1. Not much to say today in presenting these pieces. All are attempting to outline what is best for high school students from the perspective of folks in charge of doing just that. School leaders, politicians, business titans, and others. First up, the elected board of Toledo City Schools passed a resolution this week urging the legislature to extend softened graduation requirements for the Classes of 2019 and 2020 at least. A.K.A. The “right thing”, as they put it. (Toledo Blade, 12/5/18)
   

2. Next up, business leaders in the Miami Valley say they are having trouble finding qualified workers to fill urgent needs. Their solution is to reach out to students and emphasize the need for soft skills such as “leadership, teamwork, communication, problem solving, work ethic, flexibility and adaptability, and interpersonal skills”. No test-taking ability is required, it seems, but there is also no discussion of ability to read and do math at a high school level either. You know: what those tests generally measure. (Dayton Daily News, 12/5/18)

3. Hatred of tests is on full display here, as the leaders of Wickliffe City Schools in Northeast Ohio tell us bluntly. These guys have a new plan to get their students “future ready” without relying on the pesky tests. It is not, in my estimation, as unique or as foolproof as supe wants us to believe. But far be it from me to ruin a perfectly formed-fantasy. (Willoughby News Herald, 12/2/18)

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Editor’s note: On Tuesday, November 27, the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Federation of Teachers co-sponsored an event called “The 2018 Elections: What Do They Mean for American Education?” Moderated by Michelle Ringuette, assistant to the president for labor, government & political affairs at the American Federation of Teachers, the panel featured Domingo Morel, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and the Albert Shanker Institute, and Fordham Insitute president Michael Petrilli. Each participant delivered an opening statement. Here is Mike’s.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that charged school district officials in various cities with attempting to stall the growth of school choice by refusing to sell vacant properties to charter schools, or to private schools that accept vouchers.

The paper didn’t mention any Ohio cities, but the story is regrettably similar here. In a 2016 survey of principals from high-performing Ohio charters, nearly half of respondents noted that local public school districts are generally uncooperative when it comes to making buildings and facilities available. Many leaders speculated that they were denied buildings specifically because they were viewed as competition. About 60 percent of them believed that enforcing the Ohio statute that requires traditional districts to offer unused buildings to charters would be a “very effective” way to improve the charter sector.

The state law they are referring to requires traditional districts to offer unused school facilities[1] for lease or sale to charter schools, college-preparatory boarding schools, and STEM schools—all schools of choice—before they are able to sell to anyone else. The provision is commonly known as “right of first refusal,” and Ohio’s version requires districts to offer the facility for a price that’s no higher than the appraised fair market value. The law also requires that districts give priority to high-performing charters that are located within district boundaries.  

Someone unfamiliar with school choice dynamics in Ohio might read the law and assume it circumvents many of the issues found in the Wall Street Journal analysis. And sometimes, that is indeed the case. Just last spring, the Graham Family of Schools successfully purchased two buildings from the Columbus Board of Education. Such deals are positive for all parties involved: Districts make money from the sale and decrease their annual maintenance costs, while public charter schools are able to teach their students in publicly-funded, purpose-built school buildings.

Unfortunately, things don’t always go this smoothly. Ohio districts don’t usually flout the law outright by selling to entities other than charters, or by engaging in price-gouging. Instead, they’re simply hanging onto all their underutilized buildings, even when it’s financially irresponsible to do so. From the taxpayer’s perspective, this is even worse.

Columbus City Schools (CCS) is a prime example. In recent weeks, the district has been waffling about whether to close or consolidate some school buildings. School closures are always complicated, and it’s understandable that families with students attending the schools slated for closure would protest. But a Facilities Task Force made up community and business leaders was recently told that many of these buildings are “under-enrolled, underutilized, in poor condition, and unpopular among students.” The Columbus Dispatch put it plainly: “The district has too few students in too many buildings. This isn’t a matter only of wasting money; it hurts programs, especially at the high-school level, when there aren’t enough students to justify certain classes or to field strong extracurricular programs.” Closing and consolidating these schools and then selling the vacant buildings would save the district daily operating and long-term maintenance costs—the “sticky,” fixed costs that districts so often worry about in the face of flat or declining enrollments. And it would bring an infusion of cash. Unfortunately, the Columbus Board of Education opted to ignore the task force’s recommendations and kept all the half-empty schools open, with only minor changes to attendance boundaries to alleviate a few of the most egregious inefficiencies.

Similar occurrences have happened in Cleveland. In 2016 the Cleveland school district opted to demolish the “architecturally impressive” Jesse Owens facility that previously housed the district’s Sunbeam School and build a brand new site right next door rather than sell the building to a developer who wanted to preserve the building and renovate the interior into apartments. The district offered a few reasons for why it opted to demolish the building instead of selling it for a profit, including that they would have had to offer it to a charter school before they could sell it to the developer, and that was “a course the district did not want to pursue.” Meanwhile, back in 2011, the district avoided offering thirty closed buildings to charters by tearing some of them down, using others for storage, and classifying the rest with terms like “unusable.”  

The Dispatch editorial board called out the Columbus Board of Education for a lack of leadership in regard to their half-empty buildings. The district’s actions certainly fall into the category of financially unsound decision-making. But just like in Cleveland, they are also the definition of lose-lose: The district continues to bleed money it could be saving, charters continue to lack adequate facilities, and students in both school systems lose out. Students, families, and taxpayers deserve much better.

[1] Unused facilities are defined as those that have been used for school operations but have not been used in that capacity for two years.

1. Fordham’s own Aaron Churchill had an op-ed in the Beacon-Journal over the weekend. What’s he talking about? Oh nothing much, really. Only about the large-scale failure of many Ohio schools to properly educate their students for future success, and how much worse that’s going to get if Ohio sticks with its plan to make diplomas into participation awards without any relevance to academic ability. (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/1/18)

2. An interesting piece in the Toledo Blade this weekend goes from the premise that students in district schools appear to be doing “just as well” as students in local charter schools. Data is provided. This is a subtly different take on the topic of comparing schools than you normally see in the big city news outlets in Ohio (although the usual kudos for Toledo School of the Arts apply here of course). That subtlety was not lost on Toledo City Schools superintendent Romules Durant, and he responded to it as you might expect. Fascinating. (Toledo Blade, 12/1/18)

3. Speaking of charter schools, the Communities in Schools program here in central Ohio, which provides support services for students with everything from food insecurity to college application completion, also serves kids in the Graham Family of charter schools. And the program is looking to grow further. Nice. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/2/18)

4. Finally today, tiny Jefferson Township Local Schools continues to suffer from staffing woes months into the school year. While the main issue is ultimately painted as a shortage of substitutes (or, should I say, a shortage of cash to pay highly enough to lure subs away from the tonier Dayton ‘burbs), I personally was struck by the supe’s first comment: “If every (staffer) reports every day, we’re in pretty good shape.” Step One… (Dayton Daily News, 12/2/18)

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American education lost two great leaders last week with the passing of George H.W. Bush and Harold O. Levy.

It’s likely they never even met, as they came from different worlds and moved through the education solar system on different orbits. They belonged to different political parties and hailed from different generations. Yet their contributions to the betterment of K-12 education in the United States were both large and in interesting ways parallel.

Bush was a New England aristocrat turned Texas oilman turned politician and government official. Save for his time as ambassador to the United Nations, he never lived in New York. Levy, on the other hand, was a quintessential New Yorker, the son of Jewish refugees, a Wall Street lawyer who ultimately became the city’s schools chancellor and then head of an important private foundation.

Yet each was, in his way, an education leader, a visionary even, a champion of both excellence and equity, the head of large enterprises, and the source of a durable and influential legacy.

In 1988, campaigning in New Hampshire, Bush declared before a high-school audience that “I want to be the education president.” No U.S. president nor (to my knowledge) serious candidate had ever before said anything of the sort. Education wasn’t the business of the federal government—isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution. But Bush had served as Reagan’s vice president when A Nation at Risk emerged. Within months of its publication, he was hosting the governors for lobsters and education talk at Kennebunkport, along with education secretary Ted Bell. Though a number of governors, especially in the south, were already at work on boosting the educational performance of their states, there was much grumping at the Maine confab about the dearth of comparable state-level data on education performance and the absence of any sort of overall strategy for addressing the country’s level of education risk. Bush took it in—and asked Bell to do what he could. Among other things, this led to the infamous “wall chart” that paved the way for state-level NAEP testing a few years later.

In Bush’s second term as VP, Bill Bennett was education secretary and ideas began to fly for ways to tackle the education problem. The National Governors Association, led by Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, launched a five-year initiative to examine the problem and possible solutions to it. Bush himself began to visit schools and immerse himself more deeply. (While working with Bennett, I once had the thrill of accompanying the VP and Barbara Bush on Air Force 2 on a school-visit trip.) Yet there was still no coherent national strategy, certainly nothing that linked state and federal actions.

When Bush reached the Oval Office on January 20, 1989, one of his first moves was to summon the governors to an education “summit.” This was only the third time any president had convened such an extraordinary session—both Roosevelts had done so on other issues—and the first time that education was the topic.

What emerged from that September’s gathering, which prominently included Arkansas’s Bill Clinton and was orchestrated by talented White House staffers, was a joint declaration of “national education goals” for the year 2000. It was overly ambitious to be sure, almost naively so, yet in the wake of the Charlottesville summit came the sequence of events that dominated American K-12 education policy and practice for a quarter century. It led to Bush’s own “America 2000” plan (crafted largely by education secretary Lamar Alexander), followed by Bill Clinton and Dick Riley and “Goals 2000,” as well as 1994’s Improving America’s Schools Act, followed by No Child Left Behind and all that was linked to it under Bush 43 and Barack Obama. One could make a pretty good case that 2015’s ESSA legislation (also crafted by Alexander) marked a sort of return to “America 2000,” albeit with many residual elements of NCLB.

Obviously, George H.W. Bush wasn’t solely responsible for all of this. If you wanted to minimize his contribution, you’d say he caught a wave that was already headed ashore. But that’s not right. I see him as a guy who jumped onto a slow-moving vehicle that had no particular destination and both pressed the accelerator and grabbed the wheel. (Recall how much he liked to take the tiller of a speedboat.) He also had, if not a precise end point in mind, at least a clear rationale for the direction in which he was steering. Consider this from his 1990 State of the Union address:

[T]he most important competitiveness program of all is one which improves education in America. When some of our students actually have trouble locating America on a map of the world, it is time for us to map a new approach to education. We must reward excellence and cut through bureaucracy. We must help schools that need help the most. We must give choice to parents, students, teachers, and principals; and we must hold all concerned accountable. In education, we cannot tolerate mediocrity. I want to cut that dropout rate and make America a more literate nation, because what it really comes down to is this: The longer our graduation lines are today, the shorter our unemployment lines will be tomorrow.

So, tonight I’m proposing the following initiatives: the beginning of a $500 million program to reward America’s best schools, merit schools; the creation of special Presidential awards for the best teachers in every State, because excellence should be rewarded; the establishment of a new program of National Science Scholars, one each year for every Member of the House and Senate, to give this generation of students a special incentive to excel in science and mathematics; the expanded use of magnet schools, which give families and students greater choice; and a new program to encourage alternative certification, which will let talented people from all fields teach in our classrooms. I’ve said I’d like to be the “Education President.”  And tonight, I’d ask you to join me by becoming the “Education Congress.”

Thank you, President Bush. May you rest in peace and may your contributions to the renewal of American education receive the recognition and accolades they deserve.

***

Harold Levy died far too young and from an especially cruel disease. You would do well to view an exceptional tribute to him in October 2017—at a gala celebration of his life that he was present to appreciate—by Bard College president Leon Botstein, whose words also evoke some of what it was like to work with the brilliant, impatient and forward-looking chancellor.  I had the sad pleasure of visiting with Harold a few months ago; he wasn’t able to speak but proudly led me to his desk so I could view on his computer screen a video-recording of that entire marvelous event.

While in the role of New York City schools chancellor—for less than two years between 2000 and 2002—he launched the terrific Teaching Fellows program to bring able but unconventional people into the city’s classrooms. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he established three more selective-admission high schools. To forestall social promotion, he organized summer school for hundreds of thousands of students who had failed their regular classes. He pioneered “early college high schools” (one of them with Botstein’s Bard) to give able kids a faster track into higher education. He strengthened the student information system, hacked at regulations, and outsourced the management of failing schools, all the while working with the city’s powerful teacher union on a new contract that significantly boosted pay and thereby drew many more qualified applicants to seek instructional posts in the district.

In 2002, with the arrival in City Hall of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, Levy returned to the private sector but didn’t depart the education scene. First with the Kaplan Educational Foundation and then with a venture capital firm that invested in schools and education technology, he stayed interested and involved. This led in 2014 to his final position, as head of the D.C.-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, where in just a few years he turned what had been a quiet, almost invisible philanthropy into the country’s most consequential player in the realm of education for smart poor kids. The Foundation’s signature program is a suite of scholarships that enable thousands of such youngsters to get a topnotch high school and college education.

The scholarships weren’t new. But under Levy’s leadership and propelled by his considerable energy and personal charisma, the Foundation also became a major source of support for policy initiatives in the gifted-education space, research projects, and innumerable related ventures, such as the marvelous Sunday evening “From the Top” program, showcasing (on radio) outstanding young classical musicians. At least as important, it helped to boost the issue of educating gifted young people—and, especially, closing the “excellence gap” by creating opportunities for smart kids from poor and minority backgrounds—to the visibility that it deserves but historically had not received. Harold, one might say, was pretty good at getting attention and didn’t mind it one bit. But he was no show horse. He was a brilliant, tireless visionary and first-rate executive.

May you, too, rest in peace, Harold Levy, and may your heirs, successors, and followers continue to champion the missions that you expertly led us into.

***

Levy was a liberal, through and through, and a lifelong Democrat. Bush was an old-school conservative and for decades the embodiment of the GOP (which for a time he actually chaired). Each pursued many other issues and held multiple roles outside education. Both were wealthy men who didn’t need the headaches of public-education reform but turned to it because others needed better schools and opportunities. When they made that fateful turn, both shared key commitments and values. They sought to give kids more and better choices. They pursued high standards. They focused on achievement, on equalizing opportunity, and on excellence, all together and all at once. In time, they both painted with nationwide brushes and did so with persistence, imagination, the capacity to enlist others, and the ability to get lots and lots of others to understand key problems and the importance of solving them.

At a time of anger, division, self-absorption and small-mindedness in so many places, it’s both refreshing and inspiring to remind ourselves that it doesn’t have to be that way and to recall two great Americans who embodied that abiding truth.

Online charter proves a great fit for Gahanna student

Vanessa McCoy, an Ohio Connections Academy (OCA) graduate, wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the Dispatch recently. McCoy explains why she enrolled in OCA and the flexibility it afforded her.

Enrollment doubles at Sandusky’s only charter school

Monroe Preparatory Academy, Sandusky’s only charter public school, has experienced significant growth since relocating to its current location this spring. According to Erik Thorson, the school administrator, enrollment at the K-6 school has doubled and plans are in the works to add seventh- and eighth-grade classes.

ODE releases charter school sponsor ratings

A couple of weeks ago, the Ohio Department of Education released sponsor ratings for the 2017-2018 school year. The ratings, a function of Ohio’s sponsor evaluation system, categorized more than half of Ohio’s charter sponsors as “effective.” The Dayton Daily News digs into the details and gets reactions to the ratings.

Stop trying to claim charters “steal” money from traditional public schools

Christian Barnard, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, recently published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner in which he explains that charters don’t “steal” money from districts. In fact, in terms of per-pupil spending, Barnard argues that the opposite is true when we consider the funding districts receive for declining enrollment aid.

Direct funding for schools of choice

The Fordham Institute recently released a policy proposal arguing that Ohio should fund school choice programs directly from state foundation funding rather than via deductions from traditional public schools. Learn more here.

1. We start today with some very nice coverage of yesterday’s Fordham-hosted panel event on the topic of the Janus Supreme Court decision and its possible effects on education in Ohio. Good event with some important and interesting discussion. Full video forthcoming, y’all. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/29/18). Scant hours after our own Chad Aldis finished moderating that discussion, he was off to the Statehouse to testify on the topic of funding for online schools. Here is coverage of yesterday’s meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on E-School Funding, including some quotes from Chad. His full written remarks are here, if you are so inclined. (Gongwer Ohio, 11/29/18) In between, Chad was on the phone with the Enquirer’s Jackie Borchardt, talking about his most favorite of recent subjects: Ohio’s War on Knowing Stuff. Here is her coverage of the state’s current efforts to lower graduation requirements to absolute rock bottom. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 11/29/18) And while the quotes used in this Canton Rep editorial on same topic came from Chad on another, equally-busy day, they are still as fresh and biting (and correct) as ever. Editors in Canton opined in agreement. Whew! (Canton Repository, 11/30/18)

2. Here is a story about preschool providers which has some interesting parallels to Ohio’s War on Knowing Stuff. As you may know, there is a crap ton of interest in, support for, and money being thrown at expanding pre-K education in Ohio and elsewhere. Expanding the number of seats available, providing tuition support for families who need it, and increasing quality of sites are all in the mix. The latter item is covered in this piece from Cincinnati, in which a daycare operator has an unmitigated freak out (ably aided by the journalist) regarding an upcoming deadline for finalizing its quality rating. As it turns out, it was simply a matter of filling out paperwork to document the procedures already in place, but that revelation doesn’t end the freakout. The prospect of dead or damaged babies is lobbed toward the end of the story, wondering if other providers will be able to jump through all the proper hoops in time for the Massive Looming Deadline™…which is now more than two years away. (And, I believe, has been in the works for at least two years previous.) The test-based graduation requirements which Ohio’s schools are now trying to wriggle out from under had a lead time of nearly five years, and included an extra year when they were undercut for the Class of 2018 last year. Wonder what will happen if these daycares can’t make their very short Massive Looming Deadline™?  Link (WCPO-TV, Cincinnati, 11/29/18) Sticking in Cincy for a moment, another Queen City TV station reports that enrollment in Cincinnati City Schools is growing steadily. New students are arriving every week. Can you guess from where? (WKRC-TV, Cincinnati, 11/29/18)

3. Part editorial, part journalism, part civics lesson, and all cranky, this piece looks at the still-undecided election for District 2 representative to the Ohio Board of Education. The author doesn’t seem to care much for the current front-runner, but it is her stunning victory via no-campaign campaigning that really rankles and he points in all directions for how this situation came to be. While the margin is currently too close to call and a recount continues, I think dude is remiss in not noting just how few ballots were actually cast in this race among seven candidates. Surely that is important? Additionally important: he makes an excellent argument for getting rid of the elected board seats and going full-appointed. Or maybe even eliminating the state board entirely. (Toledo Blade, 11/29/18)

4. Despite it being too big, too expensive, and in need of a ton of deferred maintenance, Dayton City Schools is going to remain in its current administration building for a good while longer, despite repeated announcements of an imminent move. Why? Because their new digs also needs extensive and expensive refurbishing before it is properly habitable. It’s just money, right? (Dayton Daily News, 11/29/18)

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