As people in Sciotoville tell it, their children historically have gotten Portsmouth’s leftovers—from textbooks to sports uniforms and more. That belief, they say, was the impetus for creating Sciotoville’s two start-up charter public schools.
As people in Sciotoville tell it, their children historically have gotten Portsmouth’s leftovers—from textbooks to sports uniforms and more. That belief, they say, was the impetus for creating Sciotoville’s two start-up charter public schools.
Sciotoville East Community Schools are unique among charter public schools in Ohio. Serving students and their families from Appalachia, they are two of the very small number of charters located outside of the state’s urban communities. They illustrate what’s possible when educators, families, and an entire community come together to save their schools by transforming them into public charter schools.
This profile of the staff, students, and families of one of these schools—Sciotoville Elementary Academy—will show you an entirely new view of what charters can do to meet the needs of their communities, and why we need more of them in rural areas.
The debate around Ohio’s school report cards continues to simmer. An outspoken critic since last year’s report card release, Representative Mike Duffey recently unveiled House Bill 591. His proposal would replace the state’s current report card framework, which includes A–F school ratings, with a “data dashboard” that displays an array of data—yet provides no school ratings or letter grades whatsoever. Representative Duffey has a few legitimate beefs with school report cards, some of which we agreed with in a paper published last year on improving state report cards. Unfortunately, he targets the state’s A–F grading system for removal without recognizing its strengths, akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Why A–F? Let’s take a look.
Reason 1: It’s intuitive
Virtually all of us received A–F grades during our educational experiences. And for good reason: They remain simple, intuitive tools for communicating academic achievement. The vast majority of high schools and colleges continue to use this traditional grading system, including highly respected central Ohio school districts, such as Bexley, Dublin, Upper Arlington, Westerville, and Worthington. So do first-rate institutions of higher education, like Case Western Reserve, Oberlin, and Ohio State University, to name just a few. A few schools have tried moving to other systems, but several had to reverse course after parents complained about their inability to comprehend their own child’s report cards. According to a 2016 Chicago Tribune article, one discombobulated parent said that her school’s newfangled report card “tells me nothing.” Like it or not, A–F grading is baked into our DNA and remains the clearest way to communicate educational performance, whether at a student, school, or district level. No other grading system—including no grades at all, as in a dashboard system—can match A–F on the basis of transparency to parents and the public.
Reason 2: It’s honest
Letter grades pull no punches: An A represents hard work, high-quality, and a job well done, while an F is a red flag that something is going wrong. In comparison to other alternatives, A–F provides the most forthright approach to providing feedback. Consider a few other possibilities. One option is to use descriptive ratings. But these can be ambiguous; for example, Ohio formerly gave out a “Continuous Improvement” report card rating. Those in education knew that this label was a euphemism for mediocre performance, yet to the general public it communicated little about school quality and could even wrongly suggest that a school was improving when it had a higher rating the prior year. Another option is to rate schools on tiers, but when it comes to chronically-low-performing schools, a designation of Tier 1—or is it Tier 4?—doesn’t provide the brutal honesty of an F letter grade. (Conversely, a Tier 4 rating doesn’t have quite the pizazz of a “We got an A!”) Lastly, dashboards provide a blizzard of numbers but no help or guidance on how to interpret them. It’s like handing ordinary citizens the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States and telling them to draw conclusions about the economy. Sure, the data are the data, but where does one even start when trying to make sense of it all?
At the end of the day, A–F grading remains the clearest, most honest way to convey school performance. In turn, it holds the most promise of engaging families and communities in celebrating well-earned success or urging changes when performance isn’t up to par.
Reason 3: It provides helpful pressure on schools
“A little pressure never hurt,” was a bit of advice I once received. That saying rings true in many areas of our lives, whether it’s getting a nudge from the boss or prodding a business to work a little harder for you. Similar principles apply in education. The best and most caring teachers put healthy pressure on their students to do their best. They check-up on homework, call on students during class, and set expectations and deadlines for projects. Likewise, districts and schools are apt to function a little better when facing some pressure to deliver results. Rigorous research by Princeton’s Cecilia Rouse and colleagues found that student achievement in Florida schools rose as a result of tougher accountability policies, including the introduction of A–F report cards under Governor Jeb Bush. Though that analysis spans the early to mid-2000s, Florida students continue to register impressive gains on national exams as state leaders have stayed the course on accountability (as has Mississippi, another state with A–F grading). To be sure, accountability policies shouldn’t be unfair, cruel, or excessively punitive. But Ohio also needs to maintain a transparent system that can spur improvements and guard against complacency.
* * *
Well-designed report cards put student learning at the center and convey results in clear ways to parents and the public. In devising solid report cards, half the battle is striking the right balance between student achievement and growth metrics. On this count, Ohio lawmakers have work ahead to revamp the state report card system. But the other half is finding an effective way to communicate results to parents and the general public. To their credit, Ohio and thirteen other states have chosen an approach that is intuitive and offers maximum honesty—an A–F system that everyone can comprehend. No other grading system offers the same level of transparency, and data dashboards as the primary mode of communicating results are the most opaque of all. With achievement in Ohio barely inching upwards, state legislators would be wrong to abandon a grading system that candidly depicts educational performance and offers the best chance of focusing schools on student learning.
Education is hard, so we should celebrate success at every opportunity. A sky-high graduation rate, for example, should make us smile from ear to ear. But a recent Akron Beacon Journal (ABJ) report on dramatically higher graduation rates in Akron City Schools should raise serious concerns.
According to the story, Akron school officials calculated last fall that only 54 percent of the class of 2018 was on track to graduate. This estimate was based on how many students had earned or were likely to earn the required number of points on the state’s new and more rigorous end of course (EOC) exams. Given that Akron’s graduation rate was 74 percent the previous year (2017), district officials were understandably worried. Rather than helping students acquire a diploma through shoring up academic weaknesses to pass EOC exams or earn an industry certification, Akron opted to take advantage of the alternative—and much softer--- graduation requirements pitched by the state board and passed earlier in the year by Ohio lawmakers.
The new requirements are absurdly easy. Students need only meet two of nine metrics, which include non-academic measures such as 93 percent attendance during a student’s senior year and completing 120 hours of community service. Many voices had warned that lowering the bar in this way could have serious consequences, as it would erase all incentives for districts to focus on ways to improve students’ mastery of actual academic content. Unfortunately, it appears that’s exactly what’s happening in Akron.
After identifying all the students who weren’t on track to graduate, district officials required those lacking EOC points to complete a “senior project”—one of the alternative metrics. The second metric was left up to students, and most chose the GPA (a senior year 2.5 average), good attendance, or community service option. The result? A projected graduation rate of 93 percent. That’s right. Thirty-nine percent of Akron seniors who were previously determined to be academically off-track in reading and math will now receive a diploma at the end of the month.
The nagging question everyone should ask is whether these young people are prepared for success after high school. The district may have responded adroitly to incentives and taken steps to help students get a diploma, but it's not clear how much time was spent improving the reading and math skills they will need if they decide to attend college. Nor is there any sign that Akron school officials redoubled the district’s efforts to help students acquire in-demand technical skills and certificates that could result in both a diploma and employment earning a living wage.
When the celebrations come to a close at the end of the month and students take off their caps and gowns, high school will be over. In Akron, more young people than ever before will have a diploma. But will they actually have an education? Will they have an opportunity to pursue the American Dream? Or are their diplomas more like sports participation trophies, which are essentially meaningless since everybody gets one?
It’s tempting to celebrate the results of low standards in order to avoid the hard truth that too many students aren’t learning all that they should. Touting a lofty graduation rate is far more pleasant than answering questions about a lower one. But students who walk offstage with a meaningless diploma are destined for big disappointments in the real world that follows.
NOTE: A version of this blog first appeared as a guest editorial in the Akron Beacon Journal on May 16, 2018.
Back at the turn of the millennium, we at Fordham published a paper that urged a stronger focus on phonics. Author Louisa Cook Moates wrote: “Reading science is clear: young children need instruction in systematic, synthetic phonics in which they are taught sound-symbol correspondences singly, directly, and explicitly.” The reading wars—the longstanding debate between “whole language” and phonics proponents—has been mostly settled in the U.S. with phonics playing a key role in the federal Reading First program, and having now been embedded in most states’ English language arts standards, including Ohio’s.
Recently, British policymakers also took bold steps to prioritize phonics, i.e., structured instruction that teaches children to “decode” words. Coinciding with an influential 2006 paper known as the “Rose Report,” which recommended phonics as the principal strategy for early literacy, England began requiring its schools to move away from the nation’s “searchlights” model and instead implement phonics-centered instruction for children aged five to seven.
A recent study by Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally, and Martina Viarengo evaluates the impact of this initiative, which also included government aid allowing schools to hire literacy consultants who supported teachers’ transition to phonics. The policy was implemented in waves with eighteen local authorities participating in the pilot phase in 2005–06 and another thirty-two in the first full phase in the next year. By 2009–10, all local authorities had adopted the phonics-based program. The researchers use quasi-experimental methods to compare the test results at ages five, seven, and eleven of students who attended schools in the pilot and first phase (the “treated” group) to those unaffected by the first two waves of implementation.
Their analyses find that students benefitted from the shift towards phonics instruction. At age five, children in both the pilot and first phase posted substantial gains on reading tests of about 0.22 to 0.30 standard deviations—what the researchers call an “instant effect” of the program. The study also uncovered positive results at age seven of roughly 0.08 standard deviations. However, by age eleven, the effects were essentially zero, leading the researchers to speculate: “Most students learn to read eventually. This is the simplest explanation for why we do not see any overall effect of the intervention by age 11.” Nevertheless, though the effects for students on the whole may have dissipated, the benefits were larger and more persistent for low-income pupils and non-native English speakers. For instance, at age eleven, children from both of these groups demonstrated gains of approximately 0.05 to 0.07 standard deviations (some findings were statistically significant, but others were not). This leads Machin, McNally, and Viarengo to conclude: “Without a doubt the effect [on less advantaged students] is high enough to justify the fixed cost of a year’s intensive training support to teachers.”
Based on studies showing that reading proficiency by third grade predicts better outcomes later in life, policymakers in Ohio and other states are focusing much attention on early literacy initiatives. Can a continuing emphasis on phonics instruction prove beneficial, especially for children most apt to struggle in reading? The evidence from England—along with studies from this side of the pond—indicates that the answer is yes.
Source: Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally, and Martina Viarengo, “Changing How Literacy Is Taught: Evidence on Synthetic Phonics,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2018); open version is available here.
During the recent celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week and National Charter Schools Week, Fordham Ohio staffers shared stories of the teachers, counselors, and schools that made a positive difference in their education and in their lives. You can read about:
Ohio is no stranger to district turnarounds. Back in 2007, academic distress commissions (ADCs) were added to state law as a way for the state to intervene in districts that consistently fail to meet academic standards. The law was updated in 2015 via House Bill 70, which sharpened the powers of ADCs and significantly altered the way they were run. Some of the biggest changes included lessening the power of the local school board, empowering a CEO, and offering opportunities for expanded quality choice.
Although Lorain City Schools also immediately fell under the purview of the restructured ADC law, many considered Youngstown City Schools to be the primary target. After five unsuccessful years under the previous ADC framework, legislators insisted on more drastic action. The overhauled Youngstown ADC was appointed in December 2015, and CEO Krish Mohip was hired in June 2016. By September of that year, Mohip had unveiled the district’s new strategic plan for 2016–19.
In just a few short months, the final full year of implementation of the district’s strategic plan will begin and bring the district one step closer to a decade’s worth of ADC management. There have been a few bright spots, mainly in attendance rates and student GPAs. The district is still waiting for state test results from this academic year. But for the most part, it seems as though big improvements still elude Youngstown.
So what’s holding it back? To find out, I compared the six habits of highly effective turnaround efforts to the Ohio Department of Education’s (ODE) 2017 review of the Youngstown ADC, which offers a detailed look at both the strengths and weaknesses of the district’s efforts thus far. Here’s a look at the five most significant areas where on-the-ground realities in Youngstown don’t match up with best practices.
1. Questionable curricula and inequitable access to rigorous coursework
One of the six habits of effective turnarounds is the implementation of rigorous standards, assessments, and curricula—the lattermost of which, when content-rich and high quality, can improve student outcomes in a cost-effective way. Louisiana, for example, does all of these things well in its New Orleans Recovery School District, one of the more successful turnaround efforts in the nation.
Unfortunately, Youngstown hasn’t followed Louisiana’s curriculum-lead. In its most recent review, ODE notes that the district “lacks a current comprehensive curriculum development, review, and revision process.” This is problematic because “teachers may lack guidance and support on the use of curriculum materials, pacing guides, and balanced assessments to plan instruction and accurately monitor student achievement.” Even more troubling, the district “does not evaluate the effectiveness of resources and programs” and “does not use student performance data from assessments to determine the impact of existing programs and resources on student achievement.” The upshot is that teachers and administrators in Youngstown have no idea whether their resources, programs, and interventions even work.
That’s bad enough, but ODE also indicates that “the district does not ensure that all students have equitable access to curriculum, programs, and services.” Students who attend certain schools, like STEM schools, have access to a more rigorous and challenging curriculum than what is offered in the district’s traditional middle and high schools. In other words, there isn’t just a gap between the students in Youngstown and other Ohio districts—there’s a gap within the district itself.
2. Unclear or nonexistent accountability for adults
Highly effective turnarounds treat accountability for adults as non-negotiable: There are clear expectations for the performance of every adult role. School leaders evaluate and have the ability to reward effective instructors and remove those who consistently underperform. Yet throughout its review, ODE references Youngstown’s lack of adult accountability. The department notes that “there is no evidence that the district follows the evaluation procedures defined in district policy or negotiated agreements.” This includes district administrators (“The evaluation process for district administrators is not consistently linked to the district’s strategic plan goals and metrics of progress”), school leaders (“the district provided limited coordination or oversight to building leadership teams to ensure individual school improvement plans were developed, implemented, monitored, and aligned to the district strategic plan”), and teachers (“some teachers who wrote student learning objectives and assessments also were on the team to evaluate their own learning objectives and assessment measures”).
3. Too little focus on teacher development
Common sense suggests and research shows that teacher and principal quality are significant factors in student achievement. That’s why effective turnarounds implement systems that monitor and improve instructional quality. To the district’s credit, ODE acknowledges that administrators monitor instruction weekly and provide feedback to teachers. That’s an important part of teacher development. But ODE also asserts that, in Youngstown, “there is a disconnection between the effectiveness of teaching staff and the student achievement rating on the district’s report card.” Although part of this is due to the lack of adult accountability, it can also be attributed to the district’s lack of quality professional development for teachers. ODE notes that personalized professional development is needed for teachers in myriad areas, including formative and summative assessments, the Ohio Improvement Process, the Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) framework, the teacher-based team model, the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System, instructional strategies, analyzing data, writing law-compliant IEPs, and creating and utilizing assessments that assess higher-order thinking skills.
4. Ignoring the potential of school choice
Choice programs across the country demonstrably improve student achievement and growth. Camden, in particular, shows how school choice can enhance system-wide turnaround efforts. It’s no silver bullet, but it is a helpful tool for leaders who are looking to expand high quality options for students. House Bill 70 recognized this potential and allows the ADC, in consultation with the state superintendent, to create an independent entity to act as a high quality school accelerator that is designed to promote effective schools, recruit top-notch sponsors for charters, and attract new schools.
So far, the Youngstown ADC has not created an accelerator. That isn’t necessarily a problem, since an accelerator might not be what’s best for the district’s specific context and needs. But ODE’s report pinpoints a few other choice-related problems. For instance, ODE notes that the district doesn’t ensure students have equitable access to curricula, programs, and services. Having a variety of schools—not just those run by the district—could help to immediately alleviate this problem for some families. Furthermore, the department recommends that the district “ensure that all families have access to information on educational opportunities to enable informed choice and district accountability.” This indicates that Youngstown families lack basic information about the few choices they do have.
5. Failing to take advantage of the “big yes”
House Bill 70 awarded a considerable amount of power to the CEO of an ADC. From day one of his or her tenure, a CEO is empowered to determine curriculum and assessments, replace administrators, conduct employee evaluations, provide staff professional development, and set the district budget and calendar. This kind of authority and autonomy—referred to as the “big yes” in a 2009 brief written for the U.S. Department of Education—is a vital part of making turnarounds effective and sustainable.
Unfortunately, Youngstown’s CEO Krish Mohip has exercised this authority inconsistently. One need look no further than the first three issues outlined above for examples. If the district lacks a content-rich curriculum, it’s because the CEO has not picked one. If the district does not hold adults accountable for progress, it’s because the CEO has not implemented a solid employee evaluation system. The same is true for professional development, another area that falls under the purview of the CEO.
To be fair, some of Mohip’s reluctance to exercise his authority is probably because he wants to implement reforms alongside the community instead of issuing them from the top-down. Community engagement is, after all, another habit of highly effective turnarounds. There are also a host of issues—transportation woes, serious flaws in the district’s services for students with special needs, and legal drama—that predate both Mohip and the current ADC. But after almost a decade of poor performance and dysfunction, Youngstown’s students deserve to have radically transformed schools as soon as possible. That transformation might happen faster if Mohip would only take advantage of the authority that’s been vested in his position.
NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.
Earlier this century, Dayton, Ohio, was a hotbed for charter school growth, largely driven by parents, mostly poor and minority, desperately seeking better options for their children. In 2002, the Council of the Great City Schools captured Dayton’s challenges when it reported that “no urban school system in Ohio has fewer children meeting state proficiency standards…The problem appears to be exacerbated by high teacher absenteeism.”
Throughout the 2000s, Dayton was annually rated by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools as a “Top Ten Community by Market Share.” In fact, by the mid-2000s, Dayton had more children per capita enrolled in charters than any city in the country, save for post-hurricane New Orleans.
I was Fordham’s Ohio point person from 2001 to 2013. A big part of my job was to try and responsibly seed the growth of quality charter schools, mostly in Dayton. This meant providing start-up grant support to prospective school operators, identifying individuals and groups we thought could run schools well, organizing technical assistance for schools through partner organizations, explaining charter schools to both critics and supporters, raising money for schools and support organizations, tracking and reporting annual school performance based largely on test scores (as this was the era of No Child Left Behind), and in time helping to launch and lead Fordham’s efforts as a nonprofit charter school authorizer.
Our work was done in a city facing serious economic, demographic, and social decline. In 2008, Forbes magazine rated Dayton as being the “fifth emptiest city” in America. Some of the schools we helped launch there and elsewhere were outstanding and continue serving students well today, but too many were mediocre, and more than a few were downright abysmal. After twelve years of working in the Ohio charter school space, I left the Buckeye State bruised, battered, and humbled, but infinitely wiser about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to creating and sustaining quality public charter schools.
Since August of 2013, I have been working in Idaho to help grow its new school sector. I lead Bluum—a nonprofit dedicated to seeking out, vetting, and supporting innovative school leaders and high-performing school models. Bluum has partnered with the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, and Building Hope, a nonprofit facilities group, to launch and/or expand thirteen charter schools, two private schools, and a district innovation school. These efforts have garnered more than $13 million in direct grant support, and are collectively opening more than 6,000 new school seats mostly in and around Boise, but also in other parts of the state, when appropriate.
But in stark contrast to Dayton, the Boise area is one of the fastest growing regions in the country. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Idaho grew faster than any other state in 2017, with most of this growth occurring within a forty-minute drive of downtown Boise. Whereas Ohio had some of the lowest performing public charter schools in the nation, Idaho has some of the highest. As a cohort, Idaho’s charter school students outperform their district peers in math and English language arts, in terms of both proficiency and growth, and across student subgroups. On the 2016–17 SAT, seven of Idaho’s ten top-scoring high schools were charters. And the state’s charters were the highest performing in the country on the 2017 NAEP math exam.
Why, friends in education ask me, do Idaho’s charter schools seem to work, while Ohio’s struggle so? I’ve come up with five reasons, but there are surely more.
First, Idaho’s law allows charter schools to open anywhere in the state, but Ohio charters have only been able to open in the state’s most troubled school districts, where most students live in poverty. In Dayton, for example, more than 90 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch (FRPL). Students in the Boise-area’s three largest school districts are far less likely to live in poverty. Boise’s FRPL rate is 52 percent, West Ada’s is 28 percent, and Nampa is 66 percent. For Idaho charter schools, only about 35 percent of students are low-income. As the College Board has been reporting for years, “there’s a very strong positive correlation between income and test scores.” Allowing charter schools to educate just poor and needy children sets them up for failure, especially when they are asked to educate these students with less money than traditional districts. It also diminishes political support when largely suburban Republican lawmakers, most of whom are white, create and champion a reform program for mostly poor children and families of color.
Second, Idaho’s fastest growing communities can’t build schools fast enough, and charter schools help alleviate painful overcrowding. In Dayton, conversely, the district was losing students so fast that it had to build fewer buildings in the mid-2000s than voters had actually approved just a few years earlier. The district was not only losing students and buildings, but also some of its best teachers. Dayton’s teaching force declined from 2,000 in 1998 to about 1,100 in 2008. It seems competition in education works better in growing student markets—like Texas, Colorado, and Arizona—than in declining ones—like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Third, for-profit charter school operators over-promise and under-deliver. Ohio had a significant number of its charter schools managed by for-profit operators like Edison Learning, K-12, National Heritage Academies, White Hat, and Imagine Schools. With the exception of National Heritage Academies, these operators performed somewhere between weak and criminal. Far too often the focus seemed to be profits over children. Idaho has only two for-profit management companies operating charters, K-12 and Connections Academy; both are online schools, and both are low performers.
Fourth, zero-sum politics hurt charter school quality. In Ohio, charter schools are seen as a Republican creation with little to no support from Democrats. The narrative is that Republicans support charters, even bad ones, while Democrats seek to defund and set-back charters, even good ones. When Democrat Ted Strickland was elected governor in 2006, his first budget sought to defund all the state’s public charter schools. In 2018, Ohio Democrats are using Republican support for charters against them, with even Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown seeking to score points politically on Ohio’s ECOT charter debacle. In Idaho, however, Democrats in the legislature sometimes vote to support pro-charter school bills. And the Democratic candidate for Idaho governor, Paulette Jordan, said during a recent public debate that “charters fill an important role.” Charters, and school reform efforts more generally, work better in a bipartisan policy environment.
Fifth, quality charter school authorizing matters. Although Ohio has had a hodge-podge of more than seventy-five charter school authorizers—ranging from money hungry school districts, to empire building county education service centers, to cash strapped nonprofits—thirty-seven of Idaho’s fifty-two charter schools are authorized by the Idaho Public Charter School Commission. Ohio’s authorizing landscape was so scattershot in terms of quality and competence that the legislature in 2015 rewrote the law around the roles and responsibilities of charter authorizers in House Bill 2. Meanwhile, Idaho’s charter school commission has slowly and steadily been improving its efforts as a quality-conscious authorizer. Perfect it isn’t; but competent and steady it is.
Public charter schools are creatures of state politics and policies. Some states have done it better than others, but all can learn from others.
Terry Ryan is chief executive officer of Bluum in Boise, Idaho.
