BuckeyeBlog

About those school report cards. Your district is rated in one of five categories. Excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch, academic emergency. Once in awhile you’ll see these compared to grades, A, B, C, etc.

This is pure nonsense, a substitute for thought. Presumably it’s a shorthand, allowing parents and anyone else who is interested (usually people selling things to parents) to rank a school to the nearest good or bad, but it’s still nonsense. Maybe if the categories were excellent, good, average, poor, failing, then it might be worth something, but even then it’s not much use. Unless you’re able to say what the elements of these things include, it gives you no idea what is really happening, and worse, it gives you a false impression of what is truly relevant to your child or indeed any individual child.

What our federal, state and bureaucratic officers are doing mucking around in here bears no relation to any student’s performance. It does, however, relate closely to whether that politician or bureaucrat takes credit for the good things others do, while ensuring that the responsibility for the bad things lands elsewhere.

Each day George Bush, Ted Kennedy and the lot of them must wake up and think, “I was excellent yesterday, and I’m going to do be so again today.”

Dublin Schools will soon be rated “continuous improvement“.

Of course that means nothing whatever, so you have to know that one of the alternative ratings is “excellent,” which Dublin is accustomed to receiving.

At the same time, the state has 30 benchmarks that it scores, and Dublin hit all 30 of them. So what gives?

Two things. The state has a different scale than the feds, and the feds require that the schools measure various subgroups to see how they are performing. This is all well and good, since schools will be quick to tout their excellent performance while forgetting to mention untold numbers of individual students who simply aren’t receiving an education. Shame on the state for not doing a better job emphasizing that. No Child Left Behind, indeed.

But the federal law has a bit of silliness in it concocted by Ted Kennedy and George Bush: by 2014, 100 percent of students in each group must meet benchmarks, which is another way of saying there can be no failing students.

This is silly. People are going to fail all the time. My wife can set the benchmark that I’ll look like Tom Cruise, but it isn’t going to happen.

On the other hand, the schools shouldn’t be allowed to ignore those failing students, and assuredly if you leave it up to them to tell you about those failing students, you’re not going to hear about them.

There might be a role here for the federal government to require truth in advertising, and require schools to disclose certain information, such as failure rates. But that’s about the extent of it. There’s no role for federal funding, and there’s no role for federal mandates beyond disclosure, including requirements to close schools or take other remedial action.

Dennis J. Willard of the Akron Beacon Journal writes today that Governor Strickland’s “Conversations on Education” appear to be a sincere attempt to bring about meaningful reform:

It would be easy to dismiss Gov. Ted Strickland’s 12-city tour on education reform as a dog-and-pony show.

To do so, however, would be to prematurely demean the governor’s sincere intentions to seriously address Ohio’s woeful education funding system.

And we should at least give the governor an unimpeded path as he attempts to listen to Ohio.

On Tuesday, Strickland kicked off his ”Conversations on Education” in Columbus before an audience of about 200 people representing educators, parents, students, business owners and others.

The crowd talked about infusing students with passion, making school fun, crafting individual education plans to meet the student’s needs and talents, longer school years, all-day kindergarten, the return of the arts and physical fitness, and less emphasis on testing…

…Still, Strickland admitted afterward that he didn’t hear anything particularly new.

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National Review Online has posted an interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  Since leaving office, he has remained involved in education reform through the Foundation for Excellence in Education.  One part of the Q&A caught my attention in particular: 

NRO: In your opening remarks at the conference, you said that our education system is like “an 8-track system living in an iPod world”? What changes do you think need to be made to bring our education system into the 21st century?

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Students whose behavior is so poor as to embroil them in the Mahoning County juvenile justice system, including truants, will find themselves at a new school, Vindy.com reports.

It’s a charter school. Happens to be sponsored by the Mahoning County Educational Service Center, which already sponsors two others.

Too bad it’s only for the kids who are so poorly behaved that they are actually charged with crimes. What’s really needed is for a teacher to be able to put a student in an alternative school easily, for mere misbehavior. This is the single biggest issue behind problems in our large public schools. Change the equation so that it’s hard to stay in and easy to wash out, rather than a prison that you can’t escape from no matter how disruptive your behavior, and it will be remarkable how student attitudes will change.

The only tin note is the idea that they’re creating “education courts,” just as they have drug courts (and mental health courts). It’s not at all clear that we want this sort of judicial proliferation. What’s next? Debt courts? Eating bad food courts? Why don’t they start with Bad Judge Courts and see how they do there.

Youngstown teacher union boss Will Bagnola should be credited for candor in revealing the YEA’s true interests in thwarting kids from getting the education they need from a charter school. According to the Youngstown Vindicator:

Will Bagnola, teachers union president, said the Youngstown Education Association’s chief concern was that sending city kids to the charter school could result in job losses for teachers in the regular system.

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The usually excellent Jennifer Smith Richards must have been dozing a bit yesterday, or possibly her editor was, or both. Here’s a nice little story about Ohio’s changing it’s silly “grading” system for public schools and the consequences. Apart from an equally silly statement that the old system was designed “to punish struggling schools” (maybe it was designed to help students? Save the OEA press releases for later) the story does a nice job of describing one of the basic problems of the No Child Left Behind concept that 100 percent of children will be above average. It even quotes Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan, always a plus.

Just one thing, though. Who did this scrapping? Was it one of state Rep. Larry Wolpert’s bills to reform education? (Presumably not, since the state legislature must “still approve the new plan.”) Was it an action by Gov. Strickland? The Ohio Department of Education? The federal Department of Education? Did someone issue an executive order? Write a letter? Approve a waiver request? We sort of know why, and some aspect of it happened yesterday, but who, what, and where?

Washington, D.C. school choice leader Virginia Walden Ford talks about the importance of families sharing their experience in the scholarship program. My favorite quote from this clip:

Legislators need to see the faces of the children who will benefit from their parents having choices.

Go here for more Voices of School Choice.

The LA Times reports on a new study of charter school performance in the city of angels.  The study, conducted by the California Charter Schools Association, found that “charters in LAUSD outperform traditional public schools on a variety of student achievement measures.”  But, the interesting part of this story is not the study’s findings, but rather the response from the LA school system.

Ramon C. Cortines, L.A. Unified’s newly appointed senior deputy superintendent, said the report pointed to how traditional schools could learn from charters — a strikingly different attitude from that typically expressed by district officials.

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Update:

The House vote on SB 57 has been delayed until probably June 10th, since Representative Widowfield, a bill supporter, resigned from the House yesterday and was unable to vote today.

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The Special Needs voucher, SB 57, may be debated and voted on in the Ohio House today.

Interested citizens can follow the debate here on the Ohio Channel.

Warning: there may be scenes that will anger or disappoint you. For example, the pervasive distain many legislators will have for parents’ abilities to choose what is best for their children, or, their unquestioning embrace of socialistic principle in defending a one-size-fits-all government monopoly of public education.

As we heard in the Senate debate, there will be gross distortions of the facts, particularly the cost of the program. When any number more than $70 million in terms of money spent though the voucher program is mentioned, know that to be a whopper. And the opportunity for the program to save money for taxpayers (because the vouchers are capped in certain instances and because private schools – namely your community’s Catholic, Christian or Jewish schools well-versed at efficient operations – are simply less expensive that public schools) will probably not be aired.

Finally, watch for a poison-pill amendment perhaps coming from OEA-beholden Republican Randy Gardner. Rep. Gardner may propose what will sound like a good idea, to remove the voucher funding from the current flow of state money to local schools for special needs children.

But think of the perverse incentive this creates for public schools: if they are able to get rid of their special needs students into the Voucher program, they still get to keep all of the state funding as if the child were still filling a chair in their building. Also, the competitive effects – of public schools improving their activity because of parental/market accountability — that have been found in Florida would no longer apply. There would be no ‘whip of competition’ to condition the public schools to perform better.

The true purpose of this amendment will be to redesign the voucher as a costly, duplicative program thereby giving Gov. Strickland a more defensible excuse to veto it.