The Education Gadfly Weekly

Sean Conlan, Alex Medler, and Suzanne Weiss
National Association of Charter School Authorizers
May 2010 

NACSA’s second nationwide survey of authorizers (aka “sponsors” in Ohio) contains several policy insights (as reviewed by my colleague, Janie Scull), as well as interesting findings regarding “practitioner basics” for those of us that authorize schools (the Fordham Foundation sponsors six charter schools). The survey examines how authorizers approach key practices that are critical in the life of a charter school: application process, performance contracting, oversight and evaluation, and charter renewal.

NACSA identified 872 total authorizers across the nation, and found that 86 percent of those authorize five or fewer charter schools; 6 percent authorize six to nine schools; and 8 percent authorize ten or more schools. Authorizers in this last category oversee well over half (64 percent) of all the charter schools in the nation. One of the most interesting findings for those of us here in Ohio relates to services provided by authorizers. Specifically, among small authorizers (ten or fewer schools), 66 percent provide financial services; 89 percent provide training on improving instruction; 72 percent provide special education services; 74 percent provide data analysis; and 85 percent provide training on special education requirements.

Interesting stuff, considering we recently found that of Ohio’s approximately 67 active authorizers, two authorize one-third of all Ohio charter schools, and 52 authorize two or fewer schools. Ohio’s authorizers vary in their roles and the degrees to which they provide services to their schools. And, it’s fair to say that there’s something of an identity crisis going on regarding the appropriate role of the authorizer (so much so, in fact, that the State Board of Education is considering rules that would require authorizers to competitively bid the “administrative services” that authorizers sell to the schools they monitor and oversee in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest).

The report provides good insight on how different types of authorizers operate, and what they deem important. Read it here.

Annie E. Casey Foundation
May 2010 

Despite the title, this 2010 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation spends just six pages of the report making the case for why the end of third grade is an important threshold for child literacy. The report then outlines a broad range of factors that undermine youth literacy (such as birth weight, health issues, hunger, and poverty) and argues for a comprehensive and intensive federal effort to address all of these issues.

Given the Foundation’s admirable commitment to improving the overall welfare of disadvantaged children, its call for a coordinated strategy to improve children’s wellbeing on multiple fronts should come as no surprise. A whole range of problems plague children’s development and this report serves as a reminder of the cross-cutting nature of policy spheres (health, economics, poverty and hunger reduction, education, etc.).

However, the report doesn’t go far enough in focusing on the role that K-12 education can play in improving child welfare. As is the case in the rest of the country, student performance in Ohio isn’t where it needs to be, especially for poor youngsters. In 2009, 64 percent of Ohio public school students failed to meet NAEP’s standards for reading proficiency, and still managed to tie for 11th among all states on this test. While 58 percent of white students scored below proficient on NAEP’s fourth-grade reading tests, a “catastrophic” 87 percent of black students scored below proficient, as did 70 percent of Hispanic students.

Though the report offers few specific examples of current educational policies that are raising student achievement, it does point to charter schools as examples of the kind of community involvement that needs to occur in education to get full buy-in from parents, students, teachers and schools. The report lifts up lessons as to what K-12 education can do – regardless of what is happening in other policy spheres -- to ensure that third graders are reaching reading proficiency. Read the report here.

Ohio’s growing teacher corps has driven up the cost of education, especially as teachers’ salaries and pensions are by far the largest expenditure in K-12 education.

Also incredibly costly is the fact that 62 percent of Ohio teachers have at least a master’s degree, which is 18 percentage points higher than the US average and higher than all of the Buckeye State’s neighbors. (Kentucky has a high percentage of teachers with “specialist” degrees, which accounts for the tall red bar in the chart below.)

With the exception of math and science, there is no correlation between a teacher having a master’s degree and improved student achievement, so the master’s degree bump in salary is an expensive item for districts with little return on investment for their cash-strapped budgets.

Source:  IES National Center for Education Statistics, data from 2007-08

In Ohio’s “Big 8” cities, the number of teachers with at least a master’s degree continues to grow. In Cincinnati, that number has grown by almost 13 percent in just five years; in Dayton, by a whopping 20 percent; all other cities except Akron (which remains the same at 68 percent) have also seen a rise in the number of master’s credentialed teachers.

In Dayton, the spike in the percentage of teachers with master’s degrees didn’t result from more teachers earning their degrees or credentialed teachers joining the district. Rather, the increase came from district layoffs in the 2005-06 school year, followed immediately by a failed levy the next year that led to further cuts. This bout of layoffs axed the newest teachers and protected credentialed teachers (who are costlier but not necessarily more effective in the classroom), a reality that is being repeated in 2010 and which threatens to push younger, talented teachers out of the profession.

Source: Ohio’s interactive Local Report Card, 2004-2009

The growing number of educators seeking that piece of paper is no big surprise, given the current financial incentives in place and the value placed on things like paperwork and credentials in the profession. 

The master’s pay bump is worth several thousands of dollars to teachers, depending on their years of experience and what their contract stipulates. For example, for a teacher in Columbus City Schools with three years of experience, a master’s is worth $4200; for one with 10 years of experience, $5600. In Cleveland, those figures are $4200 and $9600, respectively.

Even without the financial motivation, Ohio teachers were required to eventually get a master’s degree to attain state licensure (this requirement changed last year with HB 1). For teachers, putting in the extra work required to attain a master’s degree certainly has been worth the opportunity cost, especially as many districts put aside a special pot of money to help teachers pay for continuing education.

Marguerite Roza, senior scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and school finance guru, argues that states should end the master’s pay bump because there is little correlation between a teacher attaining a master’s degree and becoming more effective in the classroom. Despite no evidence that master’s degrees improve student performance (except in some cases, in math and science), states and districts continue to dole out for it.

A July 2009 analysis by Roza and her colleague Raegen Miller estimates that the master’s pay bump cost Ohio $460 million a year, or 2.7 percent of total expenditures on education in Ohio. As Ohio faces a crushing budget deficit of $8 billion as it heads into the biennium, it’s time for lawmakers and leaders to reevaluate the cost-effectiveness of the automatic master’s pay bump.

If there was ever a time to rethink how we do business, it’s now. Ohio needs to concentrate funds where it makes an actual impact on student achievement.

A recent flurry of news about Ohio charter schools makes a strong case for clearer lines of charter school accountability in the Buckeye State.

On May 17, the governing authorities of ten schools operated by White Hat Management sued the company and the Ohio Department of Education and asked the Franklin County Common Pleas Court to declare a provision of state charter school law unconstitutional. At issue is a 2006 change in law that made it possible for a school operator to override a school’s governing board’s decision to switch operators by appealing directly to the sponsor (aka authorizer). If the sponsor agrees with the operator, then the operator can fire the governing authority, appoint a new one, and retain control over the school. But even if the sponsor rules that the operator should be fired, in some cases the operator will retain the school’s assets, facilities, and even its employees, leaving the board empty-handed.

The Fordham Institute – and our sister organization, the Fordham Foundation, a charter-school sponsor – applauded many of the changes included in HB 79 in 2006 but has opposed this provision since it became law. As Fordham’s Terry Ryan explained to the Akron Beacon Journal, ''[This law] creates a situation where you're going to have lawsuits and you're going to have muddied accountability because it's not at all clear who's on the hook for performance. We would not sponsor a school that worked that way… what we always say is, for us, we want to know who the governing board is and we want to communicate with the governing board and we want to have a relationship with the governing authority. Because at the end of the day, that's our partner. They're the ones we hold accountable for results.''

Meanwhile, Policy Matters Ohio released a report alleging that Imagine Schools, which operates 11 schools in the Buckeye State, “receives as much as 98 percent of its schools’ funding to act as superintendent, central office, principal, workforce and landlord” – with little regard for student performance. Further, the report shows that the authorizer of seven of Imagine’s Ohio schools sells services to all of the schools, creating an inherent conflict of interest.

Policy Matters says its findings are evidence for outlawing for-profit operators altogether. Instead, the Fordham Institute offered up three recommendations, including giving the state authority to prevent conflicts of interest for charter sponsors.

These sordid stories demonstrate the need for strong, independent statewide sponsors in Ohio. This is exactly what Fordham and the ESC of Central Ohio hope to achieve via a merger of our sponsorship efforts – an endeavor supported by the National Association for Charter School Authorizers and the Columbus Dispatch.

Reading scores for Cleveland’s fourth and eighth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) aren’t much better than the math results from last December. There are several ways to summarize the results; unfortunately most are discouraging for Ohio’s only TUDA-participating city.

Cleveland’s results versus:

• All large US cities: Cleveland ranks among six others whose fourth and eighth graders scored lower than students in large US cities on the 2009 reading test.
• Other TUDA cities: The average score for Cleveland fourth graders is second to lowest, next to Detroit. (This happened in math, too.) Cleveland eighth graders did slightly better, ranking above Detroit, DC, Fresno, and Milwaukee, but still fell into the bottom-most rung of those cities scoring below the large city average.
• Cleveland’s previous progress: Among the 11 districts that have participated in TUDA since 2002, Cleveland is one of the few whose scores have not budged at all (in a statistically significant way) in either grade. These stagnant scores mirror what is happening statewide (according to Ohio’s 2009 NAEP scores), but this is still bad news, especially considering that several TUDA-participating cities have experienced significant growth over the decade.

The following graphs compare Cleveland’s TUDA reading results with the district’s Ohio Achievement Test results, and contrast Cleveland’s TUDA results with those of other large cities, Ohio, and the national average.

Source: The Nation’s Report Card: Trial Urban District Assessment Reading 2009

Source: The Nation’s Report Card: Trial Urban District Assessment Reading 2009

The graphs illustrate two important points. First, while it’s obvious according to state tests that Cleveland students are underperforming, the landscape becomes much bleaker when ones looks at the NAEP scores (unfortunately for Cleveland, these are a more reliable metrics). A recent report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (reviewed below) reminds us that how well children read by the end of third grade predicts how well they will do later in life. This is terrible news for Cleveland, where 66 percent of Cleveland fourth graders fail to achieve even a basic level of proficiency.

Second, Cleveland students grossly underperform when compared to the rest of the Buckeye State and other large US cities. Cleveland realizes it has a problem. District CEO Eugene Sanders plans to implement a district transformation plan to dramatically improve student achievement, shutter or relocate low-performing schools, and raise graduation rates. But the city faces the brutal challenge of trying to pay for this plan (it has a price tag o$70 million over three years) while reducing a $53 million budget deficit and laying off 545 teachers.

But while lots of US cities are facing similar challenges -- not all of their schools are languishing as badly. DC, for example, has experienced growth in both reading and math over the last several years. Several others have achieved growth in fourth or eighth grades and in one or both subjects.

District leaders and Ohio lawmakers should take this data seriously, as students’ reading proficiency in Cleveland is alarmingly low. But if Cleveland’s bottom-tier performance ranking can’t inspire hope, the experience of other cities might.

Is school choice a genie you can put back into the bottle? The Dayton Public School District wants to try.

In addition to a large charter sector and strong private schools that can enroll children using the state’s EdChoice voucher (see below for the breakdown of publicly funded student enrollment in the city), Dayton has embraced intra-district choice by allowing families to send students to any school of their choosing within the district. 

Source: Ohio interactive Local Report Card; School Choice Ohio

Last week, the school board voted unanimously to support a proposal to require K-8 students to attend their neighborhood school, with the exception of a handful of magnet programs. The plan is intended to save transportation costs, and it surely would (the district spends about $13 million a year on transportation and is facing a $6.3 million budget deficit next year). But with these cost savings might come negative consequences. 

For example, currently a child in Dayton who moves during the school year can continue attending the same school, providing much-needed education continuity. Will the “neighborhood schools” policy require children to bounce from school to school as they migrate from home to home? And what of the impact on the racial and socio-economic composition of Dayton’s schools? Individual schools are sure to become less diverse as assignments are made based on proximity and not choice. The city has long-struggled with racial discord. What will the impact of this policy be on the community a generation down the road?

Last week the Dayton Daily News questioned whether the proposal will fly with parents. Fordham’s Terry Ryan commented, “This might have worked really well in 1985, but I’m not sure about 2010. Folks have grown used to choice, and they like it.” 

In fact, it could be reason enough for more families to pack up and leave the city altogether. 

Dayton’s population, like that of other Rust Belt cities, has plummeted in recent decades as jobs have vanished. An Ohio Supreme Court ruling last year that municipal employees cannot be required to live in the locale where they work opened the door for even those people who have reason to be loyal to the city to move out of it. If education options are restricted, might more Daytonians decide to depart?

Annie E. Casey Foundation
May 2010 

Despite the title, this 2010 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation spends just six pages of the report making the case for why the end of third grade is an important threshold for child literacy. The report then outlines a broad range of factors that undermine youth literacy (such as birth weight, health issues, hunger, and poverty) and argues for a comprehensive and intensive federal effort to address all of these issues.

Given the Foundation’s admirable commitment to improving the overall welfare of disadvantaged children, its call for a coordinated strategy to improve children’s wellbeing on multiple fronts should come as no surprise. A whole range of problems plague children’s development and this report serves as a reminder of the cross-cutting nature of policy spheres (health, economics, poverty and hunger reduction, education, etc.).

However, the report doesn’t go far enough in focusing on the role that K-12 education can play in improving child welfare. As is the case in the rest of the country, student performance in Ohio isn’t where it needs to be, especially for poor youngsters. In 2009, 64 percent of Ohio public school students failed to meet NAEP’s standards for reading proficiency, and still managed to tie for 11th among all states on this test. While 58 percent of white students scored below proficient on NAEP’s fourth-grade reading tests, a “catastrophic” 87 percent of black students scored below proficient, as did 70 percent of Hispanic students.

Though the report offers few specific examples of current educational policies that are raising student achievement, it does point to charter schools as examples of the kind of community involvement that needs to occur in education to get full buy-in from parents, students, teachers and schools. The report lifts up lessons as to what K-12 education can do – regardless of what is happening in other policy spheres -- to ensure that third graders are reaching reading proficiency. Read the report here.

Sean Conlan, Alex Medler, and Suzanne Weiss
National Association of Charter School Authorizers
May 2010 

NACSA’s second nationwide survey of authorizers (aka “sponsors” in Ohio) contains several policy insights (as reviewed by my colleague, Janie Scull), as well as interesting findings regarding “practitioner basics” for those of us that authorize schools (the Fordham Foundation sponsors six charter schools). The survey examines how authorizers approach key practices that are critical in the life of a charter school: application process, performance contracting, oversight and evaluation, and charter renewal.

NACSA identified 872 total authorizers across the nation, and found that 86 percent of those authorize five or fewer charter schools; 6 percent authorize six to nine schools; and 8 percent authorize ten or more schools. Authorizers in this last category oversee well over half (64 percent) of all the charter schools in the nation. One of the most interesting findings for those of us here in Ohio relates to services provided by authorizers. Specifically, among small authorizers (ten or fewer schools), 66 percent provide financial services; 89 percent provide training on improving instruction; 72 percent provide special education services; 74 percent provide data analysis; and 85 percent provide training on special education requirements.

Interesting stuff, considering we recently found that of Ohio’s approximately 67 active authorizers, two authorize one-third of all Ohio charter schools, and 52 authorize two or fewer schools. Ohio’s authorizers vary in their roles and the degrees to which they provide services to their schools. And, it’s fair to say that there’s something of an identity crisis going on regarding the appropriate role of the authorizer (so much so, in fact, that the State Board of Education is considering rules that would require authorizers to competitively bid the “administrative services” that authorizers sell to the schools they monitor and oversee in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest).

The report provides good insight on how different types of authorizers operate, and what they deem important. Read it here.