The Education Gadfly Weekly

Ohio policymakers are currently wrestling with a slew of issues related to transitions from high school to college or career. Among the major topics of debate is the state’s dual-enrollment program—known as College Credit Plus—that allows advanced students an opportunity to take university-level courses while in high school. Dual enrollment, done well, is a fine way to expand opportunities for high achievers, as are Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses and early-college high schools.

What if Ohio also made a more concerted effort to graduate high-achieving students early? Why not encourage students who are ready and willing to head off to college to do just that—rather than asking them to stick it out in high school?

These questions crossed my mind while reading a witty essay by Neerav Kingsland. Reflecting on his own educational experience, Kingsland believes he would have been better off doing other, more productive things during his late high school years. I can relate: In retrospect, going off to college early might’ve been better than suffering through a case of “senioritis.”

To encourage more college-ready students to consider the early graduation route, Ohio legislators could create a scholarship program, something a few other states have already done (e.g., Idaho, Indiana, and Kentucky). The program would offer eligible students a state-funded college scholarship if they decide to forego their junior and/or senior years. For students choosing to take up the offer, the benefits might include: 1) an opportunity to challenge themselves by enrolling in college early; 2) an extra financial boost to defray the costs of higher education; and 3) the potential to earn a college degree early and start pursuing a career at an earlier age.

Scholarships for early graduation might also be a more efficient use of taxpayer money. If the amount is less than the public funding used to subsidize students’ high school education, cost savings should follow. Though likely modest, those savings could be used to provide extra support and instruction for pupils struggling to meet basic graduation requirements, or be put to other uses.

As with any proposal, the devil’s in the details. The following is a rough sketch of how it might work.

Eligibility: Policymakers should base eligibility on objective indicators of academic readiness. To qualify for the scholarship, the state could require students to meet the high-school diploma requirements via the ACT- or SAT-score pathway, in addition to earning sufficient course credits. Because some “college-ready” students may not be able to meet the course requirements early—for instance, Ohio requires four units of English—the state might allow early graduation if students earn exceptional ACT or SAT scores (perhaps matching the higher scores needed to earn an honors diploma).  

Application and usage: Students would likely need to apply for the scholarship, something that Indiana requires to verify scholarship eligibility. With respect to usage, policymakers could require students to use it within a certain timeframe, such as three years, to accommodate early graduates who intend to work or intern before college. They could restrict usage to Ohio’s public colleges and universities, or include in-state private colleges, as well. An even more expansive approach would allow the funds to be used at out-of-state institutions; however, if policy makers wanted to encourage young people to remain in-state, they could limit use to Ohio colleges and universities.

Funding: Policymakers would need to decide how to set scholarship amounts, and a few possibilities are as follows:

• Option 1: Set a flat amount—for instance, a one-time $4,000 scholarship to any eligible student. This has the benefit of simplicity, but it’s less tied to students’ financial needs.
• Option 2: Base amounts on students’ household income (and/or assets), providing more financial aid to needier students. Verifying this would likely require paperwork, and the state would need to create a “sliding scale” that sets amounts based on family wealth. But this approach would more efficiently target assistance to lower-income students.
• Option 3: Align amounts to the state and local per-pupil funding that would have otherwise been spent on early graduates’ high school education. This would be a fairly generous approach, with scholarships upwards of $10,000. Yet it would require heftier state appropriations or districts to contribute to the scholarship pool.

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National data suggest that only about 3 percent of students graduate early.[1] That number makes sense: Most students, financial incentives or not, will likely want to finish their K–12 experience in familiar surroundings with well-known classmates. Other young people, despite being academically ready, may not feel prepared for the various social challenges of college life. Still others might want to continue building their resumes to seek admission to a top-flight university. And many students may not even contemplate early graduation as a serious possibility.

For students willing and able to take their next step in life, Ohio should put early graduation on the table by offering college scholarships. The take-up rate may or may not be very high—and some of that likely hinges on policy design. But by creating an opportunity for more college-ready students to advance into higher education early, policymakers might ensure that more people look back on their teenage years as time well spent.

Ohio’s Every Student Succeeds Act plan doesn’t include many changes to the state’s current accountability system, but it does make some meaningful adjustments that improve equity within the state. Most notably, it lowers the minimum number for Ohio subgroup sizes, or n-size, from thirty to fifteen students for accountability purposes—a transition the state is implementing gradually and will complete in the 2018–19 school year. Unfortunately, legislation that recently passed the Senate, S.B. 216, would undo the n-size shift before it’s fully implemented. Here’s why that would be a mistake.

N-size and why it matters

Subgroups generally comprise historically disadvantaged populations like black and Latino children and English language learners (ELLs). Ohio’s previous n-size of thirty students meant, for example, that only schools with at least thirty ELLs had to report their performance as a subgroup for state report card purposes. Lowering this threshold to fifteen students is beneficial because it improves transparency and holds schools accountable for meeting the needs of underprivileged students, increasing the likelihood that students will receive the proper supports and interventions they need. Indeed, civil rights groups like Ohio’s Latino community, the NAACP, and disability rights organizations have long urged schools to focus on individual subgroup performance.[1]

Stakeholder engagement and data

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) lowered the n-size requirement after engaging with stakeholders across the state in several ways. One was by hosting an n-size-specific webinar that more than 260 people attended. After presenting relevant data, ODE asked participants a couple of questions. The first was: “What is an acceptable percentage of students to exclude from subgroup calculations?” Fifty-eight percent of attendees thought it acceptable to exclude between 0 and 5 percent of students, whereas just 6 percent were comfortable excluding more than 25 percent of pupils. The second question asked participants to pick their preferred n-size, and gave them the options of ten, twenty, thirty, and “other.” Most respondents wanted an n-size lower than thirty, with 36 percent choosing twenty and 23 percent choosing ten, but a decent proportion, 37 percent, wanted to maintain Ohio’s n-size of thirty.

ODE also made n-size a discussion point during other meetings it hosted, including ten regional events that had a combined 1500 attendees, seventy small group discussions with associations and organizations, and an online survey that garnered more than 11,200 responses. Many stakeholders wanted Ohio to lower the n-size for all the aforementioned reasons, but a significant number feared that such a change would negatively impact school and district performance on report cards. Ohio, for example, holds schools accountable for closing achievement gaps, and some superintendents and practitioners were concerned that subscores based on such a small number of students could negatively impact their school grades. And indeed, there’s some merit to that. Fordham has recommended that we keep subgroup performance in the school grading system for transparency purposes, but not assign A–F ratings for individual subgroups.

Nevertheless, the positives of lowering the n-size to fifteen outweigh the negatives. As Ohio explained in its ESSA plan, decreasing the threshold increases the percentage of students in each subgroup whose performance matters for report card calculations and increases the number of schools who are held accountable for the achievement of these students. These data would, among other things, provide a clearer and more useful picture of schools, and would help the state identify which ones need targeted and comprehensive support in educating their harder-to-serve students.

Ohio’s ESSA plan explains how different n-sizes capture different percentages of disadvantaged subgroups for accountability purposes. For example, with the old n-size of thirty, only 51.8 percent of ELLs, 51.5 percent of Hispanic children, and 37.6 percent of multiracial pupils statewide were included in schools’ subgroup analyses. But lowering the n-size to fifteen increases those figures to 71.9 percent 72.6 percent, and 68.6 percent, respectively.

Senate Bill 216

Enter S.B. 216, billed as an effort to deregulate education that includes extensive changes to teacher evaluations, assessments, College Credit Plus, and more. The legislation has several promising measures that have attracted support from a broad group of stakeholders. However, as noted earlier, it also contains a provision requiring Ohio to set a minimum n-size of thirty, threatening to undo more than a year’s worth of engagement, research, and advocacy centered on ensuring all students are served.

Proponents of S.B. 216 have argued that the lower n-size increases statistical variability and volatility and risks violating students’ confidentiality. But ODE appears to have given serious thought to these issues; it stated in its ESSA plan, for example, that an n-size of fifteen is a statistically sound number for disaggregation. ODE isn’t an outlier in this regard, as thirteen states have set n-sizes of ten or fewer, and nine states set theirs between eleven and twenty students.

Fortunately, several groups have testified in opposition to S.B. 216’s n-size increase, including the Ohio 8 Coalition, Disability Rights Ohio, members of the Ohio Latino Connection, and more. State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria testified as an interested party and explained ODE’s reasoning for adopting an n-size of fifteen: “Too often, gifted students, English language learners and students with disabilities are excluded from a school’s subgroup analysis with an n-size of thirty. The needs of these students are no less important than others. I feel it is important to allow the phase-in, as planned, and provide an incentive for every school to focus on improving outcomes for all their students.”

Superintendent DeMaria is right. If we truly care about closing achievement gaps and increasing student achievement among all students, then the current plan to phase in an n-size of fifteen is the correct move. Ohio has a track record of walking back sound accountability decisions, especially as of late. But ESSA presented Ohio with a unique opportunity to engage a wide variety of stakeholders on the n-size issue, and an incredible number of groups voiced their support for reducing it. For those in the advocacy space, that’s a win. More importantly, it’s a win for students who have been neglected by our schools for far too long.

The most recent rankings from U.S. News & World Report once again have Massachusetts at the top in pre-K—12 education. For the vast majority of pundits and analysts, this should come as no surprise. Bay State students have excelled on the national and international stage for years. But what may surprise some is the state’s success with a particular type of schooling—career and technical education (CTE).

The most recent Perkins data show Massachusetts’s positive results on measures like technical-skill attainment, school completion, and graduation rates. A 2015 report from Achieve highlighted its transformation into a CTE leader, as well as some particularly successful programs. Another report showed that participating in one of the state’s high-quality CTE programs raised the probability of on-time high school graduation by 3–5 percentage points for higher-income students and 7 percentage points for their lower-income peers. And 2016 survey data showed high levels of satisfaction from both students and parents. In short, much of the data indicate that Bay State CTE programs are on par with the quality of the rest of their pre-K—12 offerings.

It could be argued that the Massachusetts’s vocational education laws and policies are a key part of its CTE success. Other states looking for ways to improve their sectors could certainly adopt them as their own and hope for the best. But each place has its own unique context and needs, and copy and pasting laws isn’t a guarantee for success.

That’s where the Alliance for Vocational Technical Education (AVTE) comes in. AVTE is a Massachusetts-based coalition that aims to increase access to high quality CTE in the Bay State. The association recently published a white paper that, among other things, outlines five domains that characterize an excellent CTE sector, and that other states can use as a starting point for following in Massachusetts’s footsteps. Let’s take a look.

Access and equity

It’s important that all students, regardless of their background or needs, have the opportunity to enroll in high-quality CTE programs. A necessary condition of that is providing students and parents with quality information about their options. And in terms of equity, states should make sure that admission policies and procedures aren’t biased in favor of certain students or certain populations.      

Infrastructure

Without the proper infrastructure in place, CTE programs can’t serve students well, let alone contribute to closing achievement gaps. AVTE points to a few key aspects of good infrastructure, namely employing effective teachers and staff, updated facilities, and access to appropriate equipment. Perhaps the most important lesson is that high-quality CTE sectors need reliable and adequate funding. Modernized buildings, proper equipment, and highly qualified staff cost money, and states that want the benefits of excellent career and technical education must be ready to fund them.

Curriculum, instruction, and assessment

In the past, CTE has been labeled as “blue-collar stuff” best left for kids who aren’t on a college path. Many of today’s programs, however, are just the opposite. Students earn industry-recognized credentials that will place them in good-paying jobs, but they also earn associate and bachelor’s degrees. This transformation has a lot to do with the curriculum, instruction, and assessments used by the programs. For starters, high expectations must be non-negotiable. CTE students should never be held to lower standards than their peers in traditional academic programs. And curricula should be aligned to state academic standards, as well as national benchmarks and local employer needs. States should also carefully consider how to license and train their CTE teachers; AVTE recommends using nationally validated teacher competency testing. As for assessments, AVTE recommends utilizing pre-and post-technical tests to measure exactly what students know and are able to do.

Career readiness

The primary goal of CTE programs is to prepare students for careers. To this end, AVTE recommends collaborating with recognized industry credential providers like NOCTI to develop state-customized credentials that accurately measure readiness. Similar to the way a good ACT or SAT score demonstrates college readiness, earning an externally validated credential can give CTE students solid proof of their readiness and skills. AVTE also emphasizes the importance of meaningful partnerships between CTE programs, businesses, and community members.

Data and outcomes

There’s no way to determine whether programs are effective without measurable outcomes, such as rates of graduation, dropout, job placement, and college-going and -persistence. States should make these data easily accessible to the public so that students and their families can make well-informed choices.

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States looking for ways to improve their CTE sectors could do worse than importing Massachusetts’s policies. But if ESSA has taught us anything, it’s that each place has its own unique context and needs. That’s why personalizing and implementing these five domains would be a smart move for states interested in mirroring the Bay State’s CTE success.

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.

In addition to fielding questions about what a charter school is, and whether charters are private or public schools, I’m often asked: Aren’t charter schools intended for failing urban districts serving low-income students of color? They do serve those communities well, but let’s talk about who else they serve.

While it’s true that over half of all charter schools are in urban districts, in the 2015–16 school year there were nearly 1,800 suburban charter schools and over 1,200 in small towns and rural communities.

It turns out that curriculum really matters to middle-income parents, and many gravitate to charter schools because they offer educational models that aren’t available in traditional public schools. Some of these models are more rigorous, some are more open and creative, and some offer unique programs. There are hundreds of examples of outstanding suburban and rural charter schools, but I’ll offer just a few to ponder.

Take the BASIS charter schools: In the 2017 US News rankings of the top 10 public high schools, nine were charter schools and five of these were BASIS charter schools. BASIS currently operates 20 charter schools in Arizona, Texas, and Washington, DC. Most of them are suburban, and they serve populations that reflect their communities. Like all charter schools, BASIS schools don’t have admissions tests—students are admitted by lottery. But once they’re in, it’s not easy. In this preschool through grade 12 program, students take biology, chemistry, and physics before they start high school and all high school students are expected to pass at least 6 AP exams. The key to success in BASIS schools is having highly professional teachers who are subject matter experts. Teachers are given considerable autonomy in their classrooms, but all of them, even kindergarten math teachers, must have a college degree in the subject they teach.

Or, what about the NYOS (Not Your Ordinary School) charter school in Austin, Texas? This school was founded twenty years ago and offers smaller class sizes, year-round school and “looping” (in which a student stays with the same teachers for several years). NYOS serves 950 students in grades K through 12, but they have 3,000 more students on a waiting list for a spot.

But many small towns are taking advantage of charter schools also. Graysville, Indiana opened Rural Community Academy in 2004 when their local school was slated to close. Since then, the school has grown to 150 students and some credit it with reinvigorating the community, saving the post office, and bringing several new businesses to the area.

Rural charters aren’t always opened to save a school, though. The Upper Carmen Public Charter School in Idaho was founded in 2005 “to complement the existing public school system by providing an alternative learning environment to enable more students from Lemhi County to be successful.” This school serves no more than 90 students and emphasizes personalized learning that allows students to progress at their own pace, rather than be grouped by age. Upper Carmen Charter School has consistently ranked among the top ten percent of schools in Idaho.

Asking if there are any good charter schools outside of major cities is like asking if there are any good restaurants outside of major cities. Of course there are. Teachers, parents, and community leaders with great ideas for educating kids are everywhere. Charter schools aren’t a perfect fit for every student, but they’re a great fit for the students they serve.

Susan Pendergrass is the Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute in Missouri. This blog was originally posted on their Show-Me Daily blog.

STEM education is, by design, integrative. It strives to emulate the real-world work of engineers within a teaching environment. Traditional science and math concepts merge with hands-on design-and-build work using technology, often through “design challenges.” Team dynamics, learning by failure and revision, and analytical thinking all factor in as well. It’s a big lift, but such efforts are vital for schools to attempt as demand for STEM—from parents, employers, the military, and colleges—increases. Traditional education models may not readily adapt to the hands-on demands of STEM, nor can many practitioners turn on a dime to accommodate a tech-heavy pedagogy. A new report from Michigan Technological University sheds light on some of these complexities that teachers face bringing STEM education into their practice.

Authors Emily Dare, Joshua Ellis, and Gillian Roehrig use observation and interview data to assess the first-time STEM integration efforts of teachers in nine physical science classrooms in different, unnamed middle schools in the United States. The researchers posit that a lack of consensus over best practices and a lack of professional development contribute to the difficulties. Both classroom observation and teacher reflection data for these nine case studies of teachers attempting STEM integration with little or no previous training data showed fundamental difficulties in full integration efforts.

The researchers’ primary variable was the amount of time teachers spent in each daily lesson on science, math, and engineering, both singularly and in integration with others. More integration was considered desirable, but the data showed far fewer instructional minutes with two or more disciplines fully integrated than researchers expected. Follow-up interviews with teachers focused on three specific factors—the style of integration chosen, how science and math concepts were integrated with engineering within the style chosen, and levels of student engagement and motivation.

STEM-integration can take on several styles in classroom practice: Engineering work can be used as an “add-on” to reinforce concepts—say, by having students design and build a roller coaster model to cap off a traditional unit on velocity—or it can be used as a primary means of imparting science and math concepts, or the balance can fall somewhere in between. The nine teachers in the case studies opted for variations of each style, determined largely by their reported comfort and familiarity with hands-on engineering projects. However, the observed time spent on integration was sometimes at odds with the teachers’ interview responses.

The dominant pattern observed, even among teachers reporting an effort at full integration, was discrete blocks of science instruction followed by engineering work, although these blocks varied from minutes to hours to days across classrooms. The smaller the discrete blocks, the more integrated the classroom, but that’s a far cry from proper STEM integration as defined by the researchers. It makes some sense that these science teachers would be focused on imparting the core knowledge of their traditional discipline—it is their job, of course, and many states have mandated science exams in middle school as well. However, interviews reinforced the notion that these teachers experienced discomfort with their own skill levels around both math and engineering.

Student engagement appeared to be a key factor for teachers in deciding their level and patterns of integration, both in designing and executing lessons. Teachers reported trepidation that students would not grasp science concepts through the engineering work, so they often defaulted to teaching science first, engineering last—which is again unsurprising, given the teachers’ job descriptions. But even those who were observed engaging in the most integration often reported that they believed their students didn’t grasp the science concepts well enough. Those teachers would typically do science first, engineering second, and then backtrack—returning to traditional science teaching so quickly that it shortchanged the hands-on engineering work or ended it entirely. This could also contribute to the even smaller amounts of instruction time dedicated to mathematics, either alone or in integration. Many teachers also reported feeling a mental clock ticking away, urging them to “finish” and move on. All of this is problematic because most teachers reported their students were eager to do the hands-on work and enjoyed it while it was underway.

Real-world work is a defining feature of STEM education—from labs to field research to problem-solving challenges in design—but these case studies suggest that single-subject teachers may struggle to integrate the various disciplines successfully. Concerns related to time, student engagement, and teacher comfort and confidence all impinge on possible success. Perhaps it is even impossible to provide high-quality STEM education in a single classroom. But there is some hope. One of the more successful cases in this report notes the assistance given by a second teacher—a math teacher—to a science instructor, so maybe fully-STEM-integrated schools or programs are the most effective providers. As demand increases, more work is needed to make sure that teachers and schools are confident in providing high-quality STEM education.

SOURCE: Emily A. Dare, Joshua A. Ellis, and Gillian H. Roehrig, “Understanding science teachers’ implementations of integrated STEM curricular units through a phenomenological multiple case study,” International Journal of STEM Education (February 2018).