The Education Gadfly Weekly

In the waning days of 2013, I highlighted five big issues to keep an eye on in 2014. Ohio’s new teacher-evaluation system was number two on the list. In terms of predictions mine was anything but bold; after all, this is the first school year that the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) has been implemented. Any new system, especially one as important and controversial as OTES, is going to make headlines.

Last fall, Senator Randy Gardner introduced legislation (Senate Bill 229) to make minor modifications to the evaluation system. Most notably, he proposed reducing from 50 to 35 percent the amount of a teacher’s performance evaluation that is based on student achievement and lengthening the time between evaluations to three years for many teachers. The bill sailed through the Senate in less than a month, but it stalled in the House Education Committee until recently.

The House last week unveiled a substitute bill (legislative comparison document) that clarifies some ambiguities in the law and offers helpful tweaks. Other modifications are more substantive and could help school leaders to more accurately determine a teacher’s performance level. The most substantial among the House’s proposed changes include the following:

• Incorporate student surveys into teacher ratings. Borrowing from the recent Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study sponsored by the Gates Foundation, it would allow (not require) school districts to use student surveys as 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation and would reduce the emphasis on the teacher-observation rating and student-growth measures from 50 percent to 40 percent each.
• Create a fifth teacher-performance level of “effective.” This rating would fall between “skilled” (second highest rating) and “developing” (second lowest) in the current system and would allow greater differentiation between teacher-performance levels.
• Require that at least one of the two formal observations of the teacher be unannounced. Current law does not require an unannounced observation, which leaves open the possibility that in some situations a principal (or other evaluator) might not get an accurate indication of the quality of the day-to-day teaching occurring in the classroom.
• Allow effective and skilled teachers to be observed less frequently than annually. While affording flexibility, it tightens a potential loophole by allowing this flexibility only if the teacher’s student-academic-growth measure is “average” or higher.
• Provide a safe-harbor provision for value-added measures (VAM) during the 2014–15 school year. The provision allows school districts, charter schools, and STEM schools to enter into an agreement with their teachers to ensure that VAM is not used for decisions regarding teacher dismissal, retention, tenure, or compensation for next school year. This is an incredibly important provision that gives schools time to implement OTES and the state’s more rigorous state assessments aligned to its new learning standards.

The proposed changes in the House substitute for Senate Bill 229 appear to be a thoughtful and more complete review of Ohio’s teacher-evaluation law and deserve careful deliberation. Recent public comments from House Education Committee Chairman Stebelton suggest that he recognizes the importance of the changes and expects to allow significant time for the committee to gather public testimony. This is precisely the right course of action and bodes well for the long-term success of Ohio’s new teacher-evaluation system.

As in many states across America, too many young adults in Ohio are unemployed, disengaged, and on the road to nowhere. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that approximately 140,000 Ohioans aged twenty-five to thirty-four have not earned a high-school diploma. Within this same age bracket, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 85,000 job-seeking young adults (or 7.6 percent of them) are unemployed in the Buckeye State.

Given these alarming statistics, the state’s efforts to support young adults in dire straits is admirable. But Ohio’s House Bill 343, which would extend access to a free and public education to young adults ages twenty-two to twenty-nine, doesn’t get the remedy right. In fact, the bill may provide an antidote more toxic than the ailment it intends to treat.

The legislation would allow up to 1,500 young adults to enroll in a dropout-recovery charter school or a school in a “challenged district” if the adult resides in the district. These students would be allowed to attend the school up to two cumulative years with the purpose of obtaining a high-school diploma. Public aid would fund the enrollment expansion at $5,800 per pupil for fiscal year 2015. The bill requires the State Board of Education to develop reporting and accountability standards for any school that enrolls young adults aged twenty-two to twenty-nine in a dropout-recovery program.

For three reasons, the legislature should think twice before enacting this bill or an omnibus bill that includes the provisions contained in House Bill 343.

First, the bill expands the role of dropout-recovery charters, schools with an unproven track record. Dropout-recovery schools are a special subset of charters that serve students aged sixteen to twenty-one who are at-risk of dropping out or have already done so. Such students may have had histories of low achievement, chronic absenteeism, and high mobility—the state’s most vulnerable young people.

Yet it’s far from clear that dropout-recovery charters are boosting these students’ odds of high-school completion. According to the most recently available data from 2011–12, just four of the state’s seventy-three dropout-recovery charter schools had five-year graduation rates above 60 percent. A near majority of them had five-year graduation rates lower than 20 percent. Of course, bearing in mind the at-risk characteristics of their students, these data must be taken with a grain of salt—but the available evidence suggests that these schools are not getting enough of their pupils to the high-school finish line. Given this, is there reason to believe that dropout-recovery charters will help older adults earn their high-school diplomas?

Second, the state is in the midst of implementing a brand-new accountability system for dropout-recovery charter schools. To its credit, the state legislature enacted House Bill 555 in December 2012, which establishes an alternative accountability system for dropout-recovery charter schools. The new accountability metrics include graduation rates (from a five- to eight-year cohort rate), results on state assessments, annual measurable objectives (AMOs), and a student-growth measure. With so much work still in progress related to accountability for dropout-recovery schools as they are presently constituted, this is an unfortunate time to open a new frontier. Let’s nail down accountability for dropout-recovery schools and then consider expansion.

Third, the state has superior alternatives for reengaging young adults than reenrolling them in a high school, whether a charter or a traditional district. By the time young adults reach their mid- to late-twenties, a high-school diploma might not be the best or only solution. They need job skills (and a job, too). For struggling young adults, Ohio should invest in the work skills that can be obtained through an apprenticeship, high-quality technical program, or community college. House Bill 486 does this, calling for a pilot program for adults without a diploma to attend a community college or a technical program to obtain their high-school diploma and an industry credential. For those who are beyond the age of a traditional high-school student, the state would be wiser to invest in community colleges or technical-training centers rather than high schools.

Young adults deserve a second chance to undo the poor decisions of their past. But House Bill 343, while well intentioned, falls short in its remedy. It relies on schools that evidently struggle to help the students they presently enroll and for which Ohio has yet to determine proper accountability. Meanwhile, state policymakers would do better to look beyond schoolhouses to help young adults get back on track for workplace—and life—success.

To learn more about dropout-recovery charter schools, click here to read the research brief.

• Horizon Science Academy in downtown Toledo has been entangled in a months-long process to secure a new facility by buying the building currently housing the YMCA. Despite a signed contract and a use permit approved by two of three needed city entities, the deal has stalled. They are opposed in this effort by a neighborhood group which would prefer Toledo Public Schools take over the space for a Head Start program and affiliated services, regardless of the fact that TPS has no funds on hand to do so. You can read the whole saga as it has unfolded on the Ohio Gadfly Daily, but the vote last week in city council to grant final approval for the use of a school in the building tied at 6–6. The city’s new mayor D. Michael Collins declined to cast the deciding vote at the time; he has two weeks in which to do so.
• Kudos to Chris Woolard, Director of Accountability at the Ohio Department of Education, for winning the 2014 State Data Leader Award from the Data Quality Campaign. Chris and his team were recognized for their efforts to ensure Ohio teachers and administrators have easy access to timely, relevant student data, as well as training in how to appropriately and meaningfully use those data to improve results for students. You can check out an audio interview with Chris, where he discusses the vital work of bridging the gap between data systems and the teachers who use them.

Since 1998, thousands of parents have chosen to enroll their children in Ohio's public charter schools. Today, nearly 120,000 students are being educated in one of Ohio's more than 400 public charter schools. Cleveland (29%), Dayton (28%), and Toledo (27%) all landed in the top ten school districts with the highest percentage of charter school students, according to a recent analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.  

For the past few months, legislators and leaders within the charter school movement have observed, with considerable concern, a handful of start-up charter schools that abruptly closed after less than a year of operation.  Missteps by a few sponsors who allowed the opening of these untested charter schools signal the need for some sponsors to do a better job of vetting.  Even with thorough vetting, new and tighter controls should also be considered when a first time, inexperienced operator decides to open a charter school.

However, even though changes should be considered, Ohio must never turn its back on new start-up charter schools.  Many of Ohio's strongest achieving charter schools were born from community inspiration and with sponsors listening to the many calls from parents.  Most of these new charter schools filled voids that existed within the traditional educational system, sometimes for decades. 

Make no mistake, the vast majority of sponsors and their charter schools have strong performance models, are highly regulated and meet state and federal regulations all while working to fill the needs of at-risk children.  As long as families continue to search for better educational options for their children, the demand for quality charter schools will continue to grow. 

For years, Ohio’s state leaders, including Governor John Kasich, House Speaker William Batchelder, and Senate President Keith Faber have demonstrated their support for quality education options for Ohio’s students. But, that political support can never be taken for granted and can easily erode if charter schools are not properly scrutinized and managed.  

There is no perfect system in education, and certainly no ‘one size fits all’ approach meets the needs of each student.  This simple truth underscores the importance of providing Ohio families with a broad range of quality education options for their children.  Most charter schools embody an entrepreneurial spirit, working daily to create a quality educational experience for students while facing a significant amount of risk and without many of the safety-nets found in traditional top-heavy education.  

Problems in public education are certainly not limited to issues with start-up charter schools.  After more than a decade of charter schools operating in Ohio there still remains vast differences in which the state views 'public' district and 'public' charter schools.  It's difficult to explain why policymakers entrust the educational future of 1.8 million students to Ohio's public schools, but create such vastly different standards in areas of funding, facility support and overall accountability for Ohio's public charter schools. 

In recent months, Dr. Richard Ross, Superintendent of the Ohio Department of Education has suggested that it may be time to re-examine some of those differences in areas of accountability.  

When legislators review the procedures for sponsors and new start-up charter schools, they should also examine the significant differences in the application of accountability to all public schools.

Ron F. Adler is President of the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education.

Recognizing the contribution of schools and teachers to their students’ learning is a key element of a performance-based accountability system. Yet determining how to measure such contributions remains unsettled science. Two approaches—student-growth percentile (SGP) and value added (VAM)—have emerged as the most rigorous ways to measure contributions to growth. Even within the value-added category, there are several ways to specify the statistical model. (Ohio, along with a few other states, uses a proprietary model that was developed by William Sanders and is run by statisticians at SAS.) But does the model actually matter, as it pertains to teacher-level ratings? In this paper, researchers compare SGP to VAM, using longitudinal student data from public schools in Washington, D.C.. Interestingly, the authors specify a teacher-level VAM (not the Ohio model) that includes student background characteristics and an SGP model that excludes them.[1] Generally speaking, the researchers found strong correlations between the models (greater than 0.9 for both math and reading). However, the analysts found a number of outlying teachers whose growth estimates were substantially different across the two models. As a result, a minority of teachers (14 percent) would have landed in a different rating category depending on the model. The analysts, however, attribute very little of the differences to the inclusion-exclusion of background variables. So is one model superior? The authors can’t say—there’s no “magic model” to compare them with—but their research demonstrates that different models can alter some teachers’ ratings. Ohio’s state-level policymakers should be aware of these facts, as they try to navigate the choppy waters of teacher-evaluation policy.

SOURCE: Elias Walsh and Eric Isenberg, How Does a Value-Added Model Compare to the Colorado Growth Model? (Washington, DC: Mathematica Policy Research, 2013).