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Republican Pre-Conditions
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Citizens United v. F.E.C. (Part 4): Kennedy's and O'Connor's Basic Approaches to Constitutional Decisionmaking – Top Down and Bottom Up
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Collector Car Hobby Loses One of the Best—Jim Roll
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Decisions Decisions: Credit Cards or Your Mortgage?
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Loucile is looking for a Lake Erie getaway in June for three kids, ages 1, 3, and 5.
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Track HR Research
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Makers of 'Castle Crashers' unveil 'BattleBlock Theater'
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Do IT this week: Layering
By Dennis J. Willard
Beacon Journal staff writer
POSTED: 06:56 p.m. EDT, Sep 05, 2009
COLUMBUS: About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.
In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ''popcorn,'' we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled.
Charter schools opened. Experimental school bells began to ring and taxpayers began to pay the bills. After a few years, the test results indicated students in charter schools were not surpassing their public-school counterparts, but instead lagged behind in many cases.
Raising questions
During the recent budget hearings in the Ohio House, state Rep. Stephen Dyer, D-Green, who chaired a standing finance subcommittee on primary and secondary education, raised a series of questions about charter-school performance, and the response from the advocates sounded eerily like traditional public school officials in the '90s.
Bill Sims, with the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Dyer that charter schools enroll large numbers of students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and the best way to measure achievement is to determine how much a student learns during the course of a year.
Sims said when it comes to a concept known as ''value-added,'' charter schools did better than traditional public schools.
At the time he said it, he was correct. A year ago, 27.3 percent of charter schools exceeded goals for value added, compared to 21.4 percent for urban public schools.
Sims also was correct in that charter schools often serve at-risk students. However, so do urban districts, and in the early days of Ohio's charter school movement, his predecessors never afforded this courtesy of ''value added'' to the teachers and administrators in the ''failing'' urban districts.
When state report cards were released a few weeks ago, the data showed improvement in both charter and urban public schools, but the tables had turned.
Accountability
In urban public schools, 54.3 percent exceeded the goals for value-added achievement, compared to 46.4 percent in charter schools.
''Everything we see so far by all the measurements is that traditional public schools outperform charter schools,'' said Barb Shaner, Ohio Association of School Business Officials associate executive director.
Shaner, a member of the Coalition for Public Education, is not calling for all charter schools to close, but her organization's members are correctly tired of being labeled failures in urban areas.
''We do not oppose the idea that there could be better choices for individual kids, but there still needs to be a lot of work in Ohio on the accountability of charter schools,'' Shaner said.
Choice is now the justification for the existence of charter schools. Few people would oppose giving a parent in an urban district who lacks the means to move or pay for private school the opportunity to enroll their child in a charter school.
For this reason, the state must work to properly assess charter schools and provide parents with sufficient tools to make an informed choice.
Making choices
The Edge Academy charter school, at Union and Perkins just north of the University of Akron campus, was started 11 years ago by David and Susan Dudas.
The charter school has demonstrated staying power, financial stability and, most recently, outscored Akron public schools and the other charter schools in Akron with the highest overall adequate yearly progress, or AYP, on the state report card for the second time in three years.
Edge Academy, the third-oldest charter school in Akron, is a good choice.
''It's a ministry for us. We attribute our success to sticking to an education program that works and being real structured,'' David Dudas said.
Edge is considered a continuous improvement charter school, but Dudas said three students who left the school after passing a third-grade reading test at the beginning of the year made the difference in getting the higher rating of ''effective.''
In the value-added rating, Edge met the standards for fourth-grade reading and fourth- and fifth-grade math, but fell short on fifth-grade reading.
At the same time Edge opened, a group of pastors, dissatisfied with the Youngstown Public Schools, opened Eagle Heights Academy on that city's south side.
Eagle Heights Academy, under new, stricter state regulations, will be forced to close at the end of this school year for continually failing to meet academic standards.
For many parents in Youngstown, the grass on the lawn of the old South High School on Market Street looked greener, but this was not a better choice for them and it is a disservice to everyone that the state took so long to act.
Sims and many advocates are calling for the state to crack down and close charter schools that perform poorly.
From the 2008-09 school year to this year, 34 charter schools, a little more than one in 10, closed, Sims said.
''We support this because we feel it is part of the accountability equation. You get a certain amount of freedom in exchange for accountability,'' Sims said.
He said he would like to see public schools held to the same standards for closing as charters.
The movement's proponents now clearly understand that headlines about financial and academic disasters only undermine the charter schools like Edge Academy and others that are truly succeeding.
''This year, collectively speaking, the urban districts did slightly better than the charter schools, but both moved up,'' Sims said.
The number of charter schools in academic emergency declined from 102 to 81; in academic watch, from 56 to 42 while the numbers in continuous improvement rose from 61 to 79; effective, from 18 to 22; and excellent, from 9 to 20, Sims said.
''We're happy for the public schools. We're happy for us, too,'' Sims said.
He would like to see the heated rhetoric cool down and the charter wars end, and he is looking forward to a new era of cooperation.
Few on either side want it any other way, but at the same time, while charter schools may ask the traditional public school people to forgive, they cannot expect them to completely forget the past decade.
Sims said his organization recently received a grant to hold a national conference in October 2010 in Columbus to bring in experts from across the country to examine the best cooperative practices between public and charter schools.
''We're doing this again because we want to change the tenor of the conversation away from the zero-sum equation into what's working for the students,'' Sims said.
Setting goals
Terry Ryan, Fordham Institute vice president for Ohio programs and policy, said his organization is concerned that ''value-added'' not become the lone measurement for success, because this does not mean a student is proficient.
Ryan said the question for both traditional and charterschools must be: Are the students ''ultimately making proficiency or moving toward proficiency?''
A report by the Fordham Institute identified 14 schools, 10 public and four charter, in which students demonstrated high growth (value-added) and high achievement (movement toward proficiency).
Two of the schools — King Elementary and Miller South School for the Visual Performing Arts — are in Akron.
This should be the goal for charter and public schools, Ryan said.
It would be a major step forward in education to witness more schools hitting these goals.
However, charter-school advocates can't keep changing the targets or reasons for their existence.
Can we truly fault a teacher for failing to teach more than a year's worth of learning in one year?
No, that's unrealistic, so before everyone once again gets all fired up about how important it is to push teachers and school administrators to perform miracles in the classroom, they should step back, particularly in these new days of educational detente, and think about why the war between charter schools and public schools began in the first place.
The true lesson for charter school advocates, learned the hard way after more than a decade, is: It is a lot easier to criticize and point fingers than it is to teach large numbers of at-risk children from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
COLUMBUS: About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.
In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ''popcorn,'' we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled.
Charter schools opened. Experimental school bells began to ring and taxpayers began to pay the bills. After a few years, the test results indicated students in charter schools were not surpassing their public-school counterparts, but instead lagged behind in many cases.
Raising questions
During the recent budget hearings in the Ohio House, state Rep. Stephen Dyer, D-Green, who chaired a standing finance subcommittee on primary and secondary education, raised a series of questions about charter-school performance, and the response from the advocates sounded eerily like traditional public school officials in the '90s.
Bill Sims, with the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Dyer that charter schools enroll large numbers of students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and the best way to measure achievement is to determine how much a student learns during the course of a year.
Sims said when it comes to a concept known as ''value-added,'' charter schools did better than traditional public schools.
At the time he said it, he was correct. A year ago, 27.3 percent of charter schools exceeded goals for value added, compared to 21.4 percent for urban public schools.
Sims also was correct in that charter schools often serve at-risk students. However, so do urban districts, and in the early days of Ohio's charter school movement, his predecessors never afforded this courtesy of ''value added'' to the teachers and administrators in the ''failing'' urban districts.
When state report cards were released a few weeks ago, the data showed improvement in both charter and urban public schools, but the tables had turned.
Accountability
In urban public schools, 54.3 percent exceeded the goals for value-added achievement, compared to 46.4 percent in charter schools.
''Everything we see so far by all the measurements is that traditional public schools outperform charter schools,'' said Barb Shaner, Ohio Association of School Business Officials associate executive director.
Shaner, a member of the Coalition for Public Education, is not calling for all charter schools to close, but her organization's members are correctly tired of being labeled failures in urban areas.
''We do not oppose the idea that there could be better choices for individual kids, but there still needs to be a lot of work in Ohio on the accountability of charter schools,'' Shaner said.
Choice is now the justification for the existence of charter schools. Few people would oppose giving a parent in an urban district who lacks the means to move or pay for private school the opportunity to enroll their child in a charter school.
For this reason, the state must work to properly assess charter schools and provide parents with sufficient tools to make an informed choice.
Making choices
The Edge Academy charter school, at Union and Perkins just north of the University of Akron campus, was started 11 years ago by David and Susan Dudas.
The charter school has demonstrated staying power, financial stability and, most recently, outscored Akron public schools and the other charter schools in Akron with the highest overall adequate yearly progress, or AYP, on the state report card for the second time in three years.
Edge Academy, the third-oldest charter school in Akron, is a good choice.
''It's a ministry for us. We attribute our success to sticking to an education program that works and being real structured,'' David Dudas said.
Edge is considered a continuous improvement charter school, but Dudas said three students who left the school after passing a third-grade reading test at the beginning of the year made the difference in getting the higher rating of ''effective.''
In the value-added rating, Edge met the standards for fourth-grade reading and fourth- and fifth-grade math, but fell short on fifth-grade reading.
At the same time Edge opened, a group of pastors, dissatisfied with the Youngstown Public Schools, opened Eagle Heights Academy on that city's south side.
Eagle Heights Academy, under new, stricter state regulations, will be forced to close at the end of this school year for continually failing to meet academic standards.
For many parents in Youngstown, the grass on the lawn of the old South High School on Market Street looked greener, but this was not a better choice for them and it is a disservice to everyone that the state took so long to act.
Sims and many advocates are calling for the state to crack down and close charter schools that perform poorly.
From the 2008-09 school year to this year, 34 charter schools, a little more than one in 10, closed, Sims said.
''We support this because we feel it is part of the accountability equation. You get a certain amount of freedom in exchange for accountability,'' Sims said.
He said he would like to see public schools held to the same standards for closing as charters.
The movement's proponents now clearly understand that headlines about financial and academic disasters only undermine the charter schools like Edge Academy and others that are truly succeeding.
''This year, collectively speaking, the urban districts did slightly better than the charter schools, but both moved up,'' Sims said.
The number of charter schools in academic emergency declined from 102 to 81; in academic watch, from 56 to 42 while the numbers in continuous improvement rose from 61 to 79; effective, from 18 to 22; and excellent, from 9 to 20, Sims said.
''We're happy for the public schools. We're happy for us, too,'' Sims said.
He would like to see the heated rhetoric cool down and the charter wars end, and he is looking forward to a new era of cooperation.
Few on either side want it any other way, but at the same time, while charter schools may ask the traditional public school people to forgive, they cannot expect them to completely forget the past decade.
Sims said his organization recently received a grant to hold a national conference in October 2010 in Columbus to bring in experts from across the country to examine the best cooperative practices between public and charter schools.
''We're doing this again because we want to change the tenor of the conversation away from the zero-sum equation into what's working for the students,'' Sims said.
Setting goals
Terry Ryan, Fordham Institute vice president for Ohio programs and policy, said his organization is concerned that ''value-added'' not become the lone measurement for success, because this does not mean a student is proficient.
Ryan said the question for both traditional and charterschools must be: Are the students ''ultimately making proficiency or moving toward proficiency?''
A report by the Fordham Institute identified 14 schools, 10 public and four charter, in which students demonstrated high growth (value-added) and high achievement (movement toward proficiency).
Two of the schools — King Elementary and Miller South School for the Visual Performing Arts — are in Akron.
This should be the goal for charter and public schools, Ryan said.
It would be a major step forward in education to witness more schools hitting these goals.
However, charter-school advocates can't keep changing the targets or reasons for their existence.
Can we truly fault a teacher for failing to teach more than a year's worth of learning in one year?
No, that's unrealistic, so before everyone once again gets all fired up about how important it is to push teachers and school administrators to perform miracles in the classroom, they should step back, particularly in these new days of educational detente, and think about why the war between charter schools and public schools began in the first place.
The true lesson for charter school advocates, learned the hard way after more than a decade, is: It is a lot easier to criticize and point fingers than it is to teach large numbers of at-risk children from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
clinton, oh
Posted 09:54 AM, 09/06/2009
Charter schools most shining attribute may be that
it simply creates competition for the public schools
And competition usually leads to improvement.
Akron, OH
Posted 07:55 AM, 09/07/2009
DS:
I think you're dead-on. As a teacher that worked 10 years in the private sector before teaching, I love the idea of competition and also choice.
In the past 2 districts I've worked my director has said, "We need to get better serving students with autism because too many parents are pulling their kids out and into specialized schools." Then the district loses money. It took outside competition to foster this motivation.
My students with behavior problems actually have a school problem--the automaton "blindly follow the rules" public school mantra doesn't work for some smart, creative, impulsive kids. Parents should have options.
