The Education Gadfly Weekly

Persistent school choice critic Steve Dyer recently posted a “takedown” of Fordham’s latest school choice policy recommendations. His attacks mostly focus on Ohio’s voucher programs, and most of his criticism is tired and misleading enough that we’ve had to address it before. I won’t do so again here. But buried among his many spurious arguments is a “recommendation” worth drawing attention to:

All voucher recipients have to attend the local public school for 180 days prior to applying for the voucher. If you’re going to take money away from public schools so kids they’ve “failed” can “escape” to private schools, shouldn’t you actually give the district a chance to succeed first?

It’s hard to know where to start with a statement that so unashamedly puts the financial needs of a system over the rights and wellbeing of people, namely kids. It is similarly difficult to fathom just how out of touch Dyer seems to be with anyone who might have had a negative experience with the district schools he champions. So let’s take it piece by piece.

“All voucher recipients have to attend the local public school for 180 days prior to applying for a voucher.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, 180 days is a whole school year. I say this because it’s important to realize that when Dyer recommends that state law require kids to attend their local public school for 180 days before they can access a voucher, he’s talking about an entire year of their lives. It appears, given the rest of his piece, that he thinks this year will magically transform the wishes of any family who thinks that their child’s needs can best be met by a private school. But what happens if he’s wrong? Does Dyer have a plan to return to that family and that child the entire year’s worth of their lives he’s demanding? Doubtful.

To presume to know what every child in this state needs—and to presume that you know it better than their parents, to the point that you think you have the right to tell them where to send their kids to school—is the height of arrogance. But to make matters worse, it’s not all parents Dyer presumes to know better than. No, it’s only certain parents who are required to take up this trial offer: those who can’t afford to circumvent the system. Families who can fund private school tuition without assistance are apparently entitled to send their children to whatever school they prefer, no waiting period necessary. The same goes for parents who can sell their house and buy a new one in a completely different district. Families with greater resources are under no obligation to wait an entire year to earn the right to send their children to the school of their choice. But everyone else? Take a number.

“If you’re going to take money away from public schools…”

Just like every other time this argument rears its ugly head, it’s a clear indicator that the system is being prioritized over kids and families. When you view kids as dollar signs, families having the right to choose another school is a threat. It doesn’t matter why they choose to leave. All that matters is that they did, and their chosen schools are accused of “stealing” money that their previous schools are somehow entitled to just by virtue of existing.

The problem with this thinking, of course, is that kids aren’t dollar signs. No school, regardless of its governance structure, is entitled to students. And the assertion that choice programs “take money” from public schools is willfully misleading. Various studies from both Ohio and elsewhere show that school choice programs don’t hurt district achievement or funding. Ohio data show that per-pupil funding actually increased between 2000 and 2019 in districts where charters and private schools have historically been the most prevalent. And while complaints about losing money might have been an understandable technicality when the state funded voucher programs through deductions to districts’ state aid, even that is no longer the case. The previous state budget overhauled the school funding formula in favor of a new system that was touted as the “fair funding” model by the same districts and advocates who are still complaining it’s unfair. 

“…so kids they’ve ‘failed’ can ‘escape’ to private schools…”

While the misleading and systems-first arguments in Dyer’s piece are offensive on their own, the quotation marks he places here around the words “failed” and “escaped” are particularly galling. Just because he doesn’t seem to have any firsthand experience with failing schools, and just because he doesn’t seem to know any families who have been desperate to escape, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Implying that struggling schools or families who want better for their kids are some sort of made-up fantasy is laughable considering the data and media stories we have on record.

Consider the following examples: Youngstown City Schools has been low-performing for years and is one of several districts that are either under state oversight or have come close thanks to abysmal student outcomes. In Columbus, an attendance and data scrubbing scandal led to bogus bonuses and criminal charges. Dayton is so consistently bad at transporting their students to school that media reports about transportation hiccups are an almost annual occurrence. Last year, the Bedford City School District temporarily switched its high school students to remote learning because of fights between students. And Coventry Local Schools managed their finances so poorly that they were on state fiscal watch for nearly two decades before tipping into full fiscal emergency for another six years. 

The point isn’t to denigrate these schools. Because here’s the dirty little secret that anti-choice folks don’t want anyone to know: Most choice advocates actually like public schools. I attended them from first grade on. I taught in them as a high school English teacher. I know how important they are to communities and democracy, and I want them to succeed. But I’m under no illusions that they always do, or that even the highest-performing school in a district is the perfect fit for every single kid. What I want—and what most pro-choice folks also want—is for kids to get an excellent education, even if that means attending a different kind of school. I want all families, regardless of their income, to have the same power to choose schools for their children that wealthy families who move to suburbs or pay private school tuition have.

If traditional public school advocates like Dyer want to champion high-quality district schools, that’s great. But at least be honest about who has access to them (spoiler alert: not everyone) and the fact that high performers can’t and shouldn’t give cover to low performers.

“…shouldn’t you actually give the district a chance to succeed first?”

The most obvious issue with this statement is a pretty simple, unanswered question: Why? Why do parents have to give public schools a chance? Every answer I can think of places a school, a district, or the system at large above the needs and rights of kids and parents. Moreover, I can’t help but think about all the experiences I’ve had that make a statement like this blatantly insensitive.

I remember being a teacher, and sitting in the living room of a potential student during a home visit with my principal. I remember this student’s mother telling us, in no uncertain terms, that she was choosing to send her son to a charter school because the district school across the street was too dangerous. She knew this from a variety of sources—from friends and family members with students enrolled in the school, from news stories, from activity in and around campus that she’d witnessed with her own two eyes since she lived nearby. If I had subscribed to Dyer’s belief that every family should be required to give traditional public schools a chance, would I have had to dismiss her viewpoint and tell her to enroll her child anyway, safety concerns be damned?

I have a family member with special needs. Right now, my family has access to voucher programs that empower us to choose the school that can best meet her needs. From Dyer’s viewpoint, that’s unacceptable. The fact that his attacks typically focus on EdChoice, and not Ohio’s special needs scholarships, doesn’t matter. By challenging the right to allow all parents to choose, he puts in jeopardy programs designed to serve families like mine, families who just want what’s best for the kids they love.

I grew up in Akron. My earliest memories are of a creaky old house with awful green carpet that was located just a few blocks from the Summit County Juvenile Court building and a mere two and a half miles from the current location of LeBron James’s I Promise school. Although there were several district schools nearby, my parents knew enough about them to recognize that they weren’t good academically or otherwise. So instead of enrolling my older sister and me, they sent us to a private school until we could afford to move to a suburb that they picked solely because of its good schools. EdChoice didn’t exist at the time. My parents made it work by depositing their tax return into a separate bank account, and then using those funds throughout the year to pay the school’s monthly bill. It’s unlikely they could’ve made this work for much longer, particularly since I have a younger sister. We were lucky the stars aligned before I started first grade. Lots of other families aren’t as fortunate. The idea of Dyer sitting at my kitchen table and telling my parents—or any of the other parents who sacrifice mightily to get something better for their kids—that they were wrong for doing so fills me with unutterable rage.

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There’s plenty of room for disagreement in education policy. There are lots of folks who want what’s best for kids, but have different ideas about how to make that dream a reality. But it’s hard to look at this “recommendation” and square it with the best interests of parents and their kids. That recommendation is a lot of things. It’s paternalistic privilege that seeks to tell certain families what to do, and then seeks to limit their opportunities when they don’t listen. It’s willful ignorance about the reality that many students face when they walk through the doors of their local public school. It’s blatant disregard and disrespect for anyone who can’t afford to buy their way into the wealthy, high-performing districts that claim they are open to all when they’re not. But a reasonable recommendation for how to make Ohio’s voucher programs “good?” Nah.

Editor’s 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 Columbus, Ohio’s largest school district, the academic year began in late August with more online learning and the first teacher strike in nearly five decades. While the strike itself lasted just three days, the terms of the final settlement promise to impact Columbus students and taxpayers for years to come.

Despite the considerable local and national media coverage the labor dispute attracted, much of the community appears to still be confused about the key points of contention and how they were ultimately resolved. My goal is to summarize some of these issues and help readers understand the promising governance and staffing reforms included in the new contract, the important provisions that were ultimately left on the cutting room floor, and the worrying longer-run financial implications of the various concessions made by the district.

Tackling teacher inequities and attendance

Columbus has struggled for years with two key challenges—dramatic inequities in teacher experience levels and turnover rates in some of its most disadvantaged schools and disturbing levels of teacher absenteeism. The new contract makes important progress on both fronts.

It expands an existing but largely dormant section of the prior contract—appropriately named “Article 911”—that provided for $4,000 stipends for teachers that volunteered for assignments in hard-to-staff schools. New provisions expand the use of such incentives to cover high-needs positions—such as in special education—district-wide. They offer district-funded opportunities for teachers to obtain licensure and certification in these areas and a one-time 20 percent pay boost, paid over three years, for accepting such teaching assignments. Given teachers unions’ historical opposition to any sort of differentiated pay, this is a major win for the district and disadvantaged students.

To address absenteeism, the new contract gives the superintendent modestly greater flexibility to police the abuse of sick leave. More importantly, it creates an innovative “buyback” program that financially incentivize teachers not to use all of their accrued sick leave days. In addition, the contract sets up a formalized teacher disciplinary process for addressing unprofessional behavior and requires teachers to allow principals to review lesson plans upon request.

Although these provisions may not seem groundbreaking, they could—if used correctly—lead to important improvements in student learning in the district. Unfortunately, the Columbus Education Association (CEA), the district’s teachers union, was successful in watering down other proposed reforms. The final contract gives the superintendent “sole discretion” to call calamity days and decide when the district moves to remote learning, to avoid the dragged-out negotiations that resulted in Columbus being among the last districts in the state to reopen during the 2020–21 academic year. However, it strips out district-proposed language that would have required teachers to provide real-time, synchronous instruction if remote learning is used. Also missing is a proposed “memorandum of understanding” that would have committed both sides to developing a “new resourcing model” addressing huge variation in enrollment and class sizes in schools across the district.

What CEA ultimately won

In the weeks of fractious off-and-on-again negotiations leading up to the strike, CEA remained disciplined and on message: The strike is about air conditioning, decrepit school building conditions, and class sizes, its leaders claimed. With the exception of class sizes, discussed in more detail below, the final contract includes largely symbolic language on these issues, perhaps to allow union chiefs to save face.

Making air conditioning one of the hills to die on for the 2022 contract negotiations was an odd choice, given the recent developments in the district. Although many Columbus school buildings have lacked air conditioning for decades, the district addressed this issue last year, thanks to an influx of federal Covid aid. In total, the district allocated nearly $40 million in federal dollars to install air conditioning in all but one school building that lacked one. (That last building is scheduled for demolition and replacement in the near future.) By the end of this month, 97 percent of Columbus school buildings were already on course to have air conditioning in every classroom. According to district data, that will rise to 99 percent by next fall.

The final contract includes language guaranteeing that learning spaces will be climate controlled. However, this provision will not take effect until the 2025–26 school year, after the three-year contract ends, and the district is clearly on pace to meeting this obligation.

Perhaps most disappointingly for teachers are the provisions related to salaries. According to an unfair labor practices complaint filed by the district, which provides a rare behind-the-scenes look into otherwise confidential negotiations, the teachers union originally asked for an 8 percent raise in each of the next three years, on top of the 4 percent annual “step” increase most (but not all) Columbus teachers were already scheduled to receive. The district countered with several alternatives, ultimately offering a 3 percent annual increase in its “last, best, and final” offer. The final agreement increased that to 4 percent per year (in addition to the “steps”), apparently prompting audible “boos” when the details were first shared by union leaders with their members.

How will Columbus pay for everything?

The union’s biggest wins—and the most serious long-term financial risk for the district—came in the form of class sizes. The district’s final offer prior to the strike included a phased expansion of an existing class-size reduction effort, eventually capping all elementary grades at 27 students per class. It also reduced by one the number of class periods taught by middle and high school teachers. Building on these reductions, the final contract further reduces the enrollment caps in middle and high school classes by two, to 33 and 34 students, respectively.

As school board members warned before the strike, paying for all of these concessions will ultimately require taxpayers to approve an operating levy in 2024. One risk for the district is that the heated rhetoric surrounding the strike—including CEA allegations that the district was “top heavy” with administrator bloat and sitting on hundreds of millions of unspent federal Covid dollars—could undermine the levy effort. More importantly, the various class-size reductions in the new contract will exacerbate a growing disconnect between district enrollment and staffing levels.

Historical data presented in the district’s latest financial report show that the total number of teachers employed in the district has grown by nearly 20 percent over the past decade, even as student enrollment has shrunk by 5 percent over the same time period. As a result, the district student-teacher ratio has declined by nearly 20 percent since 2012 and per-pupil expenditures increased by nearly 30 percent, much faster than the rate of inflation. Columbus experienced a significant outflow of students during the pandemic and some media reports suggest that charter schools saw additional enrollment growth due to the strike itself. It is difficult to imagine how the district will continue to secure voter approval for higher taxes and continue balancing its books as enrollment and teacher staffing levels move in opposite directions.

Here, the new resourcing model to address the big enrollment imbalances would have helped, by allowing the district to allocate its teaching staff more efficiently and reduce class sizes without necessarily growing the teacher headcount. As I note above, however, that proposal did not make it into the final contract.

In addition, the district’s investments in Chromebooks and air conditioners in recent years, while initially paid for with federal dollars, will require significant upkeep, maintenance, and ultimately replacement. Finding the money could be a challenge. The school board had placed a permanent improvement levy on the ballot this November to raise $40 million per year earmarked specifically for these kinds of expenses, but ultimately voted to withdraw it last month, in part out of concern that the teacher strike would make the measure difficult to pass. (The levy was paired with a $680 million bond measure to construct new school buildings, which was also removed from the ballot.)

A preview of 2023 elections?

The Columbus labor dispute occurred despite the fact that every member of the school board had been elected to office with a CEA endorsement. Indeed, the current school board president is the daughter of a Columbus teacher and another board member is a former district teacher and CEA member herself. So why did the union and its own hand-picked board fail to avoid the strike?

Two developments may have been critical. First, an outside audit released in 2020 painted a scathing picture of many aspects of district operations and the quality of its instruction. The audit specifically called out a “strong union contractual Agreement with the Columbus Education Association,” with auditors expressing “concern over CEA’s control of district governance and management functions.”

Second, around the same time, the board began working with an outside governance coach affiliated with the Council of Great City Schools. The coach, AJ Crabill, led the board through painfully awkward struggle sessions—including board members confessing about the times they had put their own political agendas ahead of kids’ interests—and almost always ending with some version of Crabill’s signature tagline: “Student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change.”

The coaching seems to be working. The current board majority, first elected in 2019, has fundamentally reorganized school board meetings, ditching long ceremonial proclamations and celebratory pictures, adopting clear numerical targets for student achievement, and holding quarterly analyses of student achievement data, with pointed questions asked of top district administrators when the data showed students falling short of board goals. Many of the new provisions in the contract directly build off of these efforts.

This year’s short strike may offer a preview of things to come, with the majority of the school board up for reelection in 2023. Three years ago, the last time the district and the union renegotiated the contract, board members faced considerable CEA opprobrium after approving a contract with an outside crisis staffing firm in case of a strike. Both sides ultimately agreed to a new contract, avoiding a strike, and the teachers union subsequently endorsed the incumbents it had criticized just months earlier in the 2019 election.

Whether the union again forgives and forgets next year could have big implications for the future trajectory of the district, its ability to implement and fund the provisions of the new contract, and the learning opportunities available to Columbus students.

Vladimir Kogan is Associate Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. The opinions and recommendations presented in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily represent policy positions or views of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, the Department of Political Science, or The Ohio State University.

At the conclusion of a harangue about our school choice recommendations, Stephen Dyer accuses Fordham of ignoring “the 90 percent of [district] students who don’t participate in these options.” The finger-pointing is nonsense given our longstanding advocacy for policies that benefit students no matter where they attend school. Truth is, we want all Ohio students to achieve at higher levels, including pupils who attend district schools and those who choose non-district options.

But is he right that 90 percent of Ohio students attend district schools? It’s worth a closer look because the statistic is commonly cited by school choice critics to suggest near-unanimous support for traditional public schools, with only a few non-conformists opting out. 

When we actually dig into the data, we find that 90 percent is an exaggeration. In truth, about 80 percent of Ohio students attend district schools, and even that number requires some additional nuance.

Table 1 displays Ohio’s enrollments for 2020–21, the most recent year of available data.[1] Traditional school districts, including students attending joint-vocational districts, served just over 1.5 million students (82 percent), with private schools enrolling about 162,000 students (9 percent) and public charter schools enrolling 114,000 students (6 percent). Roughly 52,000 students were homeschooled (3 percent) and a small share attended an independent STEM school or a state-supported organization. Note that within the traditional district system, roughly 83,000 students exercised choice through interdistrict open enrollment. Thus, the percentage of students attending a traditional public school in their home district is closer to 75 percent.

Table 1: Ohio’s K–12 enrollment by educational option in 2020–21

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This isn’t even a complete accounting of each and every school-aged child in Ohio. As indicated in the table above, the state doesn’t report the number of students attending non-chartered, non-public schools, i.e., private schools that for religious reasons choose not to be formally chartered by the state (and are ineligible to participate in state scholarship programs). Nor is there a count of adolescents of compulsory education age who did not attend school in 2020–21. If they were included, the district share would decline.

The statewide averages, of course, include areas of Ohio with few to no private or public charter schools. When we look at enrollment patterns in urban areas with more expansive school options available, we see much larger proportions of students enrolled in non-district alternatives—and consequently, lower district shares of enrollment. As the table below indicates, the Cincinnati school district educates just shy of three quarters of the city’s students, while in Cleveland and Columbus about three in five students are educated in district schools. These numbers are overestimates, as we don’t have data on tuition-paying private school students residing in these cities. Interdistrict open enrollment also occurs in the three districts. In Cincinnati, for example, 862 non-resident students enrolled in the district, while 599 resident students attended a surrounding district through open enrollment.[2]

Table 2: K–12 enrollment in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, 2020–21

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Overall, the picture of traditional public school enrollments is more nuanced than the “90 percent” rhetoric. For starters, it’s inaccurate—not even a rounding error—and critics should at least update their talking point. And it’s nowhere close to being true for Ohio’s big-city districts. We must also remember that in many places across Ohio, parents have few non-district options apart from homeschooling or online schools. Recall, too, that school funding policies advantage districts, as parents pay taxes to their local district; many, therefore, must “double pay” (taxes plus tuition) to access private schools.

To be sure, traditional public school students still represent a sizeable majority of students in Ohio. But that doesn’t indicate near-universal approval of districts. Nor does it mean that we ignore the wishes of parents who prefer alternative educational options.  

Thanks to inflation and supply chain issues, back-to-school shopping was an especially tight squeeze for many families this year. But parents aren’t the only ones shouldering the financial burden. Teachers are, too.

Most people know that teachers often spend their own money on items like student supplies, instructional materials, and classroom decorations. But many don’t realize just how steep the costs can be. A teacher questionnaire administered as part of the federal 2015–16 National Teacher and Principal Survey found an average spending total of $478 among teachers who used their own money to purchase classroom supplies. On average, elementary teachers spent more than secondary teachers, and the spending amount was higher for teachers at city schools (compared to suburban, town, or rural schools), as well as for teachers in schools where 75 percent or more of students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. Unsurprisingly, reported costs seem to have increased with time. A teacher spending survey conducted in 2020 by Adopt A Classroom found that teachers spent an average of $745 on school supplies during the 2019–20 school year. With recent inflation hikes, the totals for this year are likely even higher.

Asking employees in any profession to spend their own money so they can do their job is troubling. But it’s particularly egregious that we ask teachers to do it. In Ohio, public school teachers earn an average of about $65,000 per year. And while that salary places them in the middle class (depending on their household size and additional income), it overlooks plenty of nuances. For example, teachers who choose to work in rural and urban high-poverty districts often make less per year than their counterparts in more affluent suburban schools. Many don’t have spare cash to devote to their classrooms or to students who struggle to afford their own supplies, but they scrape together the funds anyway. Those who teach in traditionally hard-to-staff subject areas like math and science make considerably less money working in schools than they would in the private sector, and early career teachers make far less than their veteran peers. But they, too, choose to funnel a portion of their hard-earned salaries back into their classrooms. Resources like Adopt A Classroom, DonorsChoose, and classroom wish lists on Amazon can help, but relying on the generosity of strangers isn’t always enough.

It’s also not good policy. Ohio policymakers are already gearing up for budget season next year, and they’re considering a wide range of initiatives designed to support teachers and tackle possible shortages. Addressing out-of-pocket expenses should be on the list. Federal policymakers have tried to ease the financial strain via the teacher expense deduction, which allows eligible educators to deduct up to $300 from their income for classroom materials they haven’t been reimbursed for, but this amount is well below what most teachers report spending each year.

Ohio should consider supplementing the federal provision with state-level support. Obviously, lawmakers can’t just write a blank check to every teacher in the Buckeye State. And we need to start asking some tough questions about why teachers have to resort to spending their own money. The answers are likely complicated. But to address the immediate problem, state leaders could create a program styled after education savings accounts that distributes a set dollar amount to each teacher at the start of each new school year. These funds could be spent in certain stores via a debit card, and could be used to cover the cost of supplies and materials that teachers would normally have to pay for on their own.

Such a program would need strong guardrails to prevent fraud and waste. For example, all purchases would be subject to audit, and unused funds that remain in accounts as of July 1 would revert back to the state. But Ohio has created and managed similar programs before, so this isn’t out of the realm of possibility. And even if lawmakers decide that an ESA-style program isn’t the best method, there are other options—state tax credits, a state-run reimbursement program, or dedicated funding streams for schools to direct to teachers are all possibilities. What matters is that state leaders address the problem. And here’s hoping that during this upcoming budget season, they do.

Though many of America’s single parents do a great job raising their kids and getting them off to an excellent start in school and in life, research has long demonstrated that, in general, children tend to do better in two-parent, married families. A new research brief from the Institute for Family Studies offers yet more evidence of this basic fact.

Analysts Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox are aggressively binary in their work: Traditional families consisting of two married parents and their biological children are compared against all other family structures, including single-parent, stepparent, and families built by adoption. They used data from two federal National Household Education Surveys nearly twenty-five years apart: the first dates from 1996, and surveyed the parents of more than 17,500 elementary and secondary students; the second was in 2019 and interviewed the parents of just under 16,000 students. The authors focused on four negative academic outcomes of interest: if a child repeated one or more grades, if a child had been suspended or expelled, if parents were contacted about their child’s schoolwork, and if parents were contacted about their child’s behavior in school. They then examined the frequency of occurrences over time and in each family type, and compared the numbers based on factors such as parent education level, race and ethnicity, and the ages and genders of students in both family structures.

Overall, the incidence of all four outcomes was lower in 2019 compared to 1996. Reports of suspensions and grade repetition were down by half or more, likely reflecting systemic efforts by schools to move away from such practices. The incidence of schools reaching out to parents about student behavior and schoolwork was also modestly lower. In both surveys, however, students from non-traditional families were still more likely to experience these outcomes than their peers from traditional ones.

Zill and Wilcox note that the proportion of U.S. students living in single-parent, step-parent, and other non-traditional families increased a bit between the 1996 and 2019 surveys—from 41 percent to 43.5 of the total. This jibes with other data showing that the previous explosive growth of family units such as those headed by single parents has slowed in recent years and may even be leveling off. The proportion of students from non-traditional families who were suspended or expelled from school fell by 39 percent, the proportion who repeated a grade declined by 47 percent, and the proportion whose parents were contacted due to their child’s difficulties with schoolwork and classroom behavior both went down by 16 percent. Despite all this, their relative risk for these negative outcomes (compared to two-parent family peers) increased or remained the same. In fact, the data indicate that family structure is at least as strong a predictor of school suspensions, grade repetition, and student misbehavior as race.

The data do not allow for examination of the mechanisms responsible for the stark division in outcomes nor for possible differentiation among two-parent versus single-parent non-traditional families. The analysts thus conclude that no matter how or how much the American school climate has changed over the years, the educational advantages of being raised “by one’s own married parents” have stayed steady.

SOURCE: Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox, “Strong Families, Better Student Performance: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same,” Institute for Family Studies (August 2022).

As Governor Mike DeWine asserted, the state of Ohio has “a moral obligation” on behalf of students to step in when schools are falling short of academic performance standards. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), federal lawmakers have given states the ability to chart their own course when it comes to fixing under-performing schools. Shifting authority—and responsibility—to state policymakers is sensible. But state leaders can’t put school improvement on autopilot and hope for the best.

Our latest report analyzes ESSA’s school improvement requirements and how they have been implemented in the Buckeye State over the years. It also offers eight research-backed recommendations to help strengthen Ohio’s efforts going forward.

NOTE: To access a list of schools in comprehensive support and improvement status as of August 2022, please download this Excel file. The file includes school location, enrollments, and key academic data.​

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Executive summary

Ohio policymakers have consistently voiced support for rigorous education standards and ensuring that all students have the knowledge and skills needed to succeed after high school. Despite the aspirational talk, however, they haven’t always walked the walk. Instead, Ohio has gotten into a worrying habit of backing down when “real” accountability measures come online. One example is state interventions in poorly performing school districts. After years of pressure from the public education establishment, last year, state lawmakers threw in the towel and offered easy off-ramps to three districts being overseen by academic distress commissions (ADC).

Yet in the midst of the ADC debates, Governor Mike DeWine said, “The state has a moral obligation to help intervene on behalf of students stuck in failing schools.”[1] He’s right. State leaders have a duty to step in when schools are falling far short of performance standards. Students receiving a substandard education are more likely to struggle in the job market, disengage from civic life, and suffer social isolation. Because of the long-term damage that a poor education can do to students (and to the future of the state, as well), policymakers can’t turn a blind eye to failing schools.

But rather than trying to turn around entire districts—bureaucratic systems resistant to change— what if Ohio’s policymakers focused instead on fixing individual schools? The latter approach may be less politically contentious and would better target interventions at the units that actually deliver instruction to students. It also wouldn’t be a new idea, as states have for two decades been required under federal law to identify their lowest-performing schools and work to improve them. Passed in December 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—the latest iteration of the main federal K–12 education law—maintains this requirement. But in a turn from the prescriptive approach of its predecessor No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ESSA offers states greater flexibility in how they design and implement school improvement programs.

Scant attention has been paid to Ohio’s school improvement policies under ESSA. That likely reflects the intense focus in recent years on district-wide ADCs, as well as unfamiliarity with federal law.

It’s also due to the pandemic, which has paused school accountability policies writ large, including consequences for performance. And perhaps, after seeing mixed turnaround results in Ohio and nationally, some may pay it little heed because they no longer believe that state involvement in low- performing schools is worth it.

Given the formidable challenges of effective school turnaround, one strategy is to simply close failing schools and focus on expanding quality options. To its credit, Ohio has historically pursued policies that create more quality educational options, especially in parts of the state that lack them. Though not the topic of this paper, Ohio leaders should absolutely continue to promote the growth of excellent schools and encourage the closure of dysfunctional ones.[2] Given their decades-long decline in enrollment—recently exacerbated by the pandemic—Ohio’s large urban districts may need to close schools in the coming years. In any closure plan, district officials should work to shutter its poorest-performing schools, which are apt to be underenrolled, and support student transitions to higher performing schools.[3]

Beyond closure, a second, complementary avenue—the topic of this report—is to try much harder to turn schools around. Repairing broken schools is a more intensive approach, but there is evidence that, in some contexts, it can boost learning outcomes.[4] In the Buckeye State, for instance, two studies of its pre-ESSA improvement programs found positive results in schools where significant reforms took place.[5]

As a moral obligation and federal requirement, Ohio should continue working toward better outcomes in its lowest-performing schools. To increase the likelihood of success, policymakers need a well- structured improvement program. But few in Ohio have a clear understanding of ESSA’s school improvement requirements and what the state is doing in this area. This report aims to provide an introduction. To be sure, it doesn’t contain every answer about how the program functions in practice, nor is it a formal evaluation of effectiveness. Rather, it aims to offer useful baseline information, flag areas that merit further attention, and suggest ideas that could strengthen Ohio’s program.

So how does school improvement work under ESSA?

Under federal law, states must identify their lowest-performing schools as needing “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI). Such schools are required to create improvement plans that the state must approve and monitor. Should a CSI school fail to meet states’ exit criteria within a certain timeframe, ESSA then requires states to determine “more rigorous interventions” for that school. CSI schools are eligible to receive federally funded school improvement grants—of somewhat modest amounts—which may be awarded by states via formula or a competitive process. Table 1 provides a high-level overview of the CSI program, including key federal requirements. It also briefly describes Ohio’s implementation, which is led by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). More detail is found in the report starting here.

Table 1. Overview of the CSI program

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In fall 2018, Ohio identified 285 underperforming CSI schools, of which about half were district and half charter. This is the first and only cohort of CSI schools to date. Because of paused accountability systems, no schools have exited, nor have any been added via reidentification. Though not a direct result of CSI policies, forty-one schools, including thirty-four charters, have closed, leaving 244 CSI schools open at the end of 2020–21. Taken together, these schools enrolled 112,000 students, roughly the size of the Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus school districts combined.

Though not surprising, data from 2017–18 to 2020–21 depict the academic troubles of Ohio’s CSI schools. For instance, figure 1 shows that in spring 2018—the year immediately prior to entering improvement status—just half of the students attending CSI high schools graduated on time. That rate was thirty-two percentage points below the statewide average and twenty-four points below the average of the Big Eight urban districts, where most CSI schools are located. In the three subsequent years—all years in which the schools were in improvement status—graduation rates rose by an average of 1.8 points per year. Despite the uptick, CSI schools’ graduation rates in 2021 remained thirty and nineteen points below the state and Big Eight averages, respectively.

Figure 1. CSI schools’ four-year graduation rates versus selected benchmarks

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While the academic challenges are easily visible in the data, it’s less clear how exactly Ohio implements several crucial elements of its improvement program. For instance, as noted above, ESSA requires states to implement “more rigorous interventions” if CSI schools don’t meet exit criteria within a certain timeframe. But federal law doesn’t dictate specific interventions, leaving the decision to states. Without direction from the feds—or, as it turns out, from Ohio lawmakers—ODE determines them. In its ESSA implementation plan, the agency only hints at what might occur in this scenario, listing a half dozen options that it “may” require of schools, such as support from a regional educational service center, participation in a peer-to-peer network, or an on-site review. But how does ODE choose which item on the menu would apply to a school? Why might one CSI school get off the hook with a light consequence—seemingly no more than technical assistance—while another is subjected to an external review? Why aren’t more forceful actions a possibility, such as a wholesale restructuring of the school? Other hazy areas include how precisely ODE oversees and makes sure that CSI schools are following their improvement plans and whether schools are spending grants to implement highly effective, evidence-based practices.

To do right by students, Ohio’s school improvement program needs to involve more than a compliance routine and a few extra dollars. Indeed, research has shown that turnaround efforts are more likely to succeed when schools do more than nibble around the edges and instead fundamentally alter the way they operate.[6] But, while ODE has developed solid technical-assistance programs, Ohio’s ESSA-driven improvement program lacks the clarity and teeth needed to drive drastic changes in low-performing schools. To that end, state policymakers should develop a clearer, stronger, and more coherent school improvement program. This report outlines specific recommendations discussed in more detail starting here. To boil them down, they include the following:

• Ensure consistent, rigorous state oversight of low-performing CSI schools. Through its plan-approval process, ODE should insist that CSI schools’ plans include strong, evidence- based practices—e.g., curricula and materials that align with the science of reading in elementary grades, providing students with extended learning time, and policies that help to retain high-performing teachers (and remove ineffective ones). To ensure follow-through and to provide feedback on implementation, ODE should also strengthen its on-site inspection program, known as the school improvement diagnostic review (SIDR).

• Establish clear, forceful consequences for persistent school failure. ODE should develop concrete guidelines about what occurs if a school is required to undertake “more rigorous interventions.” If a school fails to respond to such interventions, the agency should require comprehensive restructuring, or work with the district or charter authorizer to close the school. More forceful accountability provisions are not only necessary for the interests of students but also to counterbalance incentives, via eligibility for improvement grants, to perpetually remain in CSI status.

• Drive more school improvement funds to CSI schools implementing effective practices. In its first (and, to date, only) cycle of competitive grants in 2019, Ohio spread dollars too thinly across hundreds of schools. In the next grant cycle, the state should award larger competitive grants to a smaller number of CSI schools that commit to intensive educational services and programs. For instance, larger awards could be offered to schools pledging to offer summer courses, high-dosage tutoring, or career-technical and work-based opportunities.

• Increase transparency about Ohio’s school improvement program. ODE should be more transparent about efforts to turn low-performing schools around. For instance, to aid public understanding, ODE should make improvement plans easily accessible to parents and local communities, and it should release a consolidated annual report about the progress of CSI schools.

Turning around troubled schools requires commitment and patience on the part of policymakers. It won’t win political accolades. The results may not materialize as quickly or as easily as hoped. But sitting on the sidelines as students receive an inadequate education isn’t an option, either. Creating sound policies for school-level improvement in Ohio—and sticking to them—would be a good start.

Introduction: From NCLB to ESSA

More than twenty years ago, in Hamilton, Ohio, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act into law. Among the many policy reforms in that iteration of federal K–12 education law, NCLB required states to identify low-performing public schools and impose escalating consequences if they failed to meet performance benchmarks year after year. At the signing ceremony, President Bush offered his reasoning behind these provisions:

Every school has a job to do. And that’s to teach the basics and teach them well. If we want to make sure no child is left behind, every child must learn to read. And every child must learn to add and subtract.  If, however, schools don’t perform, if, however, given the new resources, focused resources, they are unable to solve the problem of not educating their children, there must be real consequences.[7]

That logic is common sense. State leaders do have an obligation to intervene on behalf of children stuck in chronically failing schools, and cementing that concept into federal law was sensible. Despite the sound rationale and some evidence of improved achievement stemming from these accountability measures,[8] the policy drew fire for being excessively punitive and overly rigid. Congress overhauled the federal accountability framework through the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Although ESSA retains important NCLB provisions, such as annual state assessments and school report cards, it revamps school intervention requirements.

Reflecting shifts in thinking about federal-state relations in education, ESSA takes a more hands-off approach to school accountability. Although it requires states to engage in some form of improvement, what precisely that looks like is largely up to individual states. For instance, instead of federally prescribed interventions, ESSA outlines no specific consequences for poor performance. State policymakers, therefore, decide what types of programs and practices are acceptable in a school improvement plan, how exactly to oversee progress, and under what conditions low-performing schools may exit intervention (and what happens if they don’t).

This report first reviews, at a high level, federal school improvement policy under ESSA and how Ohio has implemented the law. Next, we analyze Ohio’s administration of federal school improvement grants under ESSA. Then, we examine Ohio’s first cohort of CSI schools, which comprise the lowest- performing schools in the state. The report concludes with recommendations that aim to strengthen the state’s school improvement policies.

We have three final introductory notes. First, ESSA focuses on improving individual schools rather than entire districts. In Ohio, ADCs have been a state-driven effort—not mandated under federal policy—to turn struggling districts around. Second, ESSA requires public charter schools to be included in a state’s accountability and improvement systems; nonpublic schools, however, are not. Third, ESSA—the current federal education law—is not to be confused with ESSER, which refers to the massive Covid-related funding packages for schools passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021.

Federal initiative and Ohio implementation

ESSA requires states to identify two separate groups of schools: CSI and “targeted support and improvement” (TSI).[9] CSI schools are the lowest-performing schools in the state, while TSI schools are less troubled yet fall short with specific groups of students (e.g., students with disabilities or English learners). States have greater responsibility in overseeing CSI schools, while local districts generally take the lead on TSI efforts. Because of the state’s smaller role in TSI schools, this report’s analysis of the category is brief.

A. Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI)

Per federal law, the overall CSI framework includes six key policy areas: (1) creating a state CSI plan, (2) identifying CSI schools, (3) creating and approving local school improvement plans, (4) monitoring plan implementation, (5) exiting CSI status, and (6) implementing “more rigorous interventions” if CSI schools don’t exit.[10]

Policy 1: Policymaking

ESSA requirements: State education agencies, after “meaningful consultation” with key stakeholders including the governor and legislature, must describe certain aspects of their school improvement policies in an ESSA plan that is approved by the U.S. Department of Education (USED). States can make amendments to their ESSA plans if they decide to alter their policies.

Ohio implementation: ODE drafted the state’s ESSA plan, which was approved by USED in early 2018.[11] Some portions of the plan simply reflected existing state law. For instance, Ohio statute has long included sections on assessments and school report cards, and those areas generally aligned with ESSA without needing revision.

In contrast, state law and regulation offer ODE little direction about how to structure a school improvement program under the more-flexible ESSA law. The current section of Ohio statute on school improvement is of no help, as it refers to NCLB-era policies such as “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) and the federally prescribed consequences for failing to meet AYP.[12] In yet another section of Ohio law, we find “restructuring” provisions—not tied to either NCLB or ESSA—that require district-run schools to either close, replace its principal and instructional staff, restart with a new operator, or convert to a charter school if they fail to meet certain performance criteria.[13] While forceful on its face, Ohio potentially relieves schools of these consequences if they conflict with federally driven interventions.[14] Meanwhile, the State Board of Education, the body that directly oversees ODE, hasn’t created specific rules about how the school improvement program is to function under ESSA. Instead, it generally refers readers to ODE’s ESSA plan.[15]

Absent clear state laws or regulations on school improvement, ODE—in a sense, by default—has significant authority to create and amend policy in this area. For instance, ESSA requires states, within certain parameters, to determine the frequency by which they identify CSI schools. ODE responded in its ESSA plan that Ohio would do so once every three years, thus making the policy without any formal legislation or rules being enacted. ODE also omits reference to the restructuring provisions in state law. Since those consequences aren’t incorporated into the ESSA plan, it’s possible that those may not be implemented. In fact, a clarifying rule created by the State Board of Education indicates that any school subject to Ohio’s restructuring law is instead deemed to be in CSI status.[16]

Policy 2: School identification

ESSA requirements: Under federal law, states must identify at least 5 percent of their Title I schools as CSI,[17] as well as any public high school—Title I or not—with four-year graduation rates below 67 percent. Each state must create a methodology to determine its lowest 5 percent (or more) of schools, with the state’s school rating system serving as the basis. States were required to unveil their initial lists of CSI schools by 2018. Thereafter, states can “reidentify”—add new schools meeting identification criteria—annually, biennially, or every three years.

Ohio implementation: To comply with ESSA provisions,[18] Ohio uses a modified “federal” graduation rate for the purposes of identifying schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. This calculation differs from the one reported on school report cards because it does not count students who receive diplomas by virtue of alternative requirements—largely students with individualized education plans (IEPs) as graduates. Appendix A has more detail about the federal versus state graduation-rate calculations.

Among Title I schools (and excluding high schools already identified under the graduation criteria), the lowest 5 percent in total points earned in Ohio’s overall school rating system are also identified as CSI.[19]

ODE opts to identify CSI schools once every three years, the longest duration allowed under federal law. Ohio’s first round of identification under ESSA guidelines occurred in fall 2018 and was based on data from the 2017–18 school year. Ohio identified 285 schools as CSI, including 144 charter schools, and more information about this first cohort is presented starting here. Ohio was initially scheduled to reidentify schools in fall 2021, but this was waived due to the pandemic. Instead, Ohio’s first reidentification of CSI schools will occur in fall 2022.

Policy 3: School improvement plans

ESSA requirements: Once a school is identified, the school district—in partnership with a school’s leaders, teachers, and parents—must develop an improvement plan for the school. The state education agency (SEA) is then required to approve a CSI school’s improvement plan. ESSA does not prescribe specific actions that must be included in such a plan (e.g., instructional reforms or staffing changes), but it does require a needs assessment and interventions that are “evidence based.” Although ESSA contains a definition of evidence based, the term is rather broad and allows for a wide range of activities.

Ohio implementation: CSI schools’ improvement plans are available through an online portal, known as CCIP.[21] The web interface is not user friendly, and among the various plans that districts and schools must submit, it is difficult to determine with certainty what precisely constitutes a CSI school’s improvement plan. The extent to which various stakeholders in a school participated in the development of the plan is also hard to ascertain, and it is unclear whether ODE requires—as it could through its approval authority—CSI schools to implement any specific programs or practices (e.g., insisting on high-quality curricula and materials or effective personnel practices). On the positive side, to support the use of evidence-based practices in improvement plans, ODE has developed a clearinghouse that allows users to search programs by grade band and subject area that schools could potentially use.[22] The online catalog is based on USED’s What Works Clearinghouse and a few other research organizations’ work that synthesizes various studies.

Policy 4: Plan implementation and oversight

ESSA requirements: States are responsible for monitoring and “periodically” reviewing the implementation of CSI schools’ plans. In addition, they must provide technical assistance to school districts with a “significant number” of CSI and TSI schools and conduct resource allocation reviews in such districts.[23] Beyond those basic guidelines, ESSA defers to states to decide how exactly to carry out these oversight responsibilities.

Ohio implementation: ODE has extensive technical-assistance resources that CSI schools can tap into. They include peer-to-peer networks, regional support systems, and the Ohio Improvement Process—a framework that schools may choose to use when developing an improvement plan.[24] ODE undertakes compliance-driven monitoring for federal programs.[25] More promisingly, in terms of providing active oversight and actionable feedback, ODE has developed a school improvement diagnostic review (SIDR). Though information about the program is limited, it appears to take a deeper dive into schools’ strengths and weaknesses through on-site visits.[26] It’s not clear how ODE determines which schools are selected for review or how many (if any) CSI schools have been reviewed under the SIDR program.[27] Unlike ODE’s district-level on-site reviews, which result in accessible reports, there are no known publicly available reports of the school-level SIDRs.[28]

Policy 5: Exit criteria

ESSA requirements: States must establish exit criteria that schools need to achieve to leave CSI status. However, the federal legislation does not set guidelines for those conditions. A state could implement weak exit criteria or set stringent ones that require substantial improvement for multiple years.

Ohio implementation: Ohio annually removes any CSI school that meets the state’s exit criteria, but because of Covid-related disruptions, no schools have actually exited. The exit criteria are in flux, as ODE proposed in May 2022 a significant revision to its original criteria in a draft amendment to its ESSA plan. If the amended criteria are approved by the feds, they would be as follows:[30]

When determining which schools are eligible to exit CSI status, each school’s improvement will be measured against its achievement level in the year that it was identified as a CSI school to ensure that the improvement is substantial and sustained. The exit criteria include the following:

• School performance is higher than the lowest 5 percent of schools based on the ranking of the Ohio School Report Card overall ratings for two consecutive years

• The school earns a federal graduation rate of better than 67 percent for two consecutive school years

• In the second year of meeting the two above criteria, the school also demonstrates improvement on their overall rating assigned on the Ohio School Report Cards.

ODE is right to require that CSI schools demonstrate “substantial and sustained” improvements to exit. The bulleted points, however, do not appear to reach such standards. The first two criteria ask CSI schools to do no more than avoid the identification criteria. The third, seemingly an effort to slightly raise the bar, is somewhat vague—whether it’s an improved rating versus the year of identification or year immediately prior is unclear—and it requires only one year of higher ratings (not a “sustained” improvement). In a May 2022 article, I suggested tweaks that would clarify the criteria, but it’s uncertain as of the writing of this report what exactly will happen with the exit criteria.[31]

Policy 6: More rigorous interventions

ESSA requirements: Federal law requires states to impose “more rigorous interventions” if CSI schools fail to meet a state’s exit criteria within a four-year (or less) timeframe. It does not, however, specify what these interventions shall be, so states decide how to implement the requirement.

Ohio implementation: In its original ESSA plan, ODE chose to implement more rigorous interventions if CSI schools failed to meet the exit criteria within four years, the maximum duration allowed under federal law. In a May 2022 draft amendment to the plan, the agency proposed reducing it to three years—a step in the right direction, especially if paired with strong intervention measures. Regardless of timetable, no school has been subject to these interventions. Starting in fall 2024 (or fall 2023, under the proposed revision), this would occur if there are schools identified in 2018 that haven’t met the exit criteria by then.

What does Ohio’s version of “more rigorous interventions” constitute? In its ESSA plan, ODE references six possible interventions that it may pursue in this situation. They include (1) supports from regional service providers, (2) peer-to-peer networks, (3) improvement reviews (seemingly akin to the SIDR process described above), (4) in-depth resource-allocation reviews, (5) more rigorous requirements on tiers of approved evidence-based strategies, and (6) required direct student supports. Few details are given about what exactly the potential interventions entail, and it’s not entirely clear how some of the options—such as participating in a peer-to-peer network—could be deemed an “intervention,” much less a “more rigorous” one. Little information is also given about how ODE decides which one of the options applies to a school. Why might one school receive a seemingly lighter consequence than another? Perhaps most surprising, given the issue, is that ODE’s plan omits reference to the state’s restructuring laws—discussed above—as potentially applying in these circumstances. That may or may not have been intentional, but the omission could make that section of state law moot.

B. Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI)

In addition to identifying CSI schools, ESSA also requires states to identify any school (Title I or not) that has one or more “consistently underperforming” student groups. The idea behind TSI is that some schools, while performing acceptably as a whole, could be struggling to serve specific groups of students (e.g., students with disabilities or who are economically disadvantaged). ESSA requires states to annually identify TSI schools, but once identified, ESSA requirements are limited. Under federal law, TSI schools must create improvement plans, but the state does not have to approve them. Unlike CSI schools, ESSA doesn’t require “more rigorous interventions” if TSI schools consistently fail to meet exit criteria.

ODE identified 537 schools for TSI status in fall 2018—roughly 15 percent of all Ohio schools. Due to their less-severe underperformance and the smaller role of the state in monitoring TSI schools, this report omits detailed analysis of schools in this category. However, because they are eligible for school improvement grants, TSI schools are included in that section.

C. Covid waivers

The pandemic and its widespread impacts interrupted the implementation of ESSA’s school intervention policies. In both spring 2020 and spring 2021,[32] the federal government offered states waivers from the requirement to identify new schools for CSI and TSI status. Save for a minor exception allowed by the feds, of which Ohio did not avail itself,[33] states were not permitted to exit schools from improvement status. As a result, Ohio’s initial list of CSI schools has been frozen for two years under the waiver program.[34]

Based on results from the 2021–22 school year, all states—including Ohio—must restart CSI identification in fall 2022 and identify a second cohort of CSI schools. They’ll also be allowed to exit schools after the 2021–22 school year, though this is unlikely to apply in Ohio’s case.[35] Table 2 displays the timeline regarding CSI identification, the year of improvement (as it pertains to more rigorous interventions), and exiting possibilities after the school year.

Table 2. Timeline of Ohio’s CSI school actions under ESSA, 2018–19 through 2025–26

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School quality improvement grants

ESSA requires states to set aside 7 percent of their Title I federal funding to support CSI and TSI schools. Of that amount, at least 95 percent must be allocated to schools via competitive grant or formula (or a mix of both). The remaining set-aside may be used by an SEA to implement the program and monitor and evaluate the uses of these funds. States must report the grant amounts that schools receive and the “types of strategies” that schools implement with these dollars. Awards may support program expenses over a maximum of four years, and schools can continue to spend grant funds even if they exit CSI or TSI status before expiration.

ODE calls this program the School Quality Improvement Grant (SQIG). In its first—and, to date, only—round of grant funding, the agency chose to allocate SQIG dollars first via competitive grant and disbursed remaining funds by formula to CSI and TSI schools that did not receive a competitive grant. The SQIG competition occurred in early 2019, shortly after the initial cohort of CSI and TSI schools were identified. The department’s application asked schools, among other things, to describe the activities and initiatives that the funds will support (Appendix C displays the template). Schools’ responses are available in an ODE database, but it’s hard to determine what grantees were required to do—outside of financial reporting—beyond their ESSA-required improvement plans.

In the first cycle, 107 out of 285 CSI schools were awarded competitive grants (38 percent of them), as were 225 out of 537 TSI schools (42 percent).[36] ESSA does not set minimum or maximum grant awards, but ODE created guidelines that provide somewhat larger grants to CSI schools and those with higher enrollments (the funding framework appears in Appendix D). Roughly three-quarters of the Title I set-aside was distributed via competitive grant, with a smaller share allocated by formula. That reflects the size of the competitive awards, with the average grant being worth roughly $450 per pupil annually versus $50 per pupil for noncompetitive grants.[37] Figure 2 displays the average grant per pupil by intervention status, showing that CSI schools receive about $150 more per-pupil funding than TSI schools.

Figure 2. Average per-pupil amount of schools’ SQIG competitive grant by intervention status, FY 2021

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Despite their smaller per-pupil grant amounts, the next chart shows that TSI schools receive a larger portion of the overall competitive SQIG dollars. That reflects the higher number of schools that received grants—as noted above, 225 TSI schools won awards versus just 107 CSI schools. Although there are more TSI schools overall, it’s somewhat surprising to see the modest portion of the set- aside going to CSI schools. As the tables in Appendix B demonstrate, CSI schools are—as one might expect—more academically challenged, and they also enroll more disadvantaged students.

Figure 3. Distribution of competitive SQIG funds by intervention status in FY 2021

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A second round of SQIG funding is planned for 2023, which will also allow Ohio’s second cohort of CSI and TSI schools to apply. Continuing to allocate the bulk of SQIG funds competitively holds more promise than simply sending money to low-performing schools with no strings attached. It encourages schools to be more thoughtful about how these dollars are being used and to commit, on paper at least, to effective practices. But the extent to which ODE demands more from schools in return for the grant dollars and how it oversees spending remains an open question. There is, for example, no accessible report that provides basic information about SQIG, including documentation about the “types of strategies” schools use to improve student achievement. Moreover, spreading funds to so many schools, including hundreds of less-troubled TSI schools, means that CSI schools may not have the extra resources needed to effectively implement rigorous and potentially costly interventions.

High-dosage tutoring, for example, is estimated to cost more than $1,000 per pupil.[38] Under the now-defunct SIG program, which produced positive academic impacts in Ohio, the state awarded improvement grants worth about $2,000 per pupil.[39] As ODE plans future rounds of SQIG funding, it should consider mechanisms that drive more competitive grant dollars to CSI schools and ensure that the schools put these dollars to good use.

Analysis of Ohio’s CSI schools

In fall 2018, ODE identified 285 schools—8 percent of public schools in the state—as CSI, roughly half of which were district-run schools and the other half public charter schools. By October 2021, forty-one CSI schools had closed: thirty-four were charters, and seven were operated by a traditional school district (five of which were Cleveland). The comparatively high number of charter closures likely reflects reforms enacted in 2015 that strengthened charter accountability, particularly for sponsors (or “authorizers”). These governing entities have the authority to close a charter school because of poor academic performance and, likely in response to policy incentives, have more aggressively closed underperforming schools in recent years.[40] Although permanent closures can be challenging, research indicates that students who move from low-performing schools to superior ones after closure reap academic benefits.[41]

That leaves 244 schools from the first CSI cohort open today. Of those schools, 95 were identified on the basis of low overall scores in 2017–18; this paper refers to those schools as CSI: Overall. Another 149 schools were identified because of low graduation rates (CSI: Graduation). As Table 3 shows, these schools together enrolled almost 112,000 students in 2020–21—or 7 percent of all Ohio public school students. Most CSI schools are located in the Big Eight, cities that have historically struggled with low academic performance. Of the 244 CSI schools open today, 170 are located in the Big Eight (a hundred district and seventy charter schools). The schools represent 24 percent of all public schools in these cities, a much higher fraction than the 3 percent of non–Big Eight schools that are identified as CSI. Given their locations in urban areas, CSI schools enroll more Black and Hispanic students compared to the statewide average and serve almost double the percentage of economically disadvantaged students (Appendix Table B1). Cleveland and Columbus have the most CSI schools of the Big Eight cities (Appendix Tables B2–B3).

Table 3. Summary of CSI schools, 2020–21

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Table 3 highlights a couple nuances regarding charter schools that are identified as CSI. First, more than half of CSI charters are designated by the state as “dropout-recovery” schools because they educate primarily students who have dropped out or are at-risk of doing so. Dropout-recovery schools, as one might expect, typically register extremely low four-year graduation rates. Second, ten e-school charters are identified as CSI, among which is the state’s largest e-school, Ohio Virtual Academy, which enrolled roughly 18,000 students in 2020–21.

Academic data

The pandemic impacted the data available to examine performance trends in CSI schools. State tests were cancelled in spring 2020. Results from spring 2021 assessments revealed significant learning losses across Ohio and nationally; in addition, fewer students participated in state exams than in a typical year. As a result of these challenges, Ohio released only limited data for the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years. No overall or component ratings were assigned in these years, nor are there school-level data on student academic growth (i.e., value-added results). However, the overall and value-added ratings of CSI schools for the 2017–18 and 2018–19 school years appear in Appendix Table B4. As one might expect, the ratings are low.[42]

Caveats and all, it’s worth digging into the extant data to get a sense of the baseline performance of CSI schools and their short-term trends since identification. This section reviews performance-index (PI) scores and graduation rates from the 244 CSI schools that remain in operation. Their results are compared to two benchmarks—Big Eight district and statewide averages. The Big Eight is a useful comparison, as most CSI schools are located in those cities and the demographics of CSI schools are broadly similar. Although it’s a tall order for CSI schools to match statewide averages, performance against this benchmark helps us gauge results versus overall trends.

Performance index

Ohio’s PI is a composite measure of student achievement across all Ohio exams. As the table below shows, the measure provides extra weight to schools when students earn higher scores. Nonparticipation in state testing generates zeros on the measure. This policy usually has minimal impact on PI scores, but in 2020–21, the percentage of untested students was higher than usual, particularly in urban areas. In the year prior to the pandemic, the statewide average PI score was 85, but due to learning losses and nonparticipation in state testing, that average fell to 73 in 2020–21.

Because of test cancellations in spring 2020, no PI scores were reported for 2019–20.

Table 4. How the PI is calculated

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Not surprisingly, given the identification rules, CSI schools register very low PI scores. In 2017–18— the year of data that led to identification—their average PI score fell ten points below the Big Eight district average and was more than thirty points lower than the statewide average. Scores such as these indicate that most students in CSI schools have academic deficiencies. Indeed, just 27 percent of CSI schools’ third graders achieved proficiency on the state ELA exam in 2017–18, and 16 percent of high school students attending CSI schools reached that mark on the Algebra I exam.

The average PI score across CSI schools inched up by 0.1 points in 2018–19—the first year of improvement status—but that gain was less than the Big Eight districts (0.8 points) and fell short of the statewide gain (0.5 points). At the far right of Figure 4, we see that PI scores dropped sharply in the Big Eight districts in 2020–21, declining by 20.7 points relative to 2018–19. Achievement losses compared to 2018–19 were also large in CSI schools (−12.5 points) but tracked more closely with the change in the statewide average (−12.2 points) than the Big Eight average.

Figure 4. CSI schools’ PI scores versus selected benchmarks, 2017–18 to 2020–21

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Though most CSI schools are in the Big Eight, about 30 percent are located outside of those cities. Figure 5 indicates that non–Big Eight CSI schools have noticeably higher PI scores than their Big Eight CSI counterparts. In 2017–18, non–Big Eight CSI schools scores were 13.1 points higher than Big Eight CSI schools. That margin increased by 2020–21 to 14.3 points, as non–Big Eight CSI schools’ scores dipped less than their Big Eight counterparts.

Figure 5. CSI schools’ PI scores by Big Eight and non–Big Eight location, 2017–18 to 2020–21

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​Figure 6 shows that CSI schools receiving competitive SQIG grants have trailed other CSI schools by one to three points. SQIG schools lost slightly more ground on this measure than non-SQIG, CSI schools between 2017–18 and 2020–21 (−12.8 versus −12.3 points).

Figure 6. PI scores by SQIG funding status, 2017–18 to 2020–21

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The averages mask variation in performance across individual CSI schools. Figure 7 shows that twenty-two CSI schools increased their PI scores between 2017–18 and 2020–21. But on the balance, consistent with pandemic-related losses in scores statewide, most CSI schools lost ground on this measure. Seventy-five CSI schools posted somewhat modest declines of zero to ten points, while over a hundred schools suffered dips larger than ten points. The practices of CSI schools that have posted improvements during this period could warrant further exploration in future research, as they may provide models for other schools.

Figure 7. Change in PI scores across CSI schools, 2017–18 to 2020–21

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Graduation rates

We last examine four-year graduation rates, using the federally compliant rates used for CSI identification, which is different from the “state” graduation rate that appears on report cards (see Appendix A). Although there are continuous data on graduation from 2017-18 to 2020-21, rates have also been affected by the pandemic, as Ohio legislators allowed schools to award diplomas to certain students in the classes of 2020 and 2021 even if they hadn’t met standard requirements.[43] The temporarily lowered bar likely boosted graduation rates, possibly more so in lower-performing schools with more off-track students.

Figure 8 begins by showing the four-year graduation rates for the classes 2018–21. At a baseline, CSI schools posted a 50.2 percent graduation rate for the class of 2018, a number that is substantially below the Big Eight district and statewide average. Keep in mind that, as mentioned earlier, dozens of the CSI schools are “dropout-recovery” schools, and these are dragging down the averages. Since 2018, CSI schools’ graduation rates have increased by 5.3 percentage points to 55.5 percent for the class of 2021. The gap, however, between the statewide and Big Eight averages remain very large. CSI schools’ graduation rates for the class of 2021 fell thirty and nineteen percentage points below the state and Big Eight averages, respectively.

Figure 8. CSI schools’ four-year graduation rates versus selected benchmarks, class of 2018 to 2021

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The next figure shows that overall improvements in graduation rates are due more to non–Big Eight schools. CSI schools located outside of the Big Eight registered graduation rate improvements of 8.4 versus 3.4 percentage points for CSI schools in the Big Eight.

Figure 9. CSI schools’ four-year graduation rates by Big Eight and non–Big Eight location, class of 2018 to 2021

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Figure 10 displays average graduation rates based on whether CSI schools received competitive SQIG funding. In contrast to the PI results, SQIG-funded CSI schools post higher four-year graduation rates than non-SQIG schools. That said, non-SQIG schools made greater improvements in graduation rates from 2018 to 2021—a 6.1 percentage point gain—than their SQIG counterparts (4.4 points).

Figure 10. Four-year graduation rates by SQIG funding status, class of 2018 to 2021

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Akin to the changes in PI scores, wide variation emerges when looking at changes in graduation rates across CSI schools. On one end of the spectrum, twenty-eight CSI schools’ graduation rates increased by a whopping twenty percentage points or more, but another forty-two schools registered declines.

Figure 11. Change in four-year graduation rates among CSI schools, class of 2018 to 2021

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​Overall, for various reasons, we cannot reach definitive conclusions about whether CSI schools as a whole got better during this turbulent period in education. As data come in for the 2021–22 school year and beyond, policymakers should keep tabs on the trends in CSI schools; a rigorous evaluation of the program’s effectiveness would certainly be welcome, as well. However, what is clear from this overview is that the academic results of CSI schools remain low, and significant work is required to improve their outcomes.

Policy recommendations

Trying to turn around troubled schools remains a moral imperative and federal requirement for Ohio policymakers. But fulfilling these obligations will take more than completing compliance checks and sending dollars to schools. Ohio policymakers still have their work cut out in terms of devising a strong, clear school improvement program. We offer several recommendations to that end. Note that ODE could likely undertake all these actions without legislative action, but the General Assembly should consider incorporating them into a comprehensive package that updates Ohio’s school improvement statutes. Codifying school improvement policies would better ensure faithful ODE implementation, even if its leadership and priorities change.

• Recommendation 1: ODE should display a notice on a school’s report card if it is in CSI status and include a link to its improvement plan. Though school report cards include parent-friendly ratings, they omit any notice that a school has been identified under federal law as low performing. School improvement plans, meanwhile, are virtually impossible to find. Putting a notice on the report card would better inform the public that a school requires intervention, and linking to its improvement plan would allow parents and communities to see the promises a school has made—and allow them to hold the school accountable for fulfilling them.

• Recommendation 2: ODE should use its plan-approval authority to insist on high- quality practices, materials, and programs in CSI schools. ESSA requires SEAs to review and approve CSI schools’ improvement plans. While ODE almost surely has a formal process for reviewing plans, it should more explicitly and transparently set expectations about what should be in a plan. In elementary grades, for instance, the agency should require CSI schools to disclose their literacy strategies and should only approve plans that align with the science of reading.[44] In high school, the department could make sure that schools, particularly those that are identified for low graduation rates, provide extended learning time and academic or career supports.

• Recommendation 3: ODE should conduct biennial site visits in CSI schools that provide feedback on leadership and instructional practices, with a report made publicly available. For CSI schools subject to more rigorous interventions, visits should occur annually. On-the-ground engagement can surface problems that can’t be seen from desk reviews, offer more valuable and actionable feedback, facilitate connections between schools and support networks, and even uncover opportunities for the state to interject on behalf of an individual school to remove administrative barriers.[45] ODE already has experience conducting site visits through its SIDR, and it does in-depth reviews of a small number of struggling districts each year. It’s unclear, however, how often these evaluations occur in CSI schools, what type of feedback they offer, and whether there is any follow-up regarding whether schools put into practice observers’ recommendations. State policymakers should ensure that on-site evaluations in CSI schools occur at least every two years—and each year for those in more rigorous intervention—and make the findings publicly accessible. In-depth inspections in schools may require additional ODE capacity—they are not inexpensive—and legislators should consider allocating additional state funds for this purpose.[46]

• Recommendation 4: ODE should require CSI schools subject to more rigorous interventions to implement practices that have the strongest evidence of effectiveness. The department’s ESSA plan offers only vague descriptions about how it intends to implement more rigorous interventions when CSI schools fail to exit. With assistance from researchers and practitioners, ODE should create a short list of reforms from which CSI schools subject to more rigorous interventions must select. Those might include approaches such as prescribing specific high-quality curricula and materials, a rigorous teacher-feedback and coaching system, career-technical programs, or high-dosage tutoring and/or quality summer opportunities for students.[47]

• Recommendation 5: If CSI schools continue to fail, ODE should require the school to significantly restructure or close. In cases of persistent failure—e.g., starting in year seven or eight of CSI status—ODE should require more forceful restructuring, such as requiring staffing changes, “restarting” the school with a proven operator, or working with a district or authorizer to close the school. (State lawmakers could also modify the state’s existing, though perhaps irrelevant, restructuring law to make such interventions applicable when CSI schools fail to exit after many years.) As a matter of principle, flexibility and local autonomy should be respected, but after too many years of failure, the state should impose stricter requirements in students’ best interests. Heightened accountability measures are also critical to balancing the perverse incentive for a school to remain in CSI status simply to maintain eligibility for SQIG funds.

• Recommendation 6: ODE should dedicate up front a larger portion of SQIG funds for CSI schools and provide larger competitive grants to those committed to implementing effective practices. While other pools of funding can be used to support turnaround efforts—including substantial Covid-relief dollars—the relatively small sizes of these grants may be insufficient for schools considering whole-school reforms or time- or labor-intensive interventions. To ensure that CSI schools have adequate resources to undertake substantial changes, ODE should dedicate more funds up front for CSI schools in the next round of SQIG (e.g., two-thirds of the Title I set-aside). ODE should also offer higher maximum grant awards to CSI schools that commit to practices that meet the highest (“level 1”) evidence standard in their funding application. It also goes without saying that ODE should carefully follow ESSA provisions that require states to “monitor and evaluate” the uses of these funds.

• Recommendation 7: ODE should disclose in an accessible format each school’s SQIG award and the uses of those funds. The state report cards issued in 2018–19 to 2020–21 did not report SQIG funding, nor is there an accessible downloadable file on ODE’s website that contains information about SQIG grants. To find information about SQIG funding, one must navigate the complicated CCIP data portal. All this limits public transparency about the allocation and uses of these funds and appears to be inconsistent with ESSA reporting requirements.[48]

• Recommendation 8: ODE should release an annual publication that summarizes its school improvement efforts and the academic progress of CSI schools. There is no consolidated report on Ohio’s improvement efforts and the academic performance of CSI schools. As a matter of basic transparency, that should change. Lawmakers could go one step further and insist that the report findings be presented annually in the education committees to draw attention to the program and promote a better understanding of it.

Under ESSA, federal lawmakers have given states the ability to chart their own course when it comes to fixing low-performing schools. Shifting authority—and responsibility—to state policymakers is sensible. They are closer to the problem than D.C. bureaucrats and can tailor solutions to local contexts. But state leaders can’t put school improvement on autopilot and hope for the best. It won’t be for the faint of heart, but with strong leadership and thoughtful policymaking, school improvement has the potential to create brighter futures for more Ohio students. 

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Abbreviations and glossary

Academic distress commission (ADC): This is a state-driven initiative that increases state oversight of low-performing districts through an appointed five-member commission whose members supervise the district and a chief executive officer charged with creating and implementing a district-wide improvement plan. At the time of this report, ADCs oversee three Ohio districts: East Cleveland, Lorain, and Youngstown.

Big Eight: The Big Eight consist of Ohio’s largest urban school districts: Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown.

Comprehensive support and improvement (CSI): Under ESSA, states must identify low-performing schools as being in CSI status. In this report, CSI: Overall refers to schools identified based on their overall scores being within the lowest 5 percent of Ohio’s Title I schools, while CSI: Graduation refers to high schools identified because their graduation rates are below 67 percent. In Ohio, CSI schools are also known as “priority” schools.

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Enacted in December 2015, this is the main federal K–12 education law. It includes Title I funding—extra federal dollars to support high-poverty schools—along with state assessment, report card, and school improvement requirements. ESSA is the current iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the previous version being No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Performance index (PI): Ohio’s composite measure of student achievement across all state tests. It provides more weight, or “credit,” when students score at higher achievement levels (the calculation is illustrated here). PI scores have appeared on Ohio’s school report cards since at least 2003 and are a major component of the overall rating system.

State education agency (SEA): A government agency that oversees a state’s K–12 education system and implements federal and state education policies. The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) is Ohio’s state education agency.

School quality improvement grant (SQIG): The name of Ohio’s grant program that allocates federal school improvement funds to CSI and TSI schools. ESSA requires states to set aside 7 percent of Title I funding for this purpose; states may choose to distribute these dollars to schools via formula, competitive grant, or a mix of both.

Targeted support and improvement (TSI): Under ESSA, states must identify schools as TSI that have one or more low-performing subgroup of students (e.g., students with disabilities or English learners). In Ohio, schools in this category are also known as “focus” schools.

About this Report

About Fordham

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute promotes educational excellence for every child in America via quality research, analysis, and commentary, as well as advocacy and charter school authorizing in Ohio. It is affiliated with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and this publication is a joint project of the Foundation and the Institute. The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the many individuals whose time and talents helped to shape this report. On the Fordham side, I thank my colleagues Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Chad L. Aldis, and Jessica Poiner for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of the report. Fordham’s Jeff Murray provided expert support managing report publication and dissemination. Special thanks to Stéphane Lavertu of The Ohio State University for his terrific feedback on the report. Pamela Tatz copy edited the report, and Andy Kittles created the report design. All errors, however, are my own.

Aaron Churchill

Ohio Research Director, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Endnotes