On August 11, 2016, Ohio’s elected state auditor delivered the following remarks during the opening of the Ohio Charter School Summit. His comments address the state’s well-documented struggles with online education head on and offer practical, learning-focused ideas for improving the sector.
We are here, very simply, because we care about educating our children and understand one very simple truth: not all children are the same. And here is a second truth that is like it: not all schools are the same.
Put another way, not all kids can learn in a given school, and not all schools will be able to teach a given child.
All the other arguments in favor of school choice—innovation, competition, efficiency—all of them are secondary to this one idea, that we owe to our children their best opportunity to learn. It is the first principle. School choice is not a policy option, it is the only logical conclusion—a conclusion that is proven and measured in the lives of these young people we met a few minutes ago, and many more like them.
Your work, your lives, and this conference are all about increasing the number of these shining stars in Ohio.
That means continuous improvement, and it means accountability. I've fought for both in the last six years, from audits to advocacy. Our work was a major factor in last year's reform, House Bill 2. Many of the reforms I asked for ended up in the bill.
But "continuous improvement" means that you never stop trying to get better, and there's still a big task in front of us.
Before I go further, I suppose I should acknowledge that most of you probably didn’t expect a side dish of policy with your morning coffee. But because you are some of the brightest minds in the charter school community, I want you to be the first to hear a key reform I believe is still needed. And, candidly, Ohio will need your expertise to help craft the solution.
Since 2014, I've been warning about the ambiguity of the funding law regarding virtual learning. Both of our reports on charter school attendance cited it as a weakness needing to be corrected. And when I testified in both the Senate and the House last year, I called upon the legislators to fix it.
With all the progress we've made, reform of the funding model for Ohio's online learning remains a task undone.
Traditional schools have long been funded based on attendance. The unspoken assumption is that if Johnny is in school, he will learn. For a lot of reasons, that is not a broadly valid assumption today, if it ever was.
When the time came to start brick-and-mortar charter schools, we imported that attendance-based idea of "time in a chair." And then—mostly because that's the way we've always done it—we used it to fund blended learning and virtual learning, even though it's remarkably hard to count noses when the classroom is everywhere, and nowhere, and anytime. Oh, we've dressed it up with talk about "hours" and "learning opportunities" instead of days, but it's still the same model—"time in a chair," as if education is like growing weeds—it just happens on its own over time.
Stephen Covey used to tell us to begin with the end in mind, so let's. What is it we, the people, are trying to buy?
It's certainly not time in a chair—not some educational time-share where enough two-week stays by different people get combined and add up to a year. And it's not an institution that goes on year after year, employing people and making offerings to students—take it or leave it.
What we are trying to buy is a process to produce a citizen who can read and write and do the math and, most of all, who can think. And that can't be produced just by time in a chair.
But an educated citizen is not what the law pays for in Ohio. The law pays for time in a chair. And too often, time in a chair is all we get.
It's time to resolve the weaknesses, by first working out what it means to achieve that result of an educated citizen. Today I'm calling on the General Assembly to take this matter up when they return this fall, and to take action. They made many of the necessary reforms in House Bill 2, and I stand ready to help finish the job.
I don't get a vote in the General Assembly, of course, or a veto pen. But if I may, let me suggest a guiding principle: Let's base payment on what we're trying to buy—an educated citizen.
The genius, and the genesis, of virtual learning is a recognition that students all learn at a different pace. What takes one student an hour could take another three hours—and in a different subject, vice versa. This dramatic paradigm shift calls for an equal shift in the law.
Learning-based funding—course completion—would mean schools get paid when they deliver a piece of education. The unit could be as large as a year's work or as little as an approved unit. Believe me, I understand the pressures of cash flow, and smaller goals may well be better.
The higher education community in Ohio has already embraced a variation on this system, with payment for graduation rather than just enrollment. Other states are using some form of learning-based funding, including Florida, Utah and Minnesota.
Several other principles should guide our debate on the specifics.
First, each student’s path to that goal—becoming a literate, thinking citizen—may vary in speed and navigation. Our funding solution needs to take into account the differences among children and their backgrounds.
Secondly, we need ongoing assessment. Forget grading periods. Assessment in the virtual environment can and should happen every day. Computers make it possible to monitor students' progress in real time, and help them when they need it—a model that is in place and working in Cincinnati's Carpe Diem school. And when the assessment periodically takes the form of a test—as it must in every school—it should be proctored in a brick-and-mortar setting to prevent cheating.
Finally, the weighting of academic value must be done by an independent, objective third party. That is, who says how much it takes for a school to get paid? Perhaps it happens by a government agency like ODE, perhaps it's a peer-based entity like the Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation—but it needs to be objective and independent of the schools seeking payment for service.
My office stands ready to help—we've learned a lot in our ground-breaking attendance work in both traditional and charter public schools. But we will need all of you in part because of your experience and expertise—but most of all because you understand that a mind alone does not make a person. Teaching requires the engagement of the heart—yours, and theirs.
Thank you for your dedication, and skill, and patience. I hope that over the next few days of this conference you find new tools and new enthusiasm for this most important of works.
