The Education Gadfly Weekly

Representative Andy Thompson and Speaker Pro Tempore Matt Huffman have introduced new legislation to repeal the Common Core, and hearings start today (Monday, August 18). But they’re not telling you the whole story. Read on to find out what they don’t want you to know and why their reasoning doesn’t make sense. 

[All opponent statements are direct quotes from this press conference]

1. Ohio was ahead of the game in wanting change: It began reviewing its academic standards back in 2007—long before governors and state superintendents started to talk about creating Common Core.

What opponents said:

[We] want to make sure Ohio is in the driver’s seat in this process.

The truth: By the time the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) started work on replacing state standards that were sorely lacking, the Buckeye state had already begun to respond to educator concerns about Ohio’s standards. In fact, the Ohio Department of Education conducted an international benchmarking study in 2008 (published in 2009) that laid out some guiding principles for revised Ohio standards—principles that Ohio stuck to when they started considering the Common Core.

2. Ohio played a significant role in crafting and revising the Common Core.

What opponents said:

Ohio’s kind of been […] tied to the railroad tracks here on this mission.

The truth: Two members from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) represented Ohio in Common Core workgroups for math and English language arts standards. They took the research mentioned above and shared it with their respective groups; in other words, Ohio research played an influential role in the development of the actual standards. When a public draft of the K–12 standards was released in March 2010, there were opportunities for people across the nation to offer feedback. Ohio provided the largest number of responses from any one state. Read more details here and here.

3. Ohioans had several opportunities to share their opinions and give feedback before Common Core was adopted.

What opponents said:

It was a four year process that a lot of people in Ohio were not aware of. Done in this kind of […] closed circuit. It was all ready to roll out upon people without any real ability for them to react.

The truth: In June 2009, two meetings were held to solicit feedback and propose revisions to the draft standards. The meetings included fifty-five education stakeholder groups and 200 teachers from four content areas. A July 2009 web survey gave more stakeholders an opportunity for feedback; 700 responses were received. The ODE’S English and math teams (made up of people from state teacher unions, higher education, special education, gifted education, content-specific professional organizations, and parents) reviewed and provided feedback on the standards. Ohio was the first state in the nation to hold regional public awareness and input meetings. There were five meetings; more than 500 people participated. The ODE also presented to the House and Senate Education Committees in May 2010 before the state board of education adopted the standards at a public meeting in June. (One of the sponsors of the repeal bill was even on the education committee at the time.) Read more details and see a timeline here.

4. Ohio’s local school districts have always had control over curriculum, and Common Core doesn’t change that.

What opponents said:

We want state control, we want local control.

The truth: Ohio’s recently passed 2014 mid-biennium review (MBR) made sure that school districts retain control of selecting curriculum and textbooks, creating reading lists, writing lesson plans, and choosing instructional materials. This was already a part of Ohio law, but the MBR serves as reinforcement. Furthermore, Ohio also will now develop review committees to examine Ohio’s standards (in English, math, science, and social studies) and make necessary changes.

5. Parents had a say in Common Core adoption and they have a say in curriculum decisions.

What opponents said:

We want “local control that recognizes parental authority.

The truth: Parents were a part of ODE advisory and work teams that reviewed and provided feedback on the standards. Parents were also invited to attend the five regional public awareness and input meetings to voice their concerns. The recent MBR also requires school districts to establish local review committees that provide an opportunity for parents to review the selection of textbooks, instructional materials, and curriculum.

6. Ohio has strong privacy and data protection laws in place.

What opponents said: Common Core doesn’t “safeguard student and family data.” We “continue to hear serious concerns about the confidentiality of student data.”

The truth: Ohio state law expressly forbids sharing student-specific data with the federal government. The MBR reaffirmed existing state laws and rules that protect student privacy and personal education information. Common Core does not change how educational data is collected or shared.

7. Support for Common Core in Ohio is diverse and widespread.

What opponents said:

When Common Core was adopted, a lot of folks weren’t at the table.

The truth: Common Core has had a lot of backers from the start. This includes teachers (the Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers), school and district leadership (the Ohio Association of School Business Officials, the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, the Ohio School Boards Association), business groups (the Ohio Business Roundtable, the Columbus Partnership, the Cincinnati Business Committee), parent and community groups (several urban leagues and the Ohio PTA), and reform groups (School Choice Ohio, StudentsFirst, the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools). Click here to read a list of Ohio organizations and people that support the Common Core.

8. Ohio teachers support the Common Core.

What opponents said:

One of the things you’d be maybe not surprised to hear is how many teachers are leaving the profession because of Common Core.

Teachers’ reaction to the above statement went something like this:

The truth is that Ohio teachers support Common Core. Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, explains that “teachers who are already using [Common Core] in their classrooms see that students more easily learn the material, retain it and apply it in other aspects of their learning.” You can read their entire response to the new legislation here. 

9. Part of the reason teachers support the Common Core is because it offers them freedom and results.

What opponents said:

One of the comments I hear is that all the joy has been taken out of teaching.

The truth: Back in 2007, when Ohio first started looking for better standards, educators were especially concerned that Ohio’s previous standards were too numerous and lacked complexity—instead of studying subjects in depth, shallow learning was repeated year after year. During a recent Ohio radio show (starting at the 31:34 mark), a Cleveland first-grade teacher explained that with Common Core, “I am much more narrowly focused on specific topics and I’m able by these standards to go more in depth.” This means that “students are able to engage with a topic in different ways […] instead of it just being rote.” On a more personal note, I’ve also taught Common Core, and I wrote curriculum using Common Core. Common Core didn’t cost me any joy. In fact, the joy and the achievement I saw from my English students thanks to Common Core were pretty darn good. For more details, check out this piece, where I talk about how I found freedom in the Common Core. You can also find teacher perspectives here, here, and here.

10. The Massachusetts Department of Education believes that Common Core is better than their previous state standards—which are the standards that Ohio bill sponsors want to adopt.

What opponents said:

Massachusetts prior to Common Core had the number one standards in the nation […] one of the questions that logically comes up is why would they go to Common Core when they had the best standards in the nation and the answer is a lot of federal money. They’re going downhill in Massachusetts as a result of Common Core.

The truth: In this 2010 press release, the Massachusetts Department of Education explains that they adopted Common Core due to its “increased academic rigor and stronger expectations for student performance.” While Massachusetts certainly had excellent standards prior to the adoption of Common Core, then-Education Secretary Paul Reville stated that the Common Core was an “opportunity to improve upon our already high standards.” In fact, external review teams of educators and academics completed an analysis of Common Core and Massachusetts previous standards and found that they were equal in quality and strength. Both review teams recommended the adoption of Common Core over Massachusetts previous standards. This begs a pretty serious question: Why would Ohio cause financial and academic chaos by switching between two sets of standards that are equal? (As a side note, the press release also mentions “distinguishing factors within the Common Core” that prompted their adoption of Common Core over their previous standards.)

Bottom line?

Repealing Common Core looks like this:

Keeping Common Core looks like this:

David Figlio, a researcher at Northwestern University, recently released his seventh-annual evaluation of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program. The study uses scholarship students’ results on national assessments, like the Stanford Achievement or Iowa Test of Basic Skills, to examine whether they are making year-to-year gains. (Elsewhere in this issue, I review the study in greater detail.) The Sunshine State’s program, which enrolls nearly 60,000 students, is akin to Ohio’s EdChoice and Cleveland scholarship (a.k.a., “voucher”) programs.

One of the study’s findings was particularly striking: Private schools in Florida, especially Catholic ones, appear to have a relatively larger impact on scholarship students’ reading scores than math. Across all schools, Figlio found that voucher students made a 0.1 percentile gain in reading but posted a loss of -0.7 percentiles in math. The overall math-reading difference may or may not be trivial—there is no test of statistical significance across the subject areas. But larger differences in reading-to-math gains appear when gains are disaggregated, for example, by religious affiliation:^[1] Consider the large annual gain in reading for voucher students attending a Catholic school (1.98 percentiles) versus the slight loss in math (-0.25). True, the larger reading gains don’t hold across all school types—non-religious schools seem to make a fairly big difference in math—but it does seem like many of Florida’s private schools are having greater success boosting reading scores.^[2]

Table 1: Average reading and math gains of Florida scholarship students by schools’ religious affiliation, 2011-12 to 2012-13

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Source: David Figlio, Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, pg. 23.

This is especially noteworthy, because many of today’s popular reforms—such as high performing charter schools and Teach For America—are almost always more successful in boosting math than reading scores. If Catholic schools are a counter-example, that’s important to know—and to know why. At the least, we might want to understand how they are teaching reading and consider replicating it in district and charter schools.

The story seems to be similar in the Buckeye State, where data on Ohio’s voucher students show more success in reading and less in math. In the Ohio Department of Education’s recently released data for 2012-13, we notice that reading proficiency rates for African-American voucher students, many of whom attend a Catholic school, far outpace their math proficiency rates—sometimes by over thirty percentage points as table 2 shows.^[3] For instance, 72 percent of voucher students in Columbus reached reading proficiency, while just 44 percent did so in math. As a reference point, reading proficiency for Ohio African-Americans in public schools statewide was, on average, thirteen points higher than math across grades three through ten in 2012-13.

This analysis is of course different than what I presented on Florida for several reasons. Most importantly, the table below reports proficiency, a one-year snapshot of achievement and a limited basis for understanding the quality of private schools. It does not indicate the growth students have made over time (i.e., “gains,” which could be understood as the impact of a school on achievement). Ohio’s data also uses state assessment results, not national ones (and gains relative to national percentile ranks); and obviously, the data are not disaggregated by religious affiliation. Caveats aside, Ohio’s voucher test data do hint that private schools—and perhaps Catholic ones—might be more successful in reading than math.

Table 2: Proficiency rates for Ohio African-American voucher students by their district of residence, 2012-13

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Source: Ohio Department of Education

Overall, so far as I can tell, private schools that enroll voucher students tend to fare better in reading relative to math. But higher reading proficiency may be an illusion too: We can’t ascertain whether the difference is attributable to the school per se or to outside factors. (It’s long been known that reading is more closely related to students’ family and home background than is math.) So, in the end, we eagerly await a rigorous analysis of Ohio’s voucher data (at a student-level as in Florida) that can help us better grasp the impact of private schools on voucher students’ achievement over time.

Enacted in 2001 and now enrolling nearly 60,000 needy students, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) is the largest private-school choice program in the nation. Since March 2008, economist David Figlio has reported evaluation results on an annual basis. This report, his seventh and possibly last due to an unfortunate change in Florida law, documents his findings on the 2012-13 school year. The results: As in previous years, scholarship students who transfer from a public to private school tend to be lower-achieving and from poorer-performing schools. In other words, private schools aren’t “cherry-picking” students. Per test performance, Florida’s scholarship students kept pace with the progress of students, of all income levels, nationwide over the course of the year. On average, they made a 0.1 percentile gain in reading but lost -0.7 percentiles in math on nationally-normed assessments. The gain in reading and loss in math were not statistically different from zero, suggesting that scholarship students gained a year’s worth of learning. (A gain of zero is interpreted as a year’s worth of learning.) The average gains, however, camouflage some variability in gains across Florida’s private-schools. For example, in reading, scholarship students in 6 percent of private schools had sluggish average loss of less than -10 percentile points, while those in 4 percent of schools posted impressive gains of 10 points or more. Due to the recent switch in Florida’s public-school assessments, Figlio was unable to compare private-school to public-school gains. As Florida continues to expand its scholarship program, state policymakers must continue to keep close watch on the program’s results to ensure that scholarship students are generally keeping pace academically. Moreover, given the low performance of a few private schools, policymakers should also consider sanctions against schools that persistently perform poorly.       

Source: David N. Figlio, Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program: Participation, Compliance and Test Scores in 2012-13 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2014).

This is a tricky story, but stay with me.

A 10-year-old charter school in the Cincinnati area ended up in court against the Ohio Department of Education back in July in an effort to find a sponsor (after being dropped) and to reopen as usual for the 2014-15 school year. The tussling ended in a court-ordered limbo, but the legal questions remained an active concern.

A July 29 piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarized the story to that point and quoted Fordham’s Vice President for Sponsorship and Dayton Initiatives Kathryn Mullen Upton laying out the legal issues under consideration: "(1) The accountability system and an authorizer's judgment about the quality of a school are meaningless; (2) if you're a school that is non-renewed by any authorizer, not just ODE, you can simply go to court and up your chances of finding a new sponsor; and (3) despite recent actions to try to improve school and authorizer quality, ODE in reality has scant enforcement ability/authority… In a nutshell, it's a huge step backward for Ohio."

The limbo dragged on with no resolution but on August 12 the school announced it would not reopen due to financial distress. This is probably the end of the VLT saga.

Two lawmakers seem to think the foregoing is a desperate cry for reform of charter school law in Ohio. Honestly, it seems that – absent the court-induced time drag – the process has actually worked just like it should. The good folks at Bellwether agree. Sponsor drops school, no other sponsor is forthcoming, school closes. There are issues with charter law in Ohio, no question, but this isn’t one of them.

While lawmakers try to make hay out of this situation, the first day of school in Cincinnati is August 25, leaving the parents of approximately 600 students about 10 days to find schools for their children. Options abound within the Cincinnati district, via the EdChoice Scholarship program (whose deadline was recently extended to September 5 for eligible families), via open-enrollment to neighboring districts, and via other established and high-quality charter schools. But who is first to ride to the rescue of the families? A new charter school with a narrow media focus whose own sponsor contract is in question.

How about instead of pontificating, the state finds the wherewithal to help those families first, then talk about proper charter law reform – from the ground up, with an eye on fostering quality and access, and with the best interests of parents and students foremost in their minds.

There are three terms and phrases that I wish we could ban from the education sphere--terms that I feel are standing in the way of meaningful dialogue and the proper, productive focus of discussion.

1. “Our Kids”

Except in cases of “wards of the state,” children do not belong to school districts, charter schools, city governments, or state departments of education. Yet that term, “our kids,” can be found in quotes from school-district officials all over the media when discussing transportation, open enrollment, and school funding. “Our kids,” as used in these examples, is a language of possession and ownership, usually linked to money. It is at once patronizing and simplistic, reductive, and exclusive.

Even a benign use of “our kids” in this context is archaic and out of touch with reality; in fact, the ownership sentiment has been out of touch since open enrollment began in 1989, and the pace of change only accelerated from there. Today, nearly 120,000 children attend a charter school, and another 30,000 or so students attend a private school via a voucher. More than 70,000 students attend a school outside of their district of residence through interdistrict open enrollment. And countless others participate in intradistrict choice, early-college high school programs, and a burgeoning career-tech sector.

The “assigned” district feeder pattern that locks children into a predetermined sequence of schools that “owns” them and passes them along from building to building throughout their K–12 experience is virtually extinct. The sooner we can stop thinking in 1950s terms, the sooner we’ll be able to put students front and center in every educational discussion; to meet families where they are; and to address the educational needs of their children without regard to the “funding deducted” and how much it costs to transport “their kids.”

To the extent that parents choose the educational setting that is best for their children—and that is an increasingly common situation—parents confer responsibility for education to schools but not ownership of that child for her entire school career. Many school leaders get it, but too many still have their head in the sand and obstruct progress through outdated modes of thinking and speaking.

2. “Default option”

The next term I’d like to banish is “default option.”

This is really an oxymoron: “default” is the furthest thing from an “option” and vice versa. But in practice, the term is a cover for lack of information and outright dismissal of any real choice. It is also used as a stick with which to beat folks who dare to look around for another school than the one their children are zoned to attend.

What if there was no such thing as a default? What if no student could enter school without their parent or guardian making an affirmative choice, even if they end up attending the same building their grandparents did because they still live in the same neighborhood? Such a scenario would be tricky and require a much more open-minded system than we have right now, but it is doable. Step one would be to ban the “default option.”

Centralized one-stop application for all school options, anyone?

We have seen great strides away from these creaky old traditions in Cleveland, but “feeder patterns” are still the rage for many in Columbus and other districts, even when a good idea for change comes along. Hopefully the realities of school choice and the power that it gives to parents will put an end to “default options” sooner rather than later.

3. “Public common school”

Probably the most controversial of all my wishes is the disposal of this phrase, which has its basis in the Ohio Constitution and is used as both shield and club by a cadre of traditionalists with regard to school funding, the governance of charter schools, and the mere existence of vouchers.

But this phrase is more of a barrier than anything. Behind that barrier are unlimited options for parents; full funding for students, whatever their educational setting; and innovation for educators. This is a barrier constructed and buttressed by folks who seem to believe that the 1950s were halcyon days. But halcyon for whom?

When it was felt that the “public common school” should be fully extended to all races in the 1960s, we got court challenges and cries that “our kids” shouldn’t be bused across town.

We were warned about A Nation at Risk in the 1980s, and decades later, instead of a successful tackling of the problems identified, we have groups bucking standards, assessment, accountability, and quality options all in the name of preserving the system of “public common schools”—a system of common schools that barely exists anymore, is apt to be dysfunctional, and whose leaders regularly talk more about what they “own” than what they’re obligated to give.

While the cadre is currently baying loudly about the possible removal of the words “thorough and efficient” from the Ohio Constitution, I think the education subcommittee of Ohio’s Constitutional Modernization Committee should really start by hitting delete on the phrase “public common school” in favor of something more modern and relevant.

***

There you have it: addition by subtraction—a modest proposal to improve education discourse by eliminating three phrases that either just don’t matter anymore or hold us back.

At the cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, Ohio’s school districts employed 132,000 or so individuals who were not classified as teachers or administrators in 2010. Who are these people, what services do they provide, and do their efforts help students achieve? In this new report, my Fordham colleague Matthew Richmond  explores the “hidden half” of school personnel in Ohio and across the nation. The study documents a huge increase in non-teaching personnel over the last several decades—an increase that has received almost no attention, despite its sizeable implications on district budgets.

In 2010, non-teachers comprised half of the U.S. public-school workforce—up from 40 percent in 1970, and 30 percent in 1950. Taken together, their salaries and benefits total one quarter of all current K-12 education expenditure. The story in Ohio mirrors national trends: In 1986, Ohio had just 47 non-teaching staff for every 1,000 students. By 2010, that number rose to 75. When the study disaggregated the category of non-teaching personnel (a sort of catch-all classification of non-teachers, including administrators), the largest growth occurred in the teacher-aide category. From 1970 to 2010, this group swelled from 1.7 percent of the U.S. public-school workforce to 11.8 percent, an increase of more than 590 percent.

The study indicates that neither enrollment numbers nor increased federal regulation is able to explain much of the growth of non-teaching staff (especially post-1980). But has the increase in the number of students with disabilities contributed to the growth? The study’s analysis suggests that increased demand for special-education services could be one contributing factor, and those increased demands were the most common explanation for staff growth given by district leaders. While there is a positive correlation between the number of students with an IEP and the total number of non-teaching personnel, the correlation does not appear to play a large part in staffing decisions. Interestingly, the study also notes that districts in or near cities have fewer teacher aides per student than districts in rural areas.

While the study does not give clear on answers on the connection, if any, between non-teaching personnel and student achievement, understanding the skyrocketing growth in non-teaching personnel is vital. Today’s school districts seem to be in a perpetual financial pinch, and they should take a hard look at the costs and benefits of their non-teaching workforce. Could districts improve student outcomes by reducing staff numbers and investing in more effective options? Maybe, maybe not. But for school-board members, superintendents, and treasurers whose job it is to determine what is prioritized and what is not, this remains a question worth asking. Either way, school leaders should investigate alternatives other than simply hiring more non-teaching staff.  

Source:  Richmond, Matthew. The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach. (The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, August 2014).