NOTE: Ohio Charter News Weekly is back from vacation and presenting this, our latest regular Friday edition. If you missed our special catch-up edition, published yesterday, you can find it here.

Important new data

On October 14, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a new report presenting up-to-date evidence about the strong performance of Ohio’s brick-and-mortar general education charter schools. Among the important findings: In grades 4–8, students in brick-and-mortar charters make significant gains on state math and ELA exams when compared to district students of similar backgrounds. News coverage of the report from the Columbus Dispatch is here, and you can watch a video of Fordham’s Chad Aldis discussing the report with Friends of Breakthrough President John Zitzner here. Report author Dr. Stéphane Lavertu of The Ohio State University presented his findings at an online event, including some Q&A at the end, a recording of which you can view by clicking this link.

Myths, busted

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy recently published a detailed response to a previous report critical of Michigan charter school oversight which was, as the Mackinac Center’s Michael Van Beek and Ben DeGrow put it, based on flawed and unsupported assumptions. “Myths and misinformation about charters should be rejected, not repeated,” DeGrow added. “K-12 education in our state can’t be improved with deceptive arguments that attempt to justify restricting choices for parents, most of which prove a lifeline to families in need of better educational opportunities.”

The rise of school choice inevitable?

Also in Michigan this week, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told an audience at Hillsdale College that school choice is “…not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.” She added: “At the end of the day, we want parents to have the freedom, the choices, and the funds to make the best decisions for their children.” She was certain that this would come to pass.

Here in Ohio… Pt 1

We learned this week that the State of Ohio is appealing that recent Franklin County Common Pleas Court ruling that said the state improperly calculated funding tied to charter school enrollment in three large urban districts more than fifteen years ago. The long-running legal case involving Dayton, Columbus, and Toledo City Schools will go on.

Here in Ohio… Pt 2

Despite a shortened timeframe, a pandemic, a recession, and an impending biennial budget process, the Ohio General Assembly seems primed to fast-track a plan to revamp school funding in the Buckeye State during the post-election lame duck legislative session. The funding plan, as the Dispatch reports, has some significant hurdles to overcome in a short period of time.

1. We heard on Wednesday that the boost in rona cases across the state were a threat to in-person education. Today, we hear that schools are not proving to be a significant source of current coronavirus spread. And there’s data to back that up. That’s good news, I think, but Tales from the Homestead is proving twistier to me than the Ice Princess storyline on General Hospital. (Cleveland.com, 10/22/20)
    
2. Perhaps buoyed by (some of) this news, Mount Vernon City Schools moved from a hybrid learning model to fully in-person education this week, a move they term “going traditional”. The decision-making process is described in detail here, including the survey preference results from both families and staff and the offer of a fully-remote option for those families not yet feeling safe enough to “go traditional” themselves. (Knox Pages, 10/22/20) Speaking of traditional, Holy Name Catholic High School in Parma has been fully in-person from the start of the school year. The principal says it’s going great. (Cleveland.com, 10/22/20)
   
   

3. Meanwhile, a new Montessori school, fully in-person as you might expect, will be opening in nearby Shaker Heights in November. (News5 Cleveland, 10/20/20)
    
4. There’s a lot of talk about math test scores in this piece, checking on the state of student performance in several central Ohio districts this year as compared to last. And a lot of talk about “balance”—that is, the balance between safety and education. (The same discussion appears in detail in the Mount Vernon story, above.) Bexley City Schools is an interesting case here—the only district included in this piece where student test scores are actually said to be up a bit from this time last year. This despite 90 percent of its students learning in a hybrid model, five percent (or 128 students in the tiny landlocked suburb) in its fully-remote (third party provider) option, and “less than two percent…enrolled in a private or charter school”. Not sure how you count the latter kids as “yours”, but that I suppose is your issue. The boost in test scores when all your kids are NOT “going traditional” is the real story as far as I can tell. (10TV news, Columbus, 10/22/20)
    
5. Despite a shortened timeframe, an endless pandemic, an incipient recession, and an impending biennial budget process, the Ohio General Assembly seems hell-bent on fast-tracking a plan to revamp school funding in the Buckeye State during the post-election lame duck legislative session. The funding plan, as the Dispatch reports, has some significant hurdles to overcome in this mad dash for the finish line. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/22/20)
   
   

6. Speaking of the pandemic (when aren’t we these days, I ask you), the head of the Ohio Manufacturers' Association opined in print that one thing hasn’t changed despite the presence of SARS-CoV-2 freakin’ everywhere: the need for need for more labor in the manufacturing sector. (What did you think he was going to say?) The critical challenges for meeting that need lie firmly at the feet of the K–12 education sector. Hey man, have you looked in Bexley recently? I hear their kids’ math scores are killer. (Cleveland.com, 10/18/20) Of course, it always helps to have industry working along with K–12 schools on this stuff. Here’s a great example from Cleveland: United Airlines is launching a fellowship program with CMSD’s Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School which will cover internships for 20 to 30 students each school year and the cost of flight training for more than 10 students. All of this could set up students—the first group of which are scheduled to graduate from Davis this year—to pursue a pilot’s license. Sounds good to me. (Cleveland.com, 10/22/20)

NOTE: Ohio Charter News Weekly is back from vacation and presenting this special catch-up edition. Another edition will be published tomorrow with up-to-the-minute news you can use.

The boost

The Ohio Department of Education late last week reported that charter school enrollment in Ohio is up more than 8 percent this year as compared to last fall. Data show this is largely driven by a 38 percent increase in online charter enrollment. The same thing is happening in neighboring Pennsylvania, where online charter schools saw their largest-ever enrollment on the first day of school this fall: about 11,400 students. There is much speculation in these stories as to the reason for the influx, focusing around the coronavirus pandemic, but the true answer probably predates the pandemic. This commentary piece from Minnesota compiles numerous reasons why parents in the North Star State chose charter schools, and they all have to do with better education for their children.

Putting it bluntly

The founder of Roger Bacon Academy (RBA) charter schools in North Carolina explains bluntly in the National Review why his schools perform better than the traditional district schools from which RBA students come: they teach students to read. No exceptions. No excuses. Discussion of RBA’s Reading Mastery program is detailed and interesting.

Supporting students into college

Four charter management organizations in Detroit are banding together to make sure their high school graduates have what they need to make it in college. “You’ve got a group of schools here who are really committed to college or bust,” said the executive director of plan partner the Detroit Children’s Fund. “They recognize that we talk about careers more in places where kids are poor than we talk about college. I think you have a group of schools here who recognize that their kids are fully capable of going to college and doing well. But it’s not going to be easy.” They promise that within a decade, 90 percent of their graduates will complete a full year of college coursework.

To sprout and grow

The Charter School Growth Fund is looking to support educational leaders wishing to grow their high-performing charter schools by providing grant funding through both their Seed strategy (“early-stage growth” to serve 250-1000 additional students over the next two years) and their Scale strategy (“later-stage expansion” to serve more than 1000 additional students over the next three to five years). Details and application information can be found here.

Closer to home

As of late last week, many schools in Dayton—including a number of charters—were planning to move soon from fully-remote learning models to some variety of hybrid learning. Plans could have changed with spikes in coronavirus cases being reported across the state this week, but whenever students return to their classrooms, it seems as though district-centric transportation will continue to be a difficulty to overcome.

On paper, it seems like Joe Biden would champion the cause of expanding high-quality charter schools. He’s a longtime centrist Democrat, and centrist Democrats usually love charter schools, going back to Bill Clinton. He was Barack Obama’s vice president, and Obama has long loved charter schools. Biden was brought back from political near-death thanks to the support of Black voters, and Black voters love charter schools. On coronavirus, climate change, and much else, Biden says we should “follow the science.” And the science loves charter schools, especially those in urban areas.

Yet Biden’s official position—which would, among other problematic policies, give districts a veto over new charter schools in their geographic areas—is arguably the most antagonistic of any major party candidate since their creation in the early 1990s. Why is that?

One obvious answer: It’s the unions, stupid. Consider that he told the National Education Association, when competing for their support during the Democratic primary, that he is “not a charter school fan.” As hard as that was for us charter supporters to hear, we probably shouldn’t have been too surprised. Not only is his wife Jill a former classroom teacher, she’s also a card-carrying member of the NEA.

More fundamentally, beyond education, Biden is a union man, through and through. As E.J. Dionne wrote last week, Biden is bringing back a specific brand of liberalism: labor liberalism. “He is doing so rhetorically and with union hall visits,” Dionne writes, “but also through an agenda that seeks to spark economic growth through substantial public investments.” This still counts as centrist, Dionne continues, “because labor Democrats are often seen as old school, [and] Biden’s arguments are inherently reassuring and carry moderate resonances.”

“Labor liberal” certainly strikes me as more accurate than other labels that people have applied to him, from “neo-liberal” to “anti-neo-liberal” to “puppet of the radical left.” But maybe that’s all beside the point. Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to try to flesh out his ideology. As a Democratic friend who spent years in elected office told me, Biden is an “instinctive” politician, a “feeler.” As such, ideology is not really his thing. Instead, compassion is his thing. Coalition-building is his thing. And bringing home the bacon for his constituents is his thing.

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Education reformers should actually be heartened by this understanding of the vice president. If Biden wins in November, we won’t be dealing with a hardened ideological foe of charter schools, as we would have with, say, Bernie Sanders. And as mentioned above, Black voters are a central part of his base. Black Democrats favor charters 58 to 31 percent; for White Democrats that’s flipped at 26 to 62 percent.

Biden won’t want to do anything that divides his coalition, so as a skillful politician, surely he can find ways to placate the teachers unions without hurting charters and the Black families they serve. Rather than propose a cut to the federal charter schools program, for example, Biden seems more likely to please the NEA and AFT by pushing for a major relief bill for public schools, or by tripling Title I funding, or dramatically expanding pre-school. That’s a way to bring his coalition together instead of tearing it apart.

Let’s be clear, though, that some of the arguments in favor of charters that worked so well with Presidents Clinton or Obama—or, more recently, with centrist Democrats like Colorado Governor Jared Polis or former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg—may fall on deaf ears with Biden. Those others understand that large, urban school systems have become bureaucratic, sclerotic, and creaky, and that charters are a form of “reinventing government” that allow social entrepreneurs to do things differently and get better results for needy kids. As President Obama proclaimed back in 2012, charter schools “give educators the freedom to cultivate new teaching models and develop creative methods to meet students’ needs. This unique flexibility is matched by strong accountability and high standards, so underperforming charter schools can be closed.”

But this sort of technocratic thinking seems unlikely to appeal to a man who loves Amtrak of all things. Biden looks at the rail system and doesn’t see a hopelessly broken white elephant on governmental life support, but thinks of (and loves) the passengers he knew on his commute back and forth from Wilmington to Washington, the conductors, the people. If it only had more resources...

So too, I suspect, when it comes to public school systems. Biden doesn’t seem to worry much about their governance structures or bogged-down decision-making processes. He sees hard-working teachers and parents who dream of a better life for their kids—parents who could never imagine sending their children to expensive private schools. He thinks of people like those he knew in Scranton or went to college with—public school people through and through.

Biden is a guy who has spent almost his whole life in the public sector, spending time around other public servants, including heroes in the military. And if our armed forces can be world-class despite their massive scale and the legendary Pentagon bureaucracy, he might wonder, why can’t our school systems be so too?

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I don’t share Biden’s confidence that age-old institutions like urban public school systems can be made to work effectively or cope with new realities and challenges. Just as set-in-their-ways private corporations are (and should be) vulnerable to disruptive innovators, so should stodgy public-sector behemoths. Sometimes starting from scratch is what’s needed to meet the moment and solve a problem. But if Biden wins, that sort of rhetoric is unlikely to win the day. Thankfully, for charter supporters, there are other, more pragmatic approaches that should be able to get the job done, as long as we remind the new president and his team of the real-life people that charter schools serve, people who are a key part of his coalition. Building back better means, in part, continuing to build charter schools that are lifelines for the people Biden knows and loves.

Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis. Back in the BCE years (Before Covid Era), considerable interest had been building among practitioners and policymakers in curriculum and instruction built on the “Science of Reading.” That critical conversation has been largely sidelined for obvious reasons as states, districts, and schools prioritize setting up and running remote and hybrid learning plans and focus on a return to in-person schooling with public health imperatives more than instructional ones, first and foremost. But a pair of recent events have re-energized literacy advocates and may help push the conversation about reading instruction back to the front burner in a way that’s been absent for the last several months.

Last week, my social media feeds and email inbox started filling up with messages asking, “Have you seen this?” “This” refers to a pair of videos posted to YouTube by a California mom and behavioral scientist who goes by “Berrinchuda” who developed some misgivings about the way her first grade daughter was being taught to “read” in school. The scare quotes are intentional. As the videos make clear, she was being taught to guess at words, not read them.

The first video, titled “Is My Kid Learning How to Read?” went up on YouTube just three weeks ago. The viewer follows along as the woman’s daughter reads a picture book on a laptop from RAZ-Kids, an online guided reading program, titled “Paint It Purple,” about a little girl who loves purple paint and uses it on a fence, a door, and by accident, on her mother. It’s “Level B,” a beginning reader book with words that kids at that nascent stage would be hard-pressed to decode, but no matter. As the video shows, phonics is only one strategy children are being taught alongside myriad “cueing” strategies, such as guessing a word that makes sense, looking at pictures to figure it out, or just skipping tricky words altogether. The little girl is far from fluent, but she reads the book reasonably well.

But when her mom has her read the same story with the illustrations covered—no pictures, no context clues, nothing to aid her in guessing—she struggles to decode the word “purple” which appeared in nearly every line (and every picture) of the book she had ostensibly read just minutes before—sixteen times in all. “It’s like, she’d never seen the word before in her life,” her mother narrates. “You can actually see the camera frame shaking because I'm so stunned.” She captures and charts her daughter’s attempts to decode various words with and without the visual aids, several minutes later, and the next day; a green box represents a successful effort:

I tracked down “Berrinchuda,” (she says it's a Spanish word used to describe a child having a tantrum) at home to learn more about what inspired her kitchen table experiment and the videos which have already garnered over 35,000 views. “As a clinical psychologist,” she tells me, “it never occurred to me that decoding wouldn’t be a part of reading.” As she discussed it with friends and fellow parents, she learned that “a lot of people have noticed these strange instructional techniques, but have gone along with it because they trust teachers.” But with children spending more time at home, it became obvious to her and many of her friends that something was amiss. Her daughter attends school in a reasonably well-off school district near Oakland, California, that uses Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study to teach English language arts.

This brings us to the week’s second big development. On Friday, Emily Hanford of American Public Media broke the news that Calkins is quietly conceding that materials produced and distributed by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, which she has led for decades, “need to be changed to align with scientific research.” Hanford, who deserves as much credit as anyone for driving the science of reading conversation over the last few years, got hold of internal TCRWP documents in which Calkins concedes that aspects of her approach “need ‘rebalancing.’” The issue is precisely the “cueing” strategies that are the subject of the “Berrinchuda” videos.

“Calkins’s published materials contain lessons and assessments that promote these cueing strategies,” Hanford reported. “Calkins’s group now says that beginning readers should focus on sounding out words and recommends that all children have access to ‘decodable’ books that contain words with spelling patterns students have been taught in phonics lessons.”

If true—and there are good reasons for skepticism—Calkins’s sudden shift could have a significant impact on how American children learn to read. Data from RAND’s American Educator Panels show that nearly one in five (18 percent) of American elementary school teachers report using the “Units of Study” curriculum; 31 percent of principals in schools serving K–5 students say they require or recommend Calkins. Even those figures understate her status as a reading practice superspreader. “Her curriculum and philosophy has had and continues to have an enormous influence on reading instruction, perhaps more so than almost any other curriculum out there,” explains RAND’s Julia Kaufman. “Any shifts to that curriculum to align it more with what we know about good reading instruction could improve reading among hundreds of thousands of children across the U.S.”

Here’s hoping. But like another famous Lucy with a habit of making promises and pulling away the football at the last moment, Calkins has a history of making earnest noises about respecting evidence or realigning her offerings to standards, but changing little. Thus news of Calkins’s change of heart has been greeted with a healthy dose of “I’ll believe it when I see it” from close observers. One insider describes the changes as “shuffling the MSV deck chairs on the Titanic to emphasize the V first,” a reference to “three cueing” strategies (Meaning, Structure, and Visual Systems) used in reading instruction; phonics falls under “V.” In other words, teachers would still be encouraged to teach children “multiple sources of information” to tackle tricky words. Calkins seemed to confirm as much in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent this week to schools who use Units of Study. She downplayed Hanford’s piece and a subsequent report in Education Week and claiming TCRWP has “long supported strong and systematic phonics instruction,” even while confirming that they plan to publish a series of decodable books and make other changes to the program. “What stays the same in our work with K–1 readers? 98 percent of it,” she wrote.

I don't believe it for a minute. @LucyCalkins will make some cosmetic changes and then she'll keep misleading teachers and children - just as she's done for the past 35 years. https://t.co/IUOLmJnzvN

— Stephen Parker (@ParkerPhonics) October 17, 2020

Hanford herself sounded a skeptical note in her piece, pointing out that Arkansas has a statewide rule in place preventing curriculum that uses “cueing strategies” from use in the state. Colorado has similarly kept Units of Study off its approved list of core reading curriculum. As states and districts have become increasingly sophisticated about curriculum, it doesn’t take a cynic to wonder if Calkins’s reversal isn’t less of a Damascus Road conversion than a commercial necessity.

In the end, parental demand for effective reading instruction may be the most potent long-term lever for change. That’s what makes the Berrinchuda videos so effective. They open parental demand as another front in the push for scientifically-sound practice, demystify reading instruction, and make accessible the inherent weakness in “balanced literacy.” They also demonstrate a credible alternative. In the second video, after a brief phonics lesson, we see her daughter able to successfully decode words like turkey, turtle, and yes, purple. In many balanced literacy classrooms like the one her daughter attends, “kids don't get any [decodable books] at all,” Berrinchuda explains. “Soon after discovering decodables” and teaching her phonics at home “I noticed a change in my daughter.” She’s becoming a reader, not merely a word guesser.

“Berrinchuda” explained that one of the reasons she wants to remain anonymous is to not embarrass her daughter’s teachers. There’s a natural tendency to assume your child’s teacher is an expert. One of the blessings of the emerging science of reading moment is that it was empowering teachers to speak out about their poor preparation to teach reading and to demand better training. The Berrinchuda videos may bring parents along for the ride. If nothing else, they seem destined to become Must See Viewing before parent teacher conferences for mothers and fathers of struggling readers to demand their children be taught to read, and not merely to guess.

In education, one of the more bizarre debates of the past quarter century has been over whether more money improves students’ outcomes. It’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion. Yet a remarkable amount of attention has been devoted to the notion that it doesn’t, as well as to the equally dubious idea that more money is the answer to all our educational ills.

Few school-spending skeptics argue that money can’t help; rather, they fear that funds will be spent on things that they deem unlikely to make a difference for students. And responsible champions of more spending concede that of course it matters how those funds are spent. In other words, nearly everyone agrees that spending is never just about “how much,” but also a matter of “how.” Yet there’s still a surprising lack of attention devoted to strategies for spending funds wisely and effectively. Our new book, Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck, and this essay are meant to help with that.

The pandemic has, among many other things, tightened budgets, shifted learning online and to unfamiliar technologies and disrupted staffing models by upending enrollment and attendance patterns, causing teachers to opt out of various roles and forcing schools to experiment with hybrid and remote instruction.

Tight budgets may be unwelcome, but they can present leaders with opportunities that don’t exist during more fiscally flush times. As Karen Hawley Miles, president of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that partners with school systems to help them transform how they organize resources, explains in our book: “Budget pressure always generates a call to reduce district office spending because it doesn’t immediately impact the classroom. This often leads to such stopgap measures as freezing hiring, drawing down reserves or deferring maintenance.”

But these are short-term patches. A better strategy, she says, is to use the unfortunate situation to “re-envision the district office role and focus district-level spending on a few powerful improvement strategies.” She urges district leaders to ask: “Where can the district find efficiencies?” “Are there opportunities to lower costs … without compromising quality?”  “What resources and decisions might [they] devolve from central to school level to foster stewardship and better match spending to school-specific needs?”

One such opportunity today emerges with regard to staffing. State laws and directives are littered with rules, regulations and routines that make this challenging for schools and districts. Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, the co-presidents of Public Impact, an education policy organization that focuses partly on funding, note in our book that line-item budgets limit the reallocation of funds; that rigid class-size limits make it difficult for teams of teachers and paraprofessionals to collectively serve a group of students; and that certification requirements can inhibit cross-functional teams. As the Hassels explain, too many existing policies serve to “lock in one-teacher, one-classroom structures,” instead of opening up staffing approaches that are more cost-effective and more instructionally effective. The challenges of this year, with shrunken class sizes, a mixture of in-person and remote groups, and redefined teachers’ roles, make this the right time to explore these kinds of changes.

American schools have a long-running, unrequited love affair with education technology. Outlandish claims have been made that this next advance—from ballpoint pens to blackboards, from radios to desktop computers—will change everything, though it invariably doesn’t. And the dismal results of remote learning circa 2020 only reinforce how far ed tech is from delivering on these grand promises.

In our book, Scott Milam, Carrie Stewart and Katie Morrison-Reed of Afton Partners, a consulting firm that has helped schools develop long-term financial plans centered around a technology-based model, observe that while technology can make a big difference for learners, the crucial determinant is how it’s actually used. They write: “The smart incorporation of technology indeed will allow for increased ‘bang for the educational buck.’ But when incorporated poorly, technology can distract, detract and waste a lot of money.” They note that the districts that have the best experiences with technology start by asking, “What are the goals and objectives for technology-enabled classrooms?” They focus intently on how to gauge progress and measure success. The most important question should never be, “How much technology does a school or system have?” Instead, it must be, “What’s being done with it?”

Although no one could have foreseen last winter the financial crunch that so many schools face right now, these new challenges can also provide leaders with the rationale to make smart, needed and overdue decisions when it comes to school spending. However much money schools get, leaders have the opportunity to make the dollars go further by finding ways to get more bang for the education buck.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the Hechinger Report.

The Progressive Policy Institute’s indefatigable David Osborne, a long-time student of and advocate for quality charter schools, now joined by Tressa Pankovits, has penned a valuable guide to the creation of autonomous “innovation schools” within traditional districts.

Neither petrified bureaucracy nor privatization, their report is a praiseworthy, classic, centrist approach to building better public schools by combining freedom with accountability. Yes, you may associate that formula with the original theory of public charter schools—and you wouldn’t be wrong. Innovation schools and charters are first cousins, if not siblings, and in places they resemble twins. But particularly in view of the political baggage attached to the charter label, there’s much to be said for promoting their close relatives.

Nor is this altogether a hazy think-tank fantasy. Recent years have brought a handful of examples of such hybrids, schools that remain within the district but are freed from some bureaucratic (and often union) micro-management. They’re called different things in different places, but the authors point to examples in Indianapolis, Denver, Boston, and elsewhere. They also point to a reasonably robust research base, both domestic and international, indicating that kids learn more in such schools. And they do a fine job of setting forth both the advantages of such schools and the essential elements that allow them to thrive. Convinced that this works best when legislators enact statewide enabling statutes, the final twenty pages of this ninety-six-page report is draft model legislation that contains all those elements and more.

It’s well worth the attention of serious education reformers and practitioners, especially those who see the advantages of finding a “third way” during this fraught time. 

That said, the institutional rigidities of districts and union collective bargaining agreements, combined with the resistance of innumerable established interests—inside those school-system bureaucracies, among other places—plus the fractious politics, protests, and sensitivities that surround us, mean that none of what they’re recommending will be easy to pull off in more than a handful of places. Even where it’s being tried, a number of constraints remain in place—few of these “innovation schools,” for instance, are truly free to staff themselves as they think best—and there’s a powerful tendency for the giant rubber band of public education to resume its previous shape as soon as the tension is released. Which is to say, the arrival of a new superintendent, a disruptive school board election, or building-level scandal can cause the decentralization engines to crash into reverse. Consider what’s happened in New York City under the de Blasio regime and may be happening in Denver today.

Even as we applaud true innovation schools—and thank David and Tressa for promoting them—we should beware of the ersatz kind and avoid putting too many eggs in a basket with holes in the bottom.

SOURCE: Tressa Pankovits and David Osborne, The Third Way: A Guide to Innovation Schools, Progressive Policy Institute (October 2020).

1. I have, I will admit, not been paying much attention to Tales from the Homestead (sequel to Ohio’s previous favorite soap opera Stories from the Crypt). I mean, I was holed up in the garage on vacation for a while. But really it’s just because the thing is such a freakin’ downer. To wit: In yesterday’s episode, I gather the The Governor told us that coronavirus cases are rising and lots of kids can’t go to school in person, which makes it doubly bad. This piece includes tweets, so you know its important information. (News19, Cleveland, 10/20/20) Thus… Parma City Schools returned to a fully-remote schedule on Monday after just three weeks of a hybrid model. (Cleveland.com, 10/19/20) Preble Shawnee High School returned to fully-remote learning due to a rash of actual cases among student athletes there. Sportsball contests were also cancelled in both Parma and Preble Shawnee. (WDTN-TV, Dayton, 10/18/20) And plans for Columbus City Schools to move from fully-remote to a hybrid model, scheduled to begin in earnest in a couple of weeks, have been scrapped until at least January. Also, make sure to take a look at those remote learning “attendance” numbers being reported in Columbus so far this year. We will be returning to that dismal theme below. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/20/20) Ditto for Cleveland Metropolitan School District, whose hybrid return plan for “academically vulnerable” students has also been put on ice until at least January. (The 74, 10/19/20)
    
2. Meanwhile, Delaware City Schools said this week that its hybrid-learning model is going great after the first nine weeks…and that it will continue for the foreseeable future. Side note from the board meeting, check this out: “In other matters, the board approved a motion regarding funds raised for the 2020 Dempsey [School’s] Washington, D.C. trip, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. The motion allows for families with a balance from the fundraiser to choose between remitting the funds as taxable income, applying the funds to future school district lunch expenses, or families can choose to donate to a school district scholarship fund for trips and events. Failure to respond on behalf of the parents will result in the funds being donated.” That doesn’t seem right, does it? (Delaware Gazette, 10/21/20) Meanwhile meanwhile, three school districts in Butler County are returning more kids to their buildings this week—with one moving from all-remote to hybrid, one expanding the number of in-person days/students in their existing hybrid model, and one (Talawanda City Schools) apparently jumping directly from all-remote to all-in person in one fell swoop. Although I may have misread that last one. Middletown and others sending more kids into buildings. (The Journal-News, 10/19/20) The elected board of Kettering City Schools voted this week to approve a hybrid plan, starting November 9. They are allowing for an all-remote options for families who are not comfortable with sending their children back into schools just yet. (Dayton Daily News, 10/20/20) Orange City Schools had a plan to move from all-remote learning to a hybrid model which was to begin this past Monday. That was scuppered when Cuyahoga County returned to a nasty red status—per Ohio’s Covid dashboard and Tales from the Homestead—which automatically stopped Orange’s plan per the board’s previously-approved reopening guidelines. Some folks were unhappy… (Cleveland.com, 10/16/20) …and now, somehow, those previously-approved guidelines are suddenly more like “suggestions”. “As recently as last week, I’ve bought into [the health guidance],” said the superintendent just yesterday. “But I’ve learned a lot about what’s going on around us and what’s going to continue going on around us, so I feel we may need to reconsider where we’re standing on this issue.” And the school board appears to be in reconsideration mode as well. (Orange-colored glasses, perhaps?) You can check out all the members’ reasoning on the issue in some detail in this piece. There are some negotiations with the local teachers union to be completed, the gang said during their in-person meeting last night. Once those are concluded, a new hybrid start date will be announced. (Cleveland.com, 10/21/20)
   
   

3. Have you chosen your favorite pandemic-era aphorism yet? I have. It’s the one that goes, “Teachers didn’t go into this job to teach kids online.” I’ve heard it a hundred times already and it is repeated again in the story clipped above. The spirit of that phrase seems to be in evidence in this piece covering the most recent meeting of the elected board of Lakewood City Schools. The subhead tells us that the “merits of remote learning” were debated during the Zoom call, but even those in favor of sticking with a fully-remote learning model seem pretty sure that there are no “merits” to learning online at all…except for, you know, not contracting the rona. (Patch.com, 10/20/20) While Columbus City Schools (above) gave us some detailed data on its dismal student remote attendance numbers, Youngstown City Schools’ Superintendent Joseph Meranto (is that guy still around?!) simply harangued his Zoom audience on the topic without any numbers required. Apparently their numbers are bad too, but supe says they’re doing everything they can, including sending school resource officers (that’s uniformed police officers, right chief?) to people’s houses. “We all want to go back…” he said. “…but we want to be safe first. What we’re doing here in Youngstown is probably one of the better models around, and other districts will tell you that.” Ohhhhh…kayyy. As an additional note: apparently concerned citizens have also been calling in to the district to report school-age kids being sighted out and about the community during “school hours”. Superintendent Meranto was quick to point out that those were probably not “his” kids. As paraphrased in the piece, he reminded everyone that “there are students in the district that don’t go to Youngstown schools, and those students aren’t their responsibility.” Some of those children [distasteful emphasis added by me, in the spirit of satire, of course] could be the students seen by individuals outside during school hours. (WYTV-TV, Youngstown, 10/20/20)
    
4. As all my dedicated Gadfly Bites subscribers know (thanks and well-wishes to all 19 of you!), I am loath to clip political stuff. I find teacher contract negotiations and strikes to be pretty political most of the time and thus try to keep them out of the clips. However, the recent conclusion of Gahanna-Jefferson City Schools first-ever teacher strike has got enough rona-relevant info to warrant inclusion today. To wit: the final contract details as enumerated in this piece are pretty darn interesting, including the various bargaining positions negotiated from along the way. Seems to me like a strange amount of concern about teachers being on camera and/or being recorded while teaching, but as a wise person said once one hundred times: teachers didn’t get into this business to teach online. Guess it must be true. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/19/20) The situation in Streetsboro City Schools is not at the strike-phase yet, but it might get there shortly. It is a similar situation as in Gahanna: teachers working without a contract when the rona hit. Complications ensued, as they say. (The Portager, 10/21/20)

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• During the pandemic, Kaneadsha Jones and her husband went seven months without steady work while caring for three daughters, one of whom is immunocompromised. —USA Today
• Kaneadsha’s story inspired hundreds of donors to come together and send her family meals, gift cards, and groceries—enough for her to share with neighbors in need. —Hechinger Report
• According to the data, schools should less spend time and money on deep-cleaning surfaces and more of it on improving indoor ventilation. —Wired
• Urban charter schools are dealing with the same obstacles to reopening as district peers, such as apprehensive parents and teachers. —Chalkbeat
• U.S. schooling failed students during the early stages of the pandemic. Let’s look to good data, not partisanship or fear, to make better decisions moving forward. —Washington Post
• A Salt Lake City suburb saw a dramatic spike in infections after its community insisted on reopening schools despite failing to contain infection rates. —New York Times
• Demonstrators organize in memory of a schoolteacher in France who was beheaded by a Chechen man for teaching about free speech and Charlie Hebdo. —Wall Street Journal
• Pandemic schooling is worsening inequities for students in Peru, which has the world’s highest Covid morality rate and where impoverished families are woefully unequipped for virtual learning. —Washington Post
• The late David K. Cohen made waves with his research on classroom instruction and equity, but also by his mentorship of many other scholars. He will be missed. —Chalkbeat
• After months of preparation and deliberations, “large school districts across the country are reopening campuses to students.” —Washington Post

A recent article from the Tribune Chronicle in Northeast Ohio covered a school funding analysis published by the personal finance website WalletHub. Several district officials offered comments in response to the analysis, but the spokesperson for Youngstown City Schools directly challenged the study’s data:  

Youngstown City School District spokeswoman Denise Dick questioned the per-pupil expenditure numbers provided by WalletHub. Youngstown ranked 52 out of 610 school districts in Ohio. It, according to the report, is the sixth-most equitable district in Trumbull and Mahoning counties.

The district’s per student expenditure is $19,156, according to the report. Dick, however, said the most recent per pupil spending numbers actually are closer to $12,634.

“I don’t think our per-pupil spending has ever been as high as what’s listed in the article,” she said.

The sizeable discrepancy in spending reported by Wallet Hub and cited by Ms. Dick—a roughly $6,500 per pupil difference—certainly raises eyebrows. What gives? The answer is wonky (stick with me!) but important. It also points to the need for a change in the way Ohio reports spending on its school report cards.

First off, the WalletHub data. It relies on U.S. Census Bureau data on K–12 expenditures in districts across the nation, which does indeed report Youngstown’s at $19,156 per pupil for FY 2018. This amount takes into account operational spending—dollars used to pay teachers and staff, buy textbooks, and the like—but excludes capital outlays. The Census Bureau’s technical documentation also makes clear that the agency removes state dollars that “pass through” Ohio school districts and transfer to charter schools, alleviating a concern about federal statistics that has been raised by local school finance expert Howard Fleeter.

While an error is unlikely, it’s worth cross-checking the census data against state statistics. The go-to state source for fiscal data is the Ohio Department of Education’s District Profile Reports, also known as the “Cupp Reports,” which were named long ago after veteran lawmaker and current House Speaker Bob Cupp. Youngstown’s report states that the district spent $18,284 per pupil in FY 2018. That’s not an exact match to WalletHub, but it’s within shouting distance—and far closer than the amount cited by the Youngstown official. Much like the Census Bureau, ODE’s expenditure per pupil data capture operational expenses and exclude capital expenses and dollars that pass through districts to charters.[1]

Where then does the $12,634 come from? As it turns out, it comes from the state report card which, lo and behold, tells us that Youngstown spent this sum in FY 2019.[2] But what’s crucial to understand about this source of fiscal data is that, per state law, report cards display an expenditure per equivalent pupil. The basic idea behind this particular statistic is to adjust a district’s actual per pupil expenditures to account for the extra costs associated with educating economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. The table below illustrates this methodology using data from Youngstown. The key difference is that the expenditure per equivalent pupil relies on a weighted enrollment—the aforementioned subgroups are effectively counted as more than one student—rather than actual headcounts. In a district such as Youngstown, which serves large numbers of economically disadvantaged students, the weighted enrollment can end up being significantly higher than the actual enrollment.[3]

Table 1: Expenditure calculations for Youngstown City Schools, FY 2018

​

There are pluses and minuses to the equivalent pupil method of reporting expenditures. On the upside, it creates fairer comparisons of district spending by trying to gauge the amount being spent on a “typical” student. Youngstown’s equivalent amount implies that it spends $12,804 per average student, 34 percent above what the average Ohio district spends on a typical student. This suggests that its spending is somewhat out of line with the state average, though less so than under the actual expenditure calculations. The downside of the equivalent methodology is that it significantly “deflates” the amount of actual spending in districts across Ohio, including Youngstown. This could mislead citizens who are unlikely to think about spending in terms of “equivalent” pupils and who, as surveys indicate, already vastly underestimate the amounts that public schools actually spend.

To clear up the confusion, Ohio lawmakers should require that actual expenditure per pupil amounts be featured prominently on school report cards, just like they are on the Cupp Reports. The equivalent spending data could be maintained as supplemental data, but they must be clearly marked as adjusted amounts that attempt to account for the expenses associated with educating students who usually have greater needs. There should also be an explanation of the methodological differences (including the enrollments used in the denominators), so that users can better distinguish between the two data points.

Productive discussions about school funding—and potential reform of the system—rely on transparent spending data. But as the story from Northeast Ohio reminds us, the wires can get crossed even among people who work in education. By omitting actual spending amounts, the current report card system displays numbers that are out of step with conventional spending data. A more complete presentation of the data is needed to offer a full picture of the resources being dedicated to educate Ohio students.