside of Dublin. That’s because school leaders are redeveloping a long-empty office building there rather than trying to wrest a purpose-built (but also long-empty) building from the hands of a school district. (By the time folks in the area learned that a charter was going in, it was way too late to NIMBY it into oblivion.) Best wishes to HOCA students, families, teachers, and staff for a great inaugural year!

Supporting charter school students to success

Five charter schools will become the first to join the Center for High School Success effort in Washington State. The long-standing goal of the group is to substantially increase the number of ninth graders who are on-track for graduation within four years. Partner schools are provided with coaching, peer learning opportunities, data analysis, training, and tools and resources to better support incoming freshman to achieve and succeed throughout high school. Kudos to Washington for recognizing charter school students as deserving of these vital programs and resources.

Authorizers matter

Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, published a piece in The 74 this week, highlighting the importance of authorizers (sponsors) in the success of charter students, especially via accountability systems. “My organization has seen time and time again,” he writes, “that a strong authorizer will have a strong accountability system, which in turn creates a greater number of students achieving at high levels and a shrinking number of kids learning below grade level.” He concludes by saying that “the combination of authorizing, accountability and innovation almost always creates the results education professionals and families so desperately crave — improved student learning.” An important lesson.

New Fordham report

The Fordham Institute’s latest report examines a key implementation step in Ohio’s effort to enshrine the Science of Reading as the law of the land: Creating a state-approved list of high-quality literacy curricula and instructional materials. It includes detailed data on curricula currently being used by charters across the state in addition to great info on the state’s progress toward implementing the new literacy provisions. Check it out!

Medicaid in Schools changes on the horizon

Passage of the last state budget bill (HB 33) set off a process to review and update the state’s Medicaid Schools Program, to further Governor DeWine’s support of schools and investment in children’s health. Potential changes to the program, to begin with the 2025-26 school year, are currently under review, and could direct federal funding to support qualifying health care services that schools are already providing. It’s not too late for interested charter leaders to review and provide feedback on these changes. More information can be found here, including an email contact to ask questions and submit comments.

*****

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

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’. 

1. In case you missed it, my colleague Aaron Churchill published a report this week, looking at a key implementation step in Ohio’s effort to enshrine the Science of Reading as the law of the land: Creating a state-approved list of high-quality literacy curricula and instructional materials. The report was covered by the media in Youngstown…. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 7/10/24) …and by the good folks at Gongwer. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/11/24)
   
   

2. Here is an interesting story about school choice under the guise of something else. Specifically, what schools the children of military families assigned to Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base attend. At least 10 districts outside of Dayton are listed as the top destinations, taking from 130 to more than 900 students each. It is not clear from this piece how they all end up in each of these districts, although having housing specifically for base personnel within district boundaries seemingly contributes to the top two on the list. (And those school communities are super welcoming and supportive, too, as we learn. Lovely.) So, proximity to home is important to many, but we are also told that “military families are much like other families transferring for job reasons when it comes to them deciding on a school district: They’re looking for schools with good academic programs and are willing to drive farther to get to work.” Meaning that those with the money to buy or rent in the high performing Oakwood or Northmont districts will often do so, no matter how far Mom and Dad have to travel to work at the base. I was interested to see that good old Yellow Springs Exempted Village Schools, did not appear on the top 10 list, despite being very high-performing and located closer to the base than several of those other, lesser choices. Kind of makes me wonder if interdistrict open enrollment might not play a part in some of these choices as well. Sir! Just sayin’, Sir! (Dayton Daily News, 7/11/24)

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

The Advanced Placement program is undergoing a radical transformation. Over the last three years, the College Board has “recalibrated” nine of its most popular AP Exams so that approximately 500,000 more AP Exams will earn a 3+ score this year than they would have without recalibration. If this process continues in other exams in the coming years (as I expect it will), approximately 1,000,000 more AP Exams every year will earn a 3+ score. The end result will be a win for AP students everywhere: Millions of high school students will save millions of dollars in college credits in the coming years.

In this article, I’m going to break down the most recent data on this “Great Recalibration”. I’ll also explain why the College Board is changing AP scores and what these changes will mean for AP teachers and students in the coming years.

Breaking down the data

The new score distribution data of AP Exams is astonishing. Beginning with AP English Literature in 2022, a total of nine AP Exams have been “recalibrated” upward so that average scores, the proportion of scores of 3 or above, and the proportion of scores of 4s and 5s, have all increased, while the proportion of scores of 1s and 2s (sometimes referred to as “failing” scores) has decreased. Here is a graph of scores of 4s and 5s for seven of the nine recalibrated AP Exams:

No matter which way you assess the data—means, medians, modes, 3 or above, 4s and 5s, pre-covid, post-covid—the trend is always the same: AP scores are being deliberately and intentionally increased. Here is a more comprehensive graph of scores of 3 or above from 2018 to 2024:

These are not minor adjustments. In AP U.S. History alone, approximately 100,000 more students have earned a score of 3 or above this year than they did last year. The interactive visualizations over at Higher Ed Data Stories are particularly compelling. Consider this breakdown of AP U.S. Government and Politics, which shows that the score distributions were not merely adjusted, they were completely inverted. Whereas the vast majority of students used to score a 1, 2, or 3 on this exam, the vast majority now scores a 3, 4, or 5.

Why is this happening?

None of this should be a surprise. The College Board has been publicly discussing recalibrating exams at conferences over the past few years. According to the College Board website, “annual studies of AP student performance in college consistently find that AP students with scores of 3 or higher outperform in subsequent college coursework the comparison groups of college students who took the colleges’ own AP-equivalent course.” By “recalibrating” AP Exams, the College Board can better align AP scores to equivalent college grades.

There is no reason to doubt the efficacy of this research, but since almost none of it is publicly available, there is no reason to accept it at face value either. The College Board has known for years—at least as early as 2021—that there are serious misalignments between AP scores and college grades. Why has the Great Recalibration been stretched out over multiple years? What about all the students whose AP Exams have not been recalibrated in time for them to earn college credits for the work they did? The lack of transparency about this recalibration project (and the uncertainty about which exams will be recalibrated in which year) has left a lot of teachers confused and frustrated.

Consider AP Environmental Science, for example. The exam has not yet undergone a recalibration, even though Trevor Packer previewed the research that showed a serious misalignment between AP Environmental Science scores and equivalent college grades. This was at the AP Annual Conference in 2023, where he also highlighted significant discrepancies between recalibrated and non-recalibrated AP Exams. It is clear that AP English Language, AP Physics, and AP Environmental Science are all overdue for a similar recalibration. AP English Language teachers have been particularly vocal about the lack of calibration for the more than 500,000 students who take that exam every year. Did 100,000 AP English Language students miss out on the opportunity to earn college credits this year because the College Board is not moving quickly enough with the research already in its possession?

Are other factors at play?

It is entirely possible that the Great Recalibration is a straightforward result of academic research in an effort to resolve the discrepancy between AP scores and equivalent college grades. The College Board claims it is following the science, and that may very well be the case, but it is possible that other factors are shaping the rollout of the Great Recalibration. Over the past few decades, the AP program has ballooned by more than 700 percent, and the program now generates approximately $500 million annually for the College Board:

• 1992: 580,143 exams
• 2002: 1,585,516 exams
• 2012: 3,698,407 exams
• 2022: 4,762,347 exams

At the same time, dual-enrollment programs have also ballooned, but those programs have little oversight and no high-stakes exam at the end of the year. Across the country, dual enrollment is competing head to head with AP. (Why risk getting a 2 on an AP Exam when you can be guaranteed college credit just for attending class?) While “recalibrating” AP scores higher may be based purely on “psychometrics,” it also confers an undeniable benefit to the AP program’s bottom line. Higher scores are good for business.

Another clue that the AP program is responding to its new, much larger audience is in the changes beyond the Great Recalibration. Many exams are getting easier with new, much simpler free-response rubrics in AP History subjects and simpler multiple-choice questions across AP English subjects. Behind the scenes, some AP Exam readers are reporting that they are being encouraged to award points on free-response questions more freely than ever before. It seems that nearly all of the recent changes to AP Exams are tending in the direction of simplification.

While it is clearly better for the program to grow and welcome students of all skill levels, the democratization of AP means that, unless all these new students meet the rigorous standards of AP, they will “fail” the exams or else the standards will need to be lowered to accommodate them. This issue was at the heart of a high-profile critique of the AP program in the New York Times last November. In that article, Dana Goldstein asked why some $90 million of taxpayer funds were being channeled into a program with so many “failing” scores of 1 and 2. The Great Recalibration may have nothing to do with this critique of the AP program, but it certainly helps address the issue.

The financial impact

Speaking of taxpayer funds, the Great Recalibration of AP Exams will affect the flow of millions of dollars into and out of high schools and colleges around the country. In states like Florida and Arizona, AP teachers are eligible to receive bonuses when their students achieve scores of 3 or higher on AP Exams. Some AP teachers in Texas are earning significant salary increases through the Teacher Incentive Allotment program when AP data are linked to improvements in their students’ outcomes. The Great Recalibration is going to help unlock even more of these public funds for AP teachers at a time when teacher pay remains dismally low.

Most public colleges and universities in the United States are required by law to grant college credits for sufficiently high AP scores. Students are able to earn college credits based on AP scores of 3, 4, or 5, depending on the policies of their college or university (the policies are searchable here). This means that when the College Board recalibrates scores for an AP exam, tens or hundreds of thousands of students will be automatically granted college credits for that exam.

The precise financial impact of this trend will depend on (1) how quickly the College Board finishes the Great Recalibration, (2) how credit policies evolve at colleges and universities, and (3) how many students actually use the credits. But the net result is undeniable and very good news for students (and very bad for colleges that will lose tuition for these credits).

The future of rigor in Advanced Placement

The College Board has argued for years that grade inflation is rampant in schools and that objective standards like SAT and Advanced Placement exams provide a stable measure of student success. But by aligning AP scores to college grades, is the College Board pegging its currency to another currency that is experiencing its own runaway inflation?

Whatever is happening with this increase in AP scores, it is destabilizing the year-over-year and course-by-course comparisons that undergird how many K–12 schools, districts, and even state governments use AP data. The College Board insists that “AP scores’ only valid use is for placing a student out of a corresponding college course” and that “AP scores have not been designed nor validated for evaluating student growth, student potential, or teacher quality.” Nevertheless, that’s not how many schools are using the numbers in practice. Will the College Board provide more guidance on how to properly use data during this era of the Great Recalibration?

I expect the Great Recalibration to continue over the next few years, and I expect this recalibration to always lean in the direction of higher average scores and a larger proportion of 4s and 5s. Will all of these changes undermine the AP program’s position as the gold standard of rigor in high school education? Probably not, but that will depend on whether anyone is actually paying attention and whether the College Board’s appeal to “psychometrics” will convince them.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Marco Learning.

Work-based learning initiatives provide a direct connection between K–12 education and the workforce. They offer students invaluable work experience, hands-on training with experienced mentors, and a chance to apply technical skills and develop soft skills. They give employers an opportunity to bolster talent pipelines and train future staff on in-demand skills. Robust work-based learning experiences are also one of the hallmarks of high-quality career pathways.

For states like Ohio, where expanding and improving career pathways is an economic priority, ensuring students have access to high-quality work-based learning experiences is crucial. But it’s also notoriously difficult, as it requires schools and the business community to work together. To their credit, Ohio leaders have spearheaded efforts to encourage collaboration. But are those efforts enough? And if not, what else should lawmakers do?

A recent report from ExcelinEd, Ohio Excels, and Workmorphis seeks to answer these questions. It does so by examining the current state of work-based learning in Ohio and identifying how state leaders can ensure that all students have access to high-quality experiences.

To start, the report offers a broad overview of work-based learning in Ohio. Student experiences fall into two distinct categories that cross-reference each other but “operate separately in both policy and practice.” The first is career connections, a framework that focuses on career awareness for grades K–5, exploration for grades 6–8, and planning for grades 9–12. The second category—and the focus of the report—is formal work-based learning.

DEW defines the latter as “a coordinated sequence of experiences designed to provide students with real-world learning through partnerships with local business and industry.” These activities should help students explore careers and choose a pathway. They must occur at a worksite,[1] be co-supervised by an instructor and an employer or business mentor, and be formalized by a learning agreement. They can be paid or unpaid, occur during or outside of school hours, offer credit (or not), and be of varying lengths. Internships, apprenticeships or pre-apprenticeships, simulated work environments, and entrepreneurship are all among the approved types.

The report’s authors conducted focus groups and distributed a statewide survey to gather input from stakeholders in four groups: public policy, business and industry, education, and intermediaries like community-based organizations. Findings indicate that, although stakeholders believe that work-based learning experiences are beneficial and should be available to all students, that’s not the case in many places across Ohio. The disconnect between formal work-based learning and career connections was cited as a challenge, with a mere 8 percent of respondents reporting that current state policies and program requirements are easy to navigate. Many stakeholders also identified worrisome gaps in measuring experience quality and student performance.

The biggest challenges, though, seem to be funding, capacity, and transportation barriers. For example, although most stakeholders believe they’ve exhausted all available state funding sources, public policy leaders are concerned that many of the available state programs and funding sources are underutilized (the report doesn’t specify which ones). Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent agree that transportation is a significant participation barrier, especially for students from lower income families and in rural areas.

The bottom line is that, although work-based learning has widespread support and promises many benefits for students and employers, Ohio has some significant issues to address. To help, the report offers four solutions. 

1. Establish a unified vision and governance. Lawmakers should create a cross-agency, cross-sector work-based learning leadership council. This council would be charged with providing a common vision, strategic direction, and ongoing evaluation of the state’s K–16 work-based learning continuum. As part of its duties, the council could create and codify definitions for work-based learning experiences, set quality standards at the program level and for individual students, and streamline resource and information distribution.

2. Provide stakeholders with the data and information they need to make decisions. This means collecting and publicly reporting data on participation, quality, and outcomes. It also means providing resources to practitioners, students, and families. One way to do so would be to create an online work-based learning hub that could provide definitions, a program inventory, best practices, and technical assistance.

3. Invest in strategies that build local capacity to expand high-quality experiences. Lawmakers could accomplish this by providing funding for work-based learning coordinators and/or coaches who are responsible for ensuring consistent communication and coordination between schools and employers. Given that more than 90 percent of survey respondents agreed that mentorship is an essential element of successful work-based learning experiences, lawmakers could also consider strategies to cultivate a pipeline of high-quality mentors.

4. Address common barriers to work-based learning. Providing scholarship accounts for students that cover state-approved expenses like transportation to and from worksites or required equipment and uniforms could help remove participation barriers. Streamlining licensure requirements to help industry experts become teachers and scaling up initiatives like the state’s teacher boot camps would help providers and educators. As for employers, collaborating with chamber and industry associations to develop and distribute clear information about available programs, partners, and resources would go a long way toward eliminating confusion and increasing engagement.

***

Ohio leaders are investing significant time and funding into expanding and improving career pathways. These efforts include a renewed focus on work-based learning experiences, which benefit both students and employers. To capitalize on the potential of these experiences in the coming budget cycle, Ohio lawmakers should heed the report’s recommendations and establish a clear governance structure for work-based learning, improve data collection and transparency, invest in capacity building, and address common barriers. 

Closing schools during the Covid pandemic was an enormous and tragic mistake. Some red-state governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Greg Abbott of Texas, deserve credit for taking the political risk to reopen schools quickly, over the objections of officials in Democratic cities. These conservative governors could have leaned on the conservative principle of local control and let each community do its own thing—with disastrous results. Instead, they decided that education was too important to leave to the left.

Now the country faces a different wave of school closings, and conservative governors must step up again.

Driving that trend is the collapse of America’s birthrate since the 2008–09 financial crisis. The number of babies born every year is down 14 percent, from 4.3 million in 2007 to a three-decade low of 3.7 million in 2022. Demographers don’t all agree on what’s causing this baby bust, but they don’t expect a baby boom anytime soon.

So now many places have too few students for the schools, thousands of which will have to be permanently closed in coming years. Postponing the inevitable only makes the process more expensive by wasting scarce tax dollars on half-empty buildings and unneeded principals, gym teachers and attendance clerks.

Whereas leaders on the left were eager to close schools during the pandemic, they are allergic to doing so now. Teachers unions worry that their members will lose jobs, and the social-justice crowd fears that minorities will be disproportionately affected by closings.

But there’s no way to avoid them. Schools have been adding teachers and other staff for decades, even more so when Covid relief dollars poured in. That’s no longer sustainable, and it will be impossible not to close lots of schools in heavily Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, given demographic shifts. Many parents have already voted with their feet, either through school-choice programs or by leaving cities altogether.

Officials should meet this challenge head on, using data to identify schools with a history of lackluster academic achievement and putting them on the chopping block. The best outcome is for affected students to end up in better schools than they attend now. They should get priority for enrollment at high-performance campuses nearby, including charter and private schools.

But how likely is it that superintendents and school boards in the cities and inner-ring suburbs, where most of the underenrolled schools are, will follow this advice? We can get an idea by looking at communities such as Houston, Chicago, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, which face the greatest declines in student enrollment and the largest budget crises as a result.

Unions are pushing districts to delay school closings while attacking charter schools for taking “their” students. Progressives are asking school boards to promise not to close schools in minority neighborhoods. Some “equity” hawks even want to make it illegal to consider the quality of schools and their students’ education when making closing decisions, on the theory that this has a disparate impact on minorities.

Some of these blue districts are in states with conservative governors. They may be tempted to avoid this political mess, but if they show leadership and get involved, as they did during Covid, they can improve the school-closing process. Gutsy state leaders could work with legislators to enact laws that force districts to close schools promptly. They could require that a school’s educational performance be a major consideration. They can press for choice policies that help students move from bad schools to good ones. They could have their appointees help local districts get the process right so students end up in stronger schools.

The alternative is to let left-wing officials mess it up, as they did during Covid. That’s too high a price for students to pay, particularly those the school system is already cheating.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The Wall Street Journal.