Last week, State Auditor Dave Yost released the findings of his investigation into data scrubbing in Columbus City Schools. Fordham's Ohio policy minds give their take on the report and what it means for the district going forward.
Auditor of State Dave Yost released the findings of a special audit of the Columbus City Schools’s 2010–11 records last Tuesday. The audit investigated whether the district manipulated student data—reported for accountability and funding purposes—and what they found was abhorrent. The district was woefully out of compliance, intentionally and deliberately falsifying records to its own advantage. The auditor has referred its findings to city, county, and federal prosecutors. The audit of Columbus City Schools is part of a larger investigation into districts that “scrubbed” student records, with Columbus’s long-simmering data scandal, which first broke in Summer 2012, being the most egregious case.
It is a sorrowful time for Columbus. Our take on the report’s findings and how the city can begin to recover follow below.
Chad Aldis: Glimmers of hope
The Columbus education-data scandal, brought to light by the crackerjack reporting of the Columbus Dispatch, has been unfolding for a year and a half. During that time, there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of column inches devoted to the sordid details—so much so that I expected State Auditor Yost’s report to be little more than a period at the end of a sentence. I was wrong.
Reading through the report and observing public reaction to its findings leaves me feeling angry, appalled, and disgusted.
I’m angry that this could happen. We rely on our schools to educate our students, to look out for their interests, and to prepare them for the future. We don’t expect our schools to change student grades, reclassify graduates as twelfth-graders, and alter attendance records in an attempt to boost school funding, nor do we expect them to incorrectly withdraw and reenroll students to game state report cards. Yet Columbus City Schools did every one of these things.
I’m appalled that many of these fraudulent behaviors occurred for over a decade. It’s shocking that so many school administrators could be complicit in such outrageous conduct. This was systemic corruption by people in education—one of the noblest fields. I have every reason to believe that these were good people who entered education to make a difference and change student lives. Instead, they changed grades.
I’m disgusted when I hear or read that in some folks’ opinions, these (perhaps criminal) transgressions are the fault of accountability systems that track student performance and graduation rates. This is akin to suggesting that when prices rise and you have a hard time making ends meet, it’s okay to steal. It’s not. This was stealing from kids, from parents, from taxpayers, and from the public trust. Critics of accountability can rationalize or justify all they want, but they should think carefully about which side of this argument they want to be on.
And yet there are glimmers of hope. New Columbus superintendent Dan Good is determined to right the ship, and he’s not alone. Mayor Coleman and the Columbus City Council have continued to express their desire to reform this troubled school system. It will be important that the business, philanthropic, faith, and labor coalition that supported the work of the mayor’s Education Commission regroup and remain supportive of Good’s efforts. The next generation of Columbus children, as well as the city’s long-term future, may depend upon it.
Jeff Murray: Who has really lost?
So, the other shoe has dropped. And while perhaps the breadth of the deception within the Columbus City Schools’s data mines made news last week, the fact of data manipulation and its purpose were not.
All of us have lived with this knowledge for eighteen months: pundits, politicians, journalists, district board and staff, district parents, taxpayers, and the general public. We have all had our chances to vent based on our level of exposure to the damage or our ideological bent. Massive levy defeat, anyone? But very little changes with the release of this report, which really only serves to put names and numbers on what we were already certain was going on.
And I am left with only one reaction now: an education system charged with helping young people—ALL young people that are entrusted to it—has been corrupted at its highest levels by individuals who willingly and systematically turned children into bits of data to be erased in order to protect jobs and benefits.
Who lost? The most vulnerable children in the system, those already facing stark realities that no human would wish upon another. Failed again by bureaucracy that is supposed to—and is likely filled with people who want to—help them achieve better. Students’ academic lives erased with a single mouse click.
But, when a mouse click to secure a better grade for a school building—and the bonus that comes with it—can endanger the life of a child held prisoner in her home, we have all lost. Talk about “high stakes.”
Aaron Churchill: District must regain its moral compass
The Auditor of State’s report on Columbus City Schools is out. It’s gut wrenching, sobering, outrageous, scandalous, and painful all at the same time. The prophet Jeremiah’s lament over Jerusalem rings in my ears: “Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?”
Essentially, the auditor’s report describes an organization that (1) ignored some laws while exploiting others, (2) was plagued by incoherent internal policies and rules, (3) enabled a handful of mid-level bureaucrats to gain excessive power, and (4) ultimately cracked because of internal weakness and external pressure.
In the report, we learn about how school administrators—sometimes months after the fact—“erased” absences from student records. We encounter academic failures and attempts by administrators to cover them up. We find adults driven by fear, not by principles; by perverse incentives, not by the mission of the organization. We find a well-intended program, one designed to help youngsters recover credit, that was carelessly managed. We find a virtually endless amount of neglect in recordkeeping and documentation. We discover the deliberate manipulation of information systems with the purpose of artificially inflating school performance. The cumulative effect of these transgressions was to deceive governments and the citizens of Columbus.
The report is a tragedy. And indeed, reading it is like watching a train wreck, a system failure, an implosion of the nth degree. Pick your simile—it ain’t pretty. There is literally nothing to cheer about in this report, and anyone who feels a twinge of schadenfreude has a heart of stone.
So, who can heal the deeply wounded Columbus City School District? I don’t know—and I sincerely doubt any one human can solve the district’s woes. I would say this, though: the organization’s recovery must start by rediscovering its moral compass. The organization has to learn again the meaning of honesty, integrity, industriousness, decency, teamwork, sacrifice, and humility. Surely some employees uphold these virtues—and as the auditor reports, there were indeed those who bravely rejected the organization’s unethical practices and “culture of deceit.” I may be naïve, but I hold out hope that there is a remnant of good women and men who together can rebuild this fallen leviathan.
Today marks the end of National School Choice Week. What started four years ago as a relatively small coalition of reform-minded organizations drawing attention to an issue they passionately supported has turned into a movement. Highlighted by a nationwide whistle-stop train tour, the most amazing part of the week is the thousands of events held all around the country by schools and organizations of all types. For at least one week, the focus shifts from the usual argument of public vs. private and lands squarely where it belongs—on empowering parents and their children with high quality educational options.
In honor of National School Choice Week, we want to take a break from our role as a Gadfly where we too often have to point out situations where quality is lacking. We’d like to recognize some Ohio charter schools that during 2012-13 achieved at a very high level. These schools made a difference in the lives of the students they served.
Given our consistent stance for high standards in all areas, it probably won’t surprise you that the bar to earn our recognition is quite high. To make the list, a charter school must be in the top 10 percent of all schools in the state on either the performance index measuring overall academic achievement or the value added measure that tracks learning gains.
We are proud to recognize and honor these twenty-five schools that have achieved a top ten rating.
Some of you may be wondering who the best of the best is, the Top Gun this year is Columbus Preparatory Academy (CPA). CPA, a Mosaica school, has a record of unmatched success and led all charters in BOTH performance index and value added. You can learn a little more about the school here. This tremendous accomplishment is worthy of praise and is an appropriate marker for other charters to strive toward.
There is little doubt that charter schools have drawn (and sometimes earned) their share of criticism over the years. Before questioning the institution though, look again at the list of the schools above. None of these schools would exist without the opportunity offered by the creation of charter school concept, and they serve as proof that charter schools – like our district schools – when well-run, can educate students at an extremely high level.
Ohio slipped one spot in National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ (NAPCS) annual ranking of charter-school laws compared to last year. For the 2014 edition, Ohio ranked 28th out of 43 states and the District of Columbia, lagging well behind national leaders such as Minnesota, Indiana, and Louisiana (ranked first to third, respectively). NAPCS ranks each jurisdiction’s charter law based on twenty components of its model law. These components include inter alia the strength of accountability measures, the transparency of the charter application and renewal processes, and equitable access to operational and facilities funding.
Among the twenty components, Ohio received a best-in-class ranking on just two: “A variety of public charter schools allowed” and “Multiple authorizers available.” (And indeed, Ohio allows seemingly anyone who wants to open one to do so.) Meanwhile, even as the state has a dynamic and wide-open charter-school marketplace, its accountability measures fall short. The state received lackluster marks on its accountability and transparency policies. And, the nail in the proverbial coffin: The state’s funding provisions for charter schools still remain inequitable. On average, Ohio charters receive roughly $2,000 per pupil less than district schools, driven largely by their inability to access local revenue.
NAPCS reported a few incremental improvements in Ohio’s charter-school law over the past year. Such improvements include a $100 per-pupil facilities-funding grant to physical charter schools, a provision that passed in the 2013 state budget bill. This, combined with a number of other small changes, improved Ohio’s score from 117 to 129. (For reference, Minnesota—the top dog nationally—received a score of 174.)
But in comparison to other states which are making aggressive improvements to their charter-school laws, Ohio dawdles. The biggest movers from 2013 to 2014? Mississippi leapt from 43rd to 14th place; Idaho jumped from 32nd to 20th; and, Indiana moved up from 9th to 2nd. NAPCS commended Mississippi for its “significant overhaul” of the state’s young charter-school law (enacted in 2010). The Magnolia State’s changes included a bump in the cap on start-up and conversion charters and the establishment of a statewide authorizing entity. Both Idaho and Indiana were fingered for their creation of a charter-school renewal process. The Hoosier State also received acclaim for clarifying, in statute, the relationship between a charter school and a service provider.
Coast-to-coast, the report finds that state’s charter laws are improving—and that state’s with weak laws are modeling legislative changes based on best-in-class charter laws. To its own detriment, Ohio is doing little of this, and the Buckeye State’s charter schools are getting left in the dust.
To catapult Ohio to the top of the rankings—and to provide the impetus for reform in the state’s charter-school program as a whole—a comprehensive rewrite of Ohio’s charter-school policies is long overdue. The state’s lackluster laws simply do not do enough good for the nearly 120,000 students who attend a charter. These kids, who often lack good public-school options, need a law that provides them with equitable funding, with the opportunity to learn in a suitable facility, and with the assurance that their school management is committed to educational quality above all else.
Public Impact has authored a report for NACSA and the Charter School Growth Fund with ten policy recommendations to foster accelerated growth of successful charter schools and school networks. Two themes emerge. The first: Taking a differentiated approach to key aspects of charter-school-authorizing work—school accountability frameworks, school replication, and school renewal—is important. Here, differentiation also means treating high-performing charters differently than others; options include green-lighting multiple schools over several years contingent on the performance of their predecessors and using shorter applications tailored to existing schools, capitalizing on the quantitative and qualitative data that an authorizing office has already collected as part of its oversight duties. The second: State policy must complement those efforts. Recommendations include crafting legislation that builds a statewide community of authorizers committed to scaling quality (e.g., establishing standards for authorizer quality and encouraging school districts to embrace a portfolio management approach); removing or tweaking state caps on charter schools so that only high performers may grow (and, conversely, adopting mandatory closure laws, as we have in Ohio, for perennial low performers); providing capital for incubation and acceleration efforts; being open to school-governance models that support inter and intra-state networks of schools; and integrating a “restart strategy” (i.e., transitioning the charter of a low-performing charter school to a new board and management team). To which we say, bring it on!
SOURCE: Public Impact, Replicating Quality: Policy Recommendations to Support the Replication and Growth of High-Performing Charter Schools and Networks (Chicago: National Association of Charter School Authorizers and Public Impact, January 2014).
