The Education Gadfly Weekly

Last year, we at Fordham wrote quite a bit about teacher policy. We talked about changes needed in teacher preparation, teacher licensure, and teacher evaluation. We also spilled some ink on innovations in teacher credentialing, teacher roles, teacher professional development, and other potential changes to teacher evaluations. By the early days of 2016, we realized that a year had passed, and—despite some debate—nothing had actually changed. Teacher policy in Ohio was pretty much ignored. The advent of a new federal education law promises to shake things up, and it could be the jolt of energy that Ohio teacher policy needs. But what should legislators and administrators know about teacher policy before they start crafting programs and reforms in the wake of ESSA? Let’s take a look.   

Teacher licensure

When lawmakers in Ohio discussed tackling deregulation last year, one of the policies they proposed was to deregulate state mandates regarding teacher licensure for eligible high-performing districts. The move generated some controversy, which is unsurprising, considering that licensure is an area of teacher policy that’s rife with conflicting research. However, that hasn’t stopped Ohio from getting middling grades from national organizations like the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) for its failure to require prospective elementary, secondary science, secondary social studies, and special education teachers to pass rigorous content tests in all the subjects they will teach prior to licensure.

Teacher evaluations

Sixty-six percent of Ohio teachers are evaluated on the student growth component of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) using either Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) or shared attribution. SLOs are inconsistent, often fail to differentiate teacher performance, and take up a lot of time; shared attribution evaluates teachers based on test scores in subjects they don’t teach. Neither of these is a high-quality measure, meaning that OTES isn’t a fair way to evaluate most teachers. Add to this the fact that multiple observers, outside observers, and unannounced observations aren’t required—and a change in law during summer 2014 that permits less frequent observations for teachers who receive the two highest ratings—and the entire system seems pretty much the opposite of unbiased and consistent. 

Teacher roles and ongoing development

A lot is shifting in education: federal law, the demographics of American schools, the types of organizations that schools rely on for services. It makes sense that the role of teachers would change too. While some have visions of classes run by robots, most changes will probably be a little less dramatic. The opportunity to utilize “hybrid” teachers is ripe, and the future of teacher professional learning—and, as a result, student achievement—will hinge on how we shape teacher roles moving forward. The way we support and empower teachers matters too. There’s a national push to elevate the teaching profession. Ohio should get on board by creating incentives and opportunities for districts to revolutionize the way they use and develop their teaching staffs.

Teacher preparation programs: Selection and preparation

Ohio’s bar for admission into education schools is still low, mostly because Ohio law doesn't have a bar at all. Screening processes like high selection standards, rigorous entrance and exit exams, or interviews aren’t required in the Buckeye State. There are, of course, some education schools that have requirements teacher candidates must meet, but many of these requirements stop and start at minimum GPAs (some of which are arguably too low).

Beyond candidate selection is candidate training, and Ohio needs some serious work there as well. In years past, NCTQ has released reports demonstrating that many education schools, including those in Ohio, need to work on improving program design and developing more rigorous training. Another recent report indicates that the textbooks teacher candidates use aren't up to snuff. Research on Teach For America (TFA) indicates that non-traditionally trained teachers are typically just as effective at promoting academic achievement as other teachers. Overall, it would seem as though traditional teacher preparation programs aren’t doing a good enough job of selecting and preparing potential teachers.

Teacher preparation programs: Accountability

The Buckeye State is perhaps the chief example of how difficult it’s been to measure the outputs of teacher preparation programs. The Ohio Department of Higher Education offers yearly performance reports that share data on teacher preparation programs. This data includes licensure test scores, OTES results, value-added data, survey results, and other information. While the performance reports are a good example of public transparency and a step in the right direction, they offer limited usefulness because the underlying data is flawed. Much of it falls short of actually differentiating teachers or the preparation programs that trained them. I’ve already outlined why shared attribution, SLOs, and evaluations in general don’t effectively differentiate teachers. But using value added is just as problematic: The more experience teachers have, the more their instruction may be influenced by learning that occurred after their undergraduate education.

Licensure tests are a similarly flawed measure because some teachers in Ohio aren’t required to take rigorous content exams for licensure. The information about candidates’ field and clinical experience measures the minimum and maximum number of field hours, the average number of weeks required of full-time teaching, and the percentage of candidates who “satisfactorily completed” student teaching—but there is no explanation of what “satisfactory” means (it’s apparently decided by the institution) or how well candidates performed during their field hours and student teaching. In short, even with considerable output data, Ohio is no closer to determining the effectiveness of its teacher preparation programs (or the state’s teachers).       

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Given the complexity of these areas—and the importance of ensuring that all kids have access to capable teachers—what’s an Ohio policy maker to do now that ESSA has returned educational power to the states? Stay tuned for out-of-the-box ideas that you’ll either love or hate. 

In September, Ohio was awarded a federal Charter School Program (CSP) grant, winning the largest slice of the pie among eight winning states ($71 million). Soon after, following on the heels of last summer’s charter school sponsor evaluation scandal at the Ohio Department of Education, there was significant backlash and a hold placed on the funds. Concerns stemmed from the fact that the grant application described Ohio as a “beacon of charter oversight” (before the state passed landmark legislation in October promising to make that a reality) and overstated the performance of its charter sector.

As part of the effort to salvage the grant, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) submitted revised data on charter school performance. Applying a more rigorous definition of failure[1] yielded fifty-seven low-performing schools, in contrast to the six listed in Ohio’s initial application last July.[2] Given these discrepancies, it’s appropriate that the feds are conducting their due diligence in asking ODE to update its application and demonstrate that it can manage the funds effectively. Meanwhile, those of us observing the ongoing debate from the sidelines should hope that Ohio retains its grant. It’s critical for the sake of good school networks looking to expand, great networks that might be willing to come to the Buckeye State if start-up dollars are available, and students in our neediest communities who would unfairly pay the price should the award be rescinded. Here are three reasons to root for Ohio to retain the grant.

Ohio’s urban families lack high-quality school options

Good urban schools can provide much-needed oases, but there aren’t nearly enough of them at present. According to Ohio’s updated letter to the feds, there are roughly the same number of high-performing[3] charter schools (fifty-nine) as low-performers (fifty-seven). For all its challenges, the charter sector slightly outshines the district schools in Ohio’s “Urban 8” communities (as shown in the chart below).[4]

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Source: Ohio Department of Education letter to Stefan Huh, Director of Charter Schools Program at USDOE

Looked at a different way, Ohio has about 175 failing schools—district and charter—in its big cities. Four out of five charters and urban district schools miss the high-performing mark. That wretched record is not what the state’s neediest children crave in the way of better school options. 

High-quality start-ups are far more effective than turnarounds

Successfully turning around even one low-performing school is a Herculean task, and Ohio has scores of such schools in its urban communities alone. Toward this end, the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program allocated $132 million to Ohio to spend on perennially struggling schools. Since 2010, Ohio’s grantees have overwhelmingly selected the softest option: “transformation,” which calls for replacing the school principal but little else in the way of meaningful change.[5] In essence, we’ve handed over fistfuls of money to schools with long track records of failure to essentially turn themselves around—a strategy that would be considered lunacy in any other industry or endeavor. Consider Weinland Park Elementary, one of Columbus City’s lowest performers, which received over a million dollars to fix itself. Surprise: it hasn’t worked, not at that school, nor at many others.

Antithetical to the doctrine that poor-performing charters should close, the SIG program also granted bundles of cash to underperforming charters. Virtual Schoolhouse, a charter school where just 31 percent of third graders were proficient in reading and an appalling 15 percent reached the proficiency bar in math in 2014, has collected at least $1.1 million for improvement purposes alone.

A glance at almost any of Ohio’s SIG grantees (and their report cards) illustrates the maddeningly ineffective strategy of throwing good money after bad in languishing schools. Most, like Weinland Park and Virtual Schoolhouse, are very low-performing four years later and have little to show for their new spending. Meanwhile, our state’s high-performing charter networks wait with bated breath to see if Ohio retains its CSP grant—a program that would allocate just a fraction as much money as SIG grants—so they can grow and replicate proven models of excellence.

CSP will help expand Ohio’s good charter schools, improving the sector overall

The contention, voiced by charter critic Stephen Dyer, that “Ohio doesn’t have lots of high-performing charters in which to invest the federal money meant to expand their footprint” is simply untrue. Ohio has at least fifty-nine such schools, representing one-fifth of the sector. Arguably, ODE should target CSP funds to fewer than that number—perhaps the top 10 percent of performers (provided, of course, that they want to grow their networks). Going through a rigorous competitive grant application process promises to benefit Ohio more broadly; even those charter schools that don’t win a grant will be better off for having applied. Ohio is home to many top-notch charter schools that launched with earlier rounds of CSP funds and currently plan to expand. Many others, unfortunately, have been sidelined in their plans as they await details regarding Ohio’s currently frozen grant.

In order to improve Ohio’s charter school landscape and create more solid options for kids who need them, top-performing schools must expand and replicate while the state and its charter sponsors simultaneously shut down low-performers and prevent shoddy schools from opening in the first place. HB 2 installed much-needed reforms that will accomplish the latter two, but that’s only half of the equation. Ohio must also grow its best school networks so that more students can be served. That’s going to be awfully hard to do if the CSP grant slips through our fingers.

Fordham’s latest blockbuster report digs deep into three new, multi-state tests (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and one best-in-class state assessment, Massachusetts’ state exam (MCAS), to answer policymakers’ most pressing questions about the next-generation tests: Do these tests reflect strong college- and career-ready content? Are they of rigorous quality? Broadly, what are their strengths and areas for improvement?

Over the last two years, principal investigators Nancy Doorey and Morgan Polikoff led a team of nearly forty reviewers to find answers to those questions. Here’s a quick sampling of the findings:

• Overall, PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments had the strongest matches to college- and career-ready standards, as defined by the Council of Chief State School Officers.
• ACT Aspire and MCAS both did well regarding the quality of their items and the depth of knowledge they assessed.
• Still, panelists found that ACT Aspire and MCAS did not adequately assess—or may not assess at all—some of the priority content reflected in the Common Core standards in both ELA/Literacy and mathematics.

As might be expected, the report has garnered national interest. Check out coverage from The 74 Million,  U.S. News, and Education Week just for a start.

Or better yet, download the report and take a look for yourself!

The challenges facing rural school districts have much in common with those facing many urban districts: lots of students living in poverty, low college-attainment rates among parents, high and growing numbers of ELL students, and difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers and principals. Add the sprawling and isolated geography, weak tax base, and iffy broadband access that plague many rural districts, and we have a daunting set of barriers to the goal of students leaving high school fully ready for their next step in life. As Paul Hill put it recently, if America neglects its rural schools, nobody wins.

Fortunately, according to a new report from Battelle for Kids and Education Northwest, America’s rural schools are not standing idly by. The report looks at the work of rural education collaboratives (RECs), which have been formed across the country in an effort to respond to these very challenges. While there seems to be no handy list—nor a single definition—of such organizations, the authors know what they’re not looking for: top-down collaborations, which they eschew in favor of “informal and organic collaborative structures that are more peer-to-peer and network based.” The metrics they use to identify the right sort of RECs are partnerships that are: 1) committed to a common purpose that creates value for rural students and reaches beyond the missions of individual members; 2) run through a member-led governance structure; 3) focused on improving practice by establishing real solutions to defined educational opportunity problems at significant scale; and 4) clear about intended outcomes and metrics of success.

RECs are characterized as positive forces for innovation in their regions and necessary engines for their districts to access burgeoning opportunities. Already, RECs have helped their participating schools leverage dual enrollment, digital learning, standards-based education, more personalized academic tracks, and career advising to give their students the best possible education given geographic and economic constraints. While education reformers have been touting the promise of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for the success of urban students, rural districts are hoping for the same boost. “ESSA ushers in an era that offers new opportunities and resources for rural schools to pursue solutions that work for them,” the authors note. RECs are seen as avenues for investment in areas of the country that are often seen only as drags on the national economy, when they are seen at all.

The report serves up case studies of four RECs (and looks generally at seventeen RECs in sixteen states) that illustrate different approaches to their regions’ unique concerns. Those interested are encouraged to check out the Vermont Rural Partnership, the Eastern Shore of Maryland Educational Consortium, and the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) Network. A taste of what you will discover in these case studies can be found in Fordham’s home state of Ohio.

The Ohio Appalachian Collaborative (OAC) was established in 2010 with the integral participation of Battelle for Kids itself. OAC currently serves twenty-seven districts with forty-eight thousand students. The case study focuses on grants received by OAC (Race to the Top, Teacher Incentive Fund, and Straight A Fund innovation grants) and on the collaborative’s major focus: college and career readiness. In three years between 2012 and 2015, OAC reported an 85 percent increase in student participation in dual enrollment courses, a six-fold increase in the number of dual enrollment courses available, and a doubling of the number of dual-enrollment credentialed teachers at the high school level. Proof of the success of Ohio’s effort (and the others) is still to come, but these are solid numbers that urban districts in the Buckeye State would love to have.

It is heartening to think that education reforms at the national level may have a positive effect on both urban and rural students in poverty, despite their differing challenges.

SOURCE: “Generating Opportunity and Prosperity: The Promise of Rural Education Collaboratives,” Battelle for Kids (January, 2016).

A recent study from the National Center on Education and the Economy examines teacher professional learning in four systems: British Columbia, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. These places have two key similarities: They are considered high-performers as measured by student achievement on international comparison tests, and they view teacher professional learning as central to the job of educating students.

In particular, each system is built around what’s called an “improvement cycle,” which directly ties to student learning. The cycle follows three steps: First, assessing students’ current learning levels; second, developing teaching practices that help students get to the next stage of learning; and third, evaluating the impact of the new practices on student learning and refining them.

The authors of the report are careful to note that the improvement cycle doesn’t work in isolation—it requires strong links between leadership roles, resource allocation, and the focus of evaluation and accountability measures. To make the cycle work and to create a culture of continuous and meaningful growth, schools must organize improvement around effective professional learning, create distinct roles for the people who lead professional development, advance teacher expertise, share responsibility between teachers and administrators for professional growth, and build collaborative learning into daily school life.

Each system has its own unique focus. Singapore boasts three different career tracks for teachers, including one that allows top performers to continue teaching while also working with less experienced teachers. British Columbia focuses on inquiry-based learning communities that allow teachers to research one specific area all year and focus on deep learning and sustained practice. Hong Kong utilizes collaborative lesson planning, a process that includes lesson observation and analysis. Shanghai focuses on mentoring, which includes tiered mentoring responsibilities for teachers based on experience and weekly lesson observation and critique.

The report provides a few key takeaways. First, all four systems are centered on the assumption that student learning matters and that teacher professional growth improves both student achievement and schools. Second, each system emphasizes the power of bottom-up initiatives. Rather than requiring specific programs, schools are permitted to organize professional learning and then held accountable for the results. Accountability centers on student learning; in Singapore, for example, school leaders must set objectives for teachers to develop their skills in using student assessment to identify the next state of student learning. Finally, each system evaluates the quality of professional learning by examining traditional student performance data (like test scores) and qualitative data (focus groups, surveys, interviews). Together, these complementing sets of data are used to hold educators accountable for their own growth and the growth of others around them (yes, you read that right—in a few of these systems, only teachers who effectively develop themselves and others will rise to leadership positions). American schools would do well to take a page out of these high-performing systems’ playbook.

SOURCE: Ben Jensen, Julie Sonnemann, Katie Roberts-Hull, and Amelie Hunter, “Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems,” The National Center on Education and the Economy (January 2016).