The Ohio House of Representatives just proposed to restructure oversight of K–12 public education by shifting much of the state Board of Education’s power to the governor through a newly formed cabinet-level position.
The Ohio House of Representatives just proposed to restructure oversight of K–12 public education by shifting much of the state Board of Education’s power to the governor through a newly formed cabinet-level position.
This would be a serious overhaul, so it’s no surprise that it’s garnering strong reactions. I’m sensitive about reducing the role of a publicly elected board—in no small part because I ran for a seat on it two years ago.
Supporters of the change argue that the board’s current hybrid governance structure—wherein the pubic elects eleven members and the governor appoints eight—is ineffective; they think the governor should be responsible for the direction of education policy and held accountable by voters accordingly. Critics of the proposal contend that reducing the authority of the partially elected board would subvert the will of the voters and replace it with “party politics,” the last thing they want for K–12 public education.
Democracy is rightly one of America’s core principles. But, as Robert Kennedy, Jr. said “Democracy is messy. And it’s hard.” Indeed, running for the state education board laid bare some of its imperfections—and not just because I lost. Elections are sometimes portrayed as ideal forms of democracy, yet the role of money and endorsements complicate them. Voters may not be well informed, especially about down-ticket races, or may skip voting altogether for the nonpartisan seats. In Ohio this includes judgeships, state education board seats, and more.
My campaign occurred in 2016 in a five-way race to represent a three-county district comprising Knox, Delaware, and most of Franklin. These elections typically fly under the radar. The predominant response I heard on the trail was that most voters couldn’t name their current representative, and many didn’t even know such a board existed.
In these lower-profile state and local elections, three factors can throw a wrench into whether the leaders that are elected truly end up representing people’s interests: money, voter knowledge, and voter turnout.
Show me the money!
I was of course aware of money’s role in elections, yet its influence became realer than ever when I needed to raise cash—as much of it as I could—to be even remotely competitive. I had never asked someone for money in my life, except when I once petitioned to buy community yoga mats. But there I stood at the beginning of a ten-week campaign cycle during which I hoped to raise between $40,000 and $50,000. Yowza.
Money matters. You need money to purchase yard signs, t-shirts, radio ads, and billboards. You need money for digital outreach. In a race to represent an area populated by hundreds of thousands of voters spread across hundreds of square miles, you need more than you think because you simply cannot walk door to door.
Enter powerful interest groups. With the ECOT saga in full view, there has been a large spotlight on contributions from the school’s operator into campaign coffers. But less talked about are teachers’ unions’ sizable contributions. For statewide elections, the contribution limit when I ran was around $12,500. That means that candidates earning both teachers’ unions’ endorsements immediately have $25,000 to work with. In school board races that don’t usually have other organized interest groups to serve as a counter weight, the union contributions make a big difference.
So do political parties. Despite the fact that these races are technically nonpartisan, parties often pony up contributions and endorse candidates, which places them on a party’s “slate card” on which voters often base their selections on down-ticket races.
I ended up talking to both the teachers’ unions, but I did not earn their endorsements. Nor was I endorsed by a major party. (I did earn the endorsement of the Stonewall Democrats.) I was able to secure contributions that kept me competitive and ultimately helped me earn second place. And I worked together with Leadership for Educational Equity, a national group that supports teachers and former teachers to run for office.
Shortly after I lost, however, smart folks who were well-schooled in politics suggested that I would never successfully earn a major endorsement unless I did it the “right” way: Go through the proper channels and let the inner circle of special interest groups and political parties tell me when it was my turn to run.
If powerful interest groups—no matter what side they’re on or what sector they come from—are hand-selecting amenable candidates who will likely do as they say, how independent are our elected representatives?
Call me naïve, but this up-close experience of money and influence in politics still surprised me. And I think most laypeople would feel that way upon realizing that the cash in candidates’ pockets and the groups backing them matter as much as—probably more than—the ideas in their heads or their ability to accomplish them.
The implication of this is clear: Ohio teachers’ unions—and other large interest groups that occasionally do get involved with education elections—have enormous influence. And this is most true in down-ticket races on which voters have little information and those aforementioned slate cards hold immense influence. Which brings me to my next point.
Voter knowledge and turnout
Many Ohioans view the latest governance proposal as a blatant removal of voter control. But that argument’s unconvincing considering how few people cast votes for education board seats, know who their representatives are, or even know what the board is. It also rings a bit hollow considering the state doesn’t have comparable policymaking boards in other domains like health, taxation, the environment, etc.
Roughly 95 percent of voters I spoke with seemed to know little or nothing about the seat for which I was running. They didn’t know what the education board did. The most powerful and resonating talking point I used was that I was the only candidate running who had K–12 public school teaching experience. At the time, only three sitting members had worked in a public school, and folks were receptive to getting another teacher on the board because they recognized the value of educators’ insight and knowledge. Yet most voters didn’t realize that wise policy decisions require other knowledge, too. Teaching kindergarten didn’t prepare me to serve on the board. But working in Ohio education policy for nearly a decade, and studying policy for my master’s degree, did.
Perhaps the most alarming lesson was about name recognition. Politically savvy friends or acquaintances would tell me I had a leg up with an Anglo-sounding name like “O’Leary.” Irish names do well in elections here in central Ohio, apparently. And so can gender neutral first names.
By the end of my campaign, after having drilled down talking points into tiny blurbs I could deliver at an OSU game to passersby, or during 30-second radio spots, the policy wonk in me felt a bit deflated. Folks didn’t seem to care much about policy details on education with so many other statewide and federal races on the ballot. Most admitted they voted in whatever way their party’s slate card instructed them to, having done little to no research on candidates independently, even for races that are meant to be non-partisan.
Moreover, it’s typical in races like mine for voters to skip the bottom of the ballot altogether—where lesser known seats are up for grabs. So even in a presidential election year, which no doubt boosts turnout, people voting for major federal and statewide candidates still often ignore the lesser-known contests.
***
All in all, it was a valuable experience for me try my hand at running for office. I got an insider’s view of the campaign cycle. And it’s a story that’s especially worth telling now that the state education board may be stripped of much of its authority.
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t want that to happen. I say that out of principle. I’m a person who thinks that local representation matters, just as I believe in the value of local food, local shopping, and vibrant local communities.
My experience showed me, however, that money and special interests dominate elections and that voters know very little about the board or the candidates running to serve on it. As Ohio leaders continue to debate governance in the coming days, I hope we’ll abandon Pollyanna notions that our current arrangement is a bastion of perfect democracy that represents the people, or that overhauling it would plunge us deeper into partisan politics than we already are. Neither is true. Instead, we owe it to ourselves—and our kids—to engage in thoughtful debate about how best to move education policy forward.
Over the past year, Ohio lawmakers have been mulling revisions to the state’s teacher evaluation policies. The leading proposal, put forth in similar provisions in Senate Bill 240 and Senate Bill 216, would replace the state’s current evaluation framework, known as the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES), with a framework sketched out by the Educator Standards Board (ESB).
If passed, the new evaluation system would continue to require annual teacher evaluations (with some exceptions); protocols calling for at least two thirty-minute observations; and ratings assigned along four categories. The major difference between OTES and the ESB recommendations is how they incorporate student performance data in teachers’ evaluations. Controversially, OTES prescribes certain weights that student growth measures must receive in the rating system. However, ESB proposes that “high quality data” be embedded as “sources of evidence” that evaluators can use to justify their ratings along various dimensions of Ohio’s performance rubric.[1] While an updated rubric has yet to be unveiled, it would likely follow a national pattern that is now weakening the use of student data in teacher ratings.
Replacing OTES with the ESB approach may or may not end up being an improvement. But Ohio lawmakers shouldn’t be the ones to decide which framework to use, or other matters of teacher evaluation. Rather, they should follow the advice of an older but still relevant RAND Corporation paper that contains the timeless recommendation: “states should not impose highly prescriptive teacher evaluation requirements.”
Scrapping mandates would reverse a decade-long national effort to bolster teacher evaluations through various policy levers. These well-intentioned efforts aimed to solve several problems in evaluations, including perfunctory classroom observations and systems that deemed nearly all teachers as satisfactory. Unfortunately, these efforts have been largely in vain. Evaluation systems continue to deem almost all teachers as competent, and many evaluators continue to sleepwalk through the process. The only things that changed were the incredible amounts of time that administrators have been forced to spend meeting state requirements and the additional testing needed to generate data for evaluations. Hence the calls to change course once again.
Instead of searching for blanket solutions, a superior approach would simply restore the rights of school leaders to manage delicate and context-dependent matters of personnel policy. By removing evaluation mandates, legislators would shift a central management task to the district and school level—where it rightfully belongs. School leaders bear the responsibility for their schools’ performance; have direct supervision over staff; can best judge what approaches are feasible within their internal political environment; and understand their own schools’ time and resource constraints. Due to considerations such as these, Ohio lawmakers should allow school leaders to undertake, without regulatory interference, the hard but essential work of managing people.
To press this idea further, let’s return to the aforementioned RAND report and apply its insights to specific evaluation mandates: conformity to the ESB (or OTES) framework and annual teacher evaluations.
Evaluation framework: One of RAND’s key insights is that “the school district should decide the main purpose of its teacher evaluation system and then match the process to the purpose.” Behind this statement is the notion that evaluations serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, they aim to help teachers improve their practice through feedback. On the other hand, they also try to hold teachers accountable by informing high-stakes personnel decisions. Yet a singular framework won’t match the main purpose of evaluations as understood in various contexts. For instance, OTES tends to veer more into accountability territory with its use of hard data that can be used to defend decisions such as teacher retention or dismissal. This type of approach might be warranted when leaders oversee struggling schools or face reductions in force due to enrollment declines. But an accountability focus may not be needed in districts that see evaluations as a way to help teachers go from good to great. Flexible, feedback-oriented frameworks might be more appropriate in those contexts.
Evaluation frequency: An equally important conclusion from the RAND paper is that “top-level commitment to and resources for evaluation outweigh checklists and procedures.” The first part of this statement deals with the unmistakable need to commit to evaluations, lest they become mindless routines. But the other key idea is that schools need to devote resources—time especially—to conduct purposeful evaluations. Under state law, schools must evaluate all teachers on an annual basis, though exceptions are made based on teachers’ prior ratings.[2] In schools with twenty or thirty teachers, undertaking this many evaluations per year could yield superficial reviews as resources are stretched thin. To conduct rigorous evaluations within constraints, schools might need to consider strategies other than annual reviews. For instance, to allow time for deeper evaluations, some schools might want to review teachers on cycles—perhaps humanities instructors in even-numbered years and STEM in odd. Other schools might need a targeted approach in which struggling or inexperienced teachers are evaluated more frequently, maybe each quarter. Such reasonable strategies, however, are disallowed or discouraged when the norm is to evaluate all teachers annually.
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Delegating authority to school leaders on evaluations would raise concerns for some. Will evaluation practices worsen without regulations? Will it be more difficult to root out teachers who cannot demonstrate minimal competence? Both are possible, but there are ways to mitigate these risks.
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On certain issues, state lawmakers need to insist on uniform rules and regulations. They include things like standard assessment and school accountability systems, uniform financial reporting, and health and safety rules that apply to all. But the legislature should embrace differences in the way that schools organize and manage themselves. Rather than imposing requirements onto all schools, they should allow local management to make decisions about personnel practices, including teacher evaluation.
[1] “High quality student data” is defined differently under SB 216 and 240. The former defaults to local boards to select assessments to generate these data; the latter is more prescriptive, with ODE defining the term and also requiring the use of teachers’ value-added data when applicable.
[2] The exceptions were enacted after the initial law implementing OTES passed. Though they reduce administrative burdens, the exceptions create problems of their own, including issues of fairness to all teachers and perverse incentives for principals who might be tempted to inflate ratings knowing they could be relieved of this responsibility in the next year.
If a renewed focus on curriculum as a driver of improvements in K–12 education is in the cards, then a recent study from University of Oregon and Georgia Southern University scientists is good news indeed. It shows that four well-designed online science modules increased student achievement across all student subgroups, and especially for English as a second language (ESL) students and students with disabilities.
The study, a randomized controlled trial with over 2,300 middle school students and their teachers in thirteen schools in Oregon and Georgia, was conducted over three school years between 2014 and 2017. Each year, students in the treatment group completed one module—described as “enhanced online textbooks.” The modules covered life science, Earth and space science, and physical science; were aligned with Next Generation Science Standards; and included teacher professional development regarding their effective use prior to the start of each school year. Pacing was left up to the teachers, although the minimum duration reported was ten weeks. Control group teachers taught these topics “as usual”—i.e., in class without online content. Students in both groups completed pre-tests and post-tests around the specific content of each module.
The researchers found that students in both groups improved their science knowledge overall, but the treatment group’s gains were nearly three times as large as those of the control group. And growth experienced by ESL students and students with disabilities in the treatment group was almost as large as the average treatment group pupil. Moreover, student and teacher satisfaction surveys showed generally positive responses to the modules.
So what’s the secret sauce in these online modules? Everything and the kitchen sink, it seems: project-based learning; collaborative work; interactive multimedia elements (read: games); multiple supports for ESL students, including videos with subtitles and spoken word versions of text; and all of it broken down into bite-sized chunks in accordance with the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media. The multiple formats are intended to help students draw on culturally relevant background knowledge and generate discussion; allow for the construction and acquisition of knowledge such as science-specific vocabulary; provide corrective and explanatory feedback on quizzes and other assessments; and allow students to practice, hypothesize, and experiment in order to develop scientific thinking skills. All this and more!
To be clear, the researchers are not claiming to have found a curricular silver bullet. The overall achievement level of all students was not spectacular—the highest post-test scorers averaged just 66.1 percent correct—and the growth observed is limited to these modules and their content only. It’s unclear, for example, whether the same model would work with chemistry. But the sustained, across-the-board growth rates produced by these modules are a strong start toward those goals. The remarkable results for ESL students and students with disabilities must also be taken seriously. These online modules should be strong contenders for integration into science courses across the country, especially in areas where strong science teachers are hard to come by. More data about how they can best be incorporated into course sequences and how to leverage them to boost achievement toward mastery seems imperative, but we already know it’s promising.
SOURCE: Fatima E. Terrazas-Arellanes, et al, “Impact of interactive online units on science among students with learning disabilities and English learners,” International Journal of Science Education (February 2018).
Non-cognitive skills are an increasingly popular topic in education. These include capabilities like perseverance, grit, self-efficacy, work ethic, and conscientiousness. Research shows that possessing them can affect both scholastic and life outcomes.
Their popularity and apparent effectiveness have led to calls on schools to pay more attention to these non-cognitive factors. These calls were answered in part by ESSA, which requires states to have an indicator of “school quality or student success” that goes beyond state standardized test scores and graduation rates. Sometimes referred to as the “nonacademic indicator,” the inclusion of this measure in federal requirements opened the door for schools to focus, at least in part, on non-cognitive skills. California’s CORE districts, for example, use a social-emotional learning metric that measures four non-cognitive competencies with student surveys.
But incorporating non-cognitive skills into schools is still quite difficult. Paul Tough, author of the widely-cited How Children Succeed, explained why in a 2016 Atlantic article:
But here’s the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?
Tough raises an important issue: If we know these skills matter, both in terms of academic achievement and long-term outcomes, then we have a responsibility to make sure that students graduate with a firm grasp of them. But if we don’t know how to teach the capacities effectively, what are we supposed to do?
When I taught high school English, my students and I discussed non-cognitive skills all the time—Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet should have practiced more self-control, Dr. King’s speeches and letters are a great example of self-efficacy and perseverance, and The Cask of Amontillado is a fascinating (albeit disturbing) look at the interplay between a conscientious character and a careless one. But similar to what Tough implied in the Atlantic, I often wondered if my classroom was the best place for students to actually practice these skills. That’s not to say it was impossible; I’m sure a few students improved their teamwork skills during group projects, or their grittiness during our seemingly endless trek through research papers. But overall, a traditional classroom with rows of desks and textbooks and a smart board might not have been the best place for them to exercise their non-cognitive muscles.
But what about non-traditional classroom spaces? Take for instance career and technical education (CTE), which integrates traditional academic subjects with technical, job-specific skills. These programs are typically designed to follow both a state’s academic standards and technical content standards that align to a chosen field and allow for hands-on training and real work experience. So, for CTE students, school isn’t just about the three R’s. It might also involve performing blood tests, interning with a pediatric physical therapy team, working on utility restoration and workplace improvement projects at places like GM, participating in mock trials, or even designing animation and software. Each of these programs puts students into real-world situations that demand the development and use of non-cognitive skills.
These are not the “vo-tech” programs of yesteryear, into which academically struggling students were shoved because their teachers didn’t know what to do with them. Today’s CTE helps students earn associate and bachelor’s degrees and industry-recognized credentials that will place them in good-paying jobs—and they value learning through doing and the development of soft skills, not just the imparting of academic knowledge.
Unfortunately, despite all the research on the positive effects of career and technical education, there seems to be little analysis of whether specific programs cultivate non-cognitive capacities. That’s something that should be remedied soon.
But resources like the Ohio Department of Education’s CTE success stories page show CTE’s potential in this regard. The student profiles therein evince the mastery of hard, cognitive skills: cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency patient care, sous-vide cooking, and expertise in automotive technology, to name a few. But the stories also show students developing non-cognitive abilities that all children need—grit and self-control, leadership and interpersonal communication skills.
As education stakeholders continue to mull over the best way to teach students non-cognitive skills, offering CTE to more students is an evidence-backed, bipartisan solution that already exists to some degree in the vast majority of states. More rigorous research is needed, but the blend of academic and technical material within these programs offers a great opportunity to teach today’s students cognitive and non-cognitive skills in real-world environments.
In the waning days of January, the Ohio Department of Higher Education gained approval from the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review for two new regulations regarding College Credit Plus (CCP) that will take effect during the quickly approaching summer term of the 2018-19 school year. Here’s a brief look at two of the most significant changes.
Course restrictions
One of the new rules divides available college courses into two categories: Level I and Level II courses. Level I is defined as any of the following:
Level II courses are all the other classes offered at an institution of higher education.
The rule mandates that students who wish to have their CCP courses paid for by the state[1] must complete fifteen credit hours of Level I courses prior to enrolling in Level II courses. However, there are some notable exceptions. For instance, students who successfully complete a Level I course in a specific subject are permitted to take a Level II course in the same subject area prior to completing the required fifteen hours.
The rules also prohibit high school students from taking certain classes, including those that involve one-on-one private instruction (like instrumental music or art), require excessive fees, or are study abroad, physical education, pass/fail, remedial, or religious courses. Previously, the only courses that were prohibited were those deemed remedial or religious.
By creating more stringent rules, students can no longer take classes that school officials deemed inappropriate and contrary to the original intent of the program—such as Zumba and Pilates. This is a smart adjustment that will ensure that taxpayer dollars are used for academic purposes.
Consequences for poor performance
The other new rule addresses students who struggle while enrolled in the program. Students will be deemed as “underperforming” if they have a cumulative grade point average lower than 2.0 in their CCP courses or if they withdraw from or receive no credit for two or more courses in the same term.
High schools are responsible for placing such students on CCP probation and notifying the student, her parents, and each college or university in which she is enrolled. While on probation, students are permitted to enroll in only one college course per term, and this course cannot be in the same subject area as the course that the student previously failed or did not receive credit for. Students move out of probationary status when their cumulative college course GPA rises to a 2.0 or higher. If a student enrolls in a course while on probation and their course grade fails to raise their cumulative college GPA to 2.0, she will be dismissed from CCP.
Dismissed students are able to request reinstatement after one full term. Reinstatement decisions are made by the student’s high school based on high school and college academic records and a measure of academic progress that is defined by the school. A student’s high school may maintain the dismissal decision, re-enroll the student into the program but with probationary status, or fully reinstate the student without restrictions. The rule also outlines an appeal process for dismissed students.
These changes are important because CCP courses are included on a student’s high school and college transcripts, and the F is calculated into the student’s GPA at both institutions.[2] While the new rules can’t and won’t prevent some students from earning poor grades, they will prevent them from racking up multiple failures or withdraws. It also underscores the importance of rigorous entrance requirements—only students who are fully prepared to succeed at the post-secondary level should be allowed to enroll in the program.
Plenty of information is still needed about CCP, including deep dives into passage rates, the rigor of courses taught on high school campuses, and the underrepresentation of minority students. But overall, these rules will better ensure that CCP is used to advance the education of Ohio’s most academically able high schoolers.
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.
On January 9, the State Board of Education again gave advocates of career and college readiness cause for dismay. With just one dissenting vote, the board adopted a resolution recommending that the legislature extend to the Classes of 2019 and 2020 the much-derided high school graduation alternatives established last year—also upon the board’s recommendation—for the Class of 2018.
It is difficult to add much to what’s already been said about the softened graduation requirements that the board would now extend to the following two graduating classes. In short, they permit an Ohio student to obtain a high school diploma without demonstrating the minimum academic competencies needed to be successful in post-secondary education and employment. These requirements are a big step back from the much more rigorous standards adopted by the legislature in 2009, which still provided appropriate flexibility for students who might wish to choose a different route to a diploma.
All this to avert a “graduation apocalypse” that never truly materialized. ODE data show that 77 percent of students in the Class of 2018 are on track to graduate without the additional options, far higher than initially projected. A staff presentation at the November board meeting also showed that by the end of their sophomore year, approximately 66 percent of students in the Class of 2019 have already met end-of-course test requirements, which is approximately the same as students in the Class of 2018 at the end of their sophomore year. Taken together, the data fairly shout the question of just what problem the board is solving by proposing to extend the dubious alternatives for this year’s graduating class to the next two.
In its narrow focus on how many students will and won’t “walk” on commencement day, the state board lost sight of the very purpose of a high school diploma. As board member Kara Morgan said the day of the vote, “The ultimate outcome isn’t high school graduation but success of those students who graduate high school in the future.” That Dr. Morgan couldn’t find one other member of the 19-member board to agree is discouraging.
The board says it needs more data on the additional pathways put in place last year before it can assent to ending them. This is a cry often heard from decision-makers who’d just as soon avoid making decisions. It doesn’t take data to know that showing up for school and holding down a part-time job are not a demonstration of preparation for success beyond high school.
The board’s action has several unintended consequences. First, it raises still more doubt for children, parents, and educators about the standards to which students will be held. When a child enters the ninth grade, she should have reasonable certainty about what will be required of her to graduate within four years. By reversing its position that the softened requirements were only meant for the Class of 2018, the board causes everyone to wonder how many additional changes are in store.
Second, it provides an “out” for legislators of weaker resolve to sidestep their responsibility. The board is charged by statute to base any requirements for graduation “upon demonstration of mastery of knowledge and skills through competency-based learning models.” The recommendations put forth by the board clearly do not fulfill this responsibility.
Third, it puts Ohio at a disadvantage compared to other states. At the board’s December meeting, ODE provided a helpful analysis of graduation requirements in various other states. This analysis indicated that although some states with testing requirements for graduation required activities in addition to evidence of academic proficiency, none offered them in place of it. While a more detailed analysis would be needed to validate this conclusion, the ostensibly one-time provisions for Ohio’s Class of 2018 do indeed seem weak in comparison with other states. Massachusetts, for instance, is widely recognized as the nation’s highest performer in K-12 education. While there are multiple reasons for the “Massachusetts Miracle,” one of them is undoubtedly the state’s high standards and expectations—as well as its commitment to stick to its plan despite continual pressures to retreat.
The General Assembly must reject the recommendation of the State Board of Education to perpetuate the soft, “one-time” alternatives given to the Class of 2018. The state’s original vision of high standards with flexibility and of demonstrated readiness for college and career is still the right one for Ohio. We should stick with the plan.
Jack Archer served as Director of Basic Education Oversight at the Washington State Board of Education until his retirement in 2016. He lives in Fairview Park.
