Fordham's new paper authored by Rick Hess on ???Creating Healthy Policy for Digital Learning??? is critically important for those of us on the ground working as school administrators, school leaders, charter school authorizers and education policy makers.
I had the good fortune to start my day at the Omega Baptist Church in Dayton with a group of young scholars and their 20-something mentors who were leading Harambee. Harambee means ???pull together??? in Swahili.
Ohio lawmakers have introduced a bill aimed at stemming Ohio's brain drain and keeping college graduates in the state after they earn their degrees.
Ohio's biennial budget put some significant education policy changes into effect this month, many of which we're still sifting through.
With Ohio's biennial budget (HB 153) now in effect, we're still wrapping our brains around all of the implications of various provisions (recall that there were several hundred pages of education policy changes in the legislation).
As Jamie previously mentioned, with Ohio's budget (HB 153) now in effect Fordham is busy dissecting all the different provisions and what they mean for Ohio's students.
After a several-month-long debate in the Buckeye State over teacher personnel policies, Ohio now stands at a crossroad. The biennial budget bill (HB 153) calls for the state to develop a model teacher evaluation framework by the end of this year and to adopt policies tying teacher evaluations to other key personnel decisions like dismissal, placement, tenure, and compensation.
In a surprise move, Ohio's State Board of Education today tapped Interim Superintendent Stan Heffner as the state's new schools chief.?? Heffner never actually applied for the job when it opened up last spring and instead announced he'd be leaving Ohio in August for a job with ETS.??
Yesterday, two days before the state board of education was slated to announce Ohio's new state superintendent, a second of the three finalists for the job removed himself from consideration. And the word on the street is that he exited the race over money, something the board could have prevented.
Today in his piece, ?Understanding upper-middle-class parents,? Mike asked one question in particular that stood out to me: Can affluent parents (who are satisfied with their own kids' schools) be energized to fight on behalf of school reform for the poor? He goes on:
Gov. John Kasich is slated to sign Ohio's biennial budget today (it's a 5,000 page document), legislation that not only appropriates funding for the Buckeye State until 2013 but that also includes hundreds of pages of education-policy changes?most of which will move Ohio forward in significant ways.
When I came on with Fordham it was in the summer of 2009, just after a notoriously difficult budget battle during which Fordham unsuccessfully fought against then Gov. Strickland's inputs-heavy ?evidence-based? model of school funding, though successfully fought against the Governor's and lawmakers' attempts to decimate charter schools (among lots of other battles).
A legislative conference committee has reported out its version of Ohio's next operating budget.?? The Senate and House are expected to approve the committee's report today and tomorrow, with Governor Kasich signing it into law Thursday.??
Potentially drastic changes to teacher personnel policy in Ohio have been at the heart of heated debates for the last five or six months, precipitated by provisions in controversial SB 5, Ohio's collective bargaining law, as well as about-to-be-passed state biennial budget HB 153.
There has been a lot of controversy in Ohio in recent weeks around House-proposed legislative changes to the state's charter law that would decimate an already weak charter school accountability system (see here,
Guest blogger Nikki Baszynski reflects on the eighth-grade graduation ceremony at Columbus Collegiate Academy (CCA), a Fordham-authorized middle school serving students in grades six through eight (the vast majority of whom are economi
In his weekly TIME column, Andy Rotherham pens a piece, ?Are These End Times for Charter Schools??, that begs further discussion. (Although how much cooler would it have been if the column came out on May 21?)
Last evening, the Ohio Senate passed its version of the state's next operating budget, which would reward exceptional charter schools with low-cost facilities.?? Specifically: Districts would be required to offer up unused space to charter schools for lease if the space goes unused by the district for two years,
Like many states, Ohio is struggling with how best to evaluate teachers and how to use those evaluations to inform personnel decisions (like remuneration, tenure, professional development, and ? when district budgets or enrollment levels leave no other choice ?layoffs).
Consistency in public policy is hard to come by. Special interests, ideology, and ignorance of issues (manipulated by lobbyists and other interested parties) all collide and compete for life in the cosmic swirl of the legislative process.
Charters in Ohio have a contentious and troubled history. Events over the last few weeks have added another controversial chapter to the story.
The Ohio Senate just released its version of the state's biennial budget.
Joanne Jacobs Diana Senechal (guest-blogging for Joanne Jacobs*) had an unusual blog post this morning, calling out two other blogs (GothamSchools and one by Ed Week's Sarah Sparks) for sloppy reporting ? or more specifically, sloppy titling.
The Ohio Senate will unveil its version of the state's biennial operating budget early next month.
This week, I made my first trip to visit our Ohio team since joining Fordham last year. I found a lot to make me very hopeful about the Buckeye State, as well as seeing things that made clear to me just how difficult the challenges are there.
This morning Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett and former Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts (and Fordham board member) David Driscoll spoke to the Ohio Senate Finance Committee about education reforms in their respective states.
Ohio is in the midst of a cosmic tussle around the future of its charter school program.
The status of the education of Hispanic students in the US is a hot topic of discussion. In this week's Ohio Education Gadfly, I reviewed a report from the Department of Education, Winning the Future: Improving Education for the Latino Community.
Fordham's Vice President for Ohio Programs and Policy Terry Ryan testified to the Ohio Senate Finance Committee today about HB 153, the pending biennial budget bill.? You can read his full prepared remarks online here. In short, he ? and the Fordham Institute ?
