The Education Gadfly Weekly

Editor’s Note: On Thursday, November 13, Chad Aldis testified before the Ohio House Education Committee on the substitute bill for House Bill 228. His comments focused on a small but substantial change that would limit the length of a state assessment, even if administered in several parts at multiple times during the school year, to four hours. A portion of his testimony is below.

I would like to commend the legislature on its decision to examine the issue of over-testing. In recent months, concerns over the amount of classroom time allocated to standardized testing have risen with a fervor and urgency that is understandable. Testing impacts thousands of students, parents, and educators across our state. As a parent of children in a traditional public school, I understand the concerns surrounding testing. I am equally concerned though that in our rush to find a solution we could potentially swing the pendulum too far the other way.

I oppose placing a testing time limit in statute for three reasons.

First, the provision limiting testing hours on the state assessment is a quick fix that may not solve the issue of over-testing. Under HB 487, enacted in June, the state superintendent is required to study the state’s assessments and report back to you by January 15. This report should give you valuable information that can be utilized in making decisions about testing. I urge you to be patient and wait for the results of this report before you codify testing limitations. Hopefully, the report will allow you to consider the nature of the tests that contribute to over-testing. State accountability assessments, after all, aren’t the only tests that students take. What about locally required diagnostic assessments? Assessments designed and administered by teachers for their own use? Additional assessments required as a result of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System? Before placing the blame solely on state tests, it’s important that we understand the value and necessity of the myriad of tests that are given to students.

The value of tests brings me to my second point: the importance of our state accountability system. It is undoubtedly true, as you heard in previous testimony, that teachers are aware of their students’ progress and needs without state assessment data. But the knowledge of teachers is just that—the knowledge of teachers. Knowing where a student is is far different than saying the student is succeeding.

Furthermore, other parties need the data that state tests offer. Ohio leaders need to understand how schools are doing to determine whether the education policy environment is helping our kids to be successful. Even more importantly, families need to know which schools are most effective. Ohio has created an education system that prominently features school choice. In order for a system of school choice to improve educational outcomes, parents must have accurate and extensive data on how well schools educate students. Without this information, parents cannot hope to make the best selection for their children.

Luckily for Ohio parents, our state’s award-winning report card provides information on student achievement, graduation rates, and learning gains. In fact, parents can even see the learning gains of specific subsets of the school population, including gifted, special education, and low-achieving students. If this data is limited by arbitrarily limiting time spent on state tests, school-based accountability could suffer.

Despite what our nostalgia for the past suggests, the days before school-based accountability were not the good old days. It’s not that the achievement gap and low test scores didn’t exist then—we just didn’t have the capacity or will to measure them. Do we really want to go back to a time when we were ignorant of the performance and needs of students? While I’m confident that this is not the intent of the bill’s sponsor, it’s important that we keep our eyes open and realize that many calling for less testing would actually prefer no testing and certainly no accountability.

Finally, my third point is that if we’re going to maintain test-based accountability, we should ensure that we use high-quality tests. Ohio needs a test that allows kids to show what they truly know—not just how many bubbles they can fill in. It is absolutely critical that we get beyond the drill-and-kill mentality and the endless hours of test prep. The next generation of assessments could potentially do that.

Previous testimony has suggested that one test, at a single test administration, for all of state accountability purposes might be a better way to go. I respectfully disagree. Is it really better for students to face one extremely high-stakes test as opposed to having multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they know? As a parent, I would much rather give my children multiple opportunities to succeed instead of just one. I would also prefer that they are tested on the critical thinking that their teachers have worked hard to cultivate—not on how well they can game a test.

In conclusion, while I applaud the attention being paid to this issue, I urge you to be patient. Wait until you have the information you need to make an informed decision. Do not compromise, especially at the behest of those who eschew accountability, the valuable contributions that have resulted from our school accountability system. Finally, let’s make sure we find a test that moves away from drill and kill and instead offers Ohio children multiple opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge.

Flanner House Elementary, an Indianapolis charter school, closed just weeks into the 2014–15 school year by a vote of its board (under heavy pressure from the mayor’s office, which was the school’s sponsor) after an investigation revealed widespread cheating on tests in previous years. This seems like a prudent course of action, given the information known and despite the havoc it wreaked on the lives of its students. A protracted closure process would have been far worse for them.

The most striking thing about this story is the praise received by the mayor’s office in the wake of the closure decision. As reported in Education Week: 

[The Indianapolis mayor's office]…assigned charter-office employees to communicate with parents on a biweekly basis.

"We had a tracker that listed when we called families, the nature of that communication, next steps that we agreed to, and then we worked with those families to meet their needs," which included buying school supplies and new uniforms, Mr. Brown said.

The mayor's office also hosted two enrollment fairs where parents could talk with leaders from nearly 30 schools and could enroll their children on the spot.

"What we saw is that we had a lot of angry families at first that, over time, came to really value the support we gave them, to the point that we had multiple families call our office and say, 'We are so thankful that you made this decision,' " said Mr. Brown. "We didn't feel like it was appropriate to close a school and then make the families unilaterally navigate a complex choice system."

The families’ positive response to these steps, extraordinary and commendable though they are in reaction to this particular crisis, show clearly that school choice requires a far more functional process—overseen by a strong third-party entity—in order to properly serve families. Not just in a crisis, but from the very beginning of the process.

Obviously, a fully functional school choice marketplace wouldn’t have prevented the cheating that went on at Flanner House, but it could have made the accommodation for students and families caught up in it smooth, instant, and automatic. Rather than a time-sensitive, ad hoc scramble to find a new school, parents who had already checked out the options the previous summer would likely have had their fully vetted second choice in hand. And if they didn’t remember, a universal enrollment system could have.

Luckily, the families at Flanner House had the mayor’s office looking out for them. Even in a time-compressed crisis, someone was there to help them “navigate a complex choice system”.

But let us briefly compare the crisis response in Columbus City Schools, which serves the district in which I reside, where neither an official “choice system” nor a third-party entity exist to help parents navigate anything.

In Columbus, we’ve got a years-long, institutional data-scrubbing program that is still being unraveled, and we have twenty schools which have been performing so poorly for so long that they are now eligible for Ohio’s parent trigger law, making them candidates for reorganization, state takeover, or closure if 50 percent of school parents decide to do so. With thousands of students affected by one or both issues, Columbus’s crisis seems at least as urgent as that of Flanner House, if not more so.

But there is no entity scrambling to reach out to parents in the wake of data scrubbing that, when undone, showed failing grades for many schools. Even the state’s voucher program, intended to provide a private school option for students in low-performing buildings, was thwarted by the data fixing in Columbus.

The state’s effort to find someone who wants the job of explaining the parent trigger to Columbus parents yielded one taker who was immediately vilified by school board members. The district simply tells us that these schools are “making strides”. We’ve seen the “improvement plans” in place in those buildings and we’re not impressed. And even if we concede that parent trigger laws are perhaps a bit scary and too new to be embraced by parents, they are still on their own to navigate more established options of voucher-accepting private schools and charters.

In the best of circumstances, parents’ choices within Columbus are shrouded in mystery. If parents want out in the wake of these dual crises, they have been left to their own devices even more than usual. School Choice Ohio does what it can, but they are far outside of the system and have no direct, official way to communicate with parents. The state gives information on a number of options, but it is largely devoid of quality and comparison data, and parents must navigate it on their own.

As a crisis response, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman tried to get into the charter-authorizing business while the data-scrubbing investigation was still in full swing. But this, along with his broader and more proactive education reform efforts, was turned back at the ballot box. Perhaps crises look different here than they do in Indy.

So kudos to Indy, and great news that parents were pleased with the crisis response there. But here’s hoping that school-choice advocates and reform-minded leaders in Ohio are emboldened and educated to move beyond crisis response and make a fully-functional school choice marketplace the status quo. Parents should be supported and assisted in all parts of the process, not just in times of crisis.

Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right. Education really is an easy major. This study from the National Council on Teacher Quality, the bête noire of America’s teacher prep programs, finds that 44 percent of prospective teachers graduate with honors, compared to only 30 percent of all graduating students at the same colleges. The reason appears to be that grading standards for education majors are much lower than for students in other majors on the same campus. NCTQ analyzed course assignments on the syllabi for nearly 1200 courses at thirty-three schools—not just in education, but in a variety of majors. The 7,500 assignments in those courses were then classified as either “criterion-referenced” or “criterion-deficient.” The former means that students were graded on “a clearly circumscribed slice of knowledge and skill-based content,” which ostensibly allows instructors to provide substantive feedback and comparisons of student work. By contrast, “criterion-deficient” assignments were more subjective in nature. These latter kinds of assignments are used about twice as often—71 percent versus 34 percent—in education coursework. The report also examines and dismisses several popular theories for why ed majors earn so many As: Yes, a rising tide of grade inflation has lifted all boats, but teacher candidates’ boats are like hovercraft rising above the waves. Interestingly, the assumption that ed school is all low-level assignments and group work turns out to be a canard—as is the less commonly held belief that ed students and faculty are simply stronger than other departments. “If one believes in training teachers by equipping them with effective techniques, then having criterion-referenced assignments is essential,” the report concludes. Mighty big “if.” The schools covered in NCTQ’s report train—well, credential—half of the country’s annual crop of new teachers. If they enter the classroom without having practiced and mastered the content and skills they need to be effective, they begin their careers already behind.

SOURCE: Hannah Putman, Julie Greenberg, and Kate Walsh, “Training our future teachers: Easy A’s and what’s behind them,” National Council on Teacher Quality (November 2014).

• Cheers to Katie Nethers of Cincinnati. When life circumstances required her to leave high school before finishing in 2013, Katie strove to earn her GED. She ended up having to travel to West Virginia to do so because Ohio law required a superintendent sign off on GEDs for people under the age of 19, and her district’s supe wouldn’t sign. But rather than stopping there, she campaigned and testified to change that sign-off requirement (and the minimum age for a GED as well). The changes were signed into law and just went into effect this fall.
   
• Jeers to kicking the can down the road. The failure of a property tax levy in the Ledgemont school district earlier this month seemed a strong indication that district residents were interested in merging with nearby Cardinal schools—an outcome already favored by both districts’ superintendents and made easier by legislation passed in Columbus earlier this year. However, neither district’s board took the action required of them to set the plan in motion. By voting down a “territory transfer,” elected board members are leaving it up to outsiders—the county ESC and/or the state of Ohio—to actually force the transfer that most folks already want.
   
• Cheers to the Beavercreek school board, who voted last week to accept as a gift from FedEx (which also earns a cheer) a decommissioned Boeing 727. The intention is to convert the plane to a STEM classroom for students anywhere to visit and study in. “That aircraft is just a bundle of math and science,” said the former educator who is spearheading three such projects going on across the country.
   
• Jeers to journalistic bias against charter schools. Editors and reporters in Canton and Akron have been relentless critics of charter schools for years. Bad actors should certainly be called out and malfeasance pursued and punished. But when a school is good, reporters should be able to say so honestly and completely—no asterisks, no caveats, no baggage. Both the Canton Repository and the Akron Beacon Journal recently profiled what are by any measure successful charter schools, but both papers layered on their usual anti-charter tropes so thickly that praise for good teachers, administrators, and students was nearly overshadowed by bad actors wholly unconnected with the schools being featured. On the upside, both Canton College Prep and Akron SCOPE Academy are clearly so good that even a shedload of bias can’t dim their light.

From its inception in 1996 with one unusual school in Chicago, the Cristo Rey education model set out to honor its Catholic roots while simultaneously embracing a new way of preparing economically disadvantaged high school students for future success—not an easy balancing act to pull off. A new report from the Lexington Institute profiles the Cristo Rey model and also looks at how its newest school in San Jose is using an innovative blended-learning approach to move the existing model forward. The success of the network to date has been tremendous. Today, Cristo Rey is a nationwide network of twenty-eight private schools serving 9,000 students, including one school in each of Ohio’s three largest cities. Ninety-six percent of network students are minority (largely Hispanic) and 100 percent are economically disadvantaged (defined as families earning less than 75 percent of the national median income). Each student's family contributes an average of $1,000 toward tuition. Employers in the school's corporate work-study program provide most of the balance needed to cover operations. The work-study model requires students to work at least one day a week in the community while keeping up with rigorous high school coursework; in lieu of wages, companies donate money to the schools. (More than 2,000 employers invested upwards of $44 million in the Cristo Rey Network of schools in 2013–14.) Cristo Rey’s school day and year are extended, including a summer preparatory program to get students up to speed on both academic and work life. The results are impressive: All 1,400 of Cristo Rey's 2014 graduates nationwide were accepted to college, and 90 percent enrolled. Refusing to rest on its laurels, the network’s newest school—Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit—is the first in the network to utilize a blended-learning approach. Integrating technology into math, English, Spanish, science, social studies, and even religion has helped to ease the pressure on the school day for students and has helped realize new operating efficiencies that may be adaptable to other Cristo Rey schools. We have written extensively about St. Martin de Porres High School in Cleveland, a Cristo Rey school, and hope to hear more great things from them and their sister schools in Cincinnati and Columbus. All three Ohio schools accept students on the EdChoice Scholarship voucher program, making them accessible and important options for families in those cities. This report gives a taste of success already achieved and a vision of successes to come.

SOURCE: Ashley Bateman, The Cristo Rey Network: Serving Sustainable Success (Arlington, Virginia: Lexington Institute, November 2014).

Can a state’s charter school sector improve over time? Yes, finds this new study of Texas charter schools. Using student data collected from 2001 to 2011, a period of explosive charter school growth in Texas, researchers examined trends in the charter-quality distribution, as measured by value-added results on math and reading test scores. They discovered that in the early- to mid-2000s, charter-sector quality fell considerably short of district quality. But by 2011, the charter-quality distribution improved, converging to virtual parity with district quality. The magnitude of the quality shift in Texas charters, note the researchers, is large and substantial (0.11 and 0.20 standard deviations in math and reading, respectively). What is the source of the quality improvement? The main reason is strikingly straightforward: Lower value-added charter schools tended to shutter over time, while higher value-added schools entered the sector. Meanwhile, schools that remained open throughout the whole period also demonstrated improvement over time. The researchers next peel back the layers of the sector-improvement onion. They discover three contributing factors: First, Texas charters have attracted students of higher achievement levels (i.e., positive “selection”), possibly leading to positive peer effects captured in the value-added results. Second, charters have experienced less student turnover as the sector has matured. Third, the analysts find evidence that the growth of schools classified as “no-excuses” charters has propelled overall sector quality. The policy takeaways for Ohio are twofold: One, it takes time for high-quality schools to edge low-quality ones out of the school marketplace. (And authorizers can also expedite the departure of weak schools as well.) Secondly, policymakers (and philanthropists) must direct more resources to help high value-added charters grow, replicate, and expand as quickly as possible. It doesn’t take an accounting degree to tell us that, when the high-performers outnumber the low-performers, overall quality improves. Let’s hope the Buckeye State is up to the task.   

Source: Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin, The Evolution of Charter Schools Quality (Boston, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2014).