OH: Vouchers for Jesus

I can vaguely remember a time when the Heritage Foundation didn't wear its conservative christianist heart on its sleeve, but those days seem gone.

Witness this latest award from Heritage. Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include outfits like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, The Claremont Institute, Feds for Freedom, Immigration Accountability Project, and the Center for Christian Virtue.

CCV is an Ohio organization that started out in 1983 as the Citizens for Community Values. 

The First Amendment ensures that people of all faiths are free to exercise their beliefs in their day-to-day lives. For Christians, this freedom is essential because our faith compels us to act – to seek the good of our neighbors and follow God’s word daily.

Yet throughout the country, laws are in place to restrict religious freedom, and to punish people of faith because of their beliefs. For this reason, protecting religious freedom is our top priority at CCV. 

I often think that ancient Christians would be baffled by what modern christianists consider "punishment" for their beliefs. The modern definition of punishment seems to be stuck on things like "not allowed to discriminate freely against people of whom we disapprove" and "not allowed to grab as much taxpayer money as we wish." 

As punishment goes historically, it seems like tame stuff. But CCV is there to stand up against it by pushing "lifesaving legislation, including bills to prohibit abortion at the moment a heartbeat is detected in an unborn child, expand Ohio’s school choice programs, and protect religious freedom."

CCV leadership include president Aaron Baer, a comms professional (Ohio University '09) from Arizona, where he was a policy advisor for the attorney general's office. He helped launch the Ohio Christian Education Network, most noted for successfully suing the Ohio health department for closing Christian schools during the pandemic. OCEN has its own executive director, Troy McIntosh, a private Christian school vet. 

CCV isn't particularly coy about where they stand on the whole public education thing, as they explain in their release about winning the Heritage award:

CCV will receive a $100,000 award to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system. The award will expand CCV's Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN) model, which helps churches operate full-time, in-person Christian schools Monday through Friday. CCV plans on leveraging Ohio's EdChoice program to offer a moral and quality education to students at little to no cost, especially to those below the federal poverty line. CCV intends to launch dozens of schools across Ohio and export this model to other states to serve and save children across the country.

 I'm not sure exactly when we shifted gears from simply alleging that public schools didn't educate very well to also accusing them of being morally corrupt. But Baer is sure that we have an "educational crisis" because "agenda-driven bureaucrats are pushing political ideologies in the classroom."

And Heritage is right there with him. Upon delivering the award, Heritage president Kevin Roberts declared:

So much of our nation's societal decay stems from our education system, and institutions like CCV are spearheading the effort to save our children and restore morality and sanity in our schools.

It's all a reminder that Ohio's voucher program is about replacing a public non-sectarian school system with one that is explicitly Christian, and to do it in a way that circumvents any actual national discussion about whether this is a good idea or not. But I guess a conversation like that would be punishment.

OH: Raking in Consultant Money

Education reform has spawned a variety of new money-making opportunities, including a burgeoning field of education consultants.

That's because one of the new steady drumbeats is that superintendents, principals, and most especially teachers-- in short, all the people who have devoted their professional lives to education-- don't know what they're doing and possess no expertise in education whatsoever. No, for real expertise, we must call in the High Priests of Reformsterdom.

That takes us to Cleveland, Ohio. I love Cleveland; I did my student teacher at a Cleveland Heights middle school while living in an apartment at the corner of East 9th and Superior, and those, indeed, were the days. But Cleveland schools have a long history of difficulty. Back in the day, Ohio schools had to submit all tax increases to voter referendum; Cleveland voters routinely said no, and Cleveland schools repeatedly shut down around October when they ran out of money.

Now, in the reform era, Cleveland schools have embraced charters and privatization with a plan that stops just short of saying, "We don't know what the hell we're doing or how to run a school district, so we're just going to open it up to anybody who thinks they can run a school or has an opinion about how to run a school. Except for teachers and professional educators-- they can continue to shut the hell up." This is Ohio, a state that has developed a reputation the charter school wild west, where even people who make their living in the charter biz say, "Oh, come on. You've got to regulate something here!"

Given this climate, it seems only likely that Cleveland schools would call on a consulting firm like SchoolWorks. If the mashed-together name makes you think of other reformy all-stars like StudentsFirst and TeachPlus, you can go with the feeling. SchoolWorks started out helping charter schools get up and running and had a close relationship with KIPP schools. Their CEO's bio starts with this:

Spencer Blasdale considers himself a “teacher by nature,” but found early on in his career that his passion was having an impact beyond the four walls of one school.

And may I just pause to note how well that captures the reformy attitude about teaching-- you are just born with a teachery nature, and you don't need training or experience and you certainly don't need to prove yourself to any of those fancy-pants teacher colleges or other professional educators. The entry to the teaching profession is by revelation, and once you "consider yourself" a teacher, well then, what else do you need?

You will be unsurprised to learn that Blasdale's "career" consists being a charter founding teacher, rising to charter administration, and then deciding to jump to charter policy. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he did teach a couple of years at a private day school back in the nineties. He has never taught in a public school. He's a product of the Harvard Ed grad school. Based on all that, he and his company are prepared to come tell you what you're doing wrong at your school; you can sign up for just an evaluation, or they will provide coaching as well.

Which brings us back to Cleveland.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that SchoolWorks has already been to the district. They visited ten schools. They visited each school for three days. Based on three whole days at the school, they evaluated the school in nine areas.

For this they were paid $ 219,000. Seriously.

The reports were not pretty. "Not all educators convey shared commitments and mutual responsibility," they said (which strikes me as a pretty incredible insight to glean in just three days). Another school was slammed for "rarely -– only 11 percent of the time –- letting students know what the goals were for class." This would be more troubling if there were, in fact, a shred of evidence that sharing the goals had any educational benefits. Security officers were careless and the schools were messy and unclean. Good thing they hired a consultant-- I bet nobody in the district is qualified to tell if a school is messy or not.

The whole SchoolWorks package is like that. They come in to give one of four ratings on nine questions.

1. Do classroom interactions and organization ensure a supportive, highly structured learning climate?
2. Is classroom instruction intentional, engaging, and challenging for all students?
3. Has the school created a performance-driven culture, where the teachers effectively use data to make decisions about instruction and the organization of students?
4. Does the school identify and support special education students, English language learners, and students who are struggling or at risk?
5. Does the school's culture reflect high levels of both academic expectation and support?
6. Does the school design professional development and collaborative supports to sustain a focus on instructional improvement?
7. Does the school's culture indicate high levels of collective responsibility, trust and efficacy?
8. Do school leaders guide instructional staff in the central processes of improving teaching and learning?
9. Does the principal effectively orchestrate the school's operations?

Now, some of these are crap, like #3's focus on data-driven instruction and decision-making. And many of them are really good goals in general, but it's going to come down to, for instance, exactly what we think "intentional, engaging and challenging" instruction looks like.

But on what planet are any of these-- even the iffy ones-- better checked by strangers with no public education expertise in the course of a three-day drive-by then by your own in-house experts? Do your superintendents and principals check none of this? We can take care of item #7 before the consultants even get to the school. Does the school's culture indicate high levels of collective responsibility, trust and efficacy? If you have just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come look at what your own people can see with their own eyes, the answer is "no," or maybe "hell, no."

But Cleveland schools say, "May we have some more." SchoolWorks will be driving by twenty-five more schools for a price tag of $667,000. Which-- wait a minute. Ten schools for $219,000 is $21,900 per school. And twenty-five times $21,900 is $547,500. Apparently the additional cost is so that SchoolWorks will provide a "toolbox of solutions."

If this seems pricey, SchoolWorks also offered Cleveland a one-day drive-by package which would have covered the thirty-five schools for $219,000.

If there's a bright spot anywhere in this picture, it's that Cleveland school leaders recognize that simply soaking test scores in VAM sauce won't give them a picture of their schools' effectiveness. But if I were a Cleveland taxpayer, I'd be wondering why I was forking over a million dollars so that some out-of-town consultants could come do the job I thought I was already paying educational professionals in my district to do.

More Evidence That Tests Measure SES

Want more proof, again, some more, of the connection between socio-economic status and standardized test results? Twitter follower Joseph Robertshaw pointed me at a pair of studies by Randy Hoover, PhD, at the Department of Teacher Education, Beeghly College of Education, Youngstown State University.

Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.

Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.

The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:

The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living conditions. Indeed, the statistical significance of the predictive power of SES led to the inescapable conclusion that the tests had no academic accountability or validity whatsoever.

The 2007 study wanted to re-examine the findings, check the fairness and validity of the tests, and draw conclusions about what those findings meant to the Ohio School Report Card.

So what did Hoover find? Well, mostly that he was right the first time. He does take the time to offer a short lesson in statistical correlation analysis, which will be helpful if, like me, you are not a research scholar. Basically, the thing to remember is that a perfect correlation is 1.0 (or -1,0). So, getting punched in the nose correlates about 1.0 to feeling pain.

Hoover is out to find the correlation between what he calls the students' "lived experience" to district level performance is 0.78. Which is high.

If you like scatterplot charts (calling Jersey Jazzman), then Hoover has some of those for you, all driving home the same point. For instance, here's one looking at the percent of economically disadvantaged students as a predictor of district performance.

 














That's an r value of -0.75, which means you can do a pretty good job of predicting how a district will do based on how few or many economically disadvantaged students there are.

Hoover crunched together three factors to create what he calls a Lived Experience Index that shows, in fact, a 0.78 r value. Like Chris Tienken, Hoover has shown that we can pretty well assign a school or district a rating based on their demographics and just skip the whole testing business entirely.

Hoover takes things a step further, and reverse-maths the results to a plot of results with his live experience index factored out-- a sort of crude VAM sauce. He has a chart for those results, showing that there are poor schools performing well and rich schools performing poorly. Frankly, I think he's probably on shakier ground here, but it does support his conclusion about the Ohio school accountability system of the time to be "grossly misleading at best and grossly unfair at worst," a system that "perpetuates the political fiction that poor children can't learn and teachers in schools with poor children can't teach."

That was back in 2007, so some of the landscape such as the Ohio school accountability system (well, public school accountability-- Ohio charters are apparently not accountable to anybody) has changed, along with many reformster advances of the past eight years.

But this research does stand as one more data point regarding standardized tests and their ability to measure SES far better than they measure anything else. 

Excuses? Maybe a Few After All

Charter operators continue, slowly but surely, to learn.

Chris Barbic, as he steps away from his job as superintendent of Tennessee's Achievement School District, gives a sideways nod to the notion that poverty might matter after all.

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment.  I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD.  As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Yes, turns out that when you have to educate the students who come with the territory, their situation matters.

And now, Ohio Charters (motto: Setting the Bar So Low That All Other Charters Look Good) have experienced the same epiphany. Here's the lede from the Cleveland Plain Dealer story from yesterday:

Ohio's school rating system is unfair to schools serving poor, urban kids and needs to change, a charter school advocacy group is telling state legislators.

Yep. Ron Adler, head of the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education ("Leadership for Public Charter Schools"), says, "When students from Cleveland public schools and Cleveland area charter schools are continually rated against the highest performing suburban schools they will always be cast off as failures."

We can set this beside the recent discovery at Bellwether Thinky Tank for Free Market Education that-- shock-- standardized tests alone might not be good measures of how good a high school is. It might be more complicated than that.

Oh, hey, and remember that time that charters stopped saying "We can do more with less" and started saying "We deserve at least as much money as public schools, if not more."

Just in case charter operators start ret-conning the charter movement, let me remind you how this song used to go.

"No Excuses for Poor Children Not To Learn, Research Shows" says the Heritage Foundation in 2000. "Schools can help all kids-- poverty is no excuse" says Eva Moscowitz in the NY Post just a year ago (if you look at the actual URL, it says the "poverty myth" is a "lame excuse"). Perhaps you haven't yet grabbed your copy of No Excuses: 21 Lessons from High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools. Or we could flash back to this Forbes article highlighting the effectiveness of "No Excuses" management in high-poverty schools-- in Ohio.

Before you get too excited, note that as with all things charter, Ohio is an extra special case. They set the bar for charter school closings (in Columbus alone, seventeen closings in one year), they fund charters at a higher rate than public schools, they have a problem with ghost students in charters, and they just bid adieu to the state's school choice chief who was cooking the books to make charters look better.

So when Ohio starts talking about factoring in demographic issues, they're actually talking about using models like the one already used in California to (unofficially) fudge the poverty factor by pretending to compare schools that are similarish. Perhaps a VAMmish addition of comparisons to imaginary schools would help as well.

Unfortunately, this is probably not good news, leading as it does to a search for an evaluation system that "proves" that charters are actually doing great. The increased discussion of charter problems and factors and costs is happening, I'm afraid, because charter folks feel confident that they are well enough settled in the landscape that discussing their issues will not lead to people saying, "Well, if they cost as much as public schools and don't do any better job, let's just get rid of them and invest all that money in public schools." So while it may be heartening and a little entertaining to see charters start to make excuses, what that may mean is that the public has started to take charters for granted. Too bad, because the rise of excuses is just one more piece of evidence that charter operators don't know a single thing that public school educators didn't already know.

Schools Offer Teacher Test Bonuses

In a move of incredible cheapness and stunted vision, the school leaders of Tipp City, Ohio, have decided to institute performance based pay. It's a good look at just how ridiculous such a system would be.

Tipp City is a bit north of Dayton and has a population of just under 10K. It used to be named Tippecanoe, and was later Tippecanoe City, but there's another Tippecanoe in Ohio and so Tipp City had its name changed. This was apparently a big deal. Fun fact: Kim Deal of the Pixies is from Tipp City.

The school district actually conducted its own phone survey, and respondents overwhelmingly rated the district's education excellent, and its use of tax dollars good.

But the phone survey also touched on another issue facing Tipp Schools--

Tipp City lost many teachers last year to higher paying jobs and nearly 40% of teachers reported they were looking or planned to look for jobs elsewhere. Do you think this is a very important, somewhat important, or not very important concern?

61.1% of respondents (who were overwhelmingly old and without children in the system, because apparently this phone survey was run during the daytime) rated that a Very Important Concern. It came in behind older schools' lack of modern facilities, and the too-small, run-down sports stadium as an important issue for the district. However, because this is Ohio, a state in which schools must go hat in hand to the voters for everything, the survey also checked on support for raising taxes to pay for holding onto teachers. From this we learn that there's a certain percentage of folks who want teachers to stay-- they just don't want to pay for it personally.

So why are Tipp City schools having a personnel problem? They spend less per pupil than eighteen of the surrounding twenty districts. Their personnel problem might be that the teachers have been frozen on their salary step for four years, and for two of those years they have had no cost-of-living increase, which means two years of real-money pay cuts. Working for Tipps is worse than working for tips.

In fact, things have gotten so bad that Tipp teachers are in the midst of forming a union. Seriously. This is playing well locally:

“I am incensed over the fact that we stand on the precipice of having a union in this town,” resident Pete Schinaman said. Schinaman is the co-chair of the levy campaign. He asked the board what could have been done to prevent the teachers association from forming.

Which brings us back to the merit pay.

This is not merit pay as in "additional pay above your step." This is merit pay as in "we're scrapping the entire pay scale and replacing it with this." The proposal is that teachers rated "accomplished" get a 1% raise. (Yes, that's 1 %, with a 1.) "Skilled" teachers get a .75% raise, and "developing" teachers get a .5%. Some quick math tells us that for someone currently stranded on a $50K pay step, the resulting raise will range from $500 down to $250.

So, still losing real dollars every year. I can't imagine why these teachers felt the need to unionize.

I am not sure on which planet this classifies as "trying to retain talented and capable teachers." I'm pretty sure that it sends a clear message and the message is, "If you're waiting for us to finally reinstate a decent pay program, you can stop waiting and start freshening up that resume."

Meanwhile, while other Ohio superintendents are standing up to the state over high-stakes testing, Tipp City's super has sent out a letter reminding parents that while they can opt out, they really shouldn't because it will have bad consequences for the schools, the community and maybe their child, and if they want to opt out, they'll have to do it in person or by phone. Did I mention that administrators can earn up to 3% raises?

So, good luck to you, Tipp City Exempted Village Schools! You have identified a problem and a need, and you have responded to it with a resounding thud, an idea so small and unhelpful that it seems more like mockery than a real attempt to help your teachers thrive and survive, like leaving a one cent tip for the wait-person instead of stiffing them entirely. I hope you enjoy your new union, but if you're worried about that, don't fret, because teachers will probably be too busy packing to bother joining in the first place.

The PARCC Fairy Tale

The fairy tale surrounding PARCC and the other Big Standardized Tests has been tweaked and rewritten and adapted, but some folks still enjoy telling it, and every once in a while I come across (like the brothers Grimm searching the countryside for classic old material) a particularly simple and straightforward version of the old classic. That's what we're looking at today.

Andrea Townsend describes her job as coordinating services for students with special needs in the schools of Greenville, Ohio (northwest of Dayton), but her LinkdIn profile shows a broader range of responsibilities (like food service). She was previously an elementary principal, and before that nine years as an intervention specialist.She started her career as a satellite instructor connected to a vocational school for three years. She has a bachelors in Vocational Agriculture Education and a Masters in Educational Leadership.

Townsend thinks the PARCC is getting a bad rap, and she took to a community website to share that view in a piece that was later picked up by some other regional media.

I feel the need to make an unpopular statement of my opinion. Here goes… I support the new statewide tests. 

So she knows she's out on a limb here. Her piece provides a testament to the mis-information that still persists and the false narrative that reformsters are still trying to sell.

Educators and legislators in our state adopted new standards to guide the instruction for public schools several years ago. These standards are focused on the skills students need to be successful in college or their career or both. The standards look at critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as developing a student’s ability communicate clearly. These skills are paramount to success in our ever changing, global and technology driven world.

Chapter One of the Tale of Test-Driven Accountability remains the same. "Once upon a time, we adopted the magical Common Core." You'll note that even though Townsend is willing to be controversial and unpopular, she's not crazy enough to promote the Common Core by name, but she does support it with the usual unproven assertions. How does anyone know that the standards cover objectives needed for career or college success? "The standards look at critical thinking"? I looked at a zoo once; that doesn't make me an elephant. Nor do I see any standards that address communicating clearly. Nor do we have a whit of evidence of exactly what skills are paramount to success.

According to the PARCConline.org website, “The new tests also are being developed in response to the longstanding concerns of educators, parents and employers who want assessments that better measure students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and their ability to communicate clearly.”

Come on, Ms. Townsend-- you're better than this. According to Budwesier ads, drinking beer will make me attractive to hot blondes. According to Tony the Tiger, Frosted Flakes will make me great. As an administrator, you've had to deal with numerous vendors-- when they're trying to sell you something, do you just take their word for it, or do you check things out and verify? PARCC is just a big test vendor. Do you have any proof of their test's awesomeness beyond their own word?

Next she raises the issue of a diverse student population, specifically considering students with special needs. Again, with no back-up other than a quote from PARCC, she asserts that PARCC totally handles a wide range of students-- without ever altering the content. PARCC just allows for different ways to interact with the test, but it is great for assessing students at the far reaches of the scale-- which is really difficult to do. Much has been written about the inadequacy of PARCC's accommodations (here's one example), so we'll need more than just PARCC's word for it here, too.

Acquiring skills begins with a clear understanding of two things. First we must clearly understand what skill we want. Second we must clearly understand the skills we already have. When we have those two pieces of information, we are able to learn, practice and apply skills between those we have and those we want. It is important in education that we have the clearest understanding of the skills each student has and the skills each student needs.

Chapter Two of the Tale includes the story of how the magical PARCC will let us know exactly what our students do and don't know. Again, we know this because PARCC says so. But the PARCC is not a formative assessment, and its results are neither fine-grained enough nor quickly returned enough nor transparent enough (remember, teachers aren't allowed to so much as look at the test questions) to help any teacher-- certainly not to give the kind of help that a teacher gets from her own assessmenbts and data in the classroom.

Change is hard, says Townsend. And some of the process of change has been problematic. But she still supports the PARCC. And she has a quote from somebody's facebook page to back that up.

The lead line says that Townsend wrote this with the support of Greenville City School's Central Office, so it's unclear exactly how much this represents the district's point of view. But It does represent the fairy tale that continues to be the supporting narrative for PARCC:

Common Core Standards are magical and will make all students ready for college and career. To know if they're really acquiring those skills, we must have a magical test that can measure exactly how skilled each student has become, so that teachers can fine tune their instruction. The PARCC is that test.

That's the story, and every single sentence of it is riddled with unproven, unsupported assertions. Townsend has given us a fairly straightforward retelling of the classic, but it still rests on magical standards, magical testing, and magical thinking.

Not-So-Bright Future for Ohio

In the Mocking Education Reformsters business, it is hard to stay ahead of the curve. I thought I was being pretty sassy last summer when I concocted a "Memo to Three Year Old Slackers" in which I suggested that it was time for toddlers to get off their butts and start the serious business of Pre-Pre-K, or when I suggested that since we were checking to see if five-year-olds were ready for college, we might as well have them fill out applications. but my mockery has been left in the dust by reality. Sometimes real live reformsters can create programs far dumber than anything we could imagine.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to BRIGHT.

BRIGHT (previously "New Leaders for Ohio Schools")is "a bold effort to recruit, train and place committed leaders to head high-poverty public schools" across Ohio. It's a partnership between the Ohio Department of Education, the Ohio Business Roundtable, and the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. Oversight of the program is proudly provided by a board including Ohio's senate and house leaders, the Ohio state superintendent, and Ohio's great man-child of a governor. Which is only right, because it would take more than just one large organization to come up with a plan this dumb.

The website credits the 2012 report "Failure Is not an Option" from Public Agenda. This report was reviewed by Mark Paige for the National Education Policy Center, and I'm not going to work through that whole review for you. The basic executive summary of the Public Agenda paper is this: if you have a really super-duper principal with awesometastic programs in place, you can totally fix poor kids and their poor school without having to actually spend money doing it. The basic summary of the NEPC review is... well, they gave it one of their coveted Bunkum Awards. Specifically, the "Do You Believe in Miracles" award. Will you be surprised if I tell you Public Agenda's funders include the Joyce Fundation, the Broad Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates?

So that little piece of unicorn farming is the basis for this shiny new program. So how does BRIGHT work?

Indeed the landscape in Ohio and across the country is replete with examples, going back twenty years, of "traditional" leadership training programs – some have worked; most have not. Recent pension reforms enacted by the Ohio General Assembly are triggering the retirements of scores of school administrators across Ohio, creating a unique opportunity for Ohio to attract the best and the brightest as school principals.

Yes, all our traditional training methods suck (but we have no ideas about how to fix them, or what is wrong, really). But we have a great opportunity because our stupid reformster ideas in Ohio are driving our school leaders right out of the profession. This is totally not a sign that our reformy ideas are dopey failures; all those departing leaders just don't get how awesome we are.

Who should be signing up to work the miracles? Well, the inaugural class will be selected from "diverse professions." If you've got a bachelor's degree and any sort of leadership experience, step right up. This job is tough but (and, yes, I am quoting here) it's "the toughest job you'll ever love." So, this is just like Peace Corps work, I guess. I have had friends and former students serve with the Peace Corps, so I'm a bit torn about who's being insulted by this appropriation of the old slogan, but at the very least this does not speak well of a bold, innovative new program that somehow couldn't come up with original ad copy.

How will it work? Well, this first group will be placed in a third world country Ohio public school for a twelve-month internship, "working and learning under the mentorship of an accomplished school principal and an executive-level business leader." Why business leader? Because the program isn't just about fast-tracking your way to a principalship, but simultaneously earning an MBA!!

Seriously. BRIGHT's own copy calls principalling a 24/7 life, but apparently somewhere between the 24 and the 7 there's room to do coursework (sixteen of them, in four modules) for the Fisher School's program, which requires three days on campus a month.

What cool things will you do while you're learning how to principal and becoming a certified Master of the Universe? Well, there will be "intensive personal assessment and development experiences such as team-building exercises; 360 feedback surveys; site visits to high-poverty, high-minority, high achieving schools across the country; and learnings from your assigned master principal and outside business mentor – all focused on reinforcing the leadership competencies to be instilled in all BRIGHT Fellows." I am particularly excited about the learnings. I think one of the best things about my teaching job is the many learnings I give to my students. But still-- the chance to actually visit a high-poverty school, all full of minority students! Doesn't that sound ecxiting?

Oh, but what are these leadership competencies of which you speak?

That particular list is hosted on the Ohio Business Roundtable site, which makes sense considering it includes things like Change Leadership and Drive for Results. In fairness, it also includes Caring for Children. I'm intrigued by the Instructional Leadership item, which is explained as "Is able to recognize and coach teachers in constructive efforts to improve teaching effectiveness." First, I do hope that a principal will be able to recognize teachers when he sees them. Second, I'm wondering how this super principal will be able to provide instructional coaching when he has never done a day of teaching in his life, nor taken an education course, either. I think I should drop by the Business Roundtable and offer to tell them how to do their jobs, too.

BRIGHT has just hired a president, Dr. Thomas G. Maridada, formerly a Michigan Superintendent of the Year and more recently working for the Children's Defense Fund. BRIGHT also has several partners including the Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus school systems, as well as New Leaders and (you knew this was coming) TFA.

When all is said and done, our insta-principal will emerge with a fast-tracked certificate and a shiny MBA. He will owe the state of Ohio two years of work as a principal-- it is not entirely clear whether he will have to find his own job or if he will be placed. The state prefers that the insta-principal go to work at a high-poverty school, but it appears that any Ohio public school will meet the requirements.

So, to recap-- we're going to take somebody with a bachelors degree and no experience, let them intern at a school for a year while simultaneously doing grad school work, and at the end of the year, he will go be a principal at some troubled school, where his awesome leadership skills and great MBA-ness will allow him to turn every student into a success without having to spend more money.

I suppose this was inevitable. TFA was providing us with insta-teachers and the Broad Foundation has been cranking out insta-superintendents. There was a real market niche for people to quickly become principals without having to mess around with all that actual experience or training (or actually committing themselves to principalling as their lifetime career). After all, who better to supervise undertrained, inexperienced TFA temps than an undertrained, inexperienced pretend principal. Ohio has stepped into the gap to fill that need.

The one mystery I was not able to solve-- BRIGHT certainly looks like an acronym, but I can't discover what it stands for. Big Reformy Initiative for Getting Highplaced Temps? Business Revenue Interests Getting Hard on Teachers? Whatever it is, I'm sure it will be a great stepping stone for some future business whiz, and a disaster for some poor school.

Ohio Superintendents Step Up

Sixteen superintendents from Lorain County, Ohio, have stepped up to speak out for public education in Ohio.

Lorain County is a short hop west of Cleveland, right on the lake. It has given the world Toni Morrison and Tom Batiuk. My first teaching job was at Lorain High School, one of the three public high schools in the city. That was 1979-- the city was a bit over 80K in population, and solidly blue-collar, with steel, auto, and shipping industries firmly in place. The bottom soon dropped out. I was RIFfed at the end of my first year; a year later Lorain was on the news as part of a feature on the collapsing industrial economy. Today the high school where I taught is a vacant lot. So I have a soft spot for Lorain County.

As reported by Michael Sangiacomo on Cleveland.com, the sixteen superintendents of Lorain County have come together to call for big changes, particularly targeting "excessive student testing, overly strict teacher evaluations, loss of state funding to charter and online schools, and other cuts in funding."

Funding formulas are a special kind of bizarre in Ohio. According to the superintendents, the state actually pays more to send students to charters and cybers than to send them to public school. They offered some specific examples but the overall average is striking by itself-- the state average per pupil payment to traditional public schools is $3,540 per student, but the average payment to an Ohio charter is $7,189.

The superintendents have a website-- restorelocalcontrol.org-- that at the moment offers just a few pieces of information.

One is the summary of the survey that the superintendents conducted in January of 2015. The summary of what they heard from Lorain County residents is short but sweet

* their school districts are doing an excellent or good job,
* high quality teachers are the most important indicator of a high quality education
* earning high marks on the state report card isn't that important
* increased state testing has not helped students
* decisions are best made at the local level,
* preschool education– especially for those students from poverty-- should be expanded (and they said they would increase their taxes to support it)
* school finance is the biggest challenge facing our schools,
* and their local tax dollars should not be going to support private schools and for-profit and online charter schools

The superintendents offer their response as well. They note that the vast majority of citizens are unaware of what's coming out of Columbus and DC. They have some specific concerns about some Ohio reforms, but their overriding concern is " the loss of local control of our public schools." And this, which I found interesting:

We are much to blame for not standing up to these ill-fated education reforms.

 There are some other interesting chunks of information on the site, including a link to the site about How Ohio Charter Schools Are Performing, which features a chance to plug in a charter and compare it to your own school results and a bank of news that provides information about how the charter fight is going. This site comes from the Ohio Charter School Accountability Project, which is a joint venture of the Ohio Education Association and Innovation Ohio. 

Ohio has been hammered hard by the reformsters, and the political leaders of the state have made no secret of their love for charters and privatization. It's nice to see an entire county's worth of school leaders standing up to fight back for public education.

Ohio Charters and Phantom Students

Apparently some charter schools feel that choice is so important that they make sure to offer it to students who don't even attend the charters.

The Columbus Dispatch reported last week on some surprise headcount trips made by Ohio state auditor David Yost. Turns out that some charters are Below Basic when it comes to proficiency in counting.

On October 1, the auditors walked into The Academy for Urban Scholars Youngstown with a stated enrollment of ninety-five. Actual students that the auditors found in the building?

Zero.

The explanation wasn't exactly encouraging. Students had been sent home at 12:30 because they had spent the morning prepping for the state exam. So it's not that the Academy was lying about students in school-- they just weren't actually teaching any.

A Youngstown tv station reported that the auditors made a follow-up visit in November. On that occasion, they found thirty-seven students in attendance.

Capital High School in Columbus claims 298 students. Auditors found 142 in the building.

Charters, of course, receive money for every student they claim. So every name on the rolls is money in the bank. It's not so much a perverse incentive as a just plain incentive for charters to enroll students who are the spiritual descendants of the legendary phantom voters of Chicago.

Of the thirty schools the auditors visited, over half had issues of at least 10%, with several showing discrepancies of over 30%.

Several of the schools who appeared to flunk counting were Dropout Recovery and Prevention schools-- charters whose selling point was that they would turn potential dropout students into successes. I suppose counting them as being in school when they aren't is one way to do that, sort of?

Ohio Schools Must Get Religion

There are some things that Ohio schools can, apparently, do without. The Ohio state school board did vote to scuttle the 5 of 8 rule; this would make schools free to operate without librarians, nurses, and guidance counselors, for starters.

But then-- why would you need a nurse or a guidance counselor when you have religion and business in the house?

Ohio governor John Kasich has a great program in place to improve school-community connections and to bring mentors into the school to help.

Community Connectors provides $10 million in 3-to-1 matching grants that will help give more Ohio students access to role models who can help motivate and inspire them, as well as help them develop skills that lead to success in school and the workplace.

Kasich even has a few words to add himself:


The power of mentorship holds great promise to help us better connect our communities with our schools, and lift up our educators and our kids. We can show them why learning matters, we can teach them about workplace culture and professional etiquette. We can help them appreciate how important good character is to success in life as well as values like hard work, discipline and personal responsibility—all of which can help motivate and inspire them to find their purpose and to reach for the stars."  —  Gov. John R. Kasich

There may be some cranky teachers who want to say, "And what did you think we're teaching them, anyway?" But I'd welcome the backup. I can tell my students that things like showing up every day, on time, are important in the workplace, but hearing it from an actual employer definitely gives the message more weight (I am, after all, "just a teacher" and of doubtful authority).

So, great idea, right? Except it comes with a string or two. Although reportedly not spelled out in the legislation, the grants come with a requirement that schools must partner with a business and with a faith-based group. Nobody is really asking questions about the business requirement for the partnership application, but the faith-based requirement needs some 'splainin'" The Cleveland Plain Dealer went in search of that explanation.

Buddy Harris, senior policy analyst at the Ohio Department of Education, is quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer saying that faith-based groups are "clearly at the heart of the vision of the governor." He goes on to allay any concerns about that pesky state-church wall being breached.

"We do not forsee any proseletyzing happening between mentors and students," Harris said. "That's not really what we're seeking."

But Kasich's welcome video for applicants to the program is a little more direct:


"The Good Lord has a purpose for each and every one of them (students) and you're helping them to find it," Kasich said on the video.

So, proseletyzing.


In the interests of transparency, I'll just note that my own relationship with organized religion is long and complicated, and I have some clear feelings about the separation of church and state, not the least of which is that the separation protects the church from the state, not just vice versa.

There are plenty of faith-based groups that do good community work without trying to sell their brand. Their are plenty of groups that use the illusion of faith-basedness as a dodge for fundraising. And there are plenty of faith-based groups who do Good Works only because it gives them an opportunity to spread their particular Word. Not all of these groups are going to provide useful mentoring to young people. We could just take all comers, but that's not going to hold up long (I look forward to the first time the Ohio Alliance of Satan Worshippers tries to get in on the mentoring action. Heck, even an Islamic group is liable to create a stink in the Buckeye State). And as soon as we try to have the conversation about which are which, we will find ourselves discussing how a government agency can evaluate the worthiness of a faith-based group (which must also include an evaluation of the faith on which it's based). Plus the coordination needed if we are going to make sure that we don't have an evangelical Christian mentoring a Jewish student, or a Islamic mentor working with a born-again Christian student. So, also a government agency to record and sort and match the religious faiths of students and mentors? This whole mess is not good for anybody.

Kasich had to know this was an issue-- most of his previous discussions of the program skipped any mention of the faith-based requirement. Ten million dollars is a small stack of money, but it's more than enough to buy a small bureaucratic train wreck.

Ohio: CCSS on the Ropes, Maybe

The Ohio PTA has called an all-hands-on-deck because it looks like HB 597, the "Get That Damn Commie Core Out of Our Schools" bill is rumored to be on the lame duck legislature's plate.

It is possible that this is all part of an Ohio scheme to put on a last-minute surge to try for the 2014 State Most Hostile to Public Education medal. They've been really working it, from the attempt to cut elementary specialists off at the knees to the proposal to trash teacher pay scales. So how did this bill end up back on the big pile of crazy?

HB 597 has been around since the summer, pitting the two wings of the GOP against each other. Its sponsors come from Glen Beck wing of the party. The bill's stated intention is to rid Ohio of the Common Core, which is embedded somewhere within Ohio's more expansive more-than-just-ELA-and-math standards.

But the bill has turned out to come with plenty of fun extras. Originally it included a provision that 80% of all works taught in 8-12 English classes be from English and American authors prior to 1970. The sponsors called that a "drafting error" which I suppose means "crazy thing we decided to take out before we submitted this." The bill also required phonics and... oh, did I forget to mention that this didn't just remove the Common Core, but replace it with a new set of standards. Those appear to be based somewhat on the old Massachusetts standards, but include some tweaks. So something pretty much like CCSS, only with some cool chrome accents.

One controversial tweak is a replacement of old science standards with standards that include a provision to "prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts in favor of another." Some people, including, apparently the bill's sponsors, seem to think the new science standards open the door to teaching intelligent design. It also bizarrely restricts science teaching to scientific facts, but puts the kibosh on teaching scientific method. Apparently, science teachers are supposed to just teach facts and leave students to assume that these facts were delivered in a vision or straight from wikipedia.

Social studies would be restricted to "real" knowledge, which-- what the hell? Since we're no longer aware of the scientific method, I'm not even sure how real knowledge is constructed. One thing it apparently is not is "designed to avoid perpetuating gender, cultural, ethnic or racial stereotypes" because that language was scraped off the MA standards when they came to Ohio.

Then there's the provision that says that the state cannot impose any financial penalties on a school district just because it chooses to ignore the state's standards. Which of course means that the local districts could adopt any damn standards they want. When these guys say "local control," the by damn mean it. 

The Republican head of the Senate education committee, State Senator Peggy Lehner has characterized the repeal attempt as "a circus." Before you start cheering for her, note that she thinks the repeal effort is terrible because the Common Core are the greatest thing since critical thinking was used to slice a loaf of bread into a state of college and career readiness.

Jessica Poiner, writing over at the Fordham blog in the summer, noted with alarm the lack of any state control of districts under this bill. She also unfurled one of the Fordham's favorite talking points from the summer-- it would be really expensive to throw away all those fine investments made in the Core and start over. You can call this the "stay the course" talking point, or the "throw good money after bad" talking point.

It is, in short, a stupid reason for sticking with the Core. "We spent a bunch of money on a bad piece of equipment that doesn't do what it's supposed," is not logically the first part of a sentence that ends with "so let's spend even more money on it and never replace it." When the engine in your car blows up, you don't say, "Well, let's buy new tires for it."

So what's a supporter of public education to do? Well, for one thing, the kerfluffle is a fine reminder that in all things political, sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, too. Also, when educational amateurs go head to head with educational amateurs, it's education that gets punched in the face.

The Ohio PTA wants everyone to call and write their legislator and tell it to vote no (a sample letter template appears below), and I think that's maybe probably the correct answer, though passage of the bill would inevitably result in such a massive crash-and-burn debacle that the Ohio legislature might be forced to get help from actual grown ups and professional teacher persons. The letter is not a winner because it is A) making the stay-the-course money argument and B) suggesting that educational experts really want to protect the lovely Core. I wouldn't send the damn thing without rewriting it. Something simple like "Dear legislator: Common Core is terrible crap, but this bill probably makes matters worse. And if anybody over there has any more stupid ideas about screwing with public education, please just keep them to yourself until forever."

I'm not sure I'm rooting for either side in this clusterfinagle; there are no heroes here. I have a hard time imagining the legislature passing this, even if some GOP folks were spanked in the election for not hating Common Core enough. It's hard to envision a responsible government leaping into such a stupid set of rules, but for the past few years, every time I've "Surely they wouldn't do something that stupid" I've turned out to be wrong. Best wishes to Ohio on their medal quest. May you do your teachers and children a favor and lose.





Sample letter:

Dear Representative _____________

I live in _____________ and I urge you to oppose H.B. 597.

Our local school district, like many other districts across the state, has invested a significant amount of time, effort, teacher education, and money toward the implementation of Ohio’s New Learning Standards since 2010.

If Ohio halts the implementation of Ohio’s Learning Standards, this investment will be lost in more ways than monetary! H.B. 597 jeopardizes the future of Ohio’s public schools and educational opportunities for Ohio’s children.

Forcing an ongoing upheaval in Ohio’s academic standards is reckless and is in no one's best interests. This legislation is bad for Ohio and is bad for our schools.

Please listen to the education experts in your constituent school districts and oppose H.B. 597.

Ohio Schools: Cuts and Unfunding Mandates and Petitions

The Ohio State Board of Education has had quite the week. After quietly starting the process of slashing state requirements for elementary specials, they got a quick lesson in social media-- this post alone blew up to 12K views in just a few days.

For the most complete coverage of the actual cuts and changes, I recommend this post over at Plunderbund, a site that specializes in Ohio School Stuff. I think the analyses there of the larger problem is spot on as well.

The cutting or requirements for elementary schools to hire a full complement of arts, phys ed, counseling, nurse, librarian, support staff is not about some perverse desire to diminish education for Ohio's children. It's about trying to give local districts the tools to help manage the damaging funding cuts that the state has inflicted on them. This approach not coincidentally has the effect of forcing local school districts to be the bad guys, because they would be the ones to say, "We're getting rid of the art teacher."

The people of Ohio have a month to raise a fuss. They can send emails, letters, and sign petitions like this one at change.org, and they should. But they should also get on the phone to the state capital and make some noise about state funding of education.

Look at it this way. If local districts were fully funded, it would barely matter that the state BOE cut the requirement to hire certain elementary staff. Local districts would simply shrug and say, "Well, why the heck would we want to cut those things" and life would go on.

A. J. Wagner, the board member who led the walkout earlier this week, reportedly reached out to protestors by letter, saying essentially that he wanted to remove the pressure of unfunded mandates from local districts, an could anybody see a way to do that. Well, there are two ways to fix an unfunded mandate problem. You can either get rid the mandate (as the board proposes) or you can keep the mandate and actually fund it! That would be my message to pass along to Wagner (not that he can fix that, but it would be a message for him to pass on to the legislature).

The pressure is not coming from some burning urge to diminish the educational lives of children. The pressure is coming from an inability to pay for everything that the school district should be providing because the governor's administration has pursued a program of starving the beast. I can't pretend to know what is in Kasich's heart, but I do know that if you don't provide public schools with the money to do a good job, and they then start to crack and fail under the funding pressure, it's a lot easier to make your case that failing public schools need to be rescued by Noble Charter Operators.

So keeping the pressure on, the noise loud, and the fight going is worthwhile. But it's also worthwhile to keep an eye on the problem behind the problem.