1. The sitting members of the Youngstown school board are going to, at some point, search for someone to take the place of Barbara Brothers. You remember her from yesterday’s clips: she ran for the board and was elected in November, only to change her mind and forgo the seat when she, apparently, found out that her putative colleagues do not share her views on state accountability. (Vindy.com, 1/1/20) Two other newly-elected board members were seated this week. However, it should not be forgotten that there should be no elected school board in Youngstown at all at this point. The law governing districts in academic distress dictate that the sitting board should be dissolved and a new board be appointed by the city’s mayor after three years of continued academic failure under an ADC. Youngstown mayor Jamael Tito Brown has, thus far, declined to move forward with this effort since there are still approximately 3,275 legal cases pending. One of them is bound to be decided by April, right? (WFMJ-TV, Youngstown, 1/2/20) We talked back in November about Mike Kahoe, a high school senior who won election to his school board in Revere Local Schools. He has taken his seat on said board and is already off and running at the age of just 18. He’s got some great ideas about how to expand the public’s access to and input in board business. By the way, did you know that he saved someone’s life while out campaigning too? True story. (Akron.com, 1/2/20) Folks are motivated to run for school board for a lot of different reasons, as we saw with the Brothers and Kahoe stories above. In Niles City Schools, not far from Youngstown, we read about a newly-elected board member who is a former district teacher, currently engaged in a lawsuit against the district he now helps to run over a claim that he was fired improperly. But I’m sure he ran for other reasons. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 1/2/20)
    
2. Hey hey. Ho ho. Editors in Toledo opined against state report cards this week, that’s what I know. (Toledo Blade, 1/2/20)
   
   

3. The good folks at Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools will be hosting an event next week that I personally think should be titled The 411 on How Much Vouchers Really Really Suck. But they probably called it something else. (Patch.com, 1/2/20) School district leaders in far eastern Ohio got together with a couple of local state legislators this week in order to complain about vouchers. Lots of incorrect details in the reporting, but there’s no way to tell where they came from. What is clear is that while it was supposed to be a talk about the state’s voucher program, participants did not once discuss parents, students, or the reasons the state provides educational options. The “evils” of choice were taken as truth and were the bedrock of the discussion. And honestly, most of the discussion centered on the underpinnings of the voucher program instead: testing, report cards, and accountability. (Steubenville Herald, 1/3/20)
    
4. Those accountability systems do apparently look different from different perspectives. This piece discusses the awesomeness of Avon Lake City Schools in Lorain County. Awesomeness that is quantified by their district report card—which, it is noted here, rose from a B to an A last year. I took a look at the component grades too, and they also were generally very high. The district supe is quoted as saying, “Avon Lake takes the state report card and the state testing seriously, but we believe that there are better measures of our specific needs. It is important that the Avon Lake stakeholders know that learning in our schools is based on individual student needs for academic growth and success in life, not on a better standardized test score or better state report card grade.” Sounds good, right? Hold that thought. Now, I also took a look at the EdChoice eligibility list and found one Avon Lake elementary school on it. What’s the issue? Looks like it’s the Progress component, currently at a D. (And, presumably, somewhere in that vicinity for one or two previous years also. Thus, a pattern.) Despite the fact that one of his elementary schools is on the EdChoice eligibility list—meaning that hundreds of students are eligible for vouchers and could opt to leave the district forever, with thousands of dollars in state funding following them—why is the Avon Lake supe not condemning the report cards in this piece? In fact, there is no mention of a voucher-eligible school at all here. If you ask me, it’s a matter of perspective. Because the report card is generally good, the district has proof of the supe’s claim that they take testing seriously, with teaching and learning going on at a fairly high level. Demonstrably. So it must be right. But that likely means that the data showing kids failing to meet adequate progress levels in that one school is also right. It is a real issue that the district must deal with or face the music from parents for whom those low-progress students are real, not just numbers on a chart. And the rest of that stuff—the “better measures” supe spoke of—are icing on the cake of a good report card. They are not a replacement for the real measures of academic achievement that parents and taxpayers rely on. I think this story shows that a truly excellent school must do all those things. How’s that for perspective? (Morning Journal, 1/3/20)

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Your

This is a special Thursday edition of Gadfly Bites, catching up on all the great/horrifying/mystifying (delete as appropriate) clips we missed while we were on break at the end of 2019. Back to regular service for 2020 tomorrow. 

1. Our own Aaron Churchill gave us all a belated Christmas present, with this op-ed in the Enquirer explaining the value of Ohio’s report card system. “It shines a light on schools that overcome obstacles and provide excellent options for families,” he writes. “At the same time, it clearly identifies schools that are struggling and need some combination of additional support and intervention.” Yep. Sounds right to me. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 12/26/19)
    
2. A recent blog of Aaron’s was also quoted extensively by the good folks at Gongwer just after Christmas. His words echoed a call by NCTQ for a review of out-of-state teacher license reciprocity in the Buckeye State. (Gongwer Ohio, 12/26/19)
   
   

3. Here is a detailed profile of the business-centric education group Ohio Excels. As my dedicated subscribers will recall, Ohio Excels was instrumental in making sure that strong, academically-rigorous graduation requirements were put into Ohio law this year. And that effort is the centerpiece of this very long profile. What’s most intriguing is the tone the writer takes throughout. It is generally respectful and fully factual (not to mention featuring a wide range of interview subjects), but it is also redolent with snarky asides and hilarious word choices that convey a more unusual view of the business community than this outlet typically features. Whatever the motivation for it, your humble clips complier and CSO (Chief Snark Officer) approves! On a more serious note, though, Fordham’s Chad Aldis is quoted throughout, paying respect to the full coalition of voices behind the graduation requirements effort. “When the Columbus Public Schools and the Olentangy School District and the business community agree on something, that’s incredible,” he says. Good stuff. But hold that thought. (Columbus CEO, 12/30/19)
    
4. You still holding that thought? Good. Because the anti-voucher choir got another voice singing in harmony last week. It was the elected board of Columbiana Exempted Village Schools this time, passing a resolution to express their opposition to the EdChoice Scholarship Program. (Morning Journal News, 12/28/19) And keeping with the theme, I guess it’s good for the behind-the-scenes conductors that Columbus City Schools also joined the anti-voucher choir, but honestly those guys shouldn’t waste time talking about vouchers. No change to EdChoice currently on the table—short of outright abolition—will help my kids’ “home district” limit voucher eligibility by much. (WSYX-TV, Columbus, 12/24/19)
   
   

5. One thing that just might help lots of districts and school buildings escape the label of suckitude is teaching their kids to a high degree of academic competency for the state to eliminate A-F report card grading. That was the wishful thinking going on in Elyria and elsewhere at year’s end. (Elyria Chronicle, 12/20/19)
    
6. But just to show you the dangers inherent in the anti-accountability mindset: here is the story of newly-elected Youngstown School Board “member” Barbara Brothers. Before even taking office, she has “resigned” (can you resign from a seat you never actually held?) and graced us all with an explanation. As near as I can translate her letter’s contents, here’s how it goes: She ran because she believed the ratings system that led to a declaration of academic distress and created the ADC is wrong/false/unfair and wanted to make change in the district on that basis. Between election and inauguration, however, she seems to have found out—somehow—that her colleagues actually BELIEVE the school district sucks. Her implication seems to be that they only SAY they believe that because it is their best route to beat the ADC. (Something along the lines of “Y’town schools sucked before because of #reasons and you removed us from power for it. But now Y’town schools suck because of ADC/CEO and now they must also be removed as a matter of fairness.”) However, because the board are bound to that outcome (and loyal Gadfly Bites subscribers know what she means there) and in that manner, there is no room to argue against the accountability system that got them there in the first place. And Ms. Brothers, being a staunch “we never deserved this” accountability hater, apparently cannot find common ground with her putative colleagues and so decided to nullify her own election and refused to take her seat. But I could be reading that wrong. (WFMJ-TV, Youngstown, 12/30/19) Related? You decide. On New Year’s Eve, public media in Northeast Ohio discussed a new report from Brandeis University that shows four Ohio cities among the bottom ten in a list of those providing poor opportunities for African-American youth. Youngstown was among the four, unsurprisingly to some. (If only we could eliminate the grading!) But what could be causing this very poor showing? The folks at Brandeis seem to suggest “residential segregation”. Hmmm… Talk about “dropping the ball”. (WKSU-FM, Kent, 12/31/19)

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Over the past few years, we at the Gadfly have gazed into our crystal balls to predict the biggest, or at least most intriguing, stories of the upcoming year. (Click on the links above to see how we did.) With 2019 now behind us, what should Ohioans expect in the world of education for the coming year? Let the predictions begin!

1. Policymakers will continue to debate school funding, but no consensus will emerge. One of the most-talked-about topics in the past year was school funding, with discussion centered on the proposal put forward by Representatives Bob Cupp and John Patterson. Their plan alters virtually every aspect of Ohio’s funding formula and, fully implemented, it would add at least $1.5 billion per year in state spending. So far, debate has revolved around whether the plan allocates enough funds to high-poverty districts, its method to estimate the cost of educating students, its frosty approach to school choice, and how the state would cover the increased outlays. Although there is almost no chance that the plan will be enacted in 2020—it’s an “off-budget” year for the state—policymakers will continue to scrutinize it, in advance of the 2021 budget cycle. In my view, the overhaul envisioned by the Cupp-Patterson plan faces an uphill climb. Not only does it affect the entire K–12 education system, but due to the sizeable funding increase, it is likely to impact Ohio businesses and citizens who may be asked to shoulder additional taxes. Anything can happen, but here’s my best guess: The proposal will continue to drive a productive debate on funding but by the end the year, legislators will start contemplating some more realistic reforms likely focused on delivering more dollars to high needs students. The chances of this happening will rise if economic indicators start going in the wrong direction.

2. School districts will complain about private-school scholarship programs, but a steadily increasing number of families will avail themselves of these opportunities. The shouting you heard at the end of 2019 wasn’t the Times Square countdown, but a cacophony of district administrators complaining about Ohio’s EdChoice scholarship (a.k.a. voucher) program. Alarmed by a growing list of low-performing public schools, school officials went to the media and torched the state’s “failing schools” voucher model in which students become eligible based on low school ratings. As this piece goes to press, there are Statehouse rumblings about proposed “fixes” that might pacify the outrage. If enacted, they will probably turn down the heat in the near term, but we’ll likely hear the grumblings start all over again in fall 2020 as expanded eligibility for income-based EdChoice kicks in. Often ignored when districts are the prevailing voice on the matter is that parents and students are the main beneficiaries of EdChoice expansions as they are provided a wider range of school options. If the historic upward trend in voucher participation continues, more families will select schools that better match their preferences.

3. Legislators will dump transparent school ratings, but this won’t stop parents from seeking clear, objective information about quality. As someone who has written strongly in favor of transparent school ratings, I do hope this prediction is wrong. But the school associations and teachers’ unions are lobbying hard to eliminate Ohio’s A–F school rating system, which they perceive as too punitive. Of course, most districts and schools do pretty well on the report card, and most schools continue to assign letter grades to their own students. But removing those pesky letter grades, which almost everyone understands, would make it easier to hide any weaknesses in student learning. While their proposals vary in specifics, they usually fall into two camps: 1) use “data dashboards,” a system that displays a blizzard of data but offers no ratings that help users make sense of the data; or 2) water down ratings by using fuzzy, informationally-deficient labels such as “approaching expectations.” Should Ohio move in either direction—and again, I hope it doesn’t—the establishment will rejoice. But parents and communities will be less able to identify quality schools, at least via the state report card. If denied clear and concise data, they might head over to Great Schools, a nonprofit organization that provides its own school ratings. And with the state abdicating its role in assigning ratings, groups here in Ohio might fill the void by creating homespun systems. In the end, the state can weasel out of transparent school ratings, but that doesn’t mean the search for clear information about school quality will end. Instead, the state will merely have lost its ability to set the tone for those ratings.

4. Policymakers will champion career and technical education, but data on student participation and outcomes will be lacking. Heeding calls from the business community for skilled workers, Ohio policymakers have made career-technical training a major priority. That’s great news, not only for adults but also for middle and high school students who are looking to get a leg up in their career preparation. We’re already seeing a few signs that schools are responding. Although the numbers remain low—just 6 percent for the class of 2018—an increasing proportion of students earn industry-recognized credentials while in high school. Yet questions still abound on the career-technical front. For instance, how many students pursue an apprenticeship during high school or participate in other forms of “work-based learning”? How many students take career-technical coursework in their regular high school versus a joint-vocational center, or a college? Which career-tech models produce the best post-secondary outcomes for students? Someone should be tracking, evaluating, and reporting on these type of questions. But alas, like too many initiatives, my suspicion is that career-and-technical education will continue to be largely shrouded in mystery.

5. Exciting new schools will continue to grow. In the realm of new school formation, the much-heralded I Promise school, supported by LeBron James and launched in 2018, generated lots of great media attention for the Buckeye State. The early returns from this Akron-based school are impressive. Happily, it’s not just superstar-backed schools that are opening in Ohio. More under the radar, Ohio’s first “classical” charter public school opened earlier this fall. Located near Toledo, Northwest Ohio Classical Academy advertises a stimulating curriculum (OK, I’m biased having taken Latin and Greek), and it’ll be interesting to track parent demand for this approach to education—not to mention its results. Meanwhile, in the private-school realm, a brand-new startup in Cleveland could offer some lessons for developers looking to go the non-public route. Opening in fall 2019, Garden Christian Academy was featured on Mike McShane’s “cool schools” podcast and, why yes, they will soon accept vouchers. Kudos to all who are working to tirelessly to provide Ohio families with an array of quality, distinctive educational options.  

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We’re sure to see other topics garner headlines, including academic distress commissions, educator certification and training, teacher pensions, online learning, and much more. Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter to keep up with all the latest developments in Ohio. In the meantime, happy New Year!

It’s that time of year once again—when the work is on pause, the computer keys are quiet, and the email boxes are weirdly dormant. Time to look back and see what pieces you, our generous and discerning readers, engaged with the most in 2019.

In (almost) chronological order:

Predicting the top education issues for 2019 (January 1)

How fitting that a piece looking ahead to the year’s most important issues ends up being one of our most-read blog posts of the year. We hit the ground running at the start of the year, predicting six themes for 2019 from testing to funding to a push to lower academic expectations. (Wait, that can’t be right can it?)

How’d we do? Looks like we were five-for-six on our predictions, with only pre-K not really rising to the top. Not bad!

How Governor DeWine could make a big impact on Ohio’s post-secondary attainment numbers (January 28)

One of the big topics we didn’t explicitly have at the top of our 2019 prediction list was post-secondary attainment. But we were diligent in tracking the efforts of Ohio’s new governor, Mike DeWine, as he promised to make that a centerpiece of his first budget. This post looked at the various proposals discussed by DeWine at the start of the budget process and the funding and policy levers proposed to support them. How the new governor could help the state reach its Attainment Goal 2025 definitely grabbed your attention.

Governor DeWine’s budget shows his commitment to meeting Ohio’s attainment goal (April 22)

When the budget language was first released in April, we were back on the case—as were you—looking at DeWine’s proposals in detail. Those specifics included a $25 million appropriation dedicated to helping students earn industry-recognized credentials while still in high school, plans and funding for multiple pathways for adults to earn in-demand work skills and certifications, and a huge effort to make college degrees more affordable for Ohioans.

A sobering reality: A look at the districts where the highest percentage of students used alternative pathways to graduate (March 11)

The ongoing debate over Ohio’s graduation requirements was, as predicted, a huge issue in 2019. As various plans to (yet again) change those requirements duked it out in various centers of power in state government, we tried to maintain attention on the practical matters at hand. To wit: This popular post, which dug into the graduation data for the class of 2018. These were the first students to have access to lowered, non-academic diploma pathways, and which schools and districts made the most use of those pathways was of vital concern. Evidence was beginning to mount that a lowered bar to graduation would boost the esteem of adults by hurting vulnerable students’ prospects for the future.

Policymakers should listen to Ohio’s business community on graduation requirements (March 19)

Soon after, the state’s business community entered the discussion in an important way. Through a non-profit coalition called Ohio Excels, business leaders put forth their own plan for new graduation requirements, emphasizing the achievements, traits, and skills they wanted to see in their future employees. The new requirements focused on four key principles: early identification of students who are at risk of not graduating on time; meaningful and research-based supports, interventions, and resources for students and teachers; consistent and externally-verified measurements; and clear timelines and better data collection. Ohio Excels’s plan had a big impact on the final graduation requirements eventually adopted in the state budget.

Tell high school students the truth about college readiness (July 17)

Despite the impending end of non-academic graduation pathways, Ohio’s high schoolers still must contend with other forms of lowered expectations along the way. Readers were apparently intrigued to learn that the achievement level called “proficient” in relation to state test scores did not mean that students were proficient in that subject. Many students did not achieve a remediation-free score on the ACT despite receiving “proficient” scores on Ohio’s math and English end-of-course exams. We urged an end to the long-standing “honesty gap” in the Buckeye State.

Honorable mention(s):

Our continuing series called Pathway to Success, profiles of high-quality charter schools and their students across the state, remained very popular in 2019. Just in case you haven’t seen them, this year’s editions comprised Towpath Trail High School in Akron and Arts and College Preparatory Academy (ACPA) in Columbus.

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Thank you for following Fordham in 2019. We appreciate your readership and hope you will continue to tune in in 2020. We’ve got lots more great stuff ahead.

And in case you might have missed one of the above or any of our blog posts, research reports, or reviews this year, don’t forget you can always subscribe to the Ohio Education Gadfly Biweekly newsletter and have all our great content sent right to your email Inbox!

2019 was a busy year for education in Ohio. Governor DeWine took office in January, replacing the term-limited John Kasich. The spring and summer months were dominated by the state budget cycle. And the latter half of the year was characterized by familiar controversies.

Here’s a look at the five biggest education policy stories of the year.

5) School funding

This spring, Representatives Bob Cupp and John Patterson released their long-awaited Fair School Funding Plan, a new state funding framework developed alongside a group of school district officials. Commonly referred to as the Cupp-Patterson plan, the proposal would increase state aid to districts and schools by $1.5 billion each year, an increase of roughly 15 percent above current state expenditures on K–12 education. Although the plan’s developers hoped to see their proposal included in the state budget, it didn’t make the cut. As a result, the remaining summer months and the entire fall session of the General Assembly were marked by almost continuous debate in the statehouse and the media over the particulars of the plan and how it could be improved. (For a more in-depth look at the Cupp-Patterson plan and its implications for school funding in Ohio, see here.)

4) Postsecondary attainment

Ohio’s Attainment Goal 2025 is a statewide objective for 65 percent of Ohioans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four to have a degree, certificate, or other post-secondary workforce credential of value in the workplace by 2025. It was first announced in 2016, but this year, the deadline started to loom large. Former Governor Kasich and several Ohio agencies initially led the way in crafting a plan to tackle the attainment gap. When Governor DeWine took office earlier this year, he acknowledged the importance of the issue by commenting that everyone “deserves a chance to succeed, to get a good-paying job, to raise a family comfortably.” His initial budget proposal contained several provisions aimed at doing just that. Many of those provisions, such as the $25 million appropriation dedicated to helping high school students earn industry-recognized credentials, survived the budget process. Events like the Aim Hire conference emphasized the importance of connecting education and the workforce. The state’s continued work with New Skills For Youth led to some exciting growth and changes. And new research on the college and career readiness of Ohio students shed additional light on attainment numbers.

3) School choice

School choice has been a major focus of education policy over the last few years, and thanks to the state budget, this year was no different. Quality charter schools will soon receive an additional $1,750 per pupil for economically disadvantaged students and $1,000 per pupil for other students. These state dollars should temporarily mitigate the significant funding shortfalls charters face compared to their district counterparts, and should make it easier to open new schools, expand high-performing networks, and recruit high-performing out-of-state networks.

On the voucher front, the budget made some big changes to the EdChoice Scholarship program. These include expanding eligibility to all low-income students in grades K–12 starting in 2020–21. The changes should also decrease the number of students who are stuck on scholarship waitlists each year. But other changes, including those related to testing and students with special needs, caused us some heartburn. Voucher opponents, meanwhile, have been complaining about the recently released list of EdChoice designated schools. The roster more than doubled in size from the previous year, and for the first time there are several suburban districts included. The presence of these districts has caused quite a stir—and not all of it has been factual or fair.

2) Graduation requirements

Ohio has been battling over graduation requirements for nearly three years now. It all started back in July 2017, when the Ohio General Assembly passed legislation permitting students in the class of 2018 to graduate based on weak alternative pathways—such as school attendance, course grades, a senior project, or volunteer hours—rather than demonstrating academic or career-technical competencies. During the early days of 2019, discussions around graduation data from the class of 2018 revealed some troubling outcomes: Several districts unsurprisingly took advantage of the weakened alternatives to inflate their graduation rates, and districts that were high-poverty or enrolled larger percentages of students of color generally had more students graduate via low-level alternatives.

The debate took another turn later in the spring, when a coalition composed of Ohio Excels, the Alliance for High Quality Education, and Fordham proposed a set of graduation requirements that were markedly different than the plan championed by the state board of education. After a considerable amount of debate, the coalition proposal was included in the final version of the budget and signed into law by Governor DeWine. At long last, Ohio seems poised to move on from testy debates over graduation requirements to focusing on helping students meet the standards instead.

1) Academic Distress Commissions

Lawmakers spent much of 2019 trying to reach a compromise over how to modify academic distress commissions (ADCs), Ohio’s method for intervening in persistently low-performing school districts. The debate has not been friendly. Each of the districts currently under the control of an ADC—Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland—have made headlines for various reasons throughout the year. So, too, has a related lawsuit that’s still before the Ohio Supreme Court.

The budget process included several proposals for how to revise the ADC model. None of the proposed plans made the cut. Instead, the budget established a moratorium on any new commissions for the 2019–20 school year. After their summer break, legislators continued to debate possible solutions. But efforts to find a compromise are still ongoing.  

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Well, there you have it. The five biggest education policy stories of the year. Agree? Disagree? What did we forget? Tell us on Facebook or Twitter.

This is the last edition of Gadfly Bites for 2019. Thank you for reading and for subscribing. We’ll be back on January 2 with a 2019 wrap up; back to regular service for 2020 on January 3. Happy New Year to all!

1. It’s nothing but EdChoice stories to end the year. Imagine that. Our own Chad Aldis is quoted in this piece looking at the “momentum” for enacting a “fix” to the program (you know what I mean). I don’t know why everyone is in such a hurry. I know these folks say there’s a February 1 “deadline” approaching (the start of the scheduled voucher application window), but surely if all this hyperbolic awfulness is true it shouldn’t be a problem to just take those vouchers away from folks after they apply. It’s for the system’s everyone’s own good, after all. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/22/19) Amid the cacophony of school district leaders decrying EdChoice and the report cards which underpin it, there’s only one voice speaking positively about EdChoice in this piece. Somewhat ironically, I think he is the leader of a charter school. (Springfield News Sun, 12/23/19) More “momentum” talk in this piece. (Gongwer Ohio, 12/20/19) There is only one message to take away from all of these pieces: voucher bad.
    
2. Here is a piece which, in the main, indicates voucher good. To wit: one or more private schools in the Akron area are going to begin accepting voucher students when they had not previously done so. That’s good, isn’t it? I mean, if your perspective is that you want folks to have choices. (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/21/19)
   
   

3. Here is a piece which says, unequivocally to me, voucher really good. It is the story of Fugees Academy, a private school new to the Columbus area that focuses specifically on helping refugee children get up to speed in English and other academic areas with accelerated curriculum, longer school days, a year-round schedule, and a whole lot of love and hands-on support. Most of the students are attending using EdChoice or other vouchers. And why? Because families fleeing to America for a better life don’t deserve the type of schooling that Manjil, a Fugees student from Nepal, experienced. The piece tells us that, after three years at a traditional public school that focuses on English language learners, the 13-year-old was still “reading at roughly a kindergarten level.” Of course, this story makes vouchers sound great because it is focused on students and families. Please note that that perspective is entirely missing from all of the previous pieces covered today—and, honestly, in most of the apocalyptic voucher stories we’ve read over the last many weeks. Interesting. (Hechinger Report, 12/23/19)

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NOTE: This is our last edition of the year. Thank you so much for reading and for subscribing. We will be back with you on January 3, 2020. Happy Holidays!

The Turbulent Tens?

While the decade is not officially over for another year, that fact has not stopped analysts from summarizing “the 10s”—the last ten years in education policy. Evie Blad and Andrew Ujifusa called the last ten years “turbulent” in their summary, published in Education Week. While they were referring to a wider spectrum of events than school choice or even simply charters, they still found some significant ups and downs in that part of their analysis.

The Tremendous Tens?

On the other hand, Dale Chu is far more upbeat about the fortunes of school choice over the last ten years. Chu, an independent consultant on education programs and policy as well as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, looked at the growth of school choice options in his old stomping grounds of Indiana and was very pleased. He predicted more upward momentum going into the 20s.

Looking toward the Twenties

A federal spending deal was reached earlier this week which would increase education funding by $1.3 billion overall. Funding for the Charter Schools Program (CSP) would remain flat at $440 million for fiscal year 2020. This final version is a compromise between the White House’s request for an increase and the House of Representatives’ bill cutting $40 million from the program.

Saying no

In New Hampshire last week, the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee voted 7 to 3 to table a CSP grant, intending to reject a payment of $46 million already requested by and awarded to the state (under a previous state administration) by the federal government.

The view from the art room

To end the year (and, by some measures, the decade) on a happy note, take a look at all the winners in this year’s National Charter Schools Institute annual student art contest. Competitors and winners come from multiple states, including Ohio. Enjoy!

1. Columnist Tom Troy (also an associate editor) at the Blade, joined the chorus of voices disappointed in the output of the state’s Report Card Advisory Committee. Interestingly, it’s not because some district he believes is awesome got a low grade—as with many of the choristers thus far. Instead, he is sure that the A to F grading system is wrong/broken/punitive/abominable (delete as needed) because a district he believes is NOT so awesome got an A. Imagine that! Fordham is mentioned in the column, lumped in with the “interest groups” who contributed to the committee’s work. (Toledo Blade, 12/20/19) In reporting on the “choir concert” around state report card mechanics, the Chronicle was more specific—noting that Fordham was one of only two committee contributors who recommended sticking with the use of A to F grading (which is the stated bone of contention, although obviously only a stepping stone to ultimately scrapping the whole shebang). Ohio Excels, by the way, was the other group in the pro A to F camp. Good company if you ask me. (Elyria Chronicle, 12/20/19)
    
2. Speaking of Fordham, while Innovation Ohio’s Steve Dyer provides most of the material for this look at the EdChoice voucher program (you know what I mean), our own Aaron Churchill gets the last word. He points out, quite reasonably I feel, that an increase in voucher eligibility will only result in an exodus of students if their families feel they need another option. In fact, if these suburban schools are as great as their supporters say they are, they should really have nothing at all to worry about here. Why is that not the story? Asks your humble clips compiler, rhetorically. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/19/19)
   
   

3. And speaking of Ohio voucher programs, Mansfield mom Tera Myers penned an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner this week where she lauded the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship for the enormous improvement it made in the educational opportunities—and life opportunities—for her son Sam. Nice! (Washington Examiner, 12/19/19)
    
4. Honestly though, if K-12 education was as great as some folks are desperately trying to convince us it is, surely the higher education sector would not have any need to want to improve “underperforming” schools in the K-12 system. But since this piece says they are trying to do exactly that, which message are we to believe? As a personal caveat, the waffly language used by the spokespeople for this “movement” and the flabby examples given of “actions” being undertaken by some colleges don’t exactly inspire much confidence in me that they will have any positive impact whatsoever. So maybe it doesn’t even matter who’s right. (Times Higher Education, 12/20/19)
   
   

5. Speaking of performance, the good folks at Preschool Promise in Cincinnati are this week touting a record level of kindergarten readiness among their charges, attributable to the pre-K programming to which the little ones have had access. Who am I to quibble with that? (Cincinnati Enquirer, 12/19/19)
    
6. Another day, another empty room. The superintendent of Garaway Local Schools, a small district well out into the boonies of northern Ohio, appears ready to use his wellness funding windfall from the state—nearly $700 K over two years, he estimates—to build an empty room. Where have we heard this before? There is no discussion of any activities that might go on in Garaway’s Room of Emptiness—you know, any programming that might actually help boost student wellness—but the fact that Supe did specify the location where he wants the room to go indicates to me that he’s definitely got a use in mind for it…eventually. But I’ll wager it ain’t wellness-related. (The Times Reporter, 12/19/19) 

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Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons. While we know that supplementation is widespread, and we have a good handle on what websites teachers rely on, we don’t really know what kinds of materials teachers seek out and whether they are any good.

To shed some light, the Fordham Institute recently asked me and co-author Jennifer Dean to study the quality of more than 300 of the most-downloaded high school English language arts (ELA) materials on three popular websites: TeachersPayTeachers, ShareMyLesson, and ReadWriteThink. We built a rubric to measure the quality of the materials along multiple dimensions, and we recruited ELA experts to help us evaluate the materials. The report, “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?” is published today. Here’s what we learned.

First, our reviewers found the texts referenced in the lessons were generally high-quality texts and worth reading (though many of them were still below grade level). They also found that the materials were mostly free from errors, well organized, and reasonably attractive.

Unfortunately, our reviewers felt the weaknesses of the materials far outweighed the positives. On a 0–3 scale, 64 percent of materials were rated a 0 or a 1, meaning teachers “should not” or “probably should not” use them. Just 1–7 percent of the materials, depending on the website, earned the top score of 3, indicating they are “exceptional and/or highly likely to contribute to a quality curriculum.” What were the main issues detected? Here are a few common culprits:

Alignment is weak. Almost all of the materials we reviewed claim alignment to very large numbers of standards—sometimes dozens or more are tagged for a single lesson or unit. But our reviewers often felt that the materials only aligned to some of the tagged standards, meaning teachers have to do their alignment homework in selecting a material—they cannot simply accept what the materials’ authors claim about alignment.

Assessments fall short. Reviewers examined the student assessments that were included in the lessons and units along several dimensions. They found these assessments often did an inadequate job of covering the core content. Just a bare majority of materials (51 percent) included scoring rubrics of any kind to help teachers evaluate student work (and many of those rubrics were deemed low quality).

Materials are not cognitively demanding and don’t build content knowledge. Reviewers found that the vast majority of the tasks were focused on lower-level skills, with very few emphasizing advanced skills like critical thinking and solving real-world problems. We also asked reviewers to examine the extent to which multi-day units introduced and sequenced knowledge in a way that allowed students to build their understanding of a topic. A majority of materials (58 percent) “not at all” or only “weakly” built students’ content knowledge in this way.

Materials do an especially poor job offering teachers support for teaching diverse learners. Out of all the dimensions on which our reviewers evaluated the materials, some of the worst scores pertained to supporting diverse learners. Just 14 percent of materials offered teachers any guidance on differentiating instruction for high or low performing students, English language learners, or other student groups (yes, we know that’s hard to do but that’s no reason to ignore such needs). Less than 1 percent of materials were rated as having “extensive” differentiation supports. Reviewers also examined both the choice of authors and the texts themselves relative to their representation of cultural diversity, with a focus on race/ethnicity, gender, and culture/national origin. Two-thirds of materials did not include diverse authors (i.e., women, people of color, or authors from nondominant cultures) or cover culturally diverse topics (i.e., the experiences of women, people of color, or authors from nondominant cultures) at all. While some may argue that only full-blown curriculum can be expected to reflect such diversity, our reviewers felt strongly that the underrepresentation of diverse voices in these materials was a problem.

Our recommendations

We view these findings as rather grim, especially given the ubiquity of teachers’ use of these kinds of materials. That said, we take a few lessons away from this work, which we hope educators and policymakers heed.

First, and most obviously, there is a need to improve the quality of supplemental materials along these and other dimensions. There is also a need to help curate what already exists, which could be done by the websites themselves; by users, including district curriculum leaders; or by other experts (in fact, we think the best approach would probably include both expert reviews and user reviews). Of course, teachers can still have the freedom to use good materials, but more curation would help ensure a minimum level of quality in the classroom.

Second, alignment and assessment quality are clear areas where more attention is needed. Teachers should be able to trust the purported alignment ratings on these websites, and that materials will provide quality assessments with which to evaluate student learning. Teachers are simply too strapped to put in all of the time needed to make these materials comprehensive, challenging, and well aligned.

Third, there is a particular need for materials that represent the cultural diversity of our students. More than half our K–12 students are nonwhite, but a scant proportion of the materials included readings by nonwhite authors or about nonwhite characters. Similarly, gender and national origin are important sources of diversity in our classrooms that are not adequately represented in the materials we reviewed.

It’s clear that teacher-sourced, online supplemental materials, while immensely popular, have a long way to go in terms of quality, and we hope that content creators at these and other websites will see these findings as a clarion call to improve. Still, we are not trying to second-guess teachers. They are finding something valuable in these online materials; interviews indicate that it’s their engagement and help with differentiation that are most useful. Those are important, but we need to be careful not to give up on providing coherence, alignment, and rigor in return.

Editor’s note: This essay was first published by Education Next.

“Twenty-five years ago, there was no proof that something else worked. Well, now we know what works. We know that it’s just a lie that disadvantaged kids can’t learn. We know that if you apply the right accountability standards you can get fabulous results. So why would we do something else?” —Jonathan Alter, “Waiting For Superman” (2010).

When I sat in a Manhattan theatre watching Waiting For Superman a decade ago, fresh from the classroom and new to the world of policy and education reform, the haughtiness and arrogance implicit in Alter’s words made me bristle. A decade later, it’s almost poignant. Did we actually believe ten years ago that America’s education problems were a simple matter of getting “accountability standards” right? That “we know what works”? Were we ever that naïve? I saw the movie with a friend who was not in education and found the film persuasive, even moving. My own response, which has since become my mantra, was “Well, it’s more complicated than all that.”

Ed reform circa 2010 was riding a cresting wave, but in retrospect it was the high-water mark. When the decade began, reform was playing offense, energetically aligned against an intransigent blob, armed with moral authority, bracing and seemingly durable bipartisan support, and a strong (if naïve) faith in the capacity of higher standards to yield broad student gains, a muscular testing and accountability regime, and enhanced choice, mostly in the form of charter schools. And all of it supported by a vast army of philanthropists and advocacy groups.

Ten years later, nearly all of this has been reversed or is in retreat. Big reform is dead. As the decade draws to a close, it takes an extraordinary level of self-deception to believe that the roots of education’s persistent and frustrating malaise are merely structural, that there are vast reserves of untapped capacity or competence in K–12 education awaiting marching orders, or that technocrats far removed from the daily work of teaching and learning hold the keys to unlocking it. This was foreseeable and foreseen. “While public policy can make people do things, it cannot make people do those things well,” wrote Rick Hess in National Affairs back in 2014, the year, not incidentally, that every American student was going to be reading and doing math proficiently by federal law. Policymakers do not run schools, Hess concluded, “they merely write laws and regulations telling school districts what principals and teachers ought to do,” and noting with understatement “there is often a vast distance between policy and practice.”

More recently, Stanford University political scientist Terry M. Moe offered an equally dour view of the inevitable failures of structural reform in his new book The Politics of Institutional Reform. Intransigent vested interests, including teachers unions, school boards, superintendents, and administrators, have no incentive to reform and reliably block it at every turn. “And so here we are,” Moe said recently on Russ Roberts’s podcast EconTalk. “It's 2019. How many kids are in charter schools? About 6 percent nationwide. How many kids have vouchers or use tax credits? Less than 1 percent nationwide.” And accountability? It’s “run into a buzzsaw with the unions hating accountability and being threatened by it,” he explained. Meanwhile Republicans are “getting back to their local government roots and getting all teary eyed about how important it is to have state and local governments run everything.” That means returning accountability to state and local governments to die. “So I think here we are, after all this time, and we've made very, very little progress,” he said.

Moe’s sobering analysis understates the intransigence of the problem. Even where barriers to reform have been limited, the gains wrung from the reform playbook have still been modest. “We all know people that say some version of, ‘Well, we know what to do, we just don't have the will to do it,’” said Mike Goldstein, a self-described “humbled technocrat” and founder of Boston’s acclaimed Match Charter schools, in an interview. “But a lot of times our best examples of gains are shown in careful studies to be much smaller than what we had hoped or thought might be possible.”

Echoing Goldstein is City Fund’s Neerav Kingsland, formerly the head of New Schools for New Orleans, who wrote on his blog this week that “doubling or tripling the postsecondary success rate for low-income students is no small feat. This could help change the lives of millions of students. But this is far below the results I hoped for when I got into this work. I imagine many of my peers feel the same. And I am sure families want more for their children.”

Looking back not just over the past decade but to the dawn of the reform era circa 1983 and A Nation at Risk, it is nearly inconceivable that anyone would view where things stand today as a victory—or even acceptable progress for thirty-five years of effort. The logic of Big Reform and its focus on testing, standards, and accountability assumed that schools and teachers know what to do and that technocratic engineering could deliver a sufficient shock to the system to make them do it. It hasn’t worked. And let me preview my 2029 ed reform retrospective: If the past decade has convinced you that the real problem in American education is institutional racism, segregation, and the broad array of social ills that have diverted education reform’s attention from its core business of teaching and learning, and that those things need to be fixed first, gird your loins for another frustrating decade.

Here’s some holiday heresy as the decade draws to a close: One lesson of the past decade may be that if reducing poverty is your public policy goal, education might not be your primary strategy. Your efforts might be better focused incentivizing work, strengthening families, shoring up personal income, or on housing and health care policy. “Education is life changing for scores of young people, and is a critical policy lever. But at scale, we’ve often approached education as the lever, the Holy Grail for poverty alleviation. The gains, even in the best of circumstances, haven't match our ambitions at the outset,” Paymon Rouhanifard, the former superintendent of schools in Camden, New Jersey, said in an interview. “This speaks to the complexity of poverty.”

In the zero-sum game of education policy debate, much of the above will be read as an indictment, even surrender—an argument that the battle is over and that ed reformers should fold their tents and go home. It’s not, for the reason suggested by Rouhanifard. There have been encouraging developments, notably networks of high-achieving urban charter schools serving tens of thousands of low-income black and brown children whose lives would be poorer without them. They are success stories that ed reform should defend (particularly as Democrats have all but abandoned charter schools and the parents who rely on them), but even the brightest stars in the charter school world are not compensation enough for the broader lack of gains. So much reform, so little to show for it.

Education reform’s reach has exceeded its grasp, but that’s not an invitation to sentimentalize a golden pre-reform era that never existed, nor to throw up one’s hands and quit the field of battle. Moreover, there’s a difference between a cynical anti-reform, just-send-more-money argument, and a thoughtful stance that is clear-eyed and humble, that holds on to its aspirations while recognizing its limitations. We don’t have permission either as educators, policymakers, or citizens to write off boxcar numbers of American children. But neither should we indulge ourselves, digging in our heels and continuing to advocate for policies that we know aren’t effective simply because we don’t want to show weakness publicly.

So where does this leave ed reformers other than chastened and humbled? If the decade to come is to be different than the one now drawing to close, it suggests more modest expectations, situating reform’s center of gravity closer to the ground (read: focusing on practice improvements, not mere structural reform) and in enhanced school choice with parental satisfaction at least as important a measure of success as test scores. Elsewhere in this issue, my optimistic colleague Dale Chu argues that the decade now drawing to a close, for all its Sturm und Drang, has been a good one for choice. He looks at the same sobering data Terry Moe cited above and sees one million more students in charter schools than in 2010, and an additional 400,000 participating in private school scholarships. That’s a long way from scale, or a rising tide lifting every child’s boat, but it’s not nothing—particularly for the low-income, black, and brown families who are its primary beneficiaries. I’m inclined to think that along with a focus on improved curriculum and pedagogical practice, defending and growing school choice in all its forms—not just the ones technocrats encourage and favor—is a more modest and appropriate focus of reform energy in the next decade.

And perhaps as good as it gets.