The number of districts rated excellent in Ohio has risen dramatically over the past several years, from 85 in the 2002-2003 school year to 352 in the 2010-11 school year (almost 60 percent of all districts in the state).
The number of districts rated excellent in Ohio has risen dramatically over the past several years, from 85 in the 2002-2003 school year to 352 in the 2010-11 school year (almost 60 percent of all districts in the state). Are students performing at higher levels than ever before, or are there other factors contributing to the large increase in excellent ratings? The authors of Grading on Curve: The Illusion of Excellence in Ohio’s Schools would argue the latter.
The report by the Ohio Association for Gifted Children points to the complexity of Ohio’s accountability system as well as low cut scores on Ohio’s assessment tests for the rise in the number of excellent districts. For example, achievement standards only require that 75 percent of students assessed at various grade levels be proficient in order for that indicator to be met. Therefore, if 75 percent of third graders score at a proficient level in math, the district meets the third grade indicator even though 25 percent of students are not proficient. Districts can also get a “bump” up to excellent for making above expected gains in value-added, thus leading to further inflation.
The report also points to NAEP results as further evidence that Ohio’s performance standards are too low. Forty-two percent of Ohio’s fourth graders scored at the accelerated level in reading, compared to the NAEP results that indicate only 9 percent of students scored at the same level. Several other measures such as Advanced Placement examinations and ACT scores are good indicators of whether a district is performing at an excellent standard. Sixty-seven districts rated excellent had zero students take an AP exam, while 109 districts had ACT scores below the state average.
Policymakers are often asked to waive certain funding constraints for excellent districts, but if these districts are not truly high-performing should they be receiving waivers and more autonomy? The report suggests several policy recommendations to bolster the meaning of excellence. Among the recommendations include incorporating high-quality metrics into the accountability system such as college remediation rates and performance on AP exams, and a move toward nationally normed high school assessments such as the ACT or SAT.
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Grading on a Curve: The Illusion of Excellence in Ohio’s Schools
Ohio Association for Gifted Children
November 2011
Ann E. Sheldon & Colleen D. Grady
Like any large city, Cincinnati faces challenges in educating youth living in poverty. When it was reported that the number of Ohio and Kentucky students attending college lagged far behind that in other states, organizers at the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the University of Cincinnati decided to increase Ohio and Kentucky’s post-secondary enrollment numbers. This brief by Education Sector describes that effort – namely the process of establishing and sustaining the Strive Partnership of Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky.
The group’s “cradle-to-career” approach coordinates every service and form of support that children and adolescents need, at every stage of their education and development. The five-year-old organization partners with over 300 civic groups, colleges, public agencies, nonprofits and businesses, and holds each partner accountable for its piece of the puzzle. Strive is frequently cited as a model of how shared accountability can work.
The “Student Roadmap to Success” was developed after community discussions favored focusing on a student’s entire academic career rather than a single point of intervention:
1. Increase kindergarten readiness
2. Support students inside and outside of school
3. Provide academic help
4. Encourage students to graduate and enroll in college
5. Complete college well prepared to enter the workforce and succeed
The five goals are then broken into benchmark indicators which are then divided among the partners. Each provider is accountable for agreed upon indicators that are used in the annual “Striving Together” report card. That report is used to tailor interventions and program changes based upon new data gathered.
Strive has also partnered with Microsoft Corporation to develop software that would create a student profile from the data gathered, and follow the student from school to school. Once the software is available, relevant information would be available to the providers involved in the child’s life.
This report attributes Strive’s greatest success to the student learning centers in the lowest-performing and elementary school campuses that serve the neediest students. The learning centers connect students, their families, and neighborhood residents to health, educational, and cultural programs.
The Strive Partnership is already helping seven other communities replicate its model and has plans to create at least 25 “Cradle-to-Career Communities” by 2015. Communities in 28 states are interested in it as well.
“Striving for Student Success: A Model of Shared Accountability”
Kelly Bathgate, Richard Lee Colvin, and Elena Silva
Education Sector
2011
The twenty years since Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law have seen a great expansion in school choice, with charters operating in all but ten states and enrolling nearly two million students nationwide. Yet while parents now enjoy more schooling options for their children, a disappointing number of charter schools fail to provide excellent educations. As an authorizer of charter schools in Ohio, we struggle daily with birthing and growing high-quality charter schools—which is why we find promising and underutilized approaches like charter incubation so appealing.
In this policy brief, Public Impact’s Joe Ableidinger and Julie Kowal examine the merits of the incubation model, outline specific strategies for supporting it, and profile organizations around the U.S. putting it into practice. The authors explain that through the strategic recruitment, selection, and training of talented leaders—and support of them as they launch or expand new charter schools—incubators offer charter school advocates an important tool in guaranteeing quality school choice.
Since 2005, Fordham has been working in Ohio to recruit high quality charter schools to neighborhoods badly in need of better schools. During our six-plus years of effort as a charter authorizer we have managed to recruit just two high-performing models to Columbus (KIPP and a BES school). Tougher still, we have been unable to recruit any to our home town of Dayton. We know first-hand the challenge of helping to recruit and launch great schools. It is for this reason that we are excited about the work of organization across the country to accelerate the growth of great new schools through a strategic process called “charter incubation.”
Charter incubators are entities that intentionally build the supply of high-quality schools and charter-management organizations (CMOs) in cities or regions by recruiting, selecting, and training promising leaders, and supporting those leaders as they launch new schools. Groups leading this innovative effort include New Schools for New Orleans, the Tennessee Charter School Incubator, Get Smart Schools in Colorado, Charter School Partners in Minnesota, The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator in Indianapolis, and 4.0 Schools in several southeastern states.
These organizations are united in their belief that the development of great charter schools can be accelerated through the recruitment, selection, and development of talented school leaders and the support of those leaders as they open and operate charter schools. Incubators provide an up-front quality screen for new leaders and intensive support on the ground, they boost the odds that new schools will succeed. Incubators are building on the success of charter school management organizations (CMOs).
The best CMOs have achieved exceptional results. For example, in 2010, Cleveland’s Breakthrough Schools – with a population of 80 percent low income and 95 percent minority students – outperformed city and state schools on every state test for the grades they serve (grades 3-8), often by substantial margins. Many other CMOs (Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, KIPP, Aspire Public Schools) across the country have reported similarly impressive results.
Public Impact’s crackerjack researchers Joe Ableidinger and Julie Kowal explain in their new policy brief—Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter School Sector—that incubators are an important tool to help meet the demands of parents and students for more quality schools of choice. An estimated 420,000 students linger on charter waiting lists. Hundreds of thousands more are stuck in failing schools without quality options available.
Yet, despite this demand, high-quality charters are growing too slowly. Ableidinger and Kowal cite statistics from 2011-12 that show the country’s top five CMOs—Uncommon Schools, KIPP, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot and Achievement First—together serve just 61,000 pupils.
How to grow better schools faster? The authors distill five main characteristics of successful charter incubators:
1. Selective screening for high-potential school leaders. Incubators focus on the recruitment and selection of top talent, restricting their services to a small group vetted for its leadership promise.
2. Strategic focus on leadership development. Incubators develop promising leaders or leadership teams through rigorous fellowships and training programs over many months that help them open and operate successful schools.
3. Expertise in new starts. While some charter-support organizations provide ongoing services to charter schools, incubators primary focus is on recruiting and supporting new charter start-ups or new school leaders, including the provision of financial resources to talented leaders to develop and build new schools.
4. Public accountability. As a result of their intense, direct relationships with school leaders, incubators, their funders, and the public tend to judge their success by the performance of the schools they incubated.
5. Regional focus. Local ties help incubators provide powerful support to school leaders as they open and operate new schools. Such targeted assistance can include access to funding, introductions to other local leaders, technical expertise (e.g. financial, academic or organizational), or direct support to encourage things like a planning year, intensive fellowship programs and training activities.
Ableidinger and Kowal also highlight strategies that federal, state, and local policymakers can implement to launch, strengthen, and expand the work of charter incubators. The authors note, “targeted funding and changes to key policies can help incubators thrive in their target cities or regions, boosting the supply of promising leaders who start high-performing charter schools and ensuring that these leaders are adequately supported as they open and operate their schools.”
The emerging work of charter incubators across the country is an important reform strategy for states and communities to learn more about. As Better Choices points out, the cost of incubation is far lower than the costs of other reform options and slighter still compared to the social and economic costs of continued school failure.
This article originally appeared in last week’s Education Gadfly.
Fordham has been involved in the arena of school choice in Ohio at virtually every level for the past decade. We authorize charter schools, we have created charter school support organizations and helped birth other choice-support entities, we’ve fought for choice policies in the legislature, and Terry and Checker literally wrote the book on what we think are the lessons from all this work in Ohio. Issues of school choice and the quality (or not) of urban schools have been a big part of my professional life the last five years. Now, they are front and center in my personal life as a parent of a 4-year old son, too. My husband and I have to decide in the next year where our child will go to school and it is a daunting decision.
I live in the Columbus City School district (CCS). My husband and I bought our home years before we had decided whether we wanted to have children, let alone where we’d want to raise them and send them to school. Fast forward about a decade: our son will be a kindergartner next year and we find ourselves navigating urban school choice firsthand.
We look forward to continuing to live in the city of Columbus and sending our son to a district school next year. We love the diversity and energy of our neighborhood, and we greatly value the close proximity of our home to downtown and the excellent community programming at nearby Ohio State University, among the many other reasons we live where we do. And, most importantly, we are satisfied with our public elementary- and middle-school options (high school is too far down the road to judge now).
Like most large urban districts, CCS’s schools vary dramatically. Some schools rival the quality of excellent nearby suburban schools and, unfortunately, at the other end of the spectrum, are schools with such perennial academic failure that it seems almost criminal that their doors remain open. And, like most urban districts, CCS offers an array of magnet school options (in addition to the city’s many independent charter schools).
In the months to come, we’ll face one of the biggest decisions of our lives about where to send our son to school. And because of limited seating in magnet programs and rules that limit our ability to return our son to his “home” neighborhood school if a choice option turns out not to be a good fit, the decision won’t entirely be ours. Don’t get me wrong, when CCS’s lottery results for the 2012-13 school year are revealed, my family’s experience won’t be reminiscent of The Lottery. Our neighborhood elementary school looks to be a fine option for our son, a place we’d be comfortable sending him for the primary grades certainly.
But just a short time into this journey (we started researching schools in earnest last summer and observed the kindergarten classrooms at our neighborhood elementary school for the first time this morning) and with my kid’s future at stake, I’m seeing schools, teachers, and enrollment policies (for starters) in a whole new, and much brighter, light. For example, I used to observe local rules about where and how students can pick a school from thirty-thousand feet through policy-wonk lenses. Now the potential impact of those policies on my family tugs at my heartstrings and wakes me in the middle of the night with worries about my son and his future and what path to choose.
I hope more than anything that the decision we ultimately make for our child is the right one. I look forward to putting this experience to use in my work and believe I’ll have a better informed, more thoughtful perspective on urban education and school choice policies as a result. And on a related note, I’m curious to see how my family’s experience will confirm or collide with what my colleagues – many of whom are also parents – and I have been doing and saying for the last decade here in the Buckeye State.
This piece originally ran on Fordham’s blog, Flypaper.
The NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results for mathematics and reading were released last week. The TUDA results look specifically at 21 large urban school districts that volunteered to have their NAEP scores reported separately (three of which participated for the first time; see the complete rundown of cities here).
The TUDA results for both reading and math in the fourth and eighth grade followed the same trend as the national results that were released last month: scores show little to no significant change since the last results were issued in 2009. At the fourth-grade level average reading scores did not significantly improve in any of the 18 participating districts. In eighth grade, the results are almost the same, with only one district, Charlotte, showing a significant improvement in its scores from 2009. The results in mathematics are somewhat more encouraging. Four districts -- Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore City, and Boston -- demonstrated higher scores than in 2009, and ever more encouraging is the fact that, at the eighth-grade level, six districts performed better than they did in 2009.
Cleveland, Ohio’s second-largest district, is a TUDA participant. Kudos to the district’s leadership for their participation in this important program as it would be easy to hide from tough data. Like most of the other TUDA cities, Cleveland’s scores remained flat in both reading and math at the fourth and eighth grade levels. Cleveland has been participating in the NAEP TUDA since 2003 and results in both reading and math have not budged in that time.
Cleveland’s results are discouraging when compared to other large cities and to the nation. For example, 68 percent of Cleveland’s fourth graders scored at a below basic level in reading, compared to 45 percent of students in other large cities and 34 percent nationally. The same trend continues when you look at math. Forty-seven percent of fourth graders in Cleveland scored below basic proficiency, compared to 26 percent in other large cities and 28 percent nationwide.
These feeble results are worrisome because when Cleveland is compared to similar large city districts (in terms of enrollment, economic status, and demographics) it becomes even clearer that Cleveland is falling behind. For example, take Atlanta Public Schools, a large urban district which at first glance looks a lot like the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Atlanta has 47,789 students, 101 schools, and 80 percent African American students, similar to Cleveland’s 44,362 students, 112 schools, and 69 percent African American student population. However, the similarities stop there. In mathematics, scores in both the fourth and eighth grade were higher than in 2009, and a significantly lower percentage of students are at the below basic level (46 percent in 2011) in grade eight mathematics than compared to 2003 (46 percent).
These poor results also come in the wake of more than a decade of reform efforts in Cleveland. The city had one of the nation’s first voucher programs, it has dozens of charter schools serving close to 15,000 children and the district has been in an almost constant state of reform since at least the early 1990s. More recently, Cleveland launched a far-reaching strategy to improve achievement and repair the district performance two years ago. Included in the reform strategy is a systematic effort to identify chronically low- performing schools and address them, while also providing more school choice options for students in the form of alternative schools and district sponsored charters. The district has also broken down high schools into smaller schools focused on specific themes, and is moving forward with a rigorous evaluation system to distinguish highly effective teachers from weaker ones. Cleveland schools have been under mayoral control since 1998, a move intended to get the district back on the right track both academically and financially.
Cleveland should be applauded for all of these efforts; however, these latest NAEP results show that more needs to be done to move the achievement needle. One could argue that maybe not enough time has passed for these most recent reform efforts to make a difference on test scores. But, Cleveland’s reforms as a whole over the last decade – including mayoral control of the schools – has not moved the achievement needle one iota. This begs the question – have Cleveland’s reforms been too timid? Might it be time to take even bolder actions akin to a place like New Orleans where more than 70 percent of children now attend a charter school and results have steadily improved? Or should we allow more time for some of the newest reforms to bite and hopefully move the needle? How much time do we really have to play trial and error though, with stagnant achievement and students in Cleveland falling further and further behind?
We’d like to extend our congratulations to Jennifer Felbaum, a teacher at Fordham-sponsored Columbus Collegiate Academy in Columbus. Jennifer was the recipient of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter School’s annual teacher of the year award, a distinction given to just one teacher in Ohio for significant contributions when it comes to advancing student achievement. Columbus Collegiate Executive Director Andy Boy said this of Jennifer:
As a founding member of our team, [she] worked tirelessly to develop curriculum, systems, and procedures that have contributed to the academic success of our students. Our students will excel beyond CCA because of Mrs. Felbaum's efforts. I am honored to work with her and amazed by her ability to reach the students we serve."
Jennifer Felbaum is a founding teacher at Columbus Collegiate Academy, an EPIC gold-gain school. She is in her fourth year of teaching sixth grade reading and writing. During this time, her students have made outstanding progress. Last year her students grew from 52 percent proficient in fifth grade to 86 percent proficient in sixth grade. They also achieved three times the normal growth for a sixth grade class as measured by the NWEA. She has also been awarded the Spotlight Teacher award from EPIC for student growth and achievement.
Congratulations, Jennifer!
The number of districts rated excellent in Ohio has risen dramatically over the past several years, from 85 in the 2002-2003 school year to 352 in the 2010-11 school year (almost 60 percent of all districts in the state). Are students performing at higher levels than ever before, or are there other factors contributing to the large increase in excellent ratings? The authors of Grading on Curve: The Illusion of Excellence in Ohio’s Schools would argue the latter.
The report by the Ohio Association for Gifted Children points to the complexity of Ohio’s accountability system as well as low cut scores on Ohio’s assessment tests for the rise in the number of excellent districts. For example, achievement standards only require that 75 percent of students assessed at various grade levels be proficient in order for that indicator to be met. Therefore, if 75 percent of third graders score at a proficient level in math, the district meets the third grade indicator even though 25 percent of students are not proficient. Districts can also get a “bump” up to excellent for making above expected gains in value-added, thus leading to further inflation.
The report also points to NAEP results as further evidence that Ohio’s performance standards are too low. Forty-two percent of Ohio’s fourth graders scored at the accelerated level in reading, compared to the NAEP results that indicate only 9 percent of students scored at the same level. Several other measures such as Advanced Placement examinations and ACT scores are good indicators of whether a district is performing at an excellent standard. Sixty-seven districts rated excellent had zero students take an AP exam, while 109 districts had ACT scores below the state average.
Policymakers are often asked to waive certain funding constraints for excellent districts, but if these districts are not truly high-performing should they be receiving waivers and more autonomy? The report suggests several policy recommendations to bolster the meaning of excellence. Among the recommendations include incorporating high-quality metrics into the accountability system such as college remediation rates and performance on AP exams, and a move toward nationally normed high school assessments such as the ACT or SAT.
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Grading on a Curve: The Illusion of Excellence in Ohio’s Schools
Ohio Association for Gifted Children
November 2011
Ann E. Sheldon & Colleen D. Grady
Like any large city, Cincinnati faces challenges in educating youth living in poverty. When it was reported that the number of Ohio and Kentucky students attending college lagged far behind that in other states, organizers at the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the University of Cincinnati decided to increase Ohio and Kentucky’s post-secondary enrollment numbers. This brief by Education Sector describes that effort – namely the process of establishing and sustaining the Strive Partnership of Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky.
The group’s “cradle-to-career” approach coordinates every service and form of support that children and adolescents need, at every stage of their education and development. The five-year-old organization partners with over 300 civic groups, colleges, public agencies, nonprofits and businesses, and holds each partner accountable for its piece of the puzzle. Strive is frequently cited as a model of how shared accountability can work.
The “Student Roadmap to Success” was developed after community discussions favored focusing on a student’s entire academic career rather than a single point of intervention:
1. Increase kindergarten readiness
2. Support students inside and outside of school
3. Provide academic help
4. Encourage students to graduate and enroll in college
5. Complete college well prepared to enter the workforce and succeed
The five goals are then broken into benchmark indicators which are then divided among the partners. Each provider is accountable for agreed upon indicators that are used in the annual “Striving Together” report card. That report is used to tailor interventions and program changes based upon new data gathered.
Strive has also partnered with Microsoft Corporation to develop software that would create a student profile from the data gathered, and follow the student from school to school. Once the software is available, relevant information would be available to the providers involved in the child’s life.
This report attributes Strive’s greatest success to the student learning centers in the lowest-performing and elementary school campuses that serve the neediest students. The learning centers connect students, their families, and neighborhood residents to health, educational, and cultural programs.
The Strive Partnership is already helping seven other communities replicate its model and has plans to create at least 25 “Cradle-to-Career Communities” by 2015. Communities in 28 states are interested in it as well.
“Striving for Student Success: A Model of Shared Accountability”
Kelly Bathgate, Richard Lee Colvin, and Elena Silva
Education Sector
2011
