The Education Gadfly Weekly

Mark Twain once quipped that God, for practice, first made idiots. Then he made school boards.

In the current issue of The Atlantic (see here), Mark Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, uses Twain to illustrate that America's 15,000 local school boards (more than 600 of which are in Ohio) are a huge roadblock to education reform and that they have to be replaced by a more centralized state or even national system of school governance. Consider this in light of Governor Strickland's proposal to appoint a director of education to usurp the powers of the State Board of Education.

Miller compares the mediocre results in U.S. classrooms with those in other nations. A 2003 assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see here) found that even though America spent more on education than nearly every other nation, out of 29 developed countries examined we ranked 15^th in reading, 18^th in science, and 24^th in math.

Reconsidering these numbers five years later should give pause to those who beat their breasts with the recent Education Week study that gives Ohio's overall efforts a "B" in comparing our schools with those in the other 49 states. While the state and the nation have some very fine schools, collectively we are just not nearly good enough. We haven't been even adequate for a very long time. In fact, 25 years after the report A Nation at Risk exposed serious weaknesses in American education, we are still mediocre at best and we aren't going to get much better, Miller argues, until local school boards are swept out of the way.

In the United States, Miller argues, local school boards, who maintain 15,000 separate curriculums, have kept education from attracting R&D dollars. Worse, local boards of education too often turn over control of many school districts to teacher unions though collective bargaining agreements that can block administrators' attempts to promote new teaching methods or get rid of ineffective teaching methods and teachers.

While, Miller admits, there is little chance of local school boards being eliminated, perhaps their roles can, at least, be minimized. In fact, consolidation might be a good place to start. Let's start in Ohio. We once had more than 2,000 school boards and now we have about 600. One school board per county-88-might be a good target.

Wondering what the future holds for public education? Then check out Education|Evolving's predictions and proposals in "The Other Half of the Strategy: Following up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Schooling."

E|E calls for drastic changes, like new and innovative schools and practices to provide alternative modes of student learning and assessment. One idea: expand the role of technology in schools to capitalize on the strengths of the tech-savvy student population and allow them to explore real-world applications of their learning. Another idea: boost pupil motivation by allowing each student to customize his or her education. The Gadfly can't help but fear a whole generation of students who focus their academic pursuits on "The Life and Times of Hannah Montana."

E|E imagines that traditional schools, as we know them today, will still have a place and the report is a bit starry-eyed in its optimistic expectations for reforms. Nonetheless, this report is an easy read that presents an array of possibilities for the future of public education. Read the report here.

WAUSEON, Ohio--New members of a school's staff sometimes can take some time to work in, although it's easier when a new staffer has four legs, like Kramer, the new counselor at Burr Road Middle School.

Kramer, a 2 1/2-year-old, part Lab-part Poodle, or Labradoodle, has been bow-wowing Burr Road's 500 students since his first day on the job in October.

"This is so awesome," sixth grader Jake Fitzpatrick told the Toledo Blade's Janet Romaker. "He looks nice. He's going to be good to talk to too. I have always wanted a dog, and now I have one."

A specialist in unconditional love, Kramer greets students arriving at school in the morning and listens to students needing a friendly tail wag. In fact, listening to student problems is a big part of Kramer's job, Principal Joseph Friess told The Gadfly.

"Just about every one of these kids touches him some day, either dropping down and hugging him or just brushing a hand over him," Friess said. "He puts in some pretty long days....He'll go to the basketball games with me. Sometimes we don't get home until 7 PM."

Kramer lives with Friess, who feeds and cares for him. Students help, occasionally hauling big bags of dog food to school. A local vet also donates care.

Both man and dog received training from Assistance Dogs of America in nearby Swanton, Ohio, before going on the job.

In his second State of the State address, Governor Strickland kept with his tradition of not distributing hard copies of the speech ahead of time and not providing supplemental information about his proposed programs and policies. (See Fordham's take on the governor's remarks here.) Those all-important details, still trickling out one week later, are setting up the battle lines over one of Strickland's most innovative education proposals.

"Seniors to Sophomores" would allow the state's high schoolers to spend their senior year on a public university campus at no cost. Ohio's current participation in early-college-access programs is weak-only 12,000 students participated last year, most were white females-and the mechanisms for tracking and evaluating such programs is even weaker (see here).

The governor has indicated that this program will not be a top-down mandate. It will be up to high schools and colleges-not state government-to decide how to implement it (see here). Parents and students, however, are rightly concerned about how the priorities of these institutions will weigh against their own interests. Look at how districts characterize charter schools and education-choice vouchers for an idea of how they might "resist" Seniors to Sophomores. Bottom line, districts will "lose" state funding for twelfth graders who bypass district schools for seats in colleges or universities.

Thus, for adults it all comes down to money. Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, whom Strickland charged with formulating the details of the program, nixed the need for new funding and indicated that the program will be funded much like other public school-choice options (think charter schools and STEM schools) where the state share of per-pupil funding is diverted from the home district to the school the young person attends. In this case, that school would be a state college or university. Superintendents and teacher unions are already clamoring about the loss of that funding and what it might mean for the youngsters left behind (see here and here).

Seniors to Sophomores has the potential to greatly expand and improve early-college access in the Buckeye State and open the doors to a college education for thousands more youngsters. It can also save cashed strapped families and their children some serious bucks (average yearly college tuition in Ohio is just over $6,500). For this to happen, however, high schools and colleges will need to work in tandem to become more nimble, flexible, and student-focused. This would undeniably be a good thing for the state's young people and their families.

Robert A. Douglas of the Richard Allen Schools responded to an editorial Checker Finn wrote laying out his 10 factors of charter-school mediocrity in the December 12 Gadfly.

You laid out 10 factors that you said contributed to charter school mediocrity. You didn't say anything what part the curriculum plays.

In Arizona where I now live charters are able to develop their own curriculum and do not have to align them with the Arizona Academic Content Standards. Three Arizona high schools were recently included in a list of the top-100 high schools in the U.S. Two of those top-100 high schools were Arizona charter high schools.

In Ohio the charter schools were asked to show how their curriculum was aligned to the Ohio Academic Content Standards. The state provided forms to show how individual items in the school's curriculum were aligned to specific grade-level indicators. This effectively locked charters into the Ohio state-sponsored curriculum.

When I recently saw many sixth-graders still counting on their fingers to compute simple addition problems like 8 + 5 I wondered where they learned that. Sure enough on page 57 of the Ohio standards under that 16^th grade-level indicator for the first grade in mathematics were eight "strategies" for computing simple one-digit addition problems. They covered various ways to solve simple addition problems by combinations of counting on your fingers along with memorizing "doubles" (7 + 7 = 14).

Learning to count on your fingers instead of memorizing might work in the first grade but it is a prescription not for mediocrity but for failure....The Ohio Academic Content Standards are filled with many such wonderful ideas that were part of what has been derisively called "Fuzzy Math." The Ohio Academic Content Standards for the other subject-areas are filled with bad ideas. It's a wonder charter schools do as well as they do.

Finally in a recent forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute (their Civic Bulletin No. 49)...two school systems in Virginia were compared (Richmond vs. Fairfax County). Richmond's black students outperformed Fairfax County's black students even though the demographics said that it should be the other way around. A big part of the reason was said to be that Richmond had changed curriculum and Fairfax County had not.

Focusing on what I call the externals and imagining that you can produce significant improvement in charter school performance is a loser. You have to focus on changing the curriculum and all the years...of bad ideas that charters are forced to accept and teach along with what teachers are taught in the ed. schools.

Colleen D. Grady, of the State Board of Education, responds to Terry Ryan's opinions concerning high-school reform:

I agree with your list of five keys to high-school reform but felt you stopped short of a couple of crucial ideas.

While I am a fan of daring to be different, different alone doesn't make the difference. A longer school day or school year without qualitative structural changes will just look different-without improvement in student achievement. And before jumping into "different" with both feet, how about having hard evidence that proposed changes (if implemented with fidelity) actually will pay off in improved student performance? We spend far too much time and money implementing changes to our education system without any evidence that our changes have a reasonable chance of effecting positive change.

The other issue that came to mind was middle school. If we are serious about improving graduation rates, reducing dropouts, reducing college-remediation rates, and increasing educational attainment we must include substantial and wide-ranging changes at the middle school. Too many high-school students drop out, fail to continue their education or obtain a job because they left middle school wholly unprepared....If we want world-class high schools it won't happen if middle schools continue to be the "black holes" of K-12 education.

If you have something to say about The Ohio Education Gadfly, say it in an e-mail to an article author or to the editor, Mike Lafferty, at [email protected]. Correspondence may be edited for clarity and length.

WAUSEON, Ohio--New members of a school's staff sometimes can take some time to work in, although it's easier when a new staffer has four legs, like Kramer, the new counselor at Burr Road Middle School.

Kramer, a 2 1/2-year-old, part Lab-part Poodle, or Labradoodle, has been bow-wowing Burr Road's 500 students since his first day on the job in October.

"This is so awesome," sixth grader Jake Fitzpatrick told the Toledo Blade's Janet Romaker. "He looks nice. He's going to be good to talk to too. I have always wanted a dog, and now I have one."

A specialist in unconditional love, Kramer greets students arriving at school in the morning and listens to students needing a friendly tail wag. In fact, listening to student problems is a big part of Kramer's job, Principal Joseph Friess told The Gadfly.

"Just about every one of these kids touches him some day, either dropping down and hugging him or just brushing a hand over him," Friess said. "He puts in some pretty long days....He'll go to the basketball games with me. Sometimes we don't get home until 7 PM."

Kramer lives with Friess, who feeds and cares for him. Students help, occasionally hauling big bags of dog food to school. A local vet also donates care.

Both man and dog received training from Assistance Dogs of America in nearby Swanton, Ohio, before going on the job.

Mark Twain once quipped that God, for practice, first made idiots. Then he made school boards.

In the current issue of The Atlantic (see here), Mark Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, uses Twain to illustrate that America's 15,000 local school boards (more than 600 of which are in Ohio) are a huge roadblock to education reform and that they have to be replaced by a more centralized state or even national system of school governance. Consider this in light of Governor Strickland's proposal to appoint a director of education to usurp the powers of the State Board of Education.

Miller compares the mediocre results in U.S. classrooms with those in other nations. A 2003 assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see here) found that even though America spent more on education than nearly every other nation, out of 29 developed countries examined we ranked 15^th in reading, 18^th in science, and 24^th in math.

Reconsidering these numbers five years later should give pause to those who beat their breasts with the recent Education Week study that gives Ohio's overall efforts a "B" in comparing our schools with those in the other 49 states. While the state and the nation have some very fine schools, collectively we are just not nearly good enough. We haven't been even adequate for a very long time. In fact, 25 years after the report A Nation at Risk exposed serious weaknesses in American education, we are still mediocre at best and we aren't going to get much better, Miller argues, until local school boards are swept out of the way.

In the United States, Miller argues, local school boards, who maintain 15,000 separate curriculums, have kept education from attracting R&D dollars. Worse, local boards of education too often turn over control of many school districts to teacher unions though collective bargaining agreements that can block administrators' attempts to promote new teaching methods or get rid of ineffective teaching methods and teachers.

While, Miller admits, there is little chance of local school boards being eliminated, perhaps their roles can, at least, be minimized. In fact, consolidation might be a good place to start. Let's start in Ohio. We once had more than 2,000 school boards and now we have about 600. One school board per county-88-might be a good target.

Wondering what the future holds for public education? Then check out Education|Evolving's predictions and proposals in "The Other Half of the Strategy: Following up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Schooling."

E|E calls for drastic changes, like new and innovative schools and practices to provide alternative modes of student learning and assessment. One idea: expand the role of technology in schools to capitalize on the strengths of the tech-savvy student population and allow them to explore real-world applications of their learning. Another idea: boost pupil motivation by allowing each student to customize his or her education. The Gadfly can't help but fear a whole generation of students who focus their academic pursuits on "The Life and Times of Hannah Montana."

E|E imagines that traditional schools, as we know them today, will still have a place and the report is a bit starry-eyed in its optimistic expectations for reforms. Nonetheless, this report is an easy read that presents an array of possibilities for the future of public education. Read the report here.