The Education Gadfly Weekly

Citizenship, patriotism and political engagement are cornerstones of our republic. Yet not much has been known about the proclivities and practices of those with substantial responsibility for cultivating these values and habits—namely, the nation’s social studies teachers. This new AEI study sought to correct that by asking over 1,000 high school social studies teachers (from public, private and Catholic schools) what they are trying to teach their students. Some findings are reassuring. For example, over 80 percent of high school social studies teachers think their students should “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” (That’s basically what the general public wants schools to teach.) But other findings raise red flags. Only 36 percent of teachers say it is “absolutely essential” to teach students key facts (like state capitals) and dates (like December 7, 1941). More alarming: only 24 percent reported being “very confident” that their students emerged knowing the protections provided by the Bill of Rights.

Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, and Jenna Schuette, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September 2010).

Melissa Lazarín and Feliza Ortiz-Licon
Center for American Progress
September 2010

Charter schools that make it their mission to reach the most underserved students must not forget the needs of Latino students and English Language Learners (ELLs). This is topic of the Center for American Progress’s latest report.

Next Generation Charter Schools first outlines the need to serve this student sub-group. Latino students represent one in every five public school students nationally, which equates to around ten million Latino students (with this number projected to grow by 160 percent by the year 2050).  Furthermore, 28 percent of Latino students currently attend chronically underperforming schools, compared to just nine percent of white students. 

Next, it outlines state policies that affect Latinos and ELLs. For example, while most states have lottery procedures for oversubscribed charters, just a few have proactive recruitment and enrollment policies to attract more Latino students. It also points out unfairness in some charters’ access to Title III funding (federal dollars for ELLs and immigrant students) if the number of such students is too low to meet the funding threshold.

The remainder of the report highlights four high-performing charter schools serving large percentages of Latinos/ELLs and exceeding achievement goals among this traditionally hard-to-serve subgroup: El Sol Science and Arts Academy (Santa Ana, California), YES Prep Gulfton (Houston, Texas), the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success (Houston), and International Charter School (Pawtucket, Rhode Island). Drawing on their success, the report identifies several best practices, such as:

• Simultaneously delivering teaching as a second language and core academic studies;
• Expanding instruction time;
• Instituting high expectations for all students, including ELLs;
• Equipping all teachers and staff (not just ELL teachers) with strategies to better serve this student group.

While charter schools tend to have more freedom and flexibility in many areas, the lessons in the report can also be applied to traditional public schools.  Currently in Ohio 2.3 percent of students are ELLs.  The graduation rate last year among Hispanics was 61.4 percent compared to 88.6 percent for White students.  Furthermore, only 33 percent of Hispanics are proficient in math and only 26 percent of English Language Learners reach proficiency.  There is significant room for Ohio schools to consider the policy recommendations and best practices presented in this report.

Doris Terry Williams
The Center for American Progress
September 2010

With all the attention given to urban schools in discussions about education reform, it’s nice to see rural schools get their own headline. In Center for American Progress’s new study, The Rural Solution, researcher Doris Terry Williams describes the rural school landscape:  such districts often spend significantly less per pupil than other districts, many are poor, and students may lack access to social services because of great distances.

After examining existing literature and data on rural schools, Williams visited some of the school districts serving America’s 10 million rural students and conducted interviews there to find out firsthand what was working and what wasn’t. She focused particularly on three schools, one each in Vermont, Maine, and Kentucky, that have adopted a community school model, making everything from Algebra classes to dentist appointments available in one central location.

Although she acknowledges that one size does not fit all, Williams uses her observations of the three schools to identify common challenges policy makers should consider when trying to improve rural schools.  The most interesting of these include:  

• The pool of potential teachers in rural districts is often quite small, which makes it difficult to recruit excellent teachers and replace ineffective ones. 
• The federal model for school turnaround is often not applicable in rural areas, where financial resources and opportunities for relocation are often scarce.
• The Full Service Community Schools Program is currently underfunded, and rural districts with limited resources often find themselves in a disadvantaged position when applying for funding from this and other grant programs.

Unfortunately, Williams spends little time discussing how to overcome significant challenges like teacher recruitment, instead focusing too broadly on the concept of community schools and the benefits of bringing education and social services together under one roof in rural districts.

Even so, the report serves as a reminder of the difficulty of improving rural schools, given the unique challenges they face in areas such as human capital, transportation, facilities, etc. According to 2007 data from the Ohio Department of Education, rural districts make up more than 40 percent of all Ohio districts, and many of these are set to feel the impending state budget crunch particularly acutely. Many of Ohio’s smaller districts may also face the problem of recruiting excellent teachers and would benefit from adopting some of the “work with what you’ve got” teacher recruitment and development proposals Williams puts forward. The full report is available here.

National Council on Teacher Quality                                                                                      
September 2010

This insightful policy brief examines the amount of control the average principal wields over hiring and HR decisions in the very schools for which they are ultimately accountable. It looks at state laws, regulations, and district policies in 101 large school districts (containing 20 percent of public school students in the US) and names several factors standing in the way of principal autonomy over teacher hiring decisions:

• Centralized hiring and assignment. Districts make most hiring decisions and determine where teachers will be deployed. (This begs the obvious question of how principals can be held fully responsible for student achievement when they don’t select their own teachers.)
• Teacher evaluations. The inability of teacher evaluations to distinguish effectiveness (in part, with student growth data) makes them feckless as part of the hiring/firing process.
• Teacher seniority and teacher placement. Principals do not have significant decision making ability when it comes to who is transferred into their building. As decisions are often based on seniority, principals may have to take a teacher with more years of experience over another who might be a better fit. In fact, only six districts in the study allow performance to be a deciding hiring factor.
• State dismissal laws. Limiting the reasons for dismissal to incompetence, immorality, or neglect of duty does not allow principals to fire ineffective teachers and ultimately make the best decisions for their schools.

NCTQ offers three basic solutions:  allow a teacher’s performance to be given weight over experience, deny teachers of having a job for life regardless of effectiveness, and give principals the freedom to end contracts.  Overall, this paper gives serious direction as to how school leaders can gain control over their largest resource – staffing – to ultimately improve student outcomes. See the brief, here.

This week Fordham's newest board member Caprice Young is spending some time in Ohio and her visit could not be timed more perfectly. Caprice is President and CEO of City Prep Academies, a blended learning service provider, former CEO of KC Distance Learning (a leading provider of virtual courses), and also former President and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association as well as President of the Los Angeles Unified School Board.

In other words, when it comes to figuring out how to foster new K-12 learning models on Ohio soil, there's literally not a better person out there to learn from than Caprice.

Yesterday's news headlines read almost as though Ohio reporters knew she was on her way. Dayton Daily News ran a piece about the exorbitant costs of college dropouts in Ohio ($300 million) and while the article didn't theorize much on the causes of these dropouts, the fact that many students leave high school unprepared and in need of serious remediation seems like one reasonable hypothesis (30 percent of students drop out of four-year programs after one year).

Meanwhile, the Columbus Dispatch article, ?Enrollment rises at online charter schools,? pointed out that despite a moratorium on new charter e-schools (installed five years ago) enrollment in online programs has risen by 46 percent, with 29,000 students now served by such programs.

There you have it: at least two reasons Ohio must rethink how we use technology in education, and embrace nontraditional, non brick-and-mortar models.

Consider the first point ? almost one in three students drop out of college after the first year. Caprice described ?blended learning? and its ability to serve kids on all ends of the bell curve ? those who are behind, those in the middle, and those gifted students for whom traditional schools are boring (she described her teenage self as the latter). For those students who haven't been well served by public schools ? such as those in a juvenile jail? online instruction is a cost-effective intervention that can bring them back up to speed. Caprice described one teen felon's attraction to one-on-one virtual learning: ?online, no one knows you're smart.? Online learning can break down these kinds of barriers for nontraditional students, help students who are credit deficient, and personalize instruction for those students who typically drop through the cracks.? (And of course it can reach kids on the other end of the spectrum, the gifted or at-risk-of-being-bored.)

The second point is that despite public policy that has thwarted innovation in Ohio and has closed the door to new, innovative virtual providers, there's evidence of rising demand for online programs. Almost 30,000 students are served by a virtual charter school. And if yesterday's meeting at the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio is any indicator, district leaders have an appetite for innovative, alternative learning models.? Ohio's credit flexibility plan allows students to earn credit for distance learning, internships, community service, and other educational experiences (and doesn't require a standard amount of ?seat time?) ? an option that district staff in the room were buzzing about.

While undoing seat-time requirements and exploring hybrid models represent uncharted territory for most Ohio educators, there was general consensus that it's inevitable. This is the pathway down which education is headed ? and it's exciting. The possibilities for using online learning to improve student achievement are exponential, and we're not taking full advantage of it (yet). Further,?a proficiency or mastery-based model makes better sense for students (Caprice described one New Jersey district using such a model,) and districts should introduce online learning as an intervention for those students having trouble mastering content. This is good for students, and the messaging is much more palatable than introducing technology in a manner that frightens teachers (they may fear it will take their jobs).

Lastly, online learning ?unbundles? teachers' skills and is more efficient than current learning models. For example, teachers who are adept at teaching AP physics or statistics can teach those courses traditionally and in an online format (and reach hundreds more students) rather than teaching AP courses along with basic courses or myriad subjects, etc. And since the online program presents the content (in various modalities suited to kids), virtual teachers spend less time presenting content and more time explaining, trouble-shooting, and interacting one-on-one with students. Isn't this what parents and educators want more of?

- Jamie Davies O'Leary

For five years, the EdChoice Scholarship Program has enabled students to escape low-performing schools (those rated D or F for two out of the last three years) in Ohio for, presumably, greener pastures in private schools.  Fourteen-thousand students, the maximum allowed by state law, in low-performing schools are using this publically funded voucher to attend private schools of their choice. 

Until recently, performance data on EdChoice students have not been available. But this year, thanks to new requirements in state law, the Ohio Department of Education released data comparing how voucher students perform on state achievement tests with their district counterparts.  The Columbus Dispatch featured this newly available data and concluded, “On the whole, Ohio students who used tax-funded vouchers to attend private schools last school year did no better on state tests than public-school students.”

The reporter reached this conclusion by comparing voucher student performance to the performance of students in their home districts. While this comparison is a reasonable starting point to understanding how well voucher students are doing, the comparison is far from fair. It is problematic to compare voucher students to the average scores of the entire home districts (which include schools of various quality levels, most of which are not low-performing enough to qualify for vouchers).  Voucher-eligible students come from the worst-performing schools and comparing them to an entire district, including high-performing schools, is misleading.  Using this comparison method voucher students will almost certainly always fall short on academic achievement tests simply because they are starting behind their peers. 

A better approach, and one that is doable with the limited data available, is to compare EdChoice student performance to the performance of students in voucher-eligible public school buildings. This creates a more apples-to-apples comparison by allowing researchers to compare voucher students to the underperforming schools from which they fled.  

The Dispatch analysis showed that public school students in Columbus City Schools outperformed voucher students in seven out of twelve academic tests.  However, the opposite is true when one compares Columbus’s voucher students to students in the city’s voucher-eligible schools, as chart 1 illustrates. 

Chart 1: Columbus: EdChoice Students vs. Voucher-Eligible Students

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Not only do EdChoice students outperform their peers in voucher-eligible schools in eight of twelve tests, they do so in some cases by a large margin. It is particularly interesting to note that in seventh- and eighth-grade reading, voucher students score more than 20 percentage points higher than their peers. 

That being said, a look at EdChoice student performance in Cincinnati paints a completely different picture. In the Queen City, as chart 2 shows, EdChoice students only outperformed voucher eligible schools in four of twelve academic tests.

Chart 2: Cincinnati: EdChoice Students vs. Voucher-Eligible Students

Source: Ohio Department of Education

A few additional findings jump out from this sort of apples-to-apples analysis.

Reading proves to be an area of strength for students using vouchers in these two cities. While this is interesting, perhaps a better question to ask is why voucher students are performing so poorly in math?  Is their performance a reflection of their time in the private school or of the teaching they received in the public school from which they fled?

Voucher students had stronger results in the middle grades (6-8) in reading, compared to students in voucher-eligible schools.  Voucher students in Columbus and Cincinnati outdid voucher eligible schools by a margin as large as 25.5 percentage points.

Of course even this sort of data and analysis has limitations. For one, students using vouchers might be more motivated and arrive at private schools at a higher level of proficiency than their peers who stayed behind in the public school. This comparison cannot account for that.  An ideal comparison would be to look at voucher users and voucher-eligible students on the waitlist, and such data could be made available now that Ohio has topped the voucher cap and has unique student identifiers for all students.  Until then, comparing voucher students to voucher-eligible students is the next best thing.

Doris Terry Williams
The Center for American Progress
September 2010

With all the attention given to urban schools in discussions about education reform, it’s nice to see rural schools get their own headline. In Center for American Progress’s new study, The Rural Solution, researcher Doris Terry Williams describes the rural school landscape:  such districts often spend significantly less per pupil than other districts, many are poor, and students may lack access to social services because of great distances.

After examining existing literature and data on rural schools, Williams visited some of the school districts serving America’s 10 million rural students and conducted interviews there to find out firsthand what was working and what wasn’t. She focused particularly on three schools, one each in Vermont, Maine, and Kentucky, that have adopted a community school model, making everything from Algebra classes to dentist appointments available in one central location.

Although she acknowledges that one size does not fit all, Williams uses her observations of the three schools to identify common challenges policy makers should consider when trying to improve rural schools.  The most interesting of these include:  

• The pool of potential teachers in rural districts is often quite small, which makes it difficult to recruit excellent teachers and replace ineffective ones. 
• The federal model for school turnaround is often not applicable in rural areas, where financial resources and opportunities for relocation are often scarce.
• The Full Service Community Schools Program is currently underfunded, and rural districts with limited resources often find themselves in a disadvantaged position when applying for funding from this and other grant programs.

Unfortunately, Williams spends little time discussing how to overcome significant challenges like teacher recruitment, instead focusing too broadly on the concept of community schools and the benefits of bringing education and social services together under one roof in rural districts.

Even so, the report serves as a reminder of the difficulty of improving rural schools, given the unique challenges they face in areas such as human capital, transportation, facilities, etc. According to 2007 data from the Ohio Department of Education, rural districts make up more than 40 percent of all Ohio districts, and many of these are set to feel the impending state budget crunch particularly acutely. Many of Ohio’s smaller districts may also face the problem of recruiting excellent teachers and would benefit from adopting some of the “work with what you’ve got” teacher recruitment and development proposals Williams puts forward. The full report is available here.

Melissa Lazarín and Feliza Ortiz-Licon
Center for American Progress
September 2010

Charter schools that make it their mission to reach the most underserved students must not forget the needs of Latino students and English Language Learners (ELLs). This is topic of the Center for American Progress’s latest report.

Next Generation Charter Schools first outlines the need to serve this student sub-group. Latino students represent one in every five public school students nationally, which equates to around ten million Latino students (with this number projected to grow by 160 percent by the year 2050).  Furthermore, 28 percent of Latino students currently attend chronically underperforming schools, compared to just nine percent of white students. 

Next, it outlines state policies that affect Latinos and ELLs. For example, while most states have lottery procedures for oversubscribed charters, just a few have proactive recruitment and enrollment policies to attract more Latino students. It also points out unfairness in some charters’ access to Title III funding (federal dollars for ELLs and immigrant students) if the number of such students is too low to meet the funding threshold.

The remainder of the report highlights four high-performing charter schools serving large percentages of Latinos/ELLs and exceeding achievement goals among this traditionally hard-to-serve subgroup: El Sol Science and Arts Academy (Santa Ana, California), YES Prep Gulfton (Houston, Texas), the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success (Houston), and International Charter School (Pawtucket, Rhode Island). Drawing on their success, the report identifies several best practices, such as:

• Simultaneously delivering teaching as a second language and core academic studies;
• Expanding instruction time;
• Instituting high expectations for all students, including ELLs;
• Equipping all teachers and staff (not just ELL teachers) with strategies to better serve this student group.

While charter schools tend to have more freedom and flexibility in many areas, the lessons in the report can also be applied to traditional public schools.  Currently in Ohio 2.3 percent of students are ELLs.  The graduation rate last year among Hispanics was 61.4 percent compared to 88.6 percent for White students.  Furthermore, only 33 percent of Hispanics are proficient in math and only 26 percent of English Language Learners reach proficiency.  There is significant room for Ohio schools to consider the policy recommendations and best practices presented in this report.

National Council on Teacher Quality                                                                                      
September 2010

This insightful policy brief examines the amount of control the average principal wields over hiring and HR decisions in the very schools for which they are ultimately accountable. It looks at state laws, regulations, and district policies in 101 large school districts (containing 20 percent of public school students in the US) and names several factors standing in the way of principal autonomy over teacher hiring decisions:

• Centralized hiring and assignment. Districts make most hiring decisions and determine where teachers will be deployed. (This begs the obvious question of how principals can be held fully responsible for student achievement when they don’t select their own teachers.)
• Teacher evaluations. The inability of teacher evaluations to distinguish effectiveness (in part, with student growth data) makes them feckless as part of the hiring/firing process.
• Teacher seniority and teacher placement. Principals do not have significant decision making ability when it comes to who is transferred into their building. As decisions are often based on seniority, principals may have to take a teacher with more years of experience over another who might be a better fit. In fact, only six districts in the study allow performance to be a deciding hiring factor.
• State dismissal laws. Limiting the reasons for dismissal to incompetence, immorality, or neglect of duty does not allow principals to fire ineffective teachers and ultimately make the best decisions for their schools.

NCTQ offers three basic solutions:  allow a teacher’s performance to be given weight over experience, deny teachers of having a job for life regardless of effectiveness, and give principals the freedom to end contracts.  Overall, this paper gives serious direction as to how school leaders can gain control over their largest resource – staffing – to ultimately improve student outcomes. See the brief, here.

Citizenship, patriotism and political engagement are cornerstones of our republic. Yet not much has been known about the proclivities and practices of those with substantial responsibility for cultivating these values and habits—namely, the nation’s social studies teachers. This new AEI study sought to correct that by asking over 1,000 high school social studies teachers (from public, private and Catholic schools) what they are trying to teach their students. Some findings are reassuring. For example, over 80 percent of high school social studies teachers think their students should “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” (That’s basically what the general public wants schools to teach.) But other findings raise red flags. Only 36 percent of teachers say it is “absolutely essential” to teach students key facts (like state capitals) and dates (like December 7, 1941). More alarming: only 24 percent reported being “very confident” that their students emerged knowing the protections provided by the Bill of Rights.

Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, and Jenna Schuette, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September 2010).