2019 was a busy year for education in Ohio. Governor DeWine took office in January, replacing the term-limited John Kasich. The spring and summer months were dominated by the state budget cycle. And the latter half of the year was characterized by familiar controversies.
2019 was a busy year for education in Ohio. Governor DeWine took office in January, replacing the term-limited John Kasich. The spring and summer months were dominated by the state budget cycle. And the latter half of the year was characterized by familiar controversies.
Here’s a look at the five biggest education policy stories of the year.
5) School funding
This spring, Representatives Bob Cupp and John Patterson released their long-awaited Fair School Funding Plan, a new state funding framework developed alongside a group of school district officials. Commonly referred to as the Cupp-Patterson plan, the proposal would increase state aid to districts and schools by $1.5 billion each year, an increase of roughly 15 percent above current state expenditures on K–12 education. Although the plan’s developers hoped to see their proposal included in the state budget, it didn’t make the cut. As a result, the remaining summer months and the entire fall session of the General Assembly were marked by almost continuous debate in the statehouse and the media over the particulars of the plan and how it could be improved. (For a more in-depth look at the Cupp-Patterson plan and its implications for school funding in Ohio, see here.)
4) Postsecondary attainment
Ohio’s Attainment Goal 2025 is a statewide objective for 65 percent of Ohioans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four to have a degree, certificate, or other post-secondary workforce credential of value in the workplace by 2025. It was first announced in 2016, but this year, the deadline started to loom large. Former Governor Kasich and several Ohio agencies initially led the way in crafting a plan to tackle the attainment gap. When Governor DeWine took office earlier this year, he acknowledged the importance of the issue by commenting that everyone “deserves a chance to succeed, to get a good-paying job, to raise a family comfortably.” His initial budget proposal contained several provisions aimed at doing just that. Many of those provisions, such as the $25 million appropriation dedicated to helping high school students earn industry-recognized credentials, survived the budget process. Events like the Aim Hire conference emphasized the importance of connecting education and the workforce. The state’s continued work with New Skills For Youth led to some exciting growth and changes. And new research on the college and career readiness of Ohio students shed additional light on attainment numbers.
3) School choice
School choice has been a major focus of education policy over the last few years, and thanks to the state budget, this year was no different. Quality charter schools will soon receive an additional $1,750 per pupil for economically disadvantaged students and $1,000 per pupil for other students. These state dollars should temporarily mitigate the significant funding shortfalls charters face compared to their district counterparts, and should make it easier to open new schools, expand high-performing networks, and recruit high-performing out-of-state networks.
On the voucher front, the budget made some big changes to the EdChoice Scholarship program. These include expanding eligibility to all low-income students in grades K–12 starting in 2020–21. The changes should also decrease the number of students who are stuck on scholarship waitlists each year. But other changes, including those related to testing and students with special needs, caused us some heartburn. Voucher opponents, meanwhile, have been complaining about the recently released list of EdChoice designated schools. The roster more than doubled in size from the previous year, and for the first time there are several suburban districts included. The presence of these districts has caused quite a stir—and not all of it has been factual or fair.
2) Graduation requirements
Ohio has been battling over graduation requirements for nearly three years now. It all started back in July 2017, when the Ohio General Assembly passed legislation permitting students in the class of 2018 to graduate based on weak alternative pathways—such as school attendance, course grades, a senior project, or volunteer hours—rather than demonstrating academic or career-technical competencies. During the early days of 2019, discussions around graduation data from the class of 2018 revealed some troubling outcomes: Several districts unsurprisingly took advantage of the weakened alternatives to inflate their graduation rates, and districts that were high-poverty or enrolled larger percentages of students of color generally had more students graduate via low-level alternatives.
The debate took another turn later in the spring, when a coalition composed of Ohio Excels, the Alliance for High Quality Education, and Fordham proposed a set of graduation requirements that were markedly different than the plan championed by the state board of education. After a considerable amount of debate, the coalition proposal was included in the final version of the budget and signed into law by Governor DeWine. At long last, Ohio seems poised to move on from testy debates over graduation requirements to focusing on helping students meet the standards instead.
1) Academic Distress Commissions
Lawmakers spent much of 2019 trying to reach a compromise over how to modify academic distress commissions (ADCs), Ohio’s method for intervening in persistently low-performing school districts. The debate has not been friendly. Each of the districts currently under the control of an ADC—Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland—have made headlines for various reasons throughout the year. So, too, has a related lawsuit that’s still before the Ohio Supreme Court.
The budget process included several proposals for how to revise the ADC model. None of the proposed plans made the cut. Instead, the budget established a moratorium on any new commissions for the 2019–20 school year. After their summer break, legislators continued to debate possible solutions. But efforts to find a compromise are still ongoing.
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Well, there you have it. The five biggest education policy stories of the year. Agree? Disagree? What did we forget? Tell us on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s that time of year once again—when the work is on pause, the computer keys are quiet, and the email boxes are weirdly dormant. Time to look back and see what pieces you, our generous and discerning readers, engaged with the most in 2019.
In (almost) chronological order:
Predicting the top education issues for 2019 (January 1)
How fitting that a piece looking ahead to the year’s most important issues ends up being one of our most-read blog posts of the year. We hit the ground running at the start of the year, predicting six themes for 2019 from testing to funding to a push to lower academic expectations. (Wait, that can’t be right can it?)
How’d we do? Looks like we were five-for-six on our predictions, with only pre-K not really rising to the top. Not bad!
How Governor DeWine could make a big impact on Ohio’s post-secondary attainment numbers (January 28)
One of the big topics we didn’t explicitly have at the top of our 2019 prediction list was post-secondary attainment. But we were diligent in tracking the efforts of Ohio’s new governor, Mike DeWine, as he promised to make that a centerpiece of his first budget. This post looked at the various proposals discussed by DeWine at the start of the budget process and the funding and policy levers proposed to support them. How the new governor could help the state reach its Attainment Goal 2025 definitely grabbed your attention.
Governor DeWine’s budget shows his commitment to meeting Ohio’s attainment goal (April 22)
When the budget language was first released in April, we were back on the case—as were you—looking at DeWine’s proposals in detail. Those specifics included a $25 million appropriation dedicated to helping students earn industry-recognized credentials while still in high school, plans and funding for multiple pathways for adults to earn in-demand work skills and certifications, and a huge effort to make college degrees more affordable for Ohioans.
The ongoing debate over Ohio’s graduation requirements was, as predicted, a huge issue in 2019. As various plans to (yet again) change those requirements duked it out in various centers of power in state government, we tried to maintain attention on the practical matters at hand. To wit: This popular post, which dug into the graduation data for the class of 2018. These were the first students to have access to lowered, non-academic diploma pathways, and which schools and districts made the most use of those pathways was of vital concern. Evidence was beginning to mount that a lowered bar to graduation would boost the esteem of adults by hurting vulnerable students’ prospects for the future.
Policymakers should listen to Ohio’s business community on graduation requirements (March 19)
Soon after, the state’s business community entered the discussion in an important way. Through a non-profit coalition called Ohio Excels, business leaders put forth their own plan for new graduation requirements, emphasizing the achievements, traits, and skills they wanted to see in their future employees. The new requirements focused on four key principles: early identification of students who are at risk of not graduating on time; meaningful and research-based supports, interventions, and resources for students and teachers; consistent and externally-verified measurements; and clear timelines and better data collection. Ohio Excels’s plan had a big impact on the final graduation requirements eventually adopted in the state budget.
Tell high school students the truth about college readiness (July 17)
Despite the impending end of non-academic graduation pathways, Ohio’s high schoolers still must contend with other forms of lowered expectations along the way. Readers were apparently intrigued to learn that the achievement level called “proficient” in relation to state test scores did not mean that students were proficient in that subject. Many students did not achieve a remediation-free score on the ACT despite receiving “proficient” scores on Ohio’s math and English end-of-course exams. We urged an end to the long-standing “honesty gap” in the Buckeye State.
Honorable mention(s):
Our continuing series called Pathway to Success, profiles of high-quality charter schools and their students across the state, remained very popular in 2019. Just in case you haven’t seen them, this year’s editions comprised Towpath Trail High School in Akron and Arts and College Preparatory Academy (ACPA) in Columbus.
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Thank you for following Fordham in 2019. We appreciate your readership and hope you will continue to tune in in 2020. We’ve got lots more great stuff ahead.
And in case you might have missed one of the above or any of our blog posts, research reports, or reviews this year, don’t forget you can always subscribe to the Ohio Education Gadfly Biweekly newsletter and have all our great content sent right to your email Inbox!
Over the past few years, we at the Gadfly have gazed into our crystal balls to predict the biggest, or at least most intriguing, stories of the upcoming year. (Click on the links above to see how we did.) With 2019 now behind us, what should Ohioans expect in the world of education for the coming year? Let the predictions begin!
1. Policymakers will continue to debate school funding, but no consensus will emerge. One of the most-talked-about topics in the past year was school funding, with discussion centered on the proposal put forward by Representatives Bob Cupp and John Patterson. Their plan alters virtually every aspect of Ohio’s funding formula and, fully implemented, it would add at least $1.5 billion per year in state spending. So far, debate has revolved around whether the plan allocates enough funds to high-poverty districts, its method to estimate the cost of educating students, its frosty approach to school choice, and how the state would cover the increased outlays. Although there is almost no chance that the plan will be enacted in 2020—it’s an “off-budget” year for the state—policymakers will continue to scrutinize it, in advance of the 2021 budget cycle. In my view, the overhaul envisioned by the Cupp-Patterson plan faces an uphill climb. Not only does it affect the entire K–12 education system, but due to the sizeable funding increase, it is likely to impact Ohio businesses and citizens who may be asked to shoulder additional taxes. Anything can happen, but here’s my best guess: The proposal will continue to drive a productive debate on funding but by the end the year, legislators will start contemplating some more realistic reforms likely focused on delivering more dollars to high needs students. The chances of this happening will rise if economic indicators start going in the wrong direction.
2. School districts will complain about private-school scholarship programs, but a steadily increasing number of families will avail themselves of these opportunities. The shouting you heard at the end of 2019 wasn’t the Times Square countdown, but a cacophony of district administrators complaining about Ohio’s EdChoice scholarship (a.k.a. voucher) program. Alarmed by a growing list of low-performing public schools, school officials went to the media and torched the state’s “failing schools” voucher model in which students become eligible based on low school ratings. As this piece goes to press, there are Statehouse rumblings about proposed “fixes” that might pacify the outrage. If enacted, they will probably turn down the heat in the near term, but we’ll likely hear the grumblings start all over again in fall 2020 as expanded eligibility for income-based EdChoice kicks in. Often ignored when districts are the prevailing voice on the matter is that parents and students are the main beneficiaries of EdChoice expansions as they are provided a wider range of school options. If the historic upward trend in voucher participation continues, more families will select schools that better match their preferences.
3. Legislators will dump transparent school ratings, but this won’t stop parents from seeking clear, objective information about quality. As someone who has written strongly in favor of transparent school ratings, I do hope this prediction is wrong. But the school associations and teachers’ unions are lobbying hard to eliminate Ohio’s A–F school rating system, which they perceive as too punitive. Of course, most districts and schools do pretty well on the report card, and most schools continue to assign letter grades to their own students. But removing those pesky letter grades, which almost everyone understands, would make it easier to hide any weaknesses in student learning. While their proposals vary in specifics, they usually fall into two camps: 1) use “data dashboards,” a system that displays a blizzard of data but offers no ratings that help users make sense of the data; or 2) water down ratings by using fuzzy, informationally-deficient labels such as “approaching expectations.” Should Ohio move in either direction—and again, I hope it doesn’t—the establishment will rejoice. But parents and communities will be less able to identify quality schools, at least via the state report card. If denied clear and concise data, they might head over to Great Schools, a nonprofit organization that provides its own school ratings. And with the state abdicating its role in assigning ratings, groups here in Ohio might fill the void by creating homespun systems. In the end, the state can weasel out of transparent school ratings, but that doesn’t mean the search for clear information about school quality will end. Instead, the state will merely have lost its ability to set the tone for those ratings.
4. Policymakers will champion career and technical education, but data on student participation and outcomes will be lacking. Heeding calls from the business community for skilled workers, Ohio policymakers have made career-technical training a major priority. That’s great news, not only for adults but also for middle and high school students who are looking to get a leg up in their career preparation. We’re already seeing a few signs that schools are responding. Although the numbers remain low—just 6 percent for the class of 2018—an increasing proportion of students earn industry-recognized credentials while in high school. Yet questions still abound on the career-technical front. For instance, how many students pursue an apprenticeship during high school or participate in other forms of “work-based learning”? How many students take career-technical coursework in their regular high school versus a joint-vocational center, or a college? Which career-tech models produce the best post-secondary outcomes for students? Someone should be tracking, evaluating, and reporting on these type of questions. But alas, like too many initiatives, my suspicion is that career-and-technical education will continue to be largely shrouded in mystery.
5. Exciting new schools will continue to grow. In the realm of new school formation, the much-heralded I Promise school, supported by LeBron James and launched in 2018, generated lots of great media attention for the Buckeye State. The early returns from this Akron-based school are impressive. Happily, it’s not just superstar-backed schools that are opening in Ohio. More under the radar, Ohio’s first “classical” charter public school opened earlier this fall. Located near Toledo, Northwest Ohio Classical Academy advertises a stimulating curriculum (OK, I’m biased having taken Latin and Greek), and it’ll be interesting to track parent demand for this approach to education—not to mention its results. Meanwhile, in the private-school realm, a brand-new startup in Cleveland could offer some lessons for developers looking to go the non-public route. Opening in fall 2019, Garden Christian Academy was featured on Mike McShane’s “cool schools” podcast and, why yes, they will soon accept vouchers. Kudos to all who are working to tirelessly to provide Ohio families with an array of quality, distinctive educational options.
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We’re sure to see other topics garner headlines, including academic distress commissions, educator certification and training, teacher pensions, online learning, and much more. Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter to keep up with all the latest developments in Ohio. In the meantime, happy New Year!
Some have said that we’ve reached the end of education policy, but that seems to be far from the case in Ohio. In fact, next year is shaping up to be a pretty busy one—so busy that I had to expand our annual predictions for the year’s top issues from five to six. With a new governor and a budget cycle on the horizon, there’s sure to be plenty to discuss. Here’s a look—for good or ill—at what will likely make headlines in 2019.
6. Testing
As long as there are still state- and federally-mandated tests, and as long as the results of those tests are used to inform parents via grading schools and districts, testing will be a hot topic. Although debates on the topic cooled somewhat in 2018, next year could bring renewed fervor thanks to incoming governor-elect Mike DeWine. His campaign platform explicitly mentioned reducing the number of tests that students are required to take, as well as providing parents and teachers with more meaningful and timely results (something we’ve also suggested). Any reduction is likely going to be minimal, however, because most of the standardized tests students take are required by federal law. But there are a few DeWine could get rid of without running afoul of federal law.
5. Revamping report cards
Like testing, school report cards are another topic that seems to crop up every year. In 2018, there was a hard push to ditch Ohio’s current A-to-F grading system in favor of a dashboard model that would display academic data in raw numbers rather than letter grades. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful, there are plenty of district superintendents and legislators who remain interested in changing the current system. It’s possible that the incoming governor will be more sympathetic to potential changes than Governor Kasich, so keep an eye out for another push to overhaul Ohio’s school report cards.
4. Expanding pre-k
This is an issue that featured as prominently as any in the governor-elect’s campaign agenda. DeWine’s policy platform had an entire section on early childhood development, including promises to raise the eligibility level for publicly funded early childhood programs and to ensure that all early childhood education centers are high quality. There is already an intense focus on pre-k in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Dayton. With the support of a new governor, look for pre-k expansion and quality to be a hot topic this year. The only things that may possibly get in the way of big increases in pre-k funding are state revenue limitations and other big-ticket items like Medicaid and school funding reform.
3. Career and technical education
This summer, President Trump signed the long-awaited reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. The new law is known as the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act—Perkins V for short—and it governs how states implement and expand access to career and technical education (CTE) programs, as well as providing over a billion dollars in federal funding. To access these funds, Ohio must submit a state plan to the federal government in much the same way it did with ESSA. Perkins V contains provisions that require states to complete local comprehensive needs assessments and increased levels of stakeholder engagement, so we can expect to see something similar to the ESSA stakeholder meetings. But the determining factor on whether CTE will be a huge headline or just another discussion point will be whether governor-elect DeWine follows through on his extensive campaign promises related to CTE. He pledged to create a student work experience tax incentive for businesses, expand career exposure and training opportunities for K–12 students, and remove limits on which CTE courses a student can count toward their high school diploma. Given the promising work that Ohio is already doing in CTE, the upcoming year could be a big one.
2. School funding
Another one of governor-elect DeWine’s campaign promises was to “create a more equitable funding system.” Although his platform included few details, he did specify that he plans to direct state resources toward “supportive services for children most in need.” That sounds a lot like wraparound services, which enjoy mostly bipartisan support and have become increasingly popular with the general public thanks to initiatives like LeBron James’s I Promise School, which offers a host of support services for students and their families. But there are two other major issues that will also push school funding to the top of the priority pile. The first is the recurring ghost of ECOT, which inspired legislators to create a Joint Legislative Committee on E-School Funding. The committee met in the waning days of 2018 to hear testimony on various e-school funding models that Ohio could potentially adopt, including a performance-based model. And 2019 could bring some proposals for a new funding system. The second issue is charter school funding. Ohio’s high performing charters continue to achieve solid results with far less funding than their district counterparts. If the DeWine administration is truly looking to tackle this issue, it would be hard to ignore charter school funding inequities.
1. A continued push for lower expectations
By far, the most talked about education issue over the last two years has been the war over graduation requirements. In the final days of the year, the General Assembly passed a bill that extends softened graduation requirements to the classes of 2019 and 2020, which Governor Kasich signed into law before the holiday break. Now, for the first time in twenty-five years, Ohio students won’t need to demonstrate some level of objective academic competence to receive a diploma (at least for two years). The extension is indicative of a larger trend, one that reflects a steady lowering of expectations for students. For example, the state’s five-year strategic plan centers on a goal that is extremely weak, purposely “shies away from traditional academic measures,” and calls for assessing and incorporating social-emotional learning into the state’s accountability system despite research that warns against doing so. Meanwhile, the permanent graduation requirements proposed by the Ohio Department of Education and the State Board would offer students a menu of options that are easily gameable and lack reliability and validity. Buoyed by their “win” on weakening graduation requirements, advocates for lowering expectations at both the state and local level are likely to be energized heading into the new year. So, you can expect even more debate about the importance of maintaining high expectations.
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If the shape of education in 2019 seems dependent upon the new governor’s policies and priorities, it’s because it does. That’s how it always goes in Ohio—no prognostication required.
Happy New Year!
