Prepared Notes for Board Meeting
August 23, 2010
Marc A. Schare
I have a few updates and
random thoughts today.
First, I attended a
presentation by Terry Ryan from the Fordham Foundation on lessons learned from
Fordham’s sponsorship of charter schools in Ohio. It is fair to say that
Fordham is a leading proponent of the charter school and education reform
movements and I thought their message might be relevant to any district interested
in renewal. Of the 18 lessons outlined, here are a handful
that I thought interesting enough to share.
Lesson 5 is that risks
need to be taken and changes embraced, even if encouraging innovation,
experimentation and choice in K-12 education entails obvious perils. In a
charter school, parents choose to embrace the change the charter is offering.
In Worthington’s renewal efforts, parents and students sometimes get swept
along for the ride so we need to move slower and with more community
engagement, but we do need to move.
Lesson 7 is that high
performing charter schools are not all alike and seldom static. Each school has
its own personality and its own distinctive way of doing things, a concept very
much embraced by our renewal efforts. The paper also discusses the difficulty
of replication implying there is no single formula that can guarantee success.
Lesson 11 is that good
data really matters and reveals truths that are sometimes painful to behold.
Ryan made the point that Ohio has been undergoing nonstop school reforms since
1997 with No Child Left Behind complicating the equation in 2002. With each new
reform, curricula needs to be aligned to new standards, data systems must be
set up to track and use new student data and so forth. Our district does a
phenomenal job at dissecting our data and using it to inform professional
development and resource decisions but the rate of change would tax any
district. It’s my hope that the state moves a little bit slower is mandating
one reform after another to allow districts like ours time to get a few years
of data on the previous reform before implementing additional reforms.
Lesson 13 is that the
education marketplace did not work as well as Fordham thought it would. Many charter
school advocates believe that we should get rid of public schools and let
parents use vouchers to select schools for their kids. This, according to free
market doctrine, would assure quality because schools would either improve or
die. In practice, some really atrocious charter schools are allowed to languish
for years according to Ryan, often because of the role the school plays in the
community. While Worthington’s schools would never be in danger of closing due
to academic performance, it does behoove us to remember, as if our constituents
would ever let us forget, the role that neighborhood
schools play throughout the district and that the importance of a neighborhood
school to a community might trump even the possibility of academic gains
offered with realignment.
Finally, Lesson 17 is that
all too often, adult/institutional interests trump the interests of kids. It’s
my hope that in Worthington, all stakeholders always try to strike an
appropriate balance between the needs of the adults and the children we serve.
And speaking of balance…
While I personally have
misgivings about the recently enacted federal legislation sending hundreds of
millions of dollars to Ohio education, we must nevertheless discuss how that
money should be used in Worthington if some of it should happen to come our way.
Assuming the money comes
with no strings attached or, alternatively, if those strings define tasks
and/or projects that we have already budgeted for, my preference would be to
take the federal money and use it to plug any holes created by Ohio’s next
biennium budget or even, and I know this is a radical thought, use it to reduce
the size of our next operating levy if, in fact, we have that flexibility. My
point is that money from the federal government should not be treated like
money from heaven. The federal government does not have a dime that it didn’t
tax from citizens, including those of the Worthington School District, or borrow from
future generations and by saving this money and using it for levy amount
reduction or hole plugging, we are demonstrating that just because we get
one-time unexpected revenue, we are going to use those funds in the context of
the overall five year spending plan that we’ve adapted, again assuming we are
permitted to do so.
And
finally…
I wanted to comment
publicly on Mark Hill’s speech at convocation. I am a big proponent of teacher
accountability measures but Mark was absolutely correct in his criticism of
Ohio’s “Value-Add”. Last week, Fordham released a report describing some of the
possible flaws in Value-Add. These flaws came to light when Douglas Clay, a
researcher at Cleveland State, observed that 83% of 5th graders made
below expected growth in 5th grade reading but the very next year,
98% of those students made above expected growth while in 6th grade.
Same kids. Wild Variations. Big problem. Fordham’s analysis suggests that the obvious
culprit is the assumption that the rigor of the standardized test remains
consistent across time and across grade level. This does not seem to be the
case and is therefore the most likely source of the variations. Ohio is
instituting two changes to value-add to hopefully smooth out the variations by
incorporating a sort of rolling average to gains made, however, Fordham
acknowledges that value-add is still very much a work in progress. That’s not
to say that value-add can’t play a role in measuring teacher or school
effectiveness, but we need to understand that it is only a part of the puzzle.