Curator’s Note: Gadfly Bites will be off tomorrow, returning on March 13 to begin a new Monday, Wednesday, Friday publication schedule.
- Nicely-detailed discussion of various “safe harbor” provisions – those already in place, those currently being debated, and those still being drafted – for Ohio teachers in relation to students’ standardized test scores. Journalist Jeremy Kelley attended Fordham’s Speakers Series event on teacher evaluations and includes a number of comments from panelists Melissa Cropper (Ohio Federation of Teacherst) and Matt Verber (Students First Ohio) from that discussion in his piece. Thanks for coming, Jeremy. (Springfield News Sun)
- Kudos to Cleveland’s Breakthrough Schools for their recent award of a $1 million grant from the Haslam family’s 3 Foundation. "They're making great strides and they're making it quickly," said Dee Haslam in announcing the award. “We really like to help those organizations that are making a difference." Nice. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
- Speaking of Breakthrough Schools, it was announced this week that Breakthrough and Cleveland Municipal School District have reached an agreement on new building leases for three charter schools in the network, including an extension of the first-of-its-kind-in-Ohio arrangement of a charter school sharing space with a district school. Nice. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
- Speaking of Cleveland charter school buildings, Menlo Park Academy – a charter school for gifted students – announced recently that it has acquired a huge new building on the west side of the city in which to move and expand. Some fascinating details in this piece from a local business publication, including the illustrious history of the building in the garment industry and some discussion of property crime statistics in the schools old vs. new locations. Best wishes to MPA on its capital campaign! (Freshwater Cleveland)
- Tired of hearing praise of Ohio Auditor Dave Yost? Me neither. Editors in Akron opine very positively today over the auditor’s testimony on charter law reform last week. (Akron Beacon Journal)
RESEARCH BITES 3/11/15: CHARTER AND DISTRICT VALUE-ADDED MEASURES COMPARED – PT 1
To its great credit, Ohio has recently expanded its report cards to include evaluations of how schools contribute to the growth of three student subgroups. Starting with the 2012-13 school year, schools and districts across Ohio are given value-added ratings (on an A-F scale) based on the gains of their special-needs, gifted, and low-achieving students. In this bite, I take a look at the performance of Ohio’s charters, compared to district schools statewide, along the low-achieving component. (Note: school value-added results are largely uncorrelated to demographics, allowing for comparisons of charters and district-run schools across the state.) The charts display the distribution of school ratings for charters and districts that received an A-F value-added rating for their low-achieving students. The breakdown of ratings, as you can see, is more or less similar across sectors: Both have a large fraction of schools in the C rating category (43 percent for charters; 42 percent for districts), while charters have a slightly larger proportion of their schools at the margins of the A-F distribution. Twenty-one percent of charters received an A versus 17 percent of districts; 16 percent of charters received an F versus 10 percent of district-run schools. When considered through the state’s report card measure, it doesn’t appear that charters are doing much better or worse than districts for low-achieving students. This appraisal is similar to the 2014 CREDO charter evaluation, which (using student-level data) revealed equivalent results for low achieving charter students in reading, though somewhat negative results in math; cf., pp. 38-39.
Chart: The distribution of A-F school ratings for the low-achieving student subgroup, district and charter, 2013-14.
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