The Education Gadfly Weekly

When it comes to gauging the performance of Ohio’s public charter schools, unfair comparisons and generalizations are all too common. Apples-to-oranges comparisons between individual schools and entire districts, as well as casual disregard for charter schools’ high percentages of children in poverty (while contrasting their performance with wealthier children), are inaccurate forms of analysis at best. At worst, they’re intentionally disingenuous. But unless you’re a wonk at heart, these data offenses probably aren’t on your radar.

There’s another refrain from charter critics that disturbs me—not as a data analyst or researcher, but as a parent. It’s the implication that if you’ve moved your child to a school that performs lower on report card measures than the district school to which you are zoned, that choice isn’t a very good one.

I see this critique often from charter critic Stephen Dyer as well as from bloggers, teachers unions, and other choice opponents. Dyer frequently asserts that lower-performing charter schools “drain” public resources from higher-performing ones. You can see this logic at work in specific complaints or in sweeping statements appearing in just about every Innovation Ohio brief, like:

…half of all state money sent to charters goes to schools that perform worse than traditional public schools….

For a long time, I cringed when reading these generalizations because school-to-district comparisons aren’t fair ones to make (i.e., don’t be surprised if a giant district that serves a mix of poor and wealthy children outperforms a school serving only poor children), and because they perpetuated unhelpful misperceptions that charters “siphon,” “steal,” and “drain” money from public schools. (Never mind that some Ohio districts close their borders to outsiders, only accepting students whose families can afford to rent or purchase a home in some of Ohio’s wealthiest communities.)

But never before have such comparisons bothered me the way they do now, as a parent with a new preschooler starting the process of school shopping for my oldest daughter.

Like most parents, I’m concerned about more than test scores. I’m considering class sizes, school size, safety, culture, and whether there’s a good arts program. My husband and I are taking into account location (convenience), educational philosophy, and discipline style, as well as my daughter’s personality and preferences. This week, we toured an outdoor nature school, where my four-year-old and I climbed across a wet creek bed and up a small ravine to get to the learning space (for outdoor learning time, not recess). I chatted in the woods with the school founder about her pedagogical point of view in wanting the children to receive two hours of outdoor time daily, no matter the weather, and learned that students demonstrate progress through portfolios, not tests. As we departed, my daughter pulled dried leaves from her hair and asked with intrigue, “Mom, was that a school?” And I realized: This is the pinnacle of privilege.

As middle-class person, I’ve enjoyed dual privileges. Most obviously, when my daughter starts kindergarten next year, I’d be able to buy my way into alternative schooling programs if my neighborhood public option doesn’t suit me. We’re looking at private schools as well as the aforementioned nature school that charges tuition despite being categorized as a homeschool. If we decide against private options, I’m also able navigate my way into other public options by dedicating time and personal resources to figuring out our intra-district lottery program.

Subtler, though, is the luxury of never having anyone question my educational decisions—a very different reality than the one facing most parents in our state who are black, brown, or poor. These parents’ decisions to enroll their children in a charter school or private school through a publicly funded scholarship are routinely lambasted by those with an entrenched interest in district schools. These parents’ careful, hard-fought choices are turned into fodder for political platforms. Their quest for safety, school culture, better opportunities, or even just good arts programming—the same things I might be praised for searching out—are belittled and reduced to a single data point from folks who probably have never faced the prospect of marching their little one up the stairs of a school that is failing to keep children safe let alone educate them.

Parents who choose public charter schools or who utilize choice in some other fashion don’t care if their new school is a D instead of a C like their assigned zone, nor do they care about the data comparisons and discussions that occupy talking heads or analysts like me. This isn’t to say that parent satisfaction alone is enough; publicly funded schools must be held accountable to minimum performance standards, and advocates should do more to ensure that parents have adequate information when making schooling decisions. Choice matters immensely, but when public dollars are being used and the academic outcomes of children are at stake, safeguards must be in place. This is why Ohio and many other states have a default closure threshold for the most chronically underperforming charter schools.

Still, it should disturb all of us who seek to do right for our own children when restrictions are placed on others—either real or rhetorical—that we’d never accept for our own families.

Ohio policy makers have actually proposed legislation in the past that would prohibit children from attending a charter school if their districts were higher rated. It doesn’t require much imagination to think of all the legitimate reasons that parents might switch schools. In privileged communities, school shopping is as normal as upgrading your Subaru or planning your next vacation, which is to say fodder for fun dinner conversation—rarely questioned. In fact, I’m fairly certain I could make a pedagogically terrible decision for my kids and have my friends and neighbors nod approvingly, assuming that I must know what I’m doing.

On the flipside, when these decisions involve programs of choice utilized overwhelmingly by low-income families and children of color in our communities, it’s par for the course to point out that school’s bad grades (typically in a one-dimensional way—looking at performance instead of growth). Critics also attribute bad motivations to the folks running or overseeing the school; and accuse those parents of weakening their public school system and harming the civic fabric of the community. (Hyperbole, much?)

It’s not that I wasn’t already aware of these dynamics. Having worked in Ohio education policy and charter schooling for almost a decade, I know there’s a great deal of hypocrisy when it comes to “choice” and that education is politicized. But standing on the crest of a hill in October sunshine, my daughter caked in dirt while I contemplated a fairly unorthodox approach to her schooling, it struck me in a surprising new way. Those of us who are lauded for our “choices” must never be silent when other parents are criticized for doing the same. The stakes for our children are so very high. 

On September 15, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) submitted its ESSA plan to the U.S. Department of Education. Ohio’s current accountability system meets most of the stipulations of the new federal law. As a result, Ohio’s federal plan doesn’t make that many changes to state practice.

But there is one under-the-radar ESSA provision that could have a significant impact on Ohio. ESSA explicitly says that when calculating four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, states can only use the percentage of students who earn a regular high school diploma. This diploma is defined as “the standard high school diploma awarded to the preponderance of students in the State that is fully aligned with State standards.” While there’s nothing stopping states from awarding multiple diplomas, the four-year graduation rate that they report to the feds can only be based on a single diploma—whichever one the majority of students earn.

This could have implications for how the state handles graduation for students with special needs, who represent about 15 percent of Ohio students. In a recent presentation to the State Board, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) put it this way:
 

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Previously, Ohio permitted Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams to exempt students with disabilities from being proficient on end-of-course tests in order to receive a diploma. If a student was determined to be exempt, they were awarded three points—the equivalent of a proficient score—for each exempted test required for graduation. Under ESSA, a state may still grant these students a diploma—but they will no longer be able to count them when calculating their graduation rates for the feds. This is because ESSA’s definition of a regular high school diploma “does not include a recognized equivalent of a diploma, such as general equivalency diploma, certificate of completion, certificate of attendance, or similar lesser credential.” In non-regulatory guidance released earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education noted that a diploma based on meeting IEP goals does not count for the purpose of calculating the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate. In layperson’s terms, this means that students with disabilities cannot be excused by their IEP team from meeting the requirements of a regular diploma and still be counted in the state’s graduation rate. Take a look at how ODE has defined the implications of this provision:
 

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Of course, whether or not there’s a big impact on Ohio’s graduation rate depends on how many students with disabilities are actually excused each year from course requirements or assessments. The proportion of students with special needs who graduated under the state’s standard requirements was pretty low (35 percent) in 2015-16, meaning that more than half of students with disabilities who graduated were exempt from passing state assessments.
 

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Just to drive the point even further home, consider ODE’s analysis of the 2015-16 graduation rate for students with disabilities under the former federal law versus the new one.
 

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As you can see, the graduation rate for students with disabilities fell from almost 70 percent to 35 percent. This is a drop that would have easily nicked a few percentage points off the state’s overall graduation rate, despite the fact that the population of students with disabilities is relatively small. The bottom line: Because of ESSA’s standard high school diploma provision, states like Ohio will see a drop in their graduation rates.

Which brings us to an interesting question: Could this underlying issue have provided fuel for the push to adopt an alternative graduation pathway during the state budget cycle?

This summer Tom Gunlock, former president of the State Board of Education, outlined a few reasons why the legislature shouldn’t alter graduation requirements. Although legislators failed to heed his warning, and the requirements are now enshrined in law for the class of 2018, it’s worth noting that one of his points was related to the changes to special education graduation requirements. He highlighted a telling example from Dayton City Schools:

For example, the graduation rate in Dayton City Schools for the Class of 2015 is 75 percent. That figure is close to the average proficiency rate of OGT tests administered to those students in March of 2013. Compare that to the graduation rate for students with disabilities among the Class of 2015, which is just under 64 percent—even though their average OGT proficiency rate is only around 27 percent. I’m no mathematics scholar, but even I can see the numbers don’t add up.

Gunlock went on to note that districts’ knowledge of the looming gap between how students with disabilities previously counted toward the graduation rate and how they would count in the future could have been the reason for the panic about an impending “graduation apocalypse.”

To be clear, there is no way—yet—to know whether or not that’s true. Many folks arguing in favor of the alternative requirements claimed that they were only concerned about students’ familiarity with the tests—since students were still adjusting to new, more rigorous EOCs, passage rates would be low, and a significant number of Ohio students would fail to graduate. But the fact that students with disabilities had been granted diplomas en masse without passing state assessments may very well have resulted in a significant exaggeration of the impact that the EOC requirements were having on the graduation rate. In the end, ESSA’s definition of a standard diploma would have lowered the graduation rate anyway.

The graduation “fix” has been pitched as a temporary exemption and one-year opportunity for the class of 2018. But if history is any indication, there will be an enormous push to make it permanent. It’s not hard to understand why Ohio policymakers might feel pressured to lower expectations. But here’s hoping legislators remember that it’s bad for kids in the long run to do so. It sells all students short, but none more so than the many students with disabilities who aren’t cognitively impaired and deserve to be held to the same high expectations as their peers. This is an important issue that needs to be considered before any additional efforts are made to alter Ohio’s graduation requirements.

By expanding access to options including charters, choice advocates hope that more students will reap the benefits of attending high-performing schools. But do all families have charter options in their area? In this study, researchers chart the Ohio landscape and seek to answer two questions: First, where are charter schools located with respect to the poverty and racial demographics of their community? Second, do low-income families have equal access to charter schools?

To answer these questions, researchers Andrew Saultz of the University of Miami and Christopher Yaluma of the Ohio State University (and a Fordham research intern this past summer) collected data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Ohio Department of Education. These data were then used to conduct analyses on the geographic locations of brick-and-mortar charters and the characteristics of their surrounding communities. For the purposes of this study, a family is said to have access to a charter school if they live within a five-mile radius of one.

Unsurprising for those who are familiar with Ohio, the majority of charters are located in large cities like the Big 8 (e.g., Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton). This is almost certainly due to Ohio law, which restricts the opening of brick-and-mortar charters to certain—mostly urban—locations served by low-performing “challenged districts.” What might be surprising, though, is that charters are less likely to locate in the very highest-poverty areas of these districts. This doesn’t mean that families in the toughest urban areas lack access—they generally live within five miles of a charter school, but their kids may have to travel farther to get there. On the other hand, families in poor rural areas are less likely to have access to a brick-and-mortar charter school.

In terms of racial demographics, data show that Ohio charters currently serve regions with higher than average proportions of Black students, but the same is not true for Hispanic students. City-specific analyses, however, indicate that charters do not locate in regions with the highest concentrations of Black populations. For example, charters in Columbus tend to locate on the perimeter of the city rather than within the city center where the highest concentration of the Black population lives. Similar patterns can be seen in Cincinnati and Dayton. Meanwhile, a higher percentage of Ohio’s Hispanic population lives in rural areas, particularly in rural northwest Ohio—a fact that explains why Hispanic students are less likely to have access to charter schools. Unfortunately, not all Buckeye students are benefitting from equal access to brick-and-mortar charter schools. Because these charters are typically located in the largest metropolitan areas, there are several regions of the state (especially rural ones) with significant levels of poverty but no charter schools. To achieve truly equal access, the authors argue that Ohio policymakers should reconsider current state law, which restricts where charter schools are permitted to open their doors. To that point, we wholeheartedly agree—Ohio needs as many high-quality schools, charter or otherwise, as possible.

SOURCE: Andrew Saultz and Christopher B. Yaluma, “Equal access? Analyzing charter location relative to demographics in Ohio,” Journal of School Choice (July 2017). 

School choice is becoming more and more common across the country, creating more and more stories of student and family success. The Foundation for Excellence in Education wants to hear as many success stories as possible and has launched a contest to find them.

The Choices in Education Video Competition begins soon and is seeking video submissions from students, parents, or alumni of existing school choice programs (public school choice, charter, magnet, private school, virtual learning, or homeschool) and even from students and families who want more choice in their state. The best part: the winners will be chosen based not on the quality of the video, but on the sincerity and passion of the story told.

Three Grand Prize Winners will each receive a $15,000 cash prize, one People’s Choice Winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize, and three Finalists will each receive a $5,000 cash prize.

So what are you waiting for? The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2017.

You can find more information and submission information by clicking here.

Good luck! 

NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.

Lowellville Local Schools in Mahoning County, Ohio, where I am superintendent, has participated in Ohio’s open enrollment program for almost 20 years. Our district enrolls about 600 students annually, about 54 percent of whom attend from outside Lowellville’s district borders through Ohio’s open enrollment option. The program’s impact on our schools and students has been overwhelmingly positive, yet there has been some skepticism about open enrollment across the state. Most of these criticisms seem territorial at heart or seem to stem from a philosophical opposition to choice. Folks might ask, “Why should taxpayers have to pay for students who live outside their district?” or they may wonder about capacity issues, overcrowding, or transportation issues when serving kids outside of their bounds.

But there are other aspects of the program worth knowing about—real benefits for students, families, educators, and communities when districts opt to allow students via open enrollment.

1)      Greater course offerings. In Lowellville, given the manner in which funding follows the student who opts into another district, we’ve been able to take these resources and offer extended courses such as Italian, robotics, STEM, computer-aided design, and higher sciences to students who are interested. These increased opportunities not only allow us to stay competitive in our course offerings around the region, they also allow students to flourish academically within a smaller class size setting.

2)      More and better choices for families. Lowellville's reputation and longitudinal data reflect academic excellence above and beyond the surrounding districts' performance. Open enrollment affords parents the choices to enroll their children in Lowellville Schools. A 2015 study performed by Dr. Ron Iarussi from the Mahoning County ESC and Dr. Karen Larwin from Youngstown State University strongly reflects the increased academic achievement of open enrolled students from surrounding districts as compared to the students who remained in their resident districts.

3)      Diverse student population. Our participation in Ohio’s open enrollment program enables Lowellville schools to be more socioeconomically and racially diverse. There are real benefits to our residents as well as students by enabling them to interact with and collaborate with folks from other backgrounds. It also helps prepare our students for real-world experiences outside of rural Ohio.

4)      Fosters healthy competition. Open enrollment indirectly places pressure on schools to perform at their highest levels, engage with families, and meet student needs. It motivates districts to attract students—and to keep them—which I think is a positive trend for public schools. 

Some critics suggest that the primary reason districts open enroll is because they are forced to do so by an inadequately funded school system. There’s no doubt that open enrollment provides extra resources to districts with a large inflow of students through the program, which can be especially helpful in rural communities. And it hurts a district’s bottom line when students leave for another district. But having worked in education for 25 years, I must support what’s best for students, even if and when that means they decide to go elsewhere.

Open enrollment is a widely used program of choice offered by the majority of Ohio’s 614 districts that enables more students and families to find the right educational fit. As Lowellville’s experience shows, there have been many benefits of participating in the program. More districts should follow suit.

Dr. Geno Thomas is superintendent of Lowellville Local Schools.

Most American public school teachers are paid according to salary schedules that take into account their years of experience and degrees earned. This compensation approach has been criticized because it doesn’t anchor teacher pay to instructional effectiveness or other factors that merit consideration (e.g., specializing in harder-to-staff fields or working in higher-need schools). Instead, teacher pay depends on factors that research suggests are not closely tied to student achievement. Now a new study by Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero of the Brookings Institution takes a different look at teacher salary schedules, this time through the lens of equitable pay and patterns of school funding.

In terms of wage distribution, the analysts find that public school teacher pay is more equitable relative to other occupations. Using the Theil Index—a measure of equity—they find that teacher pay is more evenly distributed than for doctors or lawyers and just slightly more equitable than for nurses or social workers. This is not surprising, as salary schedules tend to fit teacher pay within a relatively narrow range; for instance, salaries for Columbus educators range from about $40,000 to $90,000. Within the teaching profession, the pay differences are explained mainly by experience and degrees—predictable given the design of salary schedules—and the state in which a teacher works.

This leads the analysts to examine the state-by-state variation in wage equity among teachers. They ask: Is there a correlation between states with more “regressive” funding systems—wealthier districts funded at higher levels—and less equitable teacher pay? The theory is that regressive systems might allow affluent districts to put their educators on higher pay schedules relative to poorer ones. This, in turn, would create greater pay inequity among teachers within that state. Indeed, when they crunch the numbers, the analysts uncover a modest relationship between regressive funding and less equitable teacher pay, as expected. However, while Ohio has one of the least regressive funding systems, its teacher pay equity is about average nationally—a bit of an outlier in their analysis.

Not surprisingly, this analysis finds that lockstep salary schedules generally create a more even pay distribution for teachers. But that doesn’t mean it’s an evenhanded approach for all. Some teachers—especially younger ones who must wait years for more generous pay—may not view the salary schedule as particularly fair. It’s also possible that teachers in tough, high-poverty schools might not see their salaries as equitable when comparing their wages to those paid in upper middle-class suburbs. This has implications, particularly for high-poverty schools: Without the flexibility to differentiate pay, they struggle to retain quality teachers—particularly younger ones—who are apt to move to wealthier districts or out of the profession.

Above all, we should ask whether it’s fair to students and parents to award automatic pay raises—as salary schedules do—to ineffective or chronically absent teachers just the same as high-performing educators. Ohio law (and those in several other states) requires districts to adopt rigid salary schedules based on years of service and degrees earned. If legislators decide to put the interests of students first, they would end this outdated compensation practice that few other employers or professions use today. Instead, they should give educational leaders the flexibility to allocate pay in a way that helps them best meet the needs of students and local communities, aiming for equity for students rather than adults.

Source: Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero, “Scrutinizing equal pay for equal work among teachers,” Brookings Institution (2017).