Late last month, Ohio’s new Report Cards were released and many news stories focused on how traditionally high performing school districts took some hits for failing to address issues among some of their most gifted and challenged students. There appears to be a shift from simply examining straight test scores (notoriously linked to poverty) to a more nuanced, thoughtful examination of their meaning. And while these data remain limited by the fact only a few tests are given in a few grades in a few subjects, it appeared that the state was headed in a positive direction.
Well, even though there are better aspects of the report card, the overall results remain the same: the richer your district, the better the performance. We have attached two charts below that show how different districts perform by both percentage of students in poverty and the state’s own classification of each district.
Click for full-size image.[Read more…]
Word has come down that David Hansen, former President of the ultra-conservative Buckeye Institute, will be overseeing Charter School and Voucher programs at the Ohio Department of Education.
Hansen, whose group made its name by publicly releasing the salaries of public employees — attempting to shame them, will be pulling down a cool $105,000. Couple that with his wife, Beth Hansen, who is Gov. John Kasich’s Chief of Staff, and the Hansens are now making $275,000 in taxpayer money.
We don’t expect the Buckeye Institute will be nearly as willing to point out the hypocrisy of an anti-public worker zealot making more than a quarter million dollars in taxpayer money.
As for the job, Hansen has a heavy lift ahead. On the latest Report Card, more than 41% of charter school grades were F. More than 60% of Charter School grades were D or F. Only 20% of their grades were A or B. [Read more…]
As we teased yesterday, new state report cards do not include the state’s 85 so-called “dropout recovery” schools with other charters, nor are these schools issued letter grades in the areas measured by the new evaluation system.
This special treatment of dropout recovery schools was the result of intense lobbying by political financier David Brennan, whose chain of dropout recovery schools – Life Skills Centers — form the bulk of his considerable taxpayer funded Charter School operation. Brennan’s received over $800 million in taxpayer money since 1999 without ever testifying before a legislative committee. That’s apparently what $3 million in campaign contributions buys you these days.
Life Skills Centers are so bad that one of their locations graduates only 1.2% of its kids, and all of them at one point did not have their diplomas accepted by the military.
Since 2005, standards for these dropout recovery schools have been gathering dust on a shelf. Meanwhile, the state was banned from shutting them down — even though their performance was abysmal — before standards were adopted. Now that standards have been adopted, dropout recovery schools are separated from charter schools, which means charters no longer have these terribly performing dropout recovery schools to drag down their averages, theoretically. [see yesterday’s post about charter school performance] [Read more…]
Last week, a new Ohio Report Card was unveiled with a new approach to evaluating schools, and upon first glance, it appears that Ohio charter schools may be doing better than they did under the older, supposedly “easier” system.
The new Report Card grades schools and districts based on nine criteria, for which they receive an A-F letter grade.
Charter schools received the same average letter grade as traditional school districts in just two categories: value-added scores for gifted education and for students in the bottom 20%. However, only 2 charters received gifted scores, rendering that measure statistically meaningless. Value added scores measure actual test score growth versus what expected growth would be.
Yet charters overall still woefully underperform districts overall. And it is pretty dramatic. More than 41% of charter school grades were F. More than 60% of Charter School grades were D or F. Only 20% of their grades were A or B.
District grades were much better. Only 11% were F and 20% were D or F. Meanwhile, 53% of districts’ grades were A or B — about evenly split between both grades.
Charters got mostly Ds and Fs while public districts got mostly As and Bs.
Districts outperform charters in every category but the two mentioned earlier (and again, only 2 charters received a grade in the Gifted category). The difference is most stark when comparing graduation rates — the average charter gets an F in four-year graduation rates and a D in five-year rates. Traditional public districts average Bs in both.
What’s even more amazing is this: these charter data do not include 85 Dropout Recovery schools (about 25% of the 347 Charters in operation last year), which have been separated out in the new Report Card. These schools, historically among the poorest performing in the state, do not receive letter grades on the new Report Card.
They are exempt.
We will look at how dropout recovery schools were exempted and how they perform (spoiler alert: it’s not good) in a future post. But in the meantime, the take-away on charters is that even by excluding 85 of the poorest-performing charters by exempting dropout recovery schools from letter grades on the Report Cards, Ohio’s charter schools still underperform traditional public schools on nearly every measure. And yet they are set to receive up to $124 million more state funding this year thanks to continued expansion and policies that shift more pubic dollars away from traditional districts.
And they do this all while spending nearly twice as much as districts on non-instructional costs, effectively removing 6.5% of every non-Charter School student’s state money, providing fewer opportunities for the nearly 90% of children who attend Ohio’s traditional public schools.
The state’s new report card is out now, and there are some positive changes to the format. While many of the aspects of the report card continue to emphasize relatively raw test scores, which are notoriously predicted by demographics, there are new measures that for the first time de-emphasize the importance of demographics on school performance.
mock-up of new report card
The most obvious are the categories looking at how gifted students, special education students and the lowest performing students grow in a district. These measures illuminate for the first time whether schools have served the extremes in their populations — the very talented as well as the very challenging. [Read more…]
Recent policy changes will contribute to an already growing number of new brick & mortar and online charter schools – the vast majority of which are failing – and increase the amount of state funding lost by children attending traditional public schools to nearly $1 billion annually.
Three new eSchools have been approved to operate in Ohio in the 2013-2014 school year – the first new statewide eSchools to launch since the state imposed a ban on new schools in 2005. The three new schools are Provost Academy, Mosaica Ohio, and Insight School of Ohio, the latter an imprint of the troubled K-12 chain of online schools.
Based on enrollment projections contained in these schools’ applications[i] and a 1,000 student enrollment cap for the first year of operation, Innovation Ohio estimates that these schools will educate up to 1,600 Ohio students in 2013-2014 and up to 2,925 in 2014-2015. At the level statewide eSchools are funded in Ohio’s latest budget bill ($6,677 per pupil), this could mean up to $10.6 million deducted from state funding to traditional public districts in the first year and $19.5 million in the second.
Projected Losses to New eSchools
Also opening this fall are 49 new brick and mortar charter schools. Using a projection of pupil funding of $7,691, developed by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission during the most recent budget bill (HB 59), IO estimates that if enrollment at these schools mirrors that at other brick and mortar charter schools, each will collect $1.7 million from the state per year for a total of $83 million in new annual charter school deductions.
The new two-year budget also raised the level of funding for Ohio’s existing charter schools by $30 million, from $824 million in 2012-2013 to $854 million in 2013-2014.
Projected Losses to Ohio charter schools
When all these effects are combined — more base funding, lifting the eSchool moratorium and 49 new brick and mortar charter schools, the amount of funding deducted for charter schools in Ohio could increase by as much as $124 million this year, bringing the total that is redirected from traditional public schools to $948 million. (“as much as” because this analysis assumes that new eSchools and charters are pulling kids from traditional public districts and not other charters)
If that holds, since Gov, John Kasich has been in office, the amount of money traditional public school children are losing to charter schools will have increased by about one-third.[ii] It is quite likely that by the end of his first term, Gov. Kasich will be the first Ohio Governor to witness charter schools removing more than $1 billion from children in traditional school districts.
[ii] The Charter transfer in FY 11 – the year before Kasich took office – was $721 million. Gov. Strickland’s first three years saw a 28% increase in losses to Charters.
In 1991, Perry County high school student Nathan DeRolph filed a lawsuit against the State of Ohio for failing to provide him and every child in the state a “thorough and efficient” system of public common schools. Six years later, in a landmark Ohio Supreme Court case, the Court ruled that DeRolph was right; the way Ohio funded its schools ran afoul of the Ohio Constitution. The central bone of contention in the case was the “overreliance” on property taxes to pay for schools. Relying on property taxes, which produce extremely different amounts of money based on a community’s wealth, further accentuates existing inequities across communities, the Court reasoned.
So the Court ordered the state legislature to beef up the state support to its public schools enough so that districts would not have to rely as much on property taxes to pay for its operations.
After three more rulings asserting that the state had failed to do that, the Ohio Supreme Court decided to drop the case in 2002. Here’s what happened:
Click for full-size image. Data from ODE Interactive Local Report Card, federal funding excluded.[Read more…]
Yesterday we profiled ten school districts who were seeking new operating funds in yesterday’s special election. All were facing budget deficits, heightened thanks to state budget cuts. All had made significant cuts in recent years, and sought levy funds to restore programs or prevent additional cuts.
All ten attempts failed.
Even by historical standards, this is a shockingly high failure rate. Typically 35% of requests for additional funds succeed.
Most of these districts will be back on the ballot in November, which represents the last chance to get a tax change in effect for 2014. Unfortunately, their task will now be even harder.
In November, the same levies will now cost homeowners up to 14% more thanks to a change — enacted in the state budget and signed into law by Governor Kasich — that eliminates Ohio’s longstanding property tax rollback.
If these districts fail again in November, the consequences for some will be dire. As we outlined yesterday, three will no longer offer all-day, every-day kindergarten. Four will have eliminated non-core course offerings, eight will have reduced bus transportation and none will have imposed steep – as high as $750 per student – fees for activities and sports.
Governor Kasich has long suggested that voters reject new levies, and Senate President Faber said he hoped the elimination of the rollback would make levies harder to pass. But they have also reduced state support for education (schools will get $514 million less in 2014-15 than they did in 2010-11).
From the example provided by these ten districts, it is becoming clear that the consequences of these policies are incredibly troubling.
Ten school districts appear on special ballots today, as they seek new operating money in some cases for the third, fourth or even sixth time as prior attempts have failed. Voters in Clark County have not approved new operating revenue for Tecumseh Local Schools in eighteen years.
What these districts have in common with one another and the other 603 public school systems in Ohio are deep and sustained cuts in state support for education during the Kasich years. The last state budget provided $1.8 billion less for education, and the current budget continues to underfund schools to the tune of over $1.3 billion compared to what the state says they need. IO has calculated that 3 in 4 Ohio school districts will have less state funding in 2014-2015 than they did in 2010-2011.
Field Local in Portage County is coping with $1.6 million less annually, including a reduction of $1.2 million from the tangible personal property tax, while Clark-Shawnee (Clark) reports losing $1.5 million in two years.
As a result of these cuts, and declining tax collections during the recession, all ten districts have faced budget deficits, forcing them to make deep cuts in the past few years. [Read more…]