The 25-member education commission appointed by Columbus, Ohio Mayor Michael B. Coleman has unanimously approved a set of recommendations to improve the quality of schools in the city, The Columbus Dispatch reports. Among the recommendations are some increasingly common education reform ideas, including introducing public charter schools to the city and expanding access to pre-K programs to all students in the district.

The recommendations were authored by commission staff and were based over day-long informational meetings held since the commission was first appointed in December of last year. The full list of recommendations can be found on the commission’s website.

If adopted in full, the recommendations would substantially change how Columbus schools are operated. For example, the school board – currently operating independently – would get an overseer appointed jointly by the mayor, the school board president, the county probate judge and the city auditor.

A fund overseen by a panel from the private sector, schools and city government would oversee a fund of $35 million to $50 million to help replicate high-performing city schools and successful charter schools. A portion of that money would come from property taxes paid by district residents.

The mayor would re-start a department of education in his administration. The director would sit on the school board as a non-voting, advisory member.

A number of recommendations were released prior to the final report earlier this month, including a plan to offer an pre-K program to every student in the city. Tuition would be adjusted based on family income with the neediest students attending for free.

The commission also recommended wider adoption of the blended learning model, which combines the traditional learning environment with an online learning component.

More blended learning would require a more robust technology infrastructure in the city, including a possible one laptop per childprogram that would make digital tools like portable computers or tablets available to each student in teacher in Columbus.

Give students more chances to earn college credit or advance toward a career. That means a college or career program should offer something in each of the school district’s neighborhood zones. Parents asked for this, Fingerhut said.

Link schools with social-service agencies, hospitals and other community services. School nurses should be able to share medical information about students with the children’s doctors if parents approve. Businesses should offer more student internships, and the city’s libraries should play a bigger role in helping students learn. Every Columbus child should have a library card, Fingerhut said, and every library should be linked with schools.

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An 8-week strike that paralyzed an Ohio school district is over after the school board unanimously approved a new teacher contract, The Ohio Plain Dealer reports. The school board met and all 5 members voted to approve the contract, with the news being made public a mere three minutes after the meeting was called to order.

David Frazee, the school board president, said that replacement teachers who have been subbing in for the strikers will be given a chance to take leave of the students formally, though he wasn’t clear on the details. The new contract will be made public on the district website.

The unanimous approval of the board comes after an “overwhelming” majority of the district’s 385 union members voted to ratify it this weekend. According Tracy Linscott, president of the Strongsville Education Association, the contract is quite similar to the terms proposed by the union 10 months ago.

The contract, effective through July 31, 2015, converts the 9.3 percent contribution the district paid into the teachers’ retirement fund to salary “by increasing the base salary by 10.3 percent, an amount equivalent to the amount paid by the board prior to the conversion.”

The contract also restores raises that were frozen in the 2011-2012 school year and gives teachers who are not eligible for step increases payments of $1,200 in September this and next year. Salaries at Step 20, the highest level, range from $60,975 to $93,827 for teachers with a Ph.D.

The contract also bars any reprisals against students, parents and staff members who took part in the strike and leaves until June 1st the renegotiation of a new teacher assessment system which will put the district in compliance with the new state legislation.

In exchange, the teachers have agreed to shoulder a larger portion of their health insurance premiums in the form of co-pays and deductibles. They will also cover their own dental and vision costs.

The new contracts also omits any mention of class size and school day length limits.

Teachers met for about 2 1/2 hours starting at 5 p.m. Saturday to discuss the pact and vote on it. Those leaving the meeting after casting ballots said they could not discuss the contract, but one said, “I’m happy to be back.” Another pumped her fist and said, “Coming back!” They declined to give their names.

Union president Linscott said Sunday that she feels rejuvenated and ready to help bring the schools and community back together.

The post Strongsville, Ohio Teacher Strike Resolved After Two Months appeared first on Education News.

Strongsville, Ohio teachers are continuing their strike even as the two sides are attempting to find a way towards a compromise with the federally appointed mediator, North Ohio’s Sun News reports. Teachers have now been striking for two weeks, while those hoping for a speedy resolution are losing hope after another 5 and a half hour negotiation session failed last night.

Tracy Linscott, the president of the Strongsville Education Association, and School Board President David Frazee have both expressed frustration with lack of progress in the talks. Both said that they had high hopes that the federal mediator would bring the two sides closer, and both feel that a compromise remains out of reach at the moment.

The meeting, held at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services office in Independence, was called March 15 by the federal mediator whose been working on the negotiations since Jan. 30 and has worked with the Strongsville City Schools for a number of years.

But after the Board of Education and its bargaining team emerged, Superintendent John Krupinski said the parties remain “substantially apart” on many key issues, and no further negotiating sessions are scheduled.

The last proposal submitted by the union calls for reinstatement of step and column teacher raises as well as changing the way the work day for teachers is defined.

The raises have been frozen since the last time the union and the district butted heads in 2011. The teachers’ proposal was in response to the “best” offer submitted by the district which called for the raises to remain frozen but offered a to reinstitute Voluntary Personal Growth raises and more flexibility on how pensions are computed.

Meanwhile, parents of Strongsville seem to be split in their reactions to the strike. Many express frustration at the situation, but while some are calling on the teachers to get back to the classrooms, others are standing with the union against the district.

About 100 parents showed up at a rally the purpose of which was to show support for teachers who are willing to cross the picket lines and enter the classrooms again.

Komarek and other parents said behavior by the Strongsville Education Association’s protesting teachers – which has included two teachers getting arrested and video of teachers yelling and screaming at substituteswhile they were being escorted by police to apply the day before the strike – is setting a bad example for students, and the community.
“This strike is embarrassing the community and it’s been going on too long,” Komarek said.

Meanwhile at 7pm every night about 150 teachers, students and parents get together for a candle-light vigil which in theory was supposed to be about the students, but turned into an impromptu rally in support of the union.

Organizers of both events vowed to continue holding them daily while the strike goes on.

The post Ohio Town’s Lengthy Teacher Strike Splits Community appeared first on Education News.

Officials in some Ohio school districts have come to believe that the strings attached to federal Race to the Top grants make the money not worth receiving, The Columbus Dispatch reports. As a result as many as 80 districts and some charter schools have withdrawn from the program, in part because the money wasn’t sufficient to cover the costs associated with the grant requirements.

Even schools that have been accepting money for years are now having second thoughts, as the expense of developing a teacher evaluation system that would meet the standards set out by the grant program proved too much.

“We were spending a disproportionate amount of time following all the requirements,” said Mike Johnson, the superintendent of Bexley schools, which turned down the last half of a $100,000, four-year grant this school year. “It was costing us far more than that to implement all of the mandates.”

Teachers lost classroom time because they were stuck in training sessions aimed at familiarizing them with the new assessment regimes. The burden was particularly onerous on smaller schools who didn’t have the staff numbers nor the flexibility to allow this much time to non-academic pursuits. All in all, it was a long list of commitments for an amount of money that frequently added up to less than a percent of the district’s annual budget.

The goal of the grant program is to increase student achievement and raise the graduation rates for schools who commit to overhauling their testing systems in line with the approach championed by education reformers in the Obama administration. The Ohio grant – one of the 11 state grants to be given out – also comes with a condition that the new assessment system be put in place in the coming academic year, a full 12 months before the requirement kicks in for the rest of the state’s schools.

Some have been leery of the evaluations because half of a teacher’s performance is based on how much progress his or her students make in school. Worthington school officials haven’t decided whether they will accept the last quarter of their $520,000 grant, saying the new teacher evaluations would violate the contract between the district and its teachers union. Both Worthington and Bexley schools promised their teachers that they wouldn’t use the evaluations until 2014, giving them more time to prepare. They said it was unclear when they signed on to Race to the Top that they would be required to meet an earlier deadline.

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Ohio’s State Auditor has added four more school districts to the list of those suspected of changing student data to avoid poor state ratings. The Columbus Dispatch says that Dave Yost now believes 9 of Ohio’s 614 districts cheated to avoid penalties. But, says Jennifer Smith Richards, several of the schools claim that their mistakes were honest and protest that the state’s rules were too unclear.

Cincinnati, the state’s most-improved large urban district, was added to the list of “scrubbers” yesterday. So were Canton, Northridge in Montgomery County, and Winton Woods in Hamilton County. Columbus, Cleveland, Marion, Toledo and Campbell in Mahoning County had been named in an interim report in October.

Most of the districts are accused of finding ways to delete records of under-performing students. The students may have transferred within the district, from one high school to another, often to an alternative school. Some students with notable absences were withdrawn from records without their knowledge. The students with high rates of absence were often scoring low on standardized tests. Yost alleges that one district even marked low-performing students as “home schooled” to avoid taking credit for their test scores.

The newly-added schools protested that they didn’t deserve the public shame.

In an email to the auditor’s office, Canton Superintendent Adrian Allison lamented that Canton “ will be lumped into a report about districts and schools that intentionally manipulated data to improve their results on the Report Card.”

“The one thing I am sure about is that there was no data ‘scrubbing’ in Canton City Schools,” Allison wrote.

But Yost said that his report had already screened for honest mistakes, and that his team believed the nine districts had intentionally altered data. He didn’t exonerate the state’s Education Department, admitting that its rules were often unclear. He also recommended more oversight, including that the state should have not only student numbers and scores, but also student names so that it can verify which students had moved. Perhaps most importantly, the auditor recommended withholding the state’s pending conclusions before they are final.

Yost also said schools shouldn’t be allowed to see their projected report-card grade before they have finished submitting student data. Schools now submit test scores and other data and can see a preliminary calculation of report-card grades. That encourages them to fiddle with data until they get the desired grade, Yost said. The report says Toledo did that.

The state’s allegations against Columbus are more serious. A study of computer logs showed that some employees, including an assistant principal, actively changed student grades from failing to passing. They may have changed grades over 5,000 times over the course of the 2011-2012 school year.

Ohio plans to recalculate schools’ scores, using the new information. Beyond that, penalties will vary. It’s assumed that the schools broke state rules, but some may have broken federal rules. Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top mandate that schools collect data as part of their federal funding. Tampering with student scores could lead to federal charges for these districts. The auditor believes that Columbus’s grade changing practices will certainly involve federal complaints.

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Ohio’s Governor John Kasich has proposed a budget with greatly expanded funding for private school vouchers, writes Molly Bloom in NPR’s State Impact. Under new, broader definitions, as many as half of Ohio’s children could become eligible for state help in attending a private school.

Ohio already devotes about $100 million to subsidizing private school tuition for students who have special needs or attend low-performing schools, especially in Cleveland’s notoriously poor districts. Around 20,000 of Ohio’s school children are using these vouchers.

Kasich proposes setting aside $25.5 million over two years to pay for an expanded eligibility program. The greatest expansion would come in defining all students whose families meet the low income standard as automatically eligible, regardless of special needs or the quality of their public school. Bloom estimates that as many as 45% of children will fall into this category, since the line is drawn at $46,000 for a family of four. The governor’s expansion plan is not intended for all of these students, since it begins with kindergarten and will expand only to first grade in the second year of its funding.

These vouchers would initially be available to kindergarteners. The kindergarteners would retain their vouchers as they moved to first grade. Kasich administration officials said it was unclear whether first graders who did not receive vouchers as kindergarteners would be eligible for vouchers. State budgets cover two years, but the administration has said the intent would be for students to continue to receive vouchers in third grade, fourth grade and so on.

To placate critics of private school vouchers, Kasich’s funding does not count on subtracting from public schools when low-income students use vouchers to transfer out. The governor’s proposal includes another expansion for students who don’t meet the other criteria, including low income, but whose reading fails to progress in the primary grades. State tests of reading, through grade 3, could be used to show eligibility.

It’s not clear if those vouchers would be available only to individual students who struggle in reading or to all students in schools or districts that receive low marks in the new early literacy portion of the new school report cards.

Because failure to progress in reading would be counted as the public school’s failure, the state would deduct funding for a student who transferred under this eligibility program.

Although the numbers appear to include about half of the state’s school children, in fact, far fewer would actually use or even apply for vouchers. Experience with the current eligibility suggests that only a fraction of those eligible would actually choose to leave their local public schools. Ohio offers 12,000 vouchers for children with autism and other special needs, but nowhere near that many request to attend a private school. Most private schools find it difficult to work with children whose needs require extra staff, and it will take more time to develop schools for children with autism and other behavior and learning problems.

Ohio’s proposed voucher expansion is part of a nationwide increase in state experiments with mixed schooling models. Tennessee’s governor recently proposed expanding private school vouchers for students in low-performing schools.

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Cheating appears to have taken an unusual form in Columbus schools. A study of computer logs undertaken by The Columbus Dispatch uncovered instances of district employees changing student letter grades some 5,300 times over the course of one year, all in an attempt to “scrub” the data in order to meet state and federal achievement metrics.

The most active in the grade-changing game was Stanley K. Pyle, the assistant principal at Marion-Franklin High School who used the system 495 times to swap grades, mostly from Fs to Ds. That accounts for 9% of all failing-to-passing grade changes for the entire 2010-11 academic year.

The Dispatch attempted to get a statement from district officials and directly from Pyle on its findings, but received no response over email or the phone. Jeff Warner, the district spokesman, said only that such activity by a school administrator wouldn’t be unusual, as one of Pyle’s responsibilities would have been to make sure that all grades were entered correctly.

 The lawyer the district hired to conduct an investigation that parallels that of the state auditor said there are likely good explanations why some employees changed huge numbers of grades. It was their job to correct data, he said. The failing-to-passing changes to final marks are just one type of change made to student grades. Such changes could have awarded students credits, which could have affected graduation rates. Auditors have asked whether the rates are accurate. School employees made more than 311,000 grade changes overall during the school year in question. The district, which is Ohio’s largest, has about 50,000 students.

In addition to the internal investigation by the district, the Dispatch’s findings also attracted the attention of State Auditor David Yost. They have been looking at the data since June in an attempt to determine if the grade changes were legitimate or an attempt by school officials to make their results look better than they were.

But grade changes weren’t the only kind of record altering going on. Officials also retroactively withdrew students who had missed a large portion of the school year or who received low results on the standardized tests.

Yost now is investigating Columbus separately. His audit of other Ohio districts’ scrubbing practices will be released late this month; Columbus’ won’t come out in the near future, he said.

“You pull the string and watch the ball unroll,” he said of his growing Columbus investigation. “ I can’t possibly predict when we’re going to be done there.”

Yost said last week that he can’t comment about the grade-changing data. The district’s internal auditor mentioned grade changing as a potential problem in the audit she released last month.

Although principals and assistant principals do indeed have the power to change grades in the system after they’ve been entered, the standard operating procedure for such changes requires that each instance is recorded so the process could later be audited.

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Ohio education officials announced last week that they will replace their current high school graduation exam with a tougher test that will gauge how ready high school graduates are to tackle college-level work. In addition, students will also be required to pass a series of end-of-course exams prior to graduation.

The goal of the new testing regime is to make sure that students who are leaving Ohio high schools are either college or career ready upon graduation — something that the previous graduation exam didn’t measure. The new subject exams will first be given to high school sophomores during the 2014-15 academic year.

“This is a major step forward in our reform efforts to ensure all Ohio students have the knowledge and skills necessary to leave school remediation-free and ready for their postsecondary experience in higher education or work-force training,” said Michael Sawyers, Ohio’s acting superintendent of public instruction.

Education officials have been working on a replacement for the Ohio Graduation Test for two years, ever since they were directed to do so by state lawmakers. The exam, which has long been thought of as too easy, only measured skills gained up until 11th grade. Its lack of rigor was apparent in the fact that more than 40% of high school graduates in the state ended up needing remedial work when they got to college.

Sawyers, speaking jointly with the Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro, said that the new college-readiness exam, along with the ten subject tests, will fix the problem and will finally allow officials to determine if students are leaving school sufficiently prepared. The course exams will cover subjects like mathematics, English, social studies and science.

“Our goal is to advance degree completion in the state. One of the key ways to accomplish this goal is to ensure students are college- and career-ready. Eliminating the OGT and replacing it with a better gauge of college readiness will help students to be more successful,” Petro said.

The new testing system will go into effect at the same time as teachers will begin teaching a curriculum that conforms to the Common Core Standards. The subject exams will test the knowledge required under a CCS-conforming curriculum.

How the college-readiness exam will be put together isn’t quite clear. There is anticipation of a bidding process open to companies to design the exam; an alternative solution would be to use the ACT test already being taken by seniors seeking college admissions to judge student fitness for college-level work.

The post Ohio’s New Testing Regime Will Assess College Readiness appeared first on Education News.

It wouldn’t be overstating things to call the new academic goals just recently approved by the Cleveland school board audacious. In only five short years, Cleveland hopes to have schools achieving state test scores that beat every other large urban school district in Ohio.

Agreeing on the new set of goals is only the first step towards creating a set of benchmarks that can be used to measure the city’s academic improvement. The creation of such standards was a condition set out by the state legislature when it altered the law at the request of the city mayor Frank Jackson. The new rules are now on the books, but so is the requirement that the city make annual reports in its progress and show substantial improvement in student outcomes by 2017.

“We need to move this district forward,” said Eric Gordon, the district’s chief executive officer. “We’re trying to be aggressive. Are we being aggressive enough? We’re trying to be realistic. Are we being realistic enough? We need to find that balance in the middle.”

The most ambitious set of goals have to do with improving reading proficiency among Cleveland students. The district hopes to have 75% of its 4th, 6th and 8th graders meeting the reading standards set out by the state. This would mean that the district hopes to put itself in a position to shortly meet 3 performance indicators mandated by the state, none of which were met the previous academic year.

Although board members call for improvement in math performance in all grades, they went short of setting goals to meet the 75% state proficiency standard. Meanwhile, the schools will be working to improve the state assessment exams in all subjects every year between now and 2017.

In addition to setting out the metrics it hopes to meet in mathematics and literacy, the district also hopes to raise its high school graduation rate from 56% to 71% between now and then. Meanwhile, it’ll also be working to raise its overall performance score — thus hoping to bump up the district’s ranking from second-to-last as it earned last year.

The “performance index” goal score of 89.9 – compared to last year’s 75.4 – would have put the district just ahead of the Bedford schools and well ahead of districts like Euclid and Maple Heights. That score would have also surpassed other urban districts like Akron, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo.

Gordon said that trying to be better than those other districts is a reasonable goal.

The post Cleveland Schools Aim to Top All Urban Districts in Ohio appeared first on Education News.

When Khalilah Jones was only a few minutes late to the first parent-teacher conference at Cleveland’s Citizens Academy charter school, she found out to her surprise that all the seats in the gymnasium hosting the meeting were taken. This was the first year that Jones’ kids were enrolled in the school, and she hadn’t yet realized one of the things that contributes to the school’s success is the high rate of parental involvement. Unlike in other schools around the area, meetings between parents, school staff and faculty aren’t patchily attended. Instead, they were the hottest ticket in town.

Spending even a few minutes observing the proceedings, it isn’t hard to see why. According to Margaret Bernstein, writing for The Plain Dealer, the level of enthusiasm was high even at the start and only got higher as the Assistant Principal Lisa Quick announced the latest round of results from the state-mandated testing the year before.

There was lots of good news to celebrate. Ninety-nine percent of third-graders passed the state assessment exam in mathematics, and 100% of fifth-graders passed their reading tests. The passing rates for other exams and grades hovered between 96% and 98%.

How much of the school’s success can be attributed to parental involvement is hard to say. But there’s no doubt that parents who take an active role in their kids’ education help them succeed academically. However, to make a real difference, parents need to move beyond the traditional definition of “involved.”

Involved doesn’t just mean helping out with bake sales. Engaged parents make sure that their children don’t miss school unnecessarily and that they arrive on time. They read with them, help them master their alphabet and math facts, and essentially back up what the teacher’s doing when the student is home.

The parents of Citizens Academy students are, of course, a self-selecting group. They have already proven that they’re more invested in their kids’ education merely by making the effort to enroll them at the Academy. Still, those in charge of the school don’t take that enthusiasm for granted — even parents who are inclined to be engaged need a little encouragement once in a while. Providing that encouragement is the job of Tonyetta Miller, whose job is to “promote parent engagement,” which includes in-person contact and a campaign to get each family to volunteer at the school for at least 8 hours each year. She is even in charge of organizing the end of year parent-appreciation assembly that gives students an opportunity to thank their parents for all the work they’ve done over the course of the year.

Here, the parent club is the “in crowd” and members compete against one another to see who’s more involved. “You will hear parents in the hall saying, ‘I got two hours this week, how many do you have?’ ” Miller said, laughing.

Still, Citizens Academy didn’t always have such robust parent participation. Miller had to build it.

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