The Education Gadfly Weekly

David Wakelyn from the NGA Center for Best Practices
August 2009

Ohio lags behind the nation when it comes to Advanced Placement (AP) courses. In 2008, the state had only about 18 percent of high-school students taking an AP exam (compared to 25 percent in the U.S.), and only 11 percent of Ohio AP students scored proficient or higher on the exams (compared to over 15 percent nationally).

In 2005, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices launched a major initiative to expand AP courses in order to include more low-income and minority students and funded AP expansion in 51 schools across the country. In Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, David Wakelyn checks in on how the initiative has affected student outcomes over the last four years.

The project increased the number of AP courses available and guided schools in recruiting underserved student populations through three strategies. First, schools expanded access to as many students as possible by lowering the selectivity level for AP courses. Second, schools built teacher capacity through additional training and offered extra learning support to students through seminars, summer prep classes, and study groups. Finally, the project created incentives for students and schools. Students were able to increase their GPAs in weighted AP courses, compete for special college scholarships, and even receive monetary incentives for good AP exam scores. Schools also benefited financially for making classes available.

The efforts of the initiative delivered promising results, with the number of minority and low-income students taking AP classes more than doubling. Admittedly, the extent to which there may be a tradeoff between AP enrollment and the quality of courses remains unclear (see more here and here). AP classes are proven to decrease the amount of time it takes for students to graduate from college and carry a lot of weight when students apply for college admission and scholarships. This has the potential to help more low-income and minority students go on to higher education. While this is a worthwhile goal, NGA cannot possibly fund similar projects in every high school as AP programs are very costly. States could fund more college-level learning opportunities for high-school students, but will they be willing to pay the price?

 While Ohio's higher education cyber-learning landscape is firmly established (see here), the K-12 cyber-school landscape is still in its infancy. Of Ohio's 1.7 million students, 23,000 were enrolled full-time in one of the state's 28 cybercharters in 20-2008. In addition, the Ohio General Assembly recently established the first statewide high-school interactive distance-learning pilot program. Despite these efforts, however,  little is known about the scale of online courses offered beyond the cybercharter sector, although the Ohio Department of Education has just started collecting data on online classes offered by traditional schools, district coops and the like (see here).

The data emerging indicate that Ohio's K-12 school system is evolving  a rich and complicated cyber-learning sector. Districts, educational service centers, magnet schools, universities and colleges, charter schools, career-tech centers, and private vendors all offer cyber courses of various types. For example, Lorain County Community College allows high-school students to enroll as part of a post-secondary option (see here). More unconventional providers of cyber-learning programs are the Columbus Zoo (see here) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (see here), both of which offer supplemental online programs for interested teachers and students.

Cyber programs can span a district, the state, or the globe and they can embrace a spectrum of courses and subjects (see here and here). Some Ohio cybercharters (11) serve one county, while 14 serve multiple counties. Three cybercharters serve students statewide. None of Ohio's cybercharters, however, offers courses to students beyond the state's borders, but Ohio students may choose courses offered by an e-school based outside the Buckeye State.

Programs can be full or part time. Online or interactive distance learning courses are offered, for the most part, as part-time options and are included as part of a school's curriculum or offered through another provider. An example is Jefferson County ESC, which offers over 80 online and interactive distance learning courses that can be taken by home-schooled students, home-confined or prison-confined students, or students needing a course that they missed in their traditional high school (see here).

While some students take course at home via the Internet, other programs are offered in a blended environment with students attending a brick-and-mortar classroom several times a week and spending the rest of the time learning at home. For example, in the New Albany-Plain Local School District, high-school Spanish IV is taught in real time through distance learning (see here) via the Internet. In other districts, such as Anna Local, students who do not have space in their real-time schedules can take courses through Virtual High School, a nationwide program that offers online learning courses, to supplement their traditional academic schedule (see here).

Online courses offer promise to spread quality instruction, and to allow students to take courses to which they might not otherwise have access. Online education also allows schools deliver programs at less cost. Yet, the promise of cyber-learning may be usurped if the e-courses lack quality. Bill Tucker of Education Sector (see here) has offered four guidelines for improving the cyber-learning policy environment. They must:

• ensure quality and innovation by fostering transparency and accelerating innovation;
• create dynamic models for funding and accountability;
• enable true reciprocity for certified teachers; and
• integrate these efforts with other school reforms.

What's needed immediately is an assessment of Ohio's K-12 cyber-learning sector. The scope and scale of these offerings are not clear. How many students are served? How many provider types are there? Who are they and do they know what they are doing? Which students are being served? What is the impact of cyber-learning, or, in other words, how are these students doing academically compared to students receiving face-to-face or blended instruction? What does effective cyber-instruction cost and how should it be funded?

Also, what should be the connection between these myriad K-12 programs and the Ohio Learning Network (OLN), which supports and facilitates distance and online learning in Ohio's higher education system (see here)? What lessons can Ohio's K-12 system draw from the OLN?

Several states have implemented statewide cyber-learning programs. Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and Georgia's state-run high-school virtual schools collectively served 200,000 students in 20-2009. How can Ohio take advantage of and learn from the excellent work of these programs?

Ohio has planted seeds to grow its K-12 cyber-learning opportunities. Still, much more work will need to be done to take maximum advantage of cyber-learning's promise as online courses and programs proliferate. Ohio's students deserve every opportunity for an excellenteducation. Online learning is most certainly one of those opportunities, and now it must be encouraged with both good evaluation and practice.

 Ohio may be lagging in the numbers of students taking Advanced Placement courses, although students who do take the AP science tests are among the top scorers nationally, according to a recent survey.

The survey, Taking the Pulse of Bioscience Education in America (see here), places Ohio in a leading group of eight states. While Ohio education planners can take heart, the report's overall message is that America is failing to prepare its middle- and high-school students to study the biosciences in college.

The results of the study, released in May, will be examined at the BioOhio Education Summit September 1 at the TechColumbus Center (see here). The report was funded and researched by Battelle (see here), BIO (see here), and the Biotechnology Institute (see here).

The top eight states cited in the report are Connecticut followed by Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin. States lagging the most are Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.

According to the study, 63 percent of Ohio students taking AP science exams scored grades of three or better in 2008, compared with 55 percent nationally. Looking at biology only, the state placed seventh with 58 percent scoring three or better compared with 50 percent of the student test-takers nationally. When the ACT is considered, however, achievement falls. On the science portion of the ACT in 2008, Ohio placed 16^th, with an average score of 21.7 compared with a national average of 20.8.

The AP results have to be tempered with the realization that AP courses are self-selective and tend to attract students particularly interested in the field of study, said Constance Barsky of the Ohio Department of Education. They aren't directly comparable to ACT results.

While both the AP and ACT results place Ohio well up among the top half of the states, Ohio is lagging in science teacher preparation. According to the study, just 55 percent of teachers in grades 7-12 are teaching a subject in the field in which they majored in college. This compares with 77 percent nationally and ranks the state a poor 47^th. Just 21 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade science teachers were certified, while 85 percent of the state's biology teachers were certified in their field.

Among the report's national findings:

• Only 28 percent of the high school students are prepared to take college-level biology courses, according to their ACT scores.
• 52 percent of twelfth graders are at or above a basic level of achievement in the sciences, and for eighth graders only 57 percent are at a basic level of achievement.
• Average scores for twelfth graders in the sciences have actually declined from 1996 to 2005 and shown no improvement for eighth graders both overall and on the life science component.

Marianne Clarke, the study's lead author, said that science and technology business leaders encouraged Battelle to do the report. "They're looking to the future and are not seeing people coming out of school with the kind of skills they need," she said. Bioscience is one of the key technology areas the state is banking on for the high-tech future envisioned in Ohio's Third Frontier research program. Most bioscience jobs require some level of post-secondary education.

The report suggested a number of actions, including incorporating biotechnology into revised science standards and taking a systematic approach to teacher professional development.

Ohio is now involved in a major push to revise its curriculum standards, including those for science. The standards, which must be approved by the State Board of Education by June 2010, are likely to be more coherent than current standards. Rather than introducing a topic in one grade and then not studying it in the next grade, the standards will emphasize progressive learning. For example, they will encourage schools to take an idea from geology and add more information and complexity to it as students progress through the grades.

"In feedback, teachers say the (current) standards are unmanageable and difficult to understand, difficult to integrate materials (between subjects such as life science and Earth-space) and to apply to teaching science by inquiry," Barsky said.

When charter schools were introduced in Ohio, they were presented as vital options for students in underperforming urban schools. Eleven years later, charters have broken through the borders of the "Big Eight" urban districts. Now, nearly a quarter of charter-school students hail from rural and suburban areas, with a surge in charter enrollment from such districts over the past five years. Evidence indicates that suburban families choose charter schools for the same reasons urban families do: to access an education that better meets the needs of their children.

E-schools enroll the majority of non-urban charter school students (more than 75 percent of e-school students come from outside the state's major urban districts) and account for much of the recent enrollment growth (e-schools first opened in Ohio in 2001, see more below).

In Franklin County, where suburban charter-school enrollment growth was highlighted recently in the Columbus Dispatch (see here), most of the suburban districts that are losing significant numbers of students to charter schools are also among the area's lowest-performing districts. Groveport Madison Local Schools lost nearly 1,100 students to charter schools last year, up from 400 students five years ago. Last year, the district failed to meet the state's minimum proficiency standards on 15 of the 23 state assessments administered in grades 3 through 10, besting only Columbus and Whitehall among Franklin County's 16 districts.

Families are also choosing charter schools at the urging of their home districts. Despite oft-repeated rhetoric, not all districts fight school choice. In fact, 55 of Ohio's 600-plus school districts serve as charter-school authorizers - the entities that sanction and oversee charter schools.

Upper Arlington City Schools has embraced the charter-school model as a tool for increasing and improving its educational offerings. Nearly 10 percent of the district's students attend one of its three charter schools - Wickliffe Alternative Community School, Upper Arlington International Baccalaureate High School, and Upper Arlington Community High School.

This cooperative coexistence of charter and district schools is reflective of a national trend. District leaders in cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Denver are turning to charter schools as a way to create "portfolios" of high-performing schools for their students and families. District-charter cooperation also finds supporters on both sides of the political aisle. In its version of the state operating budget, for example, the Democrat-led Ohio House of Representatives provided financial incentives for charter schools affiliated with school districts.

Smart district leaders in Ohio and beyond are moving away from a zero-sum attitude. They are embracing charters as a tool that allows for innovation and operational freedoms-like   longer school days, relaxed teacher certification requirements, and innovative curricula. District leaders, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was one himself in Chicago - understand that charter schools are public schools and that when students attend them they and their parents are choosing a public option that they think works better for them than their traditional neighborhood school. These innovative educators appreciate that results matter more than district control, and their efforts should be commended rather than lamented.

David Wakelyn from the NGA Center for Best Practices
August 2009

Ohio lags behind the nation when it comes to Advanced Placement (AP) courses. In 2008, the state had only about 18 percent of high-school students taking an AP exam (compared to 25 percent in the U.S.), and only 11 percent of Ohio AP students scored proficient or higher on the exams (compared to over 15 percent nationally).

In 2005, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices launched a major initiative to expand AP courses in order to include more low-income and minority students and funded AP expansion in 51 schools across the country. In Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, David Wakelyn checks in on how the initiative has affected student outcomes over the last four years.

The project increased the number of AP courses available and guided schools in recruiting underserved student populations through three strategies. First, schools expanded access to as many students as possible by lowering the selectivity level for AP courses. Second, schools built teacher capacity through additional training and offered extra learning support to students through seminars, summer prep classes, and study groups. Finally, the project created incentives for students and schools. Students were able to increase their GPAs in weighted AP courses, compete for special college scholarships, and even receive monetary incentives for good AP exam scores. Schools also benefited financially for making classes available.

The efforts of the initiative delivered promising results, with the number of minority and low-income students taking AP classes more than doubling. Admittedly, the extent to which there may be a tradeoff between AP enrollment and the quality of courses remains unclear (see more here and here). AP classes are proven to decrease the amount of time it takes for students to graduate from college and carry a lot of weight when students apply for college admission and scholarships. This has the potential to help more low-income and minority students go on to higher education. While this is a worthwhile goal, NGA cannot possibly fund similar projects in every high school as AP programs are very costly. States could fund more college-level learning opportunities for high-school students, but will they be willing to pay the price?