The Education Gadfly Weekly

Over the past decade teachers have seen numerous reform efforts aimed at changing the status quo on teacher evaluations, pay, and tenure among other things. More often than not teachers are not directly involved in these reform efforts, leaving a key voice out of the process. A recent report by Education Sector looks at how teachers feel about these teacher-related reforms, and about unions and their involvement in reform efforts. A nationally representative survey of a randomly selected group of 1,101 K-12 public school teachers was conducted by the FDR Group to obtain the data. The questions for the survey were developed and refined through four diverse focus groups.

Significant findings in the report include that teachers support reforms such as:

• teacher evaluations, as long as the evaluation methods are perceived as fair
• pay reforms for factors teachers have more control over (e.g., working in tough neighborhoods and specializing in hard-to-fill subjects as opposed to student test scores)
• restructuring tenure laws that make firing ineffective teachers too difficult

For traditional union activities such as protecting their jobs and negotiating salaries and benefits, teachers viewed union involvement to be significant and favorable. In addition, teachers want unions to be involved in other activities which they generally do not participate in such as providing support for instruction and career development, and helping to reform teacher evaluation and dismissal.

Although the study surveys teachers at a national level, many of the findings are likely applicable to Ohio. Last year, Ohio went through a hard-fought battle around public sector union reform. While the contentious effort was ultimately defeated by voters, polls showed that Ohioans supported some of its changes, like paying teachers according to their performance and effectiveness. If the unions represent the interest of teachers, then they should proactively lead these reforms. The report concludes that “the viability of the union will be determined by whether teachers perceive them as being part of the problem or part of the solution for public education.”

Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession

Sarah Rosenberg and Elena Silva

Education Sector

July 2012

Better late than never. Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owens of the Center for American Progress have now looked at the twenty-seven second-round waiver applications that states submitted to Secretary Duncan (as Ayers had done with the first round waivers in December 2011), seeking recurrent themes across three of the Department’s four priority areas: standards and assessments, accountability systems, and teaching and leadership. (“Duplication and burden” was not included as few states addressed it in their waiver applications.) Most importantly, they found that “the waiver process itself did not stimulate new innovations aside from accountability.” What’s more, even within this sphere, nine states opted to follow one of the Department’s prescribed options for accountability, and many others set similar goals, slightly tweaked—bringing into question the level of “innovation” that is actually occurring. (This is probably due to the feds’ tight leash on waivers at least as much to lack of imagination in the states.) CAP then uses its own policy priorities to rate the states’ applications and offer recommendations. Among them: The Department of Education should ask for more detail on aspects of state plans and should establish a clearinghouse to document and share tools, strategies, and lessons of implementation. There’s much helpful background here—and much detail about individual states’ waivers. But read with a discerning eye, remembering that CAP, during this election year, is not about to ding the Obama administration.

Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owen
No Child Left Behind Waivers: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications
Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012.

The Fordham Foundation is excited to announce that as of July 1 we have three new schools in our sponsorship portfolio. DECA PREP, Columbus Collegiate Academy – West, and Village Preparatory School::Woodland Hills Campus are all now part of Fordham’s sponsorship efforts. These three schools join eight others that we already sponsor, bringing the total to eleven schools throughout the state of Ohio. All three of these schools stem from other high-performing schools, and we have full confidence that they will provide a great education to youngsters in Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland.

Here is a quick look at each of the new schools.

DECA PREP - Dayton, Ohio
DECA PREP will open this fall as a new K-6 school in Dayton designed to immerse first-generation college-goers into a rigorous and structured elementary academic setting to ensure that they will be successful in high school and college. DECA PREP will incorporate components of the academic model of its sister school, the highly successful Dayton Early College Academy (DECA), which serves grades 7-12 in Dayton and has produced tremendous results over the years. In 2010-11 DECA received an Excellent with Distinction designation from the Ohio Department of Education (the highest possible rating) and it continually outperforms Dayton Public Schools. For example, the graph below demonstrates DECA’s performance compared to Dayton Public Schools in tent- grade math proficiency in 2010-11.

Source: Ohio Department of Education

DECA Prep will serve grades K, 1, 2, and 6 in its inaugural year and add grades until it serves K-6 in the 2015-16 school year. Demand for DECA PREP has been tremendous, and school leaders are excited to open the doors this fall. As Superintendent Judy Hennessey stated, “This new elementary school is a dream come true. We firmly believe that we can help build a college-going culture around our youngest learners and ground them in strong reading and math literacy skills. Parents who live within the city of Dayton can choose a K-12 school program that is singularly focused on preparing students for eventual college graduation.”

DECA PREP will be led by Diane Blackburn who is an experienced educator and who served as principal in several Ohio schools. To learn more about DECA PREP visit its website.

Columbus Collegiate Academy -West- Columbus, Ohio
CCA West will open this fall on the west side of Columbus as a replication of the successful Columbus Collegiate Academy Main campus, which is located just east of downtown Columbus. Like CCA Main, CCA West will serve grades 6-8. CCA West will also maintain high expectations for scholarship and behavior, and an achievement-oriented school culture to ensure all students are equipped to enter, succeed in, and graduate from the most demanding high schools and colleges.

CCA Main first opened its doors in 2008 and has `continually placed among the highest performing urban middle schools in the state. In 2011 CCA received an EPIC Gold-Gain School award for dramatic gains in student achievement, a tremendous accomplishment as only four charter schools in the country won the award in 2011. CCA Main continually outperforms the district in student achievement, as the graph below illustrates.

Source: Ohio Department of Education

CCA West will be run by Kathryn Anstaett, a former Teach For America corps member who had this to say about the new school, “Since opening, Columbus Collegiate Academy has been serving students primarily on the east and north sides of Columbus. I am thrilled to be opening our second campus and bringing this opportunity to students and families on the west side as well.” Founder and Executive Director Andrew Boy also expressed his excitement about CCA West, “We’re enormously proud of our accomplishments and we look forward to replicating the success of our flagship school on the west side of Columbus. Strong educational options for all students can be realized with the right mission and the right commitment.” We at Fordham also have little doubt that, like CCA Main, CCA West will be a successful school and a great addition to the Columbus charter community. To learn more about both CCA schools, go here.

Village Preparatory School::Woodland Hills Campus - Cleveland, Ohio
The Fordham Foundation is extremely excited to announce our new partnership with the nationally recognized network of Breakthrough Schools. Village Preparatory School::Woodland Hills Campus (VPWH) is a K-4 school and the latest school to join the Breakthrough network (joining six other successful charter schools in Cleveland).

VPWH will provide a highly structured environment that engages students, a school culture that emphasizes academic rigor and clear expectations, ongoing assessments to determine mastery, character development, and an extended day and extended year. Breakthrough Schools have already had tremendous success in educating children in the Cleveland area. E-Prep Woodland Hills, a 6-7 Breakthrough school, outperformed the district by nearly 20 percentage points in sixth-grade math in the 2010-11 school year (see below).

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Village Preparatory School::Woodland Hills Campus will be led by Chad Webb, who summarized his excitement about the new school with the following statement, “Visitors will quickly see that our teachers are passionate and committed to our mission, and every minute is used to the fullest. With two highly qualified teachers in each classroom, we focus on literacy and numeracy instruction to build a strong foundation for future success. Although young, our scholars are held to high behavioral and academic standards, and each scholar understands that they attend school with college as their long-term goal.” Visit www.breakthroughschools.org for additional information.

Innovation: It’s an education reform cliché. But what is innovation, really?

Ask most people about innovation and they’ll probably talk about products—airplanes, laptops, smartphones. But innovation also refers to process. That’s what blended learning is for education. It turns the process of teaching upside down.

Late last month, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in partnership with Knowledge Works and Reynoldsburg City Schools, welcomed Anthony Kim, founder and CEO of Education Elements, to Ohio to speak with local educators and district leaders. Founded in 2010, Education Elements is a California-based company that advises schools on how to adopt and implement blended learning models. Education Elements has assisted charters (KIPP Los Angeles), traditional public school districts (Houston Independent School District), and parochial schools (Mission Dolores Academy in San Francisco).

Kim began the conversation with an audience that included superintendents, teachers, lawmakers, and state board members by describing his blended learning model. According to Kim, blended learning has three goals:

• To differentiate teaching by breaking the classroom into smaller groups
• To increase the collection and use of student achievement data to improve teaching
• To create more efficient schools

How does blended learning achieve these goals?

First, blended learning can address some of the challenges of teaching students who read, write, and do math at different levels. Blended learning deploys a classroom rotation model: students are first broken into groups and then these groups rotate through different work stations throughout the school day.

Kim presented a three-station model, in which station one is where teacher instruction happens (e.g., lecture), station two is where students work on team projects, and station three is where self-paced digital learning occurs. In a blended learning environment, students would be working at all three stations simultaneously. This hybrid approach enables teachers to cluster their students by ability and to create a more balanced approach to student learning—not all lecture, not all team-project, and not all computer-based learning.

Second, blended learning can increase the collection and application of student achievement data. Because up to a third of a student’s learning is done digitally, teachers can immediately look at results from informal, online student assessments. Thus, the student-teacher “feedback loop” is reduced.

Third, blended learning can handle larger class sizes, which improves school efficiency. Because the blended learning model divides classes into smaller groups—some students here, others there—larger classes can be taught with potentially fewer instructors.

Blended learning is a completely different process of teaching. It’s clearly not your parents’ education: gone is the teacher as omniscient lecturer, with students quietly sitting—or sleeping—at their desks.

But does it work? It’s still very much an open question, since blended learning is so new. (The first blended learning schools came online around 2008.) Certainly, the fact that some of this country's best charters use blended learning attests to its effectiveness– but these are also schools with an ingrained culture of innovation and tech-savvy teachers.

For blended learning to work on a larger scale, traditional school cultures would need to change radically (something Kim acknowledges). And this type of change would require visionary school leaders who can secure the buy-in from teachers who would use this model. Will any of Ohio’s educational leaders be daring enough to deploy this cutting-edge model in their schools? Only time will tell.

Louisiana recently submitted a proposal to that state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that calls for school choice and quality control in the state’s voucher program-- two words that have not been paired together enough here in Ohio. Specifically, the plan calls for a practical accountability system for the state’s voucher program. Louisiana’s K-12 scholarship program awards students who meet a residency and income requirement and who attend a low-performing school a scholarship to attend a private school of their choice. Currently approximately 5,000 students are using a public voucher in Louisiana.

The accountability plan, which would be the first of its kind in the nation, would introduce an accountability system based on a “sliding scale” (i.e. those schools enrolling more voucher students would be held to a higher level of accountability-- an idea Fordham proposed three years ago). Under the new system schools enrolling an average of greater than ten students per grade or forty or more students enrolled in tested grades will have their test scores reported. Schools will then be given points based on their performance, similar to the ones given to the public schools. Schools who receive low scores in the second year or any year after that will not be permitted to enroll any additional scholarship students for the next year.

While states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin have demonstrated greater transparency around student achievement data for voucher students, Louisiana’s proposed plan would be the first to include teeth with the potential to kick low-performing private schools out the program. States, including Ohio which has a statewide voucher program that serves over 15,000 students should take note of this plan.

Over the past decade teachers have seen numerous reform efforts aimed at changing the status quo on teacher evaluations, pay, and tenure among other things. More often than not teachers are not directly involved in these reform efforts, leaving a key voice out of the process. A recent report by Education Sector looks at how teachers feel about these teacher-related reforms, and about unions and their involvement in reform efforts. A nationally representative survey of a randomly selected group of 1,101 K-12 public school teachers was conducted by the FDR Group to obtain the data. The questions for the survey were developed and refined through four diverse focus groups.

Significant findings in the report include that teachers support reforms such as:

• teacher evaluations, as long as the evaluation methods are perceived as fair
• pay reforms for factors teachers have more control over (e.g., working in tough neighborhoods and specializing in hard-to-fill subjects as opposed to student test scores)
• restructuring tenure laws that make firing ineffective teachers too difficult

For traditional union activities such as protecting their jobs and negotiating salaries and benefits, teachers viewed union involvement to be significant and favorable. In addition, teachers want unions to be involved in other activities which they generally do not participate in such as providing support for instruction and career development, and helping to reform teacher evaluation and dismissal.

Although the study surveys teachers at a national level, many of the findings are likely applicable to Ohio. Last year, Ohio went through a hard-fought battle around public sector union reform. While the contentious effort was ultimately defeated by voters, polls showed that Ohioans supported some of its changes, like paying teachers according to their performance and effectiveness. If the unions represent the interest of teachers, then they should proactively lead these reforms. The report concludes that “the viability of the union will be determined by whether teachers perceive them as being part of the problem or part of the solution for public education.”

Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession

Sarah Rosenberg and Elena Silva

Education Sector

July 2012

Better late than never. Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owens of the Center for American Progress have now looked at the twenty-seven second-round waiver applications that states submitted to Secretary Duncan (as Ayers had done with the first round waivers in December 2011), seeking recurrent themes across three of the Department’s four priority areas: standards and assessments, accountability systems, and teaching and leadership. (“Duplication and burden” was not included as few states addressed it in their waiver applications.) Most importantly, they found that “the waiver process itself did not stimulate new innovations aside from accountability.” What’s more, even within this sphere, nine states opted to follow one of the Department’s prescribed options for accountability, and many others set similar goals, slightly tweaked—bringing into question the level of “innovation” that is actually occurring. (This is probably due to the feds’ tight leash on waivers at least as much to lack of imagination in the states.) CAP then uses its own policy priorities to rate the states’ applications and offer recommendations. Among them: The Department of Education should ask for more detail on aspects of state plans and should establish a clearinghouse to document and share tools, strategies, and lessons of implementation. There’s much helpful background here—and much detail about individual states’ waivers. But read with a discerning eye, remembering that CAP, during this election year, is not about to ding the Obama administration.

Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owen
No Child Left Behind Waivers: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications
Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012.