1. While LeBron James is leaving Northeast Ohio for a new job out west, his family foundation is plowing ahead with its support of the new I Promise School in Akron. He promises to be there on opening day in August. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/3/18)
    
2. Meanwhile, in Lorain, bellyaching from the elected board continues as they dither on the topic of a levy. Oh, and there’s something about Ariana Grande in here too. (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 7/3/18)
    
3. Speaking of money, the premature shut down of ECOT early this year turned off the spigot of financial “clawback” of state funding from the school to the state which had been underway. Really? Whoda thunk it? Six months later, a new source of money may have been identified. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/3/18) Back in the real world, here’s an update on the state’s effort to account for the dissemination of former ECOT students. Six months after closing, 2,300 former ECOTters remain unaccounted for. Some folks say this is not unusual because of the frequent turnover in online schools in general and because some 1,000 of these unaccounted students are technically adults – 18 or over – who would likely not bother finding another school to attend. Haters say otherwise. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/5/18)
    
4. Editors in Toledo, opining once again about education, say that the secret to better education is attendance. Because this is Toledo, of course, they have to make sure to note that this is actual attendance, not just data which says a student attended. (Toledo Blade, 7/5/18)
    
5. Finally today: Kids learning proverbs. “You can’t fight City Hall,” so the saying goes. We’ll see if Mentor High School’s hockey team can get their storage space back after being kicked out of the rink owned by the City of Mentor. (Willoughby News-Herald, 7/5/18) “Cheaters never prosper” is a saying that has come true for the National Academic Championship team from Eastern Elementary School in Lexington, Ohio. The team was belatedly declared co-champs after initially losing their competition to a team who used an illegal player from a *gasp* private school. Is nothing sacred, you guys? (Mansfield News Journal, 7/4/18)

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The recent Janus ruling was one of the most significant by the Supreme Court in years, especially with regard to education. I thought it was the right outcome, though I’d urge caution to fellow conservatives who may be celebrating the unions’ demise. The high court’s decision to strike down agency fees will surely result in fewer members and less money, but unions will still have collective bargaining rights and, as a result, continued influence in education politics at the local level.

This is important to note because, though Janus will surely tilt the scales toward reform when it comes to state policy, it’s not going to do much to help school districts run more efficiently or effectively. To do that, you need to limit collective bargaining, which is either mandated or permissible in all but seven states. Collective bargaining agreements (CBA) cover a remarkably broad range of items, though the arcane nature of what’s inside many of them contributes to the lack of nuance in the larger arguments at play about the pros and cons of public-sector unions.

To get a better sense of this, I thought it might be helpful to provide a behind-the-scenes look into collective bargaining in Indiana while I was at the state’s department of education. Prior to 2011, teachers unions there had negotiated almost anything under the sun. It was a veritable free-for-all, ranging from wages and benefits to teaching load and working conditions. Though some might argue this is about voices being heard, we found that it was more about special treatment and other processes that had little to do with agency and everything to do with ensuring that adult interests were prioritized ahead of student needs.

These processes handcuffed district superintendents across the state, who reached out to us lamenting the unworkable constraints within their CBAs. In response to these complaints, our legal team undertook the Herculean task of reviewing almost fifty of them. The product was a ten-page report that laid bare the prohibitive—and often nonsensical—barriers that were embedded in these contracts. Here are ten examples of provisions that were in place at the time, presented verbatim:

1. During a Reduction in Force, a teacher with tied seniority will be dismissed based on the sum of the last four digits of the social security number. The higher sum of the two is granted the greater seniority.
2. Principals have no authority to appoint teachers to classrooms. Teachers choose their own classroom assignments based on seniority. Each teacher submits to the Board their top three choices. The Board shall then work down the seniority list in assigning classes. If a less senior teacher prefers a class already requested by a more senior teacher, the Board shall move on to the less senior teacher’s second preference, and so on, until all teachers receive their most desired available pick. Then, the Board shall repeat for two more cycles to assign as many teachers as possible to their respective preferences.
3. No more than five hours a school year may be used for teacher’s meetings. Teachers must have ten days notice of the meeting.
4. Classroom instruction conducted via technology shall not be used to replace teachers.
5. Teachers and students must be protected from students and non-student rowdies and troublemakers, hostile parents, and others who disrupt the school.
6. Teachers hired before 2008 pay only $1.00 for health insurance.
7. If a teacher's personnel file is examined by an administrator, the file shall contain a record indicating who reviewed it, the date reviewed, and the reason for such review.
8. Special education teachers and teachers who have special education students shall not be evaluated based on the achievement of goals and/or objectives contained in the individual student's IEP.
9. Non-permanent teachers must be fired twice. Non-permanent teachers are dismissed through procedures established in the contract, then granted protections in state law.
10. All carpet should be vacuumed using a filtration method that filters at greater than 99 percent efficient at 0.3 micron and that prevents particulates from entering the workspace. As vacuum cleaners are replaced they will be replaced with vacuums that can accommodate HEPA filtration.

Now imagine nine more pages of analogous provisions. In many states, stipulations like these tend to make their way into contracts with scant public scrutiny, the reasons for which are many. When districts are strapped for cash, local school boards might acquiesce to a whole host of other items. Over time, these concessions contribute to the “culture of can’t.” This was certainly the case in Indiana. The lengths of these CBAs were also an impediment; we even had a district with a ten-year contract! It’s difficult enough for districts to anticipate their financial situation from one legislative session to the next, let alone a decade down the road.

Armed with this information, we shared our report with legislative leaders. This set the wheels in motion for our collective bargaining reforms, which among other things limited bargaining to wages and wage-related benefits and the length of any agreement to a budget biennium.

I still believe that there is a place for collective bargaining, but I’m incredulous to those who believe this means protecting it as it currently exists. It might make sense for teachers unions to advocate for core issues like wages and benefits, but I question whether any other item (the number of support staff, school climate, etc.) should be codified in a CBA. In fact, as we did in Indiana, districts and students would be better served if the bulk of these issues were permissible—but not required—in bargaining. Better yet, these items could be discussed at the table and put in board and district policy rather than in the master agreement. Doing so would provide leaders greater flexibility in responding to the needs of their students.

The Janus verdict was a momentous one, but let’s not lose sight of the power and influence unions will continue to exert because of collective bargaining. States that have not reined it in will continue to have a hard time dismissing ineffective teachers or allocating teachers across schools. Until that’s addressed, there’s little cause for celebration. For too many of our students, collective bargaining in education continues to be a bad deal.

Since 2012, Tennessee has taken a unique approach to intervening in struggling schools. With the goal of turning around the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the state (known as priority schools), officials introduced two separate models: the Achievement School District (ASD) and Innovation Zones (iZones). The ASD is a state-run district that directly manages some priority schools and turns others over to select charter management organizations. iZones, on the other hand, are subsets of priority schools that remain under district control but are granted greater autonomy and financial support to implement interventions. There are four districts that contain iZones: Shelby County Schools (Memphis), Metro-Nashville Public Schools, Hamilton County Schools (Chattanooga), and Knox County Schools (Knoxville). The remaining priority schools weren’t included in either of these initiatives, effectively creating a comparison group.

Research teams from Vanderbilt University and the University of Kentucky have kept a close eye on both initiatives. In 2015, they published an evaluation of the ASD and iZone schools after three years of implementation. They found that, while ASD schools did not improve any more or less than other priority schools, iZone schools produced moderate to large positive effects on student test scores. A separate study also found that both initiatives had high rates of teacher turnover, but that the numbers were higher in ASD than iZone schools.

Now a recently published study examines the impacts of both initiatives after five years of implementation. To complete their evaluation, the researchers examined student- and teacher-level demographic data, test scores on state assessments, and school enrollment data from 2006—07 through 2016—17. They then compared changes in test scores after reforms were initiated with changes in test scores in priority schools that weren’t part of the ASD or iZones.

The five-year findings are similar to the results of the three-year evaluation. After five years, iZone schools showed moderate to large positive and statistically significant effects on reading, math, and science test scores. These results that suggest iZone schools were able to sustain their early success. ASD schools, on the other hand, showed insignificant results across all three subjects—that is, they did not gain more or less than non-ASD or iZone priority schools. Since the ASD includes recent cohorts of schools that were only exposed to one to three years of reform, the researchers also reviewed the data using only the first two cohorts of schools, those overseen by the ASD for four or five years. However, they found that effects were still not statistically significant in any subject.

The researchers also took their analysis a step further by comparing the iZone’s positive results to other turnaround results across the country. They found that, in reading, iZone gains of 0.14 standard deviations were similar to those that occurred under the School Redesign Grants model in Massachusetts and the state takeover of Lawrence Public Schools. In math, iZone effects ranging between 0.16 and 0.20 standard deviations were similar to gains achieved in Philadelphia’s restructured schools. 

Overall the results for ASD schools were disappointing, but the findings of this brief and the gains made by iZone schools are a valuable addition to existing school turnaround research.

SOURCE: Lam Pham, Gary T. Henry, Ron Zimmer, Adam Kho, “School Turnaround After Five Years: An Extended Evaluation of Tennessee’s Achievement School District and Local Innovation Zones,” Tennessee Education Research Alliance (June 2018). 

If you’re looking for ideas about the future of the education system, there is no shortage on YouTube, where scholars and charlatans alike seek to redpill you with ideas of often dubious merit. Brilliant ones really do exist, though, and my personal favorite is by the former dean of the University of Oklahoma Honors College, David Ray. (Full disclosure: I attended the University of Oklahoma for a couple of years and had a class with Dr. Ray, although they would have never let me near the Honors College.)

Dr. Ray’s lecture raises important questions about the value of education, the structural changes happening in the economy, recent social and cultural trends, and how these all interact. His concluding thoughts are refreshingly unsatisfying, and at the beginning of the talk he warns the audience, “You will be annoyed.” Bare of the hubris of the typical self-proclaimed “thought leader,” Dr. Ray’s TedTalk offers a lot of wisdom, but it is what he says about education technology and student motivation that I keep going back to.

Dr. Ray reflects frankly on his nearly forty years of experience teaching undergraduates with a range of motivation, and his take on the importance of student motivation is a minor but consequential part of a talk. Citing the book Academically Adrift, he points out that students admit to studying much less than they did a few decades ago. This withering appetite for knowledge is reflected in Dr. Ray’s own syllabuses: Whereas in the past he would assign nine books for a course, today’s students expect a single textbook accompanied by lectures that “talk about the book,” as if there should be no expectation that students have done their readings prior to class. Though many students may be working hard at other things—taking multiple jobs to support families or to pay for ever higher tuition—Dr. Ray argues convincingly that students are working much less on their studies than in the past. Of course some students are highly motivated and still put in the academic work necessary for a real education. “These students are terrific,” Dr. Ray says, “but they are a minority.”

Dr. Ray points out that his university has “a required freshman comp sequence, an aggressive expository writing program, two different writing centers, and several professional colleges—architecture, management, and engineering—that have added a writing course,” yet many still graduate unable to write well. For many students, the problem is not lack of access, but lack of uptake.

Looming over Dr. Ray’s argument are the macroeconomic trends that he believes are shaping higher education and the job market students face after graduation. The figure reproduced below is, according to Dr. Ray, “the single most important graph I’ve ever seen.” It shows that more recent economic recoveries (represented by the black, brown, and red lines) have been very slow and largely “jobless.” When Dr. Ray’s gave his lecture in 2014, the U.S. still hadn’t recovered the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession, which began almost five and a half years earlier. Slower recoveries mean not only pain for workers—whether they have a credential or not—but also shrunken budgets for things like education.

In this bleak economic context, a college degree seems even more necessary to many families. But with fewer resources to devote to education, they are having a hard time paying tuition, and student debt has grown dramatically. “In the best American way,” Dr. Ray offers, “we look to technology as a way to be more efficient.” The catch, however, is that, without student motivation, technology helps only so much.

The incredible technologies of the twenty-first century have made humanity’s knowledge base available to almost everyone, and tools that have been created just in the past few years—massive open online courses (MOOCs), YouTube tutorials, online coding modules, and others—have made many aspects of an education free and accessible to anyone with a smartphone or a library card. Dr. Ray extols the promise of education platforms that can reach millions of students at zero cost to the student, such as Khan Academy and the MOOC. Yet, he admits that the latter “actually didn’t work very well. It worked fairly well for some students, the motivated students. But the unmotivated students didn’t finish.”

He suggests that, eventually, “market realities”—and here he points at the graph—“will motivate [students], usually after the fact and very harshly.” But will they? For a student, market realities can seem very far off, and this is especially true for middle school and high school students who must build the foundational skills that prepare them to be successful in college. Once these opportunities have been missed or someone is out of school, catching up can be costly and, for adults, disruptive to family and career. A reason our country continues to experience poor educational outcomes is precisely that distant market realities aren’t enough to motivate students, who may never acquire the skills and knowledge needed for a successful, independent adulthood.

Yet an implication of Dr. Ray’s observations about student motivation and the potential of ed tech is that more motivated students will take better advantage of new technologies and educational opportunities. Inspired by Dr. Ray’s lecture, I have been researching student motivation for the past few years, and in a recent article in Education Next, my colleague Mike Petrilli and I present some of our takeaways from this research. In the article, we argue that education policy must help bridge the gap between student effort and reward, motivating our young people to invest in themselves early on. And we present evidence that better educational policies can be used to spur student motivation, and get students to contribute more effort. More work on this issue needs to be done, but our hope is that, with the plentiful educational resources of our internet age, better motivated students will zoom ahead farther than we could have imagined.

The recent Fordham Institute study on self-discipline and Catholic education ought to surprise no one. It finds that students in Catholic schools are more likely, regardless of demographics, to exhibit self-control and are, according to teachers, less likely to act out and be disruptive. The data do not allow for an experimental research design. But it represents more compelling evidence than is on offer for other pillars of education reformers’ faith, like higher standards and test-based teacher evaluation. The strongest hypothesis for why Catholic school students are better behaved: Their teachers appeal to a higher authority, in whom parents trust.

Such a notion may be somewhat foreign to technocratic education reformers, who—especially on school discipline—adhere to a secularized gospel of social justice. But this new evidence of a thing previously unseen in the research literature ought to scramble the traditional orthodoxies on school discipline and school choice.

For one, it raises the question of whether the expansion of charter schools has really been a net-positive for urban students of color. Charter school critics traditionally focus on the alleged, but broadly undemonstrated, harm that charters do to traditional public schools. But as research conducted by my former colleagues Andrew Kelly and Michael McShane has demonstrated, charter sector expansion has come at a grave cost to urban Catholic schools. Reformers have expressed few qualms about this; after all, the charter school test scores were good. But as this study reminds us, there is more to a quality education than short-term test-score effects.

I was poignantly reminded of this the other month when I traveled down to New Orleans to speak to an Education Writers Association conference about “restorative justice.” My Airbnb hostess that weekend was Mrs. Brown, an African American soul-singer extraordinaire and mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter. So I asked her what she thought about New Orleans charter schools. She expressed deep discontent bordering on despair. But her anti-charter litany didn’t conform to the highly-stylized, leftist arguments about corporations privatizing public education. Her concerns could better be characterized as small-C conservative in spirit.

To Mrs. Brown, charters had severed the connection between the schools and the community. Students were no longer being taught by their down-the-block neighbors, who had taught their older siblings and sometimes even their parents. Schools were no longer centers of neighborhood life. Now they were staffed by twenty-something Teach For America types, who try as they might were totally out of touch with the community, and whose commitment to “social justice” came across as condescending. Students at her daughter’s old school were not being taught handwriting or reading books. Everything was geared toward higher performance on standardized tests. To Mrs. Brown, New Orleans charter schools represented the latest iteration in structural racism perpetuated by a new generation of oppressors. Finally fed up, she did what unfortunately few urban parents have the financial means to do—withdrew her daughter and sent her to a Catholic school.

Because Mrs. Brown lamented that many in her daughter’s generation had little respect for authority, I expected her to be on the hawkish side of the school discipline debate. She was not. She argued that charter schools default to suspensions because their twenty-something teachers don’t have the skills to understand their students. But then she pivoted to a different lament: Because one parent complained and threatened a lawsuit, teachers at an old and venerable Catholic school were no longer permitted to administer corporal punishment.

At first, I didn’t see how this contradiction could be resolved. How could she both oppose school suspensions and bemoan the discontinuation of corporal punishment? But as we continued to converse, her perspective and values became clear: It all comes down to trust. If you don’t trust the adults at a school—if you don’t think they’re of your community and hold your values, if you suspect that they might be trying to hold your child down—then you don’t trust them to even send a kid home for a few days. But if you do trust them, if they come from your community, respect and reflect your values, and are trying to elevate your child toward something higher—then you’d trust them, even with the rod.

These values, however, are not shared by mainstream education reformers. Indeed, much of today’s education reform movement seems almost intentionally designed to make this vision of social trust deteriorate. In the effort to regulate our way toward charter schools with higher test scores, reformers may be marginalizing minority and community-led charter schools in favor of networks led by out-of-touch social justice elitists.

And today’s discipline reformers routinely tell students and parents that their teachers’ authority must not be trusted because it is tainted by racial bias. The more that message is broadcast, the more it will be believed. The more it is believed, the less the schools will be trusted. That breeds a vicious cycle in which we encourage students to blame their teachers when they act out of line—a surefire recipe for destroying self-discipline.

Policymakers can fight against this vicious cycle by promoting policies that place greater trust in parents and teachers. Policymakers ought to provide parents with education savings accounts and give them the freedom to choose schools that reflect values that education reformers might not necessarily share (faith) and offer value-propositions that standardized tests can’t measure (self-discipline). Activists ought to stop advancing the argument that public schools are fundamentally and irredeemably guilty of the sin of institutional racism.

To be sure, humans are fallen creatures. Adults often fall short. But children always require instruction to walk a proper path. Unfortunately, something has gone very wrong when parents no longer trust their schools—indeed are being told not to trust their schools. When trust decays this far, parents—like Mrs. Brown—ought to be afforded recourse to schools that appeal directly to a higher authority.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

1. Remember what we were saying last week about the downbeat assessment of the passage of a bill that would, among other things, change many facets of e-school accountability? Well, “downbeat” appears to have given way to outright pessimism over the weekend, with editors in Columbus… (Columbus Dispatch, 6/30/18) …and editors in Akron opining strongly on the topic. (Akron Beacon Journal, 7/1/18)
    
2. Conversely, laurels are in the offing in regard to recently-passed legislation making changes to the state’s teacher evaluation system. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/1/18)
    
3. Speaking of teachers, contract negotiations are underway in Youngstown, for the first time since the district began operating under the aegis of a CEO-style Academic Distress Commission. Almost everyone interviewed in this piece expresses optimism for the process, including some folks whose opinion on the matter should probably not be included. Here’s hoping for a good process and outcome despite that. (Youngstown Vindicator, 7/1/18)
    
4. Here’s a nice look at what could be described as a behavioral health summer camp in Toledo – designed to help students with things like anger management and respecting boundaries. The most interesting part: the entire program consists only of charter school students. How’d that happen? Probably just an oversight. (Toledo Blade, 7/1/18)
    
5. Things got a little testy last week during a meeting of the task force looking into possible school closures in Columbus City Schools. Several members had questions for the administration regarding the surprise purchase of ECOT’s former headquarters building, what it meant for their work going forward, and, you know, what the heck they were thinking there. Administration folks declined to answer after a while. Nothin’ to see, I guess. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/29/18) Meanwhile, the school board was busy approving big tax breaks for two proposed development projects, including that one we talked about a couple of weeks ago that will benefit everyone except Columbus City Schools. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/29/18)

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In recent years, momentum has been building behind the idea that curriculum materials, including textbooks, represent a powerful lever for education reform. And yet, as the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli noted recently, no more than 10 or 15 percent of schools are using materials that have been found by outlets like EdReports to be high-quality and aligned to state standards. Why, Petrilli asked, are these numbers so low?

As I write in a new Brookings Institution report, The challenges of curriculum materials as a reform lever, there are many reasons why districts flunk this basic test.

First, school districts have complex, highly ceremonial practices when it comes to textbook adoptions. In the interviews my team conducted for the report, we found that virtually all districts have processes that involve a) one or more committees of teachers, b) evaluation of textbooks against complex rubrics, c) multi-week pilots, and d) one or more formal votes before reaching a final decision.

Second, even if districts adopt strong materials, that’s no guarantee that teachers will actually use them. The fact is that, while many teachers still use textbooks, large proportions of teachers use them as simply one resource among many. This finding is confirmed in both large, state- and nationally-representative surveys, as well as in our interviews of California teachers. In our sixty-seven interviews, no teachers said they used only the district-adopted textbook for their eighth grade mathematics instruction. Most teachers reported that the adopted book was inadequate in one of two ways—it lacked sufficient opportunity for students to practice foundational skills, or it lacked sufficient enrichment exercises to cover the more conceptual content in the standards.

Whatever the gap in the materials, teachers reported supplementing with lessons from old books or with materials they sourced from various websites on the internet. An illustrative quote from one of our teachers was “We have had to use additional resources. We can’t just settle on just using the [Textbook Title]. There isn’t enough quality in it in order to make it a full, 100 percent program. If you just used the book itself and nothing else, it wouldn’t be enough for them to learn the entire curriculum.” Given this view of textbooks, getting even the best-quality materials to be used with fidelity by teachers may be a challenge.

Teacher surveys suggest that textbooks may not be the main source of lessons for large proportions of teachers. For instance, a five-state study found that 72–80 percent of teachers (depending on subject) reported using instructional materials developed by them or their colleagues at their school at least once a week, as compared to 43–53 percent for materials created by external organizations such as publishers. Another national survey pegged the proportion using district-adopted textbooks once or more a week at about 62 percent. National data from the American Teacher Panel found greater than 90 percent of teachers reported using Google, and more than 70 percent reported using TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest, to find lessons. Regardless of the data source, it is clear that textbooks are widely used but far from the only source of curriculum in typical American classrooms.

To be sure, our teacher interviews did find certain district-level policies that seemed to be associated with better implementation of standards. For example, we found that teachers did need some sort of backbone for their curriculum, and having a formal textbook adoption provided that. Teachers in districts that did not formally adopt a curriculum, or that took a very long time after the standards were written to do so, complained about the lack of support and their concomitant inability to fully implement the standards. So districts should adopt something, and it’s possible that a stronger backbone—offered by a more effective textbook—would be used even more.

In addition, teachers said they needed specific kinds of professional development focused on both the textbook itself and the standards more generally. They were critical of publisher-provided professional development, which they said often focused on surface elements of the materials. And they often were unable to state specific changes that were called for by the standards, perhaps reflecting a lack of deep knowledge of the standards. In short, teachers in general would like to have both a formally adopted material and support to understand and implement the standards through professional learning opportunities.

There are reasons to be optimistic that curriculum materials, including textbooks, indeed represent a powerful lever for education reform. And there’s are promising steps states, districts, schools, and teachers can take to overcome the many challenges. But each of them requires serious, sustained engagement. Here’s hoping leaders are up to the task.

This essay is adapted from a Brookings Institution report, The challenges of curriculum materials as a reform lever.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1445654, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and an anonymous foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

According to Apoorva Panidapu’s parents, their thirteen-year old daughter is a joyous person both on the face of it and to the core. Her most noticeable features are her radiant smile and her remarkable speed (except when it comes to chores).

For her parents, it seems that Apoorva is always in perpetual motion as she tries to satisfy her insatiable curiosity. By three years old, she was devouring one book after another, her father remembers. Apoorva is just so excited about so many things, including drawing, music, writing, speech and debate, Kung Fu, problem solving, teaching others, and everything in between. She can recite more than two hundred digits of Pi rapid fire, and she can memorize a deck of cards in fifteen minutes. “We don’t need a calculator when she’s around, or RAM for that matter, because her speed and memory are super charged for puzzles, codes, and theorems,” her mother confesses with a shy smile.

Recently, viewers all over the world got to see Apoorva’s love of learning on NBC’s Genius Junior, where she shared her passion for mathematics and competition. Apoorva was her team’s 'Super Brain for Number Cruncher' in the preliminary, semi-final, and final rounds, solving strings of equations with squares, cubes, and cube roots in split seconds.

Apoorva won millions of hearts for her efforts, as viewers from around the world sent her messages expressing their awe, congratulations, and encouragement. What many viewers might not know is that Apoorva is not simply a “super brain,” but also an artist who is deeply committed to what she calls, “Art for Charity’s Sake.” With her kind heart and colorful brushstrokes, Apoorva is making the world a better place. She is the “Human Calculator” with a heart of gold…

***

“Five-hundred and eleven, five-hundred and twelve, five-hundred and thirteen. We have raised over five hundred dollars! That’s enough for ten goats,” my fourth-grade teacher exclaimed, her eyes sparkling with joy. I cheered and clapped along with my peers, delighted that my small fourth-grade class was able to make a difference for underprivileged people around the world. We did it just by making and selling bracelets, origami, and artwork at our school fair. That the goats would provide entire villages with milk, cheese, and butter day after day simply thrilled me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the class project even after it ended, wanting to make more art to buy more goats!

Throughout my life, my parents have always given me unconditional love and support. I think I took the incredible opportunities they provide me with for granted before participating in my school’s fundraiser. I started to truly realize how fortunate I am to be born into my family, when I thought about the lives of the people who did not have enough food to eat. For many African children, hunger is a constant, chronic pain. Right now, children are living on the brink of famine. Millions of girls and boys need emergency food assistance to survive. Death is prominent in many areas, and a devastating 20 percent of Africa’s children do not reach the age of six. I decided to continue to work with Save the Children so that I could do more to help families in Africa who lack such basic human necessities as food, clean water, medicine, shelter, and safety.

Because I was so saddened by this harsh situation, I wanted to take action to defend human rights. I connected with Save the Children and created a charity dedicated to the Child Hunger and Famine Relief Fund.

This fund aids children of Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya, by giving them sufficient food, water, and shelter. I am proud to be making a positive contribution, wanting nothing more than to make art for charity’s sake.

To launch my fundraiser, I created my own online art gallery, a platform for me to connect with people who would like to buy my art or make donations in support of my cause. Since I started my charity eight months ago, I’ve raised over $2,500. With Genius Junior airing, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some media attention, and I’m getting even more orders for my artwork.

As an avid artist, I’m most inspired when I’m painting and sketching in order to help improve the lives of others. I’m honored and humbled when I can support the children of Africa, and I plan to continue making art so that I can help people all around the world.

You can follow Apoorva on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Over the past month, local newspapers across Ohio have blasted headlines such as “Local schools lost millions to ECOT” and “Study: Now-defunct ECOT siphoned $2.6 million from Athens-area schools.” Taking a statewide view, the Columbus Dispatch ran a piece titled “Liberal group says ECOT diverted $591M from public schools in 6 years.” These news articles are all based on an analysis by Innovation Ohio—an anti-charter school group—that calculates the amount of state money that transferred from local districts to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) from 2012–13 to 2017–18, the year in which the behemoth online charter school closed.

First off, ECOT’s shameless political self-dealings were outrageous and have harmed the reputation of responsible charter public schools in Ohio. Its academic results were astonishingly bad, with abysmal value-added scores—estimates of its impact on student growth over time—being the clearest signs of educational dysfunction. (No, its low graduation rates are not compelling evidence as some claim; the school likely enrolled significant numbers of credit-deficient students, artificially “deflating” their graduation rate.)

All in all, count me sympathetic to those who are outraged and indignant at the school. But ECOT’s wrongs don’t make it right to distort how school funding works, and should work, in Ohio. Let’s review the ways in which Innovation Ohio, and the media that amplified its analysis, erred.

First off, ECOT didn’t nefariously “siphon” or “divert” funds from school districts. The online school was paid based on its student enrollment and in accordance with state laws and regulations (its legal and financial woes are based on alleged inabilities to report enrollment properly). Though ECOT may or may not have provided sufficient documentation—a question that remains in court—the districts that supposedly lost millions to the school surely did not enroll or educate ECOT students. As such, they have no rightful claim on the funds that were transferred to that school. So we arrive at a half-truth: Yes, districts saw their state funding reduced, but that’s because they lost students to ECOT—not because it somehow siphoned money from districts. Unfortunately, the fact that districts’ funding reductions are directly tied to losses in enrollment is conveniently omitted—as if dollars and cents are all that matter and students are not to be mentioned. A fairer headline would have read: “Thousands of students opted for ECOT, with millions in state aid following them.”  

Bear in mind three other critical points, often overlooked, about districts’ funding “losses.” First, although they forfeit state funding when students transfer, they don’t lose a dime in local tax revenue, since the latter amount depends not on enrollment but on property values and tax rates approved by district voters. Second, districts can lose state aid for any number of reasons, including when families decide to move. Yet we rarely, if ever, see headlines like: “Suburban districts have siphoned millions from Youngstown schools” or “Ohio districts lose funds as residents move to California.” Third, although uncomfortable, districts should work to reduce their costs in proportion to their revenue declines, as any other organization is expected to do.

Perhaps most troubling of all, Innovation Ohio’s distorted view of school funding reinforces a fundamentally misguided notion that funding policies should be tailored to the needs and wants of school districts, rather than those of parents and children. Speaking to the Athens News, the comments of congressional candidate Rick Neal are a perfect example: “That money [the funds transferred to ECOT] could have gone toward textbooks and supplies, school infrastructure, and teacher salaries—instead it went to line the pockets of ECOT scam artists." Setting aside the “scam artists” swipe—that’s an accountability matter—it’s flawed to think that districts’ purchasing desires or staffing wishes ought to drive funding policy. That line of thought places institutional interests at the forefront, with parents, students, and the broader taxpaying public pushed to the background.

In contrast, the smartest thinking on school funding puts families and students at the front of the line, under the notion that public dollars should be used to meet their needs and support their educational choices. When this lens is applied, we see that it’s appropriate to transfer funds from districts when students attend a school of their choice—and of course hold those schools accountable. Although we at Fordham would much prefer a “direct funding” method for charters (instead of state dollars passing through districts), it’s not wrong in principle to deduct money when students choose schools such as ECOT instead of a district school.

In the end, ECOT’s harshest critics are both right about the incompetence of the school and wrong on school funding policy. So here’s my concluding take on the whole debacle: Did state taxpayers get a return on their hard-earned dollars to educate ECOT students? In all likelihood, no. The costs of funding students who enrolled in ECOT probably outweighed the cumulative benefits of pupils attending that school. The school has already paid the penalty of closure—and further consequences may ensue. But let’s be frank: Ohio taxpayers continue to get a raw deal when they lavish tens of millions of dollars in public funding on inept schools. Ohio has any number of low-performing public schools, including dozens run by big-city districts, where students receive too little benefit for the price of public education.

If we as a state want to “get serious” about cracking down on lousy public schools, district or charter—or heck even trying to root out ineffective administrators and teachers, including those with tenure—in efforts to raise achievement and protect taxpayer money, count me in. What about groups like Innovation Ohio and others on the ECOT-bashing bandwagon: Are you game?