The Education Gadfly Weekly

Education will always be one of Ohio’s highest priorities. It bonds communities together, provides the foundation for the state’s long-term economic success, and—most importantly—helps students across the state to realize their potential and pursue their dreams.

Data is imperative to understanding Ohio’s education policies, practices, and outcomes—both at a state level and locally. This guidebook offers simple and easy-to-use vital statistics about Ohio’s schools and the students they serve. The facts and figures contained within this report offer an overview of who Ohio’s students are; where they go to school; how they perform on national and state exams; and how many pursue post-secondary education. In addition, we present a few key statistics on Ohio’s educators, and how much Ohio taxpayers contribute to K-12 education and how those dollars are spent.

For those preferring a web version, try out www.OhioByTheNumbers.com.

The 2017 edition of Ohio Education By the Numbers can be accessed here.

Like any life transition, preparing for a new job and saying farewell to colleagues and allies offers a bittersweet window of time to reflect. I’m sitting in that window now. Having finished almost a decade in the Ohio K–12 education policy space and my second stint at Fordham Ohio, I’m shifting into the early childhood policy domain.

Here are five essential ingredients for any advocate’s personal tool kit that I’ve been reflecting on and that I’ll be taking with me.

Principles that ground you—deeply

Working in public policy inevitably means you will interface with politics, whether you like it or not. When I began working in education policy at the state level, Obama had just been elected and Arne Duncan was his education secretary. There was a strong bipartisan coalition around charter schools—nationally at least—and I had been living and working in states where charter schools weren’t as partisan or as contentious as they are in the Buckeye State. It was news to me when I arrived back in Ohio and quickly learned that charter schools were almost exclusively supported by Republicans. Moreover, Democrats would be contesting the creation of Teach For America – Ohio, a program I—as a first-generation college graduate—had joined precisely because I believed in equity and justice.

I’ve always believed in principles above partisanship, and that’s helped me stay afloat in an otherwise often contentious policy space. More specifically, I think it’s vital to be able to identify your defining moments and remember why they led you where they did. Mine include:

• The night I met a man with epilepsy while volunteering at a homeless shelter; he was the same age as my brother, who has the same neurological disorder. It occurred to me that without strong family support and stable public services, my brother would be living on the streets himself. I applied for a public service fellowship shortly after.
• The moments leading up to the realization that I wanted to be a teacher, and nearly every moment spent in the classroom through the lens not only of a teacher but also as an observer of parents and grandparents who were ferociously dedicated to their little ones. This led me into education policy, specifically.
• The afternoon a student’s mother asked my honest advice about sending her to a (better) charter school up the street. This initiated my conversion to school choice supporter.
• The days my kids were born—for too many reasons to elucidate here. It’s safe to say that parenting informs much of what I believe now about policy priorities, choice, high expectations, and believing the best about others.

Your life’s defining moments should inform your principles, and combined with both experience and trial and error, they should inform your theory of change. When you’ve carefully and earnestly defined these for yourself, you can stand tall in what you do, even if you become discouraged on the policy front.

Commitment to research and data

This is one attribute I appreciate uniquely about my Fordham colleagues. As a think tank, Fordham is committed to research and data and does not stoop to the spin that has come to define social media and much of the news cycle.

Fordham will publish studies that actually contradict its own policy objective. That takes a tremendous amount of intellectual integrity. Every single colleague I’ve worked with looked at data carefully and monitors the latest and best research on K–12 education policy religiously.

I wish that more policymakers and advocates would take a deeper dive into research and data, and would resist arriving at conclusions prematurely. Perhaps that’s a tall order in this day and age, but there need to be more among us who care about technical truth and accuracy even if it dampens otherwise great-sounding rhetoric.

An understanding of context and history

In any policy endeavor, it’s important to get a run-down of the past. What was the impetus behind a current trend or piece of legislation? (Example: Common Core was developed by a bipartisan association of governors and state leaders, not by Obama, and not by evil leaders conspiring to brainwash our children.) Why has this policy proposal failed before? How do other states do it? What had to happen there in order to make a change?

These might sound like obvious points, but they weren’t immediately apparent to me upon entering the policy world. I assumed that smart policy ideas could and should be enacted by the mere fact that they were good ideas. Context matters so much that it’s nearly all I think about now, maybe to my detriment. Be careful not to focus on context exclusively, though, because that’s a one-way road to Irreversible Cynicism. For example, you may realize that an idea will never pass because there are not enough people in office currently to support it, so why even bother. But someone still needs to believe in Big Ideas, and if that someone is you—please continue carrying the torch. Recruit others if you must, or take a break, but by all means keep going.

Empathy

Empathy is conspicuously missing from most public debate, and this is part of the reason why the policy/political sphere gets a bad name for being so ugly and nasty at times.

Working alongside people at Fordham with whom I disagree in some areas—particularly those policy domains outside of education—has been challenging at times. But it’s strengthened my own reasoning and has sometimes revealed weaknesses in my own positions. It’s pushed me to try to practice dialogue that is respectful, civil, and productive. It’s required me to examine nuance and not oversimplify matters, and it’s made it easier to extend the benefit of the doubt to people with whom I may not share political affiliation but do share principles.

There’s too much demonizing and not enough humanizing, with social media exacerbating the problem at every turn. I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I encourage anyone working in the policy arena to seek out others who are not like you. Talk to them, learn from them, maybe befriend them. And by God, spend less time on Twitter.

Humor

Finally, stay humble and keep a sense of humor because, without it, the work can become grueling. And that’s no fun for anyone.

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Thanks to all of the great people I’ve had a chance to work with and learn from. Keep at it and know that I’ll be cheering you on from whatever window I’m looking out.

Jamie is the Associate Director of Policy at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The Ohio State University. She’ll be working on public policy impacting young children in schools, at home, and in the community. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter. 

An increasing number of headline-grabbing graduation scandals have renewed the public’s interest in how students earn a high school diploma. A recent paper from the Center for American Progress adds to the discussion by examining high school graduation requirements in all fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, to determine whether they are aligned with college admissions requirements and a variety of quality indicators.

To complete their state-by-state comparisons, the authors reviewed the state-level high school coursework needed to earn a standard diploma, as well as the admissions requirements for each state’s public university system.[1] These requirements were divided into two categories: years of study within each subject area and the course type and sequence within each subject.

The authors used Carnegie units to measure the years of study required by both high school graduation and college admissions standards; one Carnegie unit is equivalent to 120 hours of class time. States were placed into one of three categories based on their coursework requirements for math, English, science, social studies, foreign language, fine arts, physical education/health, and electives.[2] In states where both the high school and public university systems required the same number of units in each subject, states were deemed meeting expectations. High school requirements that demanded more coursework units in a subject were labeled as exceeding, while high school requirements that demanded fewer units were labeled as not meeting college expectations.

Forty-four states met expectations in English, and three exceeded them. For math, twenty-nine states met expectations, and eleven exceeded them. California was the only state that failed to meet the expectation in both math and English; meanwhile forty states’ diploma requirements met or exceeded college admissions’ coursework standards in both math and English, including Ohio. The least amount of alignment between high school graduation and college requirements occurred in foreign languages, with twenty-three states failing to meet college expectations; twenty-three others met them.

As for the types of classes required, the authors acknowledge that many students are able to choose the courses they take to fulfill graduation requirements. Nevertheless, the authors were able to determine whether the course type and sequence required by high school graduation standards were aligned with college admissions requirements based on course names. States in which students are required to take the same or more rigorous courses than what is required for college admission are considered to be in alignment.[3]

They found that forty-four states met this standard in both social studies and English. Numbers were smaller in math and science—twenty-three and seventeen states, respectively—but in many additional states, students had the option of choosing high school class sequences that were aligned with college expectations in these subjects.

The authors conducted an additional state-by-state comparison of the quality of graduation requirements based on five criteria: requiring three courses in the same CTE field; addressing the need for a well-rounded education via a life-skills course, like financial literacy; complete coursework alignment between high school graduation and college admissions expectations; and requiring the completion of a fifteen-credit college-ready curriculum. No state satisfied all five, but some met a few. Louisiana and Tennessee, for example, require a fifteen-credit college ready curriculum and have completely aligned their diploma requirements with their state’s public university’s coursework admissions standards. Twenty-three states require some element of a well-rounded education. And one state, Delaware, requires its students to complete three credits in the same career and technical education field.

Overall, the authors find a “significant misalignment” between states’ high school and college systems. They also note that, although their analysis attempted to review the quality of graduation requirements, it did not take into account the content taught in each course. Given the mismatch between rising graduation rates and low proficiency rates on assessments like NAEP, the authors acknowledge that “it is almost a guarantee that America’s schools are graduating students who have not learned as much as they should in high school.” 

The paper concludes with a series of recommendations for state policymakers. Unsurprisingly, the first recommendation is to ensure clear alignment between the requirements for high school graduation and college admission. The authors also recommend mandating the completion of the fifteen-credit college-ready coursework that’s required by most public university systems because research shows that students have better life outcomes if they take a rigorous high school course load, regardless of eventual college enrollment.

SOURCE: Laura Jimenez and Scott Sargrad, “Are High School Diplomas Really a Ticket to College and Work? An Audit of State High School Graduation Requirements,” Center for American Progress (April 2018).

Personalized learning (PL) is becoming cause célèbre in education circles, drawing support from important outside influencers like RAND and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It has the potential to revolutionize classroom practice. And a new analysis from KnowledgeWorks indicates that PL has strong support across the country, at least according to state ESSA plans. Researchers looked at all the plans submitted to the U.S. Department of Education—some of which have been approved, and some of which are still under consideration—to identify nationwide trends related to PL.

With the definition of PL an unsettled matter, KnowledgeWorks sets forth their own criteria: instruction aligned to rigorous academic standards and social-emotional skills students need to be ready for what’s next after high school; customized instruction allowing each student to design personalized learning experiences aligned to his or her interests; varied pacing of instruction based on individual student needs, which allows students to accelerate or take additional time based on their level of mastery; real-time differentiation of instruction, supports, and interventions based on data from formative assessments and student feedback; and access to clear, transferable learning objectives and assessment results so students and families understand what is expected for mastery and advancement.

KnowledgeWorks finds that most states evince one or more of the above criteria in their ESSA plans, and fully one-third of them have personalization at the core of their vision statements for K–12 education. Support for competency-based practices; a focus on readiness, social-emotional, or employability skills; and provision for multiple pathways to achieve and demonstrate readiness are the most prevalent features across state plans.

Most of the support for PL shows up in the accountability portion of state plans. Thirty-seven plans, for example, include an extended-time graduation-rate indicator that gives schools credit for successfully boosting students who need extra time to earn their diploma. Thirty-five states incorporate multiple pathways for demonstrating student readiness based on a pupils’ trajectory into career or college or military service. Twenty-five feature proficiency indicators that include growth measures, which better represent students’ true academic status. And nineteen states establish informational dashboards for families to evaluate schools and to keep track of students’ progress toward readiness via multiple indicators.

Yet personalized learning also shows up in ESSA plan sections that concern improving low-performing schools, supporting teachers, using Title IV funds, and personalizing education plans for all students. Eleven plans, for example, prioritize PL strategies as the first line of support for struggling schools. These strategies include real-time data tracking of students’ growth toward mastery, community and family engagement, and a whole-child focus that comprises wraparound services and efforts to boost social-emotional learning opportunities. In terms of teacher supports, more than fourteen states offer personalized professional development opportunities, flexible micro-credentialing, and specific training on in-class PL strategies. Twenty-one states devote portions of their Title IV dollars to social-emotional learning and whole child supports. And nineteen states ensure that all students will have personalized education plans that align to their academic needs, interests, and goals.

The news is not, however, all good for those looking for a nationwide movement toward high quality personalized learning. As KnowledgeWorks notes, the flexibility afforded by ESSA did not seem to encourage a trend toward new and better assessments. “Several states are advancing new performance-based science assessments,” they wrote, “a few are exploring local assessments, and one state is committed to more granular score reporting.” But the status quo reigns for the most part. KnowledgeWorks promises continued vigilance on this front, looking for a move toward innovative assessments with a focus less on standardization and more on personalization along with more useful and timely reporting of results. Assessments that inform students and families and guide practice must be part of successful PL. KnowledgeWorks gives props to the community engagement process required for ESSA plan development for bringing personalized learning to the fore.

It is clear that parents, policymakers, and the public are looking for education that produces well-qualified graduates across the board—young people ready and able to take on whatever challenges they choose. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, they say. The recipe is largely here. And it’s time to get cooking.

SOURCE: “Personalized Learning and the Every Student Succeeds Act: Mapping Emerging Trends for Personalized Learning in State ESSA Plans,” KnowledgeWorks (March 2018).

Scrapping regulations that burden schools, have little to do with student learning, and restrict local flexibility and autonomy is a worthy undertaking. Over the past few years, Ohio legislators have taken small but commendable steps in providing regulatory relief for public schools. For example, Senate Bill 3, enacted in December 2016, provides flexibility for high-performing school districts around various staffing regulations. Last month, the Senate passed legislation intended to further pare down regulations. With unanimous support, Senate Bill 216—known as the Ohio Public School Deregulation Act—now heads to the House for consideration. But what’s in this bill? What positive steps does it take? And what provisions should House members take a closer look at?

Let’s start with three solid provisions.

Provides flexibility around teacher licensing. Most Ohio educators are licensed to teach in specific grade spans (PK–3, 4–9, and 7–12) and in certain content areas. Although research has not shown a close link between standard licensing requirements and classroom effectiveness, licensing is viewed by many as a way to ensure minimum criteria around who teaches which courses. But at the same time, licensing also restricts the ability of school leaders to deploy staff in ways that meet organizational (and student) needs. Consider a school with a vacancy in tenth grade math. Its school leaders may want to fill that opening internally. But they could not easily assign that course to a ninth grade teacher licensed in grades four through nine, even though he or she is willing and able to teach tenth graders. The vacancy could also be filled externally. Yet as a barrier to entry, licensure regulations shrink the applicant pool, as only those specifically certified to teach math in grades seven through twelve could be hired. In some parts of Ohio—and in harder-to-staff subjects like math and other STEM fields—finding candidates meeting licensure requirements can prove difficult.

SB 216 would allow superintendents to more effortlessly deploy teachers in grades and content areas in which they aren’t licensed. Three conditions, however, must be met before they can do so: 1) the teacher’s license must be within two grade levels of the course being taught;[1] 2) the teacher must have at least three years of instructional experience; and 3) the teacher must pass an exam in the out-of-field area. Interestingly, the introduced version of SB 216 did not include any conditions—it would’ve given school leaders more latitude to match personnel to organizational needs—but the Senate added them as the bill moved through committee. All told, the Senate-passed version of SB 216 does a fair job balancing local autonomy with some basic quality-control provisions.

Increases the time before non-teaching staff can receive tenure. Like most states, Ohio has seen a boom in non-teaching staff. In many districts, state law grants these school employees job protections after their third year of employment—i.e., they receive tenure. SB 216, however, increases non-teaching staff’s probationary period from three to seven years before they receive tenured status. This is a smart change, and it’s one recommended in our 2015 deregulation paper. First, it aligns non-teaching employees’ probationary period with that of teachers, who generally become eligible after seven years. Second, by delaying tenure, school management will have a longer time to assess the capabilities, performance, and organizational fit of their non-teaching staff before awarding job protections that make it costly and difficult to remove them, should that become necessary. To be sure, a bolder overhaul of tenure, including potentially phasing it out entirely as a few states have done, should be considered. Nevertheless, this change would give school leaders more tools to effectively manage a large part of their workforce.

Preserves the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA). Perhaps the most-discussed provision in the introduced version of SB 216 was its proposed elimination of the KRA, a statewide test given to all incoming kindergarteners. The idea seems to stem from concerns about the burdens of the assessment. In Senate testimony last December, various educators noted the significant time needed to administer the KRA, as it requires one-on-one testing with each student. But in testimony, early-learning advocacy groups stressed the role of KRA data in revealing the need for high-quality preschool, particularly in disadvantaged communities. After much debate, the Senate decided to maintain the KRA, though it also directed the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) to recommend ways to streamline it. Both are good steps. As preschool initiatives continue to forge ahead, it’s critical to gauge progress statewide in kindergarten readiness. At the same time, minimizing testing burdens remains an important goal, and ODE should work on solutions to improve the efficiency of the KRA.

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Now let’s turn to three provisions in SB 216 deserving of scrutiny in the lower chamber.

Masks data on student subgroups by increasing the minimum “n-size” to thirty. To ensure that schools do not overlook historically disadvantaged students, state law requires the disaggregation of data by various subgroups. Current Ohio law allows such data to be publicly reported when there are at least ten students in a subgroup—anything less is masked to ensure privacy. For school accountability purposes—as in the Gap Closing component that focuses on subgroups—ODE has used a higher threshold of thirty students, but it will soon lower that number to fifteen under its ESSA plan. As discussed by my Gadfly colleague Madison Yoder, SB 216 would change all of this by increasing Ohio’s n-size to thirty students for both reporting and accountability purposes. That’s wrong on both counts. It would conceal from public view disaggregated data on children who are most apt to get lost in our school systems. The higher n-size would also weaken accountability for their academic results. Because this policy directly relates to pupil outcomes—and not educational “inputs”—lawmakers should reverse SB 216’s proposal to raise the n-size to thirty.

Requires reading improvement plans from additional districts and schools. It’s odd to see new administrative burdens included in a deregulation bill, but SB 216 does just that. It requires districts, charters, and STEM schools to submit reading improvement plans to ODE when less than 80 percent of their students reach proficiency on the state third-grade English language arts exam. Ohio law already requires districts and charters with low K–3 Literacy ratings and less than 60 percent proficiency in third-grade ELA to submit an improvement plan; hence, this would likely place more districts into a “needs improvement” status. It’s far from proven that creating these plans alone leads to learning gains, but it would create more paperwork. How is that deregulation?

Maintains state requirements on teacher evaluations. SB 216 makes major changes to Ohio’s teacher-evaluation framework by eliminating the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) and replacing it with a rubric designed by the Educator Standards Board. As discussed in a separate piece, my view is that matters of personnel evaluation should be delegated to local management. No single framework can work in the context of all local schools, and trading one set of requirements for another doesn’t seem to meet the goal of enhancing flexibility and autonomy.

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Much more work remains for those of us who want to free educational leaders to organize their schools in ways that best meet student needs, along with parent and community demands. But by passing SB 216, the Senate has approved several solid ideas that would provide greater managerial flexibility, while maintaining—with the exception of the n-size change—accountability for outcomes.

The Move to PROSPER project is a new initiative by a consortium of organizations led by the Ohio State University to provide a path to stability for some of the least stable families in central Ohio—namely, low-income single-parent households with one or more school age children. Due to its wide-ranging goals, its origin in city planning, and its long-term focus, the model’s ambition far exceeds the typical work of social service providers. However, its very existence raises uncomfortable questions about the effectiveness of urban policies in meeting the broader needs of less advantaged families living in Columbus.

Move to PROSPER has been raising private and philanthropic resources in central Ohio for over a year in order to launch a pilot project that will help ten families living in poverty move out of Columbus to what are seen as more stable and resource-rich suburban communities. The project neatly aligns with the language and mindset of city planners.[1] Safe and stable housing, closer proximity to good-paying jobs, transportation assistance, community connector support, better medical care, and better schools are just some of the benefits touted by the program’s high-profile leaders. Through relocation, the Move to PROSPER model hopes to give families with little or no means a boost several rungs up the ladder of success in one fell swoop. There is no question that this is an artificial boost predicated on the idea that stability is a function of resources and vice versa. The people and organizations involved are motivated by an abundance of caring and a firm desire to see families succeed, but to embrace such an exodus means we must also embrace why it is necessary. Is the success ladder completely inaccessible to the vast majority of Columbus’s poorest residents? Are the tears in our social fabric so wide that more people than ever are in danger of falling through them? Here are four areas where answers may be sought:

Housing: Move to PROSPER posits that moving families out of Columbus is the most expedient means for them to find safe and affordable housing. That’s probably right, despite efforts of city leaders to address issues of slumlords, code enforcement, racial and cultural redlining, and exploitative rental companies. We must face the fact that there is far too much unlivable “housing” stock in Columbus and that too much of our livable housing is out of reach of poor families’ budgets. A systemic fix for these inadequacies would likely require enormous amounts of money and politically unpopular moves by city and county governments. With Columbus seemingly obsessed with attracting $400,000 condos—often at the expense of existing lower-income units—getting a no-frills suburban flat seems like a quick and easy alternative. Especially when the builders are your partners.

Employment: Government, banking, insurance, and legal services are still big employers in Columbus, but increasingly good jobs are locating in suburban areas, especially jobs for folks without a college degree. Employers are following the workers who began migrating en masse in the 1970s. Exurbs and rural areas are the hottest new locations for job growth, cruelly flipping the script for poor families in the city. The Columbus City Council and Franklin County Commissioners have given millions of dollars in tax breaks to lure a handful of jobs to the city, with very few going to the people who need them the most. Columbus has been sprawling for decades—first housing, now jobs. The creation of Move to PROSPER is tacit admission that our large-scale efforts to bring jobs to workers are not producing the needed results.

Transportation: Despite a major redesign last year, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) system is still patterned on intra-city movement of workers to jobs, just as it was in the twentieth century. As noted above, that employment pattern has changed drastically. Move to PROSPER touts transportation assistance for its participating families—likely in the form of free access to ride-hailing services for jobs, medical appointments, and grocery shopping—because the current transit system has already proven inefficient for most poor residents. COTA’s new initiatives instead target “riders of choice”: K–12 and college students, arena goers and bar hoppers, and the ever diminishing number of downtown workers. Free Wi-Fi, GPS tracking, no-fee circulator buses in entertainment districts, and free rides for downtown office workers are all the rage—paid for by taxing the citizenry at large and by the full-price ticket purchases of folks who ride every day. The jobs and appointments of “riders of necessity” are a low priority and may never rise to the top again.

Education: This is the most obvious of the lost causes that Move to PROSPER supporters must accept. The communities into which the program’s participants will move are identified not by the suburb itself, but by school district name, indicating that quality schools are highly desired resources for families. Columbus City Schools has been mired in poor performance, scandal, and recurring crises of leadership for decades. Faced with these facts, we must either give full-throated support to school choice (charters, vouchers, STEM schools, interdistrict open enrollment) or to facilitation of the OG option: moving to the ‘burbs. There is no way to ignore which option the Move to PROSPER organization embraces, nor the unflattering light in which the city schools are cast because of it. Education in Columbus needs to radically change.

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Some may raise concerns about the Move to PROSPER project based on classism or racism or systemic inequity grounds, but doing so would obscure larger issues. Rising from a poor quality of life to a better one is an understandable desire—likely one that we all have had at some point in our lives. The more people who can achieve that dream, the better. The leaders of Move to PROSPER are armed with data and resources and a sincere desire to help. People with means have made such moves without a second thought, and this artificial form of social mobility could provide benefits for lots of people. Whether it will work remains to be seen. But the questions raised about the quality of life in our city—vital questions raised by the need to have a program such as this—are now unavoidable.

Who can call Columbus home?