For the past five years, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been analyzing the academic performance of schools in our hometown of Dayton and in other Ohio cities.
Can Gloria Estefan save Miami's schools? In case you haven't heard, despite its subtropical location, the Miami-Dade County school district isn't doing so hot.
What will be the impact of the next president on public education in Ohio? We'll know a lot more about their different plans a month from now after both parties have held their nominating conventions and unveiled their formal platforms.
This month the State Board of Education officially kicked off its search for the state's new superintendent of public instruction. The search is occurring amid continued uncertainty about the actual role and responsibilities of the superintendent if Gov. Strickland gets his way with the creation of a cabinet-level director of education.
There's so much going on this summer: high gasoline and other energy prices, a looming presidential election, the nation's (and in particular, Ohio's) continuing economic problems, and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In education, Gov. Ted Strickland is gathering input and, likely, putting the final touches on his education-reform ideas.
Once known as the Mother of Presidents, the once-great state of Ohio is getting poorer, older and dumber--and making all the wrong moves to reverse the situation.
Here's an excerpt from a June 24 Gongwer report concerning a Center on Education Policy study showing Ohio's testing and accountability program is working. Terry Ryan, Fordham's Ohio vice president for programs and policy, spars with the Ohio Education Association over the issue of whether the state should hold schools and students accountable for academic results.
-- "[Statewide tests] may be crude, and they should never be the sole means of measuring students' academic abilities and progress. But the accountability they have brought to schools and the statistical guideposts they've established are undeniable benefits. Take, for instance, the reading and math achievement gap between minority and white students.
In response to a June 4 Gadfly article about Ohio's proficiency standards, State Board of Education member Colleen Grady comments about board members' consideration of student proficiency testing:
One might think that leaders of the Buckeye State who have at least one eye focused on education would be struggling to prepare tens of thousands more kids with the skills and knowledge that global competitiveness demands in the 21st century: math, science, engineering, history, languages, and writing as well as prowess in "creative" applications of such skills and knowledge.
Ohio is bracing for an exodus of baby boomers from classrooms as experts sound alarms about whether there will be enough teachers to staff our public schools.
A recent evaluation of proficiency standards asks how well states are doing at setting "world-class" academic expectations (see here). The answer: not great, unless you live in South Carolina, Massachusetts, Missouri, and maybe Hawaii.
Durham, North Carolina, allows its public-school students a variety of educational choices: pupils in the district have been free to apply for any open spot at any public school. But now, it seems, that wise policy may be changed.
The childhood obesity epidemic has lately been much in the news.
Terry posted earlier today on the pressure mounting on attorney general Marc Dann to quit office in light of recent scandals. He's just resigned.
A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan .
An essay that every high-school freshman should be required to read but isn't is "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell.
Here in D.C., the politics of education reform seem tame compared to what our Fordham team in Ohio faces, a point made clear in this Columbus Education Association interview with Governor Ted Strickland.
Gadfly readers will recall last June's much-debated Thomas B. Fordham Institute study, Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System, which called for overhauling the State Teachers Retirement System (see here).
The state's autism voucher program provides up to $20,000 a year for special instruction for an autistic child.
While the Empire State was agog over Spitzergate, New York's union-friendly state assembly quietly passed a bill that will preemptively quash any attempts by school districts to factor student test-scores into tenure considerations.
First Lady Frances Strickland's February 27 interview in The Gadfly sparked this response from Dayton educator Mike McCormick, superintendent of the Richard Allen Schools:
Ohio can boast of praiseworthy gains over the past decade in making school funding more equitable across districts. The next step must be to make funding fairer within districts, according to a new report-Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance-from the Thomas B.
Charter opponents often claim that charter schools in Ohio are unaccountable. But this claim is wrong and utterly indefensible.
Last month, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released the value-added achievement test data for the state's public schools. This data, from the 2006-07 school year, shows student academic growth (in math and reading, grades four through eight) over time.
Ohio's State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) has serious problems that won't go away without fundamental changes to the system.
Advocates for Children and YouthDecember 2007
Center for Collaborative EducationNovember 2007Ohio is a hotbed of high-school reform initiatives, including:the KnowledgeWorks- and Gates-funded Early College High Schools like DECA in Dayton (see here);
As lawmakers in Washington hash out the details of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), both accountability and standardized testing are facing mounting criticism and skepticism. This backlash is felt in the Buckeye State, where some would like to move our academic accountability system away from the state's current achievement tests.
Anti-charter-school wolves are circling in Ohio, howling about low test scores but ignoring the fact that the same low scores are shared by many district schools (see here).
