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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > August
August 2006
Strike officially over
Teachers and support staff in Huber Heights approved a tentative contract agreement with the school board by a wide margin about 20 minutes ago. So the strike is officially over and school will be in session Friday.
So far, they are not talking about what’s in the deal. Those details will be very interesting.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Carnival’s in town for two weeks
I’ve been so wrapped up in the Huber Heights school strike I almost forgot to mention that this week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted by fellow Ohio-based edublogger Thespis Journal.
The carnival is a weekly compilation of the best education posts from around the blogosphere, and next week it will be hosted right here at Get on the Bus. If you have an education blog and would like to offer a post for inclusion next week, send me a link at scemel@aol.com by 9 p.m. Eastern time next Tuesday, Sept. 5.
Among many great posts from around the edusphere this week, you can read Thespis’ take and my own in our dueling posts about the Huber strike.
I’m also included in this week’s Carnival of Ohio Politics for my post on charter school performance.
(Image credit: Cox News Service)
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Huber Heights: Hopefully details this afternoon
My colleague Valryn Warren reports the teachers and staff will vote on the proposed deal at 3 p.m. today. With any luck, they will ratify it and we’ll learn details of the strike-ending deal afterward. Keep watching DDN.com and check back here later for more.
Permalink | | Categories: Schools and Politics
Strike over? Huber back in school Friday (maybe)
We have few details, but early this morning striking teachers and support staff reached a tentative agreement with the Huber Heights school board. About all we know right now is that school will be in session Friday (assuming the deal is ratified). More details as soon as we have them. Check back here and at the main DDN.com page later this morning.
NOTE: I updated this post to make it clear the deal still needs to be ratified by the union.
Permalink | | Categories: Schools and Politics
Hey kids: Huber may settle after all
I just spoke to my colleague Laura Bischoff at the State Employment Relations Bureau in Columbus. Talks are ongoing between the Huber Heights school board and the union representing teachers and support staff. But the reporters still hanging around have been told not to go anywhere, that there could be an announcement soon. This is a strong indication that there may be a settlement after all. That’s quite a welcome turn of events given how bleak things looked earlier today.
Among the things I am not sure of is whether the district would have school tomorrow if they settle this late tonight. If I hear anything in the next couple of hours, I’ll post an update.
Permalink | | Categories: Schools and Politics
Huber strike — It’s not looking good
I just left the offices of the State Employment Relations Board where negotiators for Huber Heights teachers and staff and the school board are in marathon talks.
Well, sort of.
Talks would imply two sides talking to each other. I spent most of the day watching them huddle in separate conference rooms. Mediators did go back and forth, but not nearly as often as you’d expect if a settlement were near.
If I had to lay a bet on the outcome right now, I’d say they will not make a deal tonight and will end up before the SERB board tomorrow for a hearing on the school board’s complaint that the union did not follow required procedures before going on the picket lines. I hope I am wrong.
On the other hand, even some progress from these talks is better than no talks at all, which is where we’ve been since the strike began Friday.
Laura Bischoff, one of the paper’s Columbus bureau reporters, is going to keep watch on the talks the rest of the night. Keep an eye on DDN.com for any updates and I’ll try to post more here if there’s any news. So check back.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Schools and Politics
The Huber Heights strike standoff
I’m in Columbus today waiting to see if a day-long marathon bargaining session between Huber Heights teachers and support staff and the administration will pay off with a settlement before the two sides end up in a hearing before the State Employment Relations Board tomorrow.
SERB ordered these talks to try to end the strike before ruling tomorrow on a school board complaint. They have two mediators running back and forth between the negotiating teams — Superintendent William Kirby and an attorney for the board, union President Becky Whited and Ohio Education Association negotiator George Bozovich for the union.
Now we wait and see if they can work anything out. No wireless Internet connection near the SERB office. I’m posting right now from the DDN’s Columbus bureau. But if news breaks, check DDN.com first for the latest. I’ll post something here as soon as I can.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Cheating on state tests
Education Week reports Texas is launching a major investigation into cheating on its state tests. (Sorry. EdWeek subscription required to read the story).
This just got me thinking. Texas is a big state with a high profile testing program. Ohio is a big state with a high profile testing program. Texas is very worried about cheating and is taking serious action. I wonder how worried Ohio’s state education officials are about cheating and what steps have been taken here to ensure testing is above board?
I’ll be talking to state education officials later this week about the testing program. I’ll ask and let you know what they say.
Here’s an excerpt from EdWeek’s story:
“The Texas Education Agency is launching an investigation next month to determine how widespread test cheating is throughout the state. In a letter to school administrators earlier this summer, state Commissioner of Education Shirley Neeley said the agency would also create an independent task force to lead the investigation, use on-site monitors to oversee future administrations of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, and impose sanctions against schools or districts where cheating is exposed. The five-member task force, which has been created, includes business and education leaders. The agency is also putting some muscle behind the investigation and has assigned 15 people to work on the project—tripling the size of the staff that had been in charge of looking into allegations of testing improprieties.”
What do you know about cheating on state test in Ohio? Ever seen evidence of it?
(Image credit: www.lazymotivation.com)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Online journalism matters
I just learned that Get on the Bus is a finalist for “online commentary” in the annual Online Journalism Awards competition, a national contest sponsored by the Online News Association and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.
Go here for the complete list winners.
I’ve really enjoyed watching these awards grow over the past few years. The winners’ list always includes several great examples of news organizations harnessing the power of the Web in creative ways. So I am truly surprised by, and appreciative of, their recognition.
I think these awards are destined to become even more important in the upcoming years, as news outlets get better at using the Web and integrating online elements into their news gathering routines. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found writing the blog to be both useful and enlightening. I think I’m a better journalist today because of blogging.
But by definition a blog cannot be one man show. It’s loyal readers like you who really make Get on the Bus go. So thanks again to you.
(Image credit: www.ahstudy.com)
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Journalism
What not to wear (to school)
Not Appropriate school attire
Appropriate school attire
I just love how Lorain schools near Cleveland spell out in pictures on a website exactly what is cool and not cool to wear to school.
But it seems not all the kids out there are getting the message. So one Indiana principal went to extreme measures.
Theresa Mayerik sent home 128 kids at her Hammond, Ind., high school for inappropriate dress.
“This was the worst year I’ve seen in a long time,” she told the Associated Press. “It’s gotten out of control, and we needed to send a message that we’re not messing around.”
Edublogger Chemjerk already has nominated her for principal of the year. The National School Boards Association’s blog BoardBuzz has also been tracking this issue nationally.
How big a problem is this at your school?
(Image credits: Lorain (Ohio) schools)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: My Favorite Posts
Huber schools strike hard to handicap
(Huber heights teachers and staff picket near Wayne High School early Friday morning.)
Huber Heights kids will miss their second day of class today because of a strike by teachers and support staff in this large, suburban district. This is one of the most unusual strikes in the education realm that I’ve seen in 16 years as a journalist, making it very hard to predict when and how it will end.
Nearly every school strike I’ve covered has come down to a dispute that primarily is about money. Strangely, in this case the sides have essentially agreed to a solid 3.5 percent raise so pay is really not on the table.
In Huber Heights, the strikers do have a pocketbook issue — health insurance. But the sides are so close together on that point, too. The two proposals are different only by $5 for office visits, $10 for urgent care and $25 to go to a hospital.
Side issues, which usually fall away as bargaining gets down to a strike deadline, have hung around this time. What are the issues? An email I got today from a union supporter summarizes them from the teachers’ point of view:
“—They want a reasonable classroom size set up and enforced. Currently there are Kindergarten classes with 28 and first grade classes with 27. Check the districts who are excelling in the standards and find out what their numbers look like. Huber even has a math class with 36 in it. However, the teachers are expected to teach a class this size and be certain that every student can pass the state tests.
—Secondly, the teachers want to stop the district from out-sourcing its students to others. They do not want the district to bring in others to teach classes or to send the MH students to someone else to teach when we have qualified teachers available to teach these classes.
—Thirdly, the teachers want the administration to enforce its own zero tolerance policy. There have been knives brought to school and no expulsions.”
With the possible exception of outsourcing (the district has used community college instructors for some advanced classes), these are not the sorts of issues that usually lead to a strike. That they have here speaks to the history of turmoil in Huber Heights with schools and the toll that has taken on each sides’ psyche.
Somehow, both sides need to get past that to reach a settlement. The question is how long that will take.
I know there are a lot of strong feelings about this situation. I’d like to hear your take on it in the comments, but please try to dial down your feelings and simply state your case for how this strike should be resolved.
UPDATE: The education blogger Thespis Journal backs the Huber Heights teachers here. Do you know of anyone else blogging about the Huber strike? If so, send me a link.
(Image credit: Jim Witmer, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Newspapers, education and the Internet
Back in June, my edublogging pal Alexander Russo at This Week in Education predicted that the mainstream media (MSM) was going to go hog wild into education blogging this year, with no less than 10 MSM websites launching new education blogs. And within days … uh, well, nothing happened for a while.
But yesterday, I noted the appearance of a new education blog at a MSM website — The Hall Monitor by the White Plains, N.Y., Journal News — and last week, I wrote about the Houston Chronicle’s new blog, School Zone.
Counting, the Miami Herald’s Gradebook and the Los Angeles Times’ School Me!, which both launched in the spring, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s School Zone, which launched in February, it appears Alexander is halfway there.
Given all the changes, I thought I would quickly update my list of who’s out there blogging about education for the MSM. In order of appearance, they are:
- The Chalkboard by Jennifer Fernandez and Morgan Josey, education reporters at the Greensboro News-Record.
Begun in 2004 by Fernandez and former News-Record reporter Bruce Buchannan, The Chalkboard is intensely local and very engaged with Greensboro-area readers, who comment frequently, but doesn’t often tread into issues outside of North Carolina.
- Get Schooled by Patti Ghezzi of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Get Schooled launched in early 2005 and touches on a wide variety of education topics — local, state and national. There’s usually a Georgia tie-in, but fortunately there is a ton of interesting education issues there. Get Schooled engagingly written by Ghezzi, easily the most experienced blogger among us MSM edubloggers, it generates an incredible amount of discussion in its comments.
- Get on the Bus by Scott Elliott (yours truly) of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, which launched in August 2005.
With Get on the Bus I try to write about a range of education topics on the local, state and national level and encourage reader interaction through comments. Ohio is a big player in education issues like testing, standards and vouchers and Dayton has been the nation’s No. 1 charter school city for several years, although it looks like New Orleans will supplant it this year as most of the schools now open there are charters.
- Campus Watch by Greg Esposito and Amy Kovac, the higher education reporters at the Roanoke Times in Virginia, which started in November 2005.
This one is a little more narrowly focused than the others, since it’s specific to colleges and mostly revolves around Virginia’s higher education scene, but I’ve found some really interesting stuff here. They seem to have a knack for using the blog on breaking news stories, of which they have had a few big ones lately. Campus Watch allow comments and have growing reader interaction.
- School Zone, launched in February of 2006, is written by a team of education reporters at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel — Alan Borsuk, Sarah Carr, Jamaal S. Abdul-Alim, Alice Chang, Kate Goodloe, Amy Hetzner and Megan Twohey and education editor David Haynes.
The Journal-Sentinel has excellent education coverage, anchored by experienced education reporters Alan Borsuk and Sarah Carr. They are joined on the blog by suburban education reporters and they write about education issues big and small in the Milwaukee area, which fortunately for us has tons of interesting stuff going on. Milwaukee has the nation’s biggest voucher program, for instance. Unfortunately, School Zone does not allow comments.
- Miami Gradebook, which first appeared in April of 2006, by Matthew Pinzur, the education reporter at the Miami Herald. Comments are allowed.
Pinzur is great and the education issues in South Florida are fascinating. Sadly, Matt just announced he is switching beats and it is unclear if Miami Gradebook will continue in the same fashion after he moves on.
- School Me!, which began in May of 2006, by Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn at the Los Angeles Times.
This new blog is really a hit, rounding up world education events once a week, highlighting teacher blogs and following the crazy education stories of the Los Angeles school system and elsewhere in California. Sipchen, a columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes an excellent Monday column online and in print. Great use off graphics, photos and art at School Me! too. The only bad thing I have to say about School Me! is that it doesn’t allow comments, which it really should.
- School Zone, just launched here in August of 2006, is written by the education team at the Houston Chronicle — Jennifer Radcliffe, Sarah Viren, Ericka Mellon, Cynthia Garza and Jason Spencer.
If ever there was a perfect match for education blogging and a news site, it’s the Chronicle. The paper is considered one of the best MSM news sites anywhere and earlier this year was named the “best blogging newspaper.” Meanwhile Houston, the birthplace of the ideas behind No Child Left Behind, has loads of interesting education issues and stories. This blog also allows comments. Seems like there’s a good school joke to be made here about how they copied their blog name off Milwaukee’s paper, but I couldn’t come up with anything funny enough.
- The Hall Monitor, at The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y. also just appeared here in August, 2006. It’s written by the paper’s education team — Diana Bellettieri, Alice Gomstyn, David Novich, Leah Rae, Lanning Taliaferro, Randi Weiner, David Wilson and Dwight R. Worley. Comments are allowed.
Whew! That’s a lot of contributors! i’m not normally a big fan of blogs written by a group. I think a blog tends to have more personality if it’s written by one or two people. But so far, The Hall Monitor looks promising. And perhaps just a few of those contributors will find out they really like blogging and start carrying most of the load.
Altogether I count nine MSM edblogs now! That’s triple what there was after I started Get on the Bus just over a year ago. Maybe Alexander will be proven right after all.
BTW, if you know of another MSM edblog I haven’t mentioned here, please let me know. Also, one other MSM site to check out is Class Struggle by Jay Mathews at the Washington Post. This is really more of an online column than a blog, and it also has no commenting. But Mathews is one of the best in the education writing biz, so he’s always an interesting read.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Journalism
Never buy school supplies again
My co-worker has had enough.
This friend, a conscientious mother of a second-grader, now knows more about where crayons are made than anyone should.
Why? Because her child’s teacher sent home a school supply list that not only specified the kids have crayons among more than a dozen items, but the teacher wanted only crayons MADE IN THE U.S.!
“I’m all for buying stuff that’s made in America,” the friend told me, “but I had to go to three stores to find them!”
School supply lists are running amok. Gone are the days when bringing in a box of crayons, a few glue sticks, some pencils and a stack of notebook paper might be greeted by an appreciative smile. Now the list of demands are ultra-specific and even beyond what many adults might nostalgically think of as school supplies — Fiskars-brand scissors (5-inch size, sharp), Clorox-brand clean-up wipes, two Dry Erase-brand black markers with wide tips, 36 No. 2 pencils, yellow only.
But what if you could have somebody else buy all this junk for you and deliver a complete box directly to your child’s classroom? Perhaps you can.
I spotted this on a brand-new MSM education blog that I recently discovered. It’s called The Hall Monitor, and it’s written by the education reporters at The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.
This week, they highlighted their own story about companies that will buy your school supplies for you. In some cases, they partner with PTO’s for school fund-raisers, but the school in the story where they did that wanted $45 for a box of supplies! How much would you pay to have someone else buy your kids’ school supplies?
(Image credit: Holy Family School, Nazereth, Pa.)
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
Pluto’s peril and other planet problems
Now that Pluto has been declared “not a planet” by scientists, there are some very important implications for schools everywhere:
—How many millions of dollars will it cost to rewrite every science textbook in the world?
—Will there be a ceremonial plucking of Pluto off the solar system models?
—And most importantly, have scientists really thought about how hard it’s going be for fifth grade boys to keep a straight face when their teachers tell them Uranus is now at the rear of the solar system?
(Image credit: http://www.physics.uc.edu/)
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Elsewhere in the education world …
While I’ve been busy here with Ohio’s report card release and now a possible teacher strike in Huber Heights just as school begins, a lot has been happening elsewhere in the world of education.
Here’s some of what else is going on out there:
A big survey
An annual poll by Phi Delta Kappa, an education professional group, had interesting results that sent the edusphere buzzing. Keep in mind that PDK is an organization of educators, so they come from a particular point of view, but among their survey’s conclusions were:
—Those surveyed preferred to fix public schools rather than create alternatives, with voucher support dropping.
—Respondents’ ratings of their own public schools are near an all-time high and support public education strongly
—The respondents largely believe school problems are caused by societial problems
Over at Edspresso, they present an opposing view.
Discussing the PDK results on charter schools are Joe Williams from the New York Charter School Association and John at the American Federation of Teachers. They talk the somewhat amusing fact that a majority of the survey respondents say they favor charter schools while also making it clear by their responses that they have no idea what charter schools are.
The long awaited federal charter school study
This study is similar to the recent report that found no advantage for private schools on tests when other factors are controlled. This one found public schools outscoring charters nationally. Both studies were done by the National Center for Education Statistics and both are controversial.
The charter results have supporters of traditional public education feeling good about how they compare. You can read the executive summary here to see why. And charter critics were quick to say the study supports their view.
On the other side, Nelson Smith, who heads a national charter school group, makes the primary counter argument, that the study is limited by its data and methodology. Joanne Jacobs summarizes some other criticism from the pro-charter crowd.
A couple of carnivals
At this week’s Carnival of Education, you can read my post about the university president who might get prison for life. Also highlighted by the carnival is my mini-debate with Thespis Journal about whether my reporting about Ohio report cards is sane or insane.
Finally, I also was included in this week’s Carnival of Ohio Politics, which just keeps getting more interesting as the election season heats up. They picked up my my post about charter school as hot potatoes.
(Image credit: www.solarviews.com)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, The Carnival of Education
Time for some perspective?
OK, OK. So perhaps I’ve gone a little report card crazy here at Get on the Bus. At least one of my readers thinks it’s because I love standardized testing and am obsessed with the sports metaphor “horse race” coverage of who’s winning and losing.
Let me try to clarify a few things.
First, let’s go over what exactly where we’ve been since last week’s state report card release:
—We’ve ranked the Miami Valley’s high schools, elementary schools and school districts, plus listed where the local districts all fell in on the state’s academic rating scale.
—We covered some general highlights of trends for local districts.
—We also looked at charter schools and how they compared to the rest of the city’s public schools.
—And we offered up one method for considering the report card winners and losers.
Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
It’s not. It’s just a scratch on the surface of the gigantic pile of data that comes with the report card release. There’s still tons more data — test scores broken down by student status of various types — ethnicity, gender, disability, etc. There’s also lots of data about teachers and district spending.
In the past, the paper hasn’t done all that much with this data — just a simple ranking and who’s up, who’s down, etc. To be honest, I always felt a little guilty that we didn’t give our readers more. I knew there was interest in this information, but there just wasn’t space in the paper to dive into such detail.
And there still isn’t. In the actual paper, there’s been just three report card stories — one on the overall state results, one on the results for the Miami Valley and one on charter school performance, the latest installment of a comparison I’ve been doing for six years.
But this year, with the blog, I realized there was really no limit to what we could write about online. So I began putting up some of the figures I thought people would be most interested in. School-level data, for instance, is rarely reported. And judging by reader response, people did, indeed, want this information — the post on elementary schools set a one-day Get on the Bus record for page views.
But there is a danger here, one an eagle-eyed reader was quick to point out. Does all this data mean test scores are all that matter?
Those who have followed our education reporting here at the DDN through the years might find it amusing that I should have to answer this question. In the past, I’ve written here about the weaknesses of standardized tests, such as what a test can’t tell you, and just last year, Mark Fisher and I won a national award for our series Flunking the Test, a critique of standardized testing that earned us a few nasty letters from testing advocates.
But I think what I missed this year was a post like I had last year, trying to put the scores in perspective by explaining what it all means.
Test scores have incredible importance today for schools and students. Our elected leaders, both at the state and national level, have chosen standardized tests as the primary tool for evaluating educational quality.
Even so, test scores are just one way to judge school performance. They are most useful for comparing one school or district to another. But they do not tell the whole story of whether a schools is good or bad, effective or not.
Think of it in medical terms. As a heart patient, I’m fairly obsessed with my cholesterol these days. But I have to keep in mind that this is but one measure of my heart health. I also have to pay attention to blood pressure, my weight, my fitness level, my stress and my doctor’s expert opinion. Plenty of people with good cholesterol still have heart attacks.
Equate your school’s standardized test results to a cholesterol check. If your school’s score is the best around, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is the most healthy. It’s useful information, but not all you need to know. Look at other measures, too — attendance, teacher and principal quality, the experience of your children and their friends, your own observations.
And try to keep things in perspective.
(Image credit: Whitman Middle School, Alexandria, Va.)
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Miami Valley’s high schools ranked
(The pep band at Oakwood High School, the perrenial top-rated Miami Valley high school on the state report card)
Yesterday, I wrote here about the 50 best elementary schools in the Miami Valley, as ranked by the state for test performance, but the complete list was too long to republish here.
Not so with high schools.
I’ve got 72 area public high schools ranked by the state by “performance index score,” a measure of how students performed across all state tests taken. (Let me know if you spot a local school that is missing from this list.)
How did your school do? Take a look and find out (a perfect score is 120):
Oakwood 114.1
Mason 110.8
Bellbrook 109.2
Centerville 108.5
Springboro 108.3
Vandalia Butler 107.5
Arcanum 106.4
Northmont 106.2
Kings 106.1
Russia 106.1
Tippecanoe 106.1
Versallies 105.4
Anna 104.9
Beavercreek 104.9
Botkins 104.9
Cedarville 104.5
Kettering Fairmont 104.1
Bethel 104
Brookville 103.8
Milton-Union 103.4
Troy 103.3
Covington 102.6
Dayton Early College Academy 102.6
Miami East 102.4
Ansonia 101.9
Franklin Monroe 101.9
Miamisburg 101.6
Lebanon 101.3
Little Miami 101.3
Dixie 101.3
Carlisle 100.9
Valley View 100.7
Greenview 99.1
National Trail 98.6
Xenia 97.7
Stivers School for the Arts 97.6
Newton 97.6
Piqua 97.4
Fairborn 97.4
Stebbins 97.1
Eaton 96.5
Sidney 96.5
Wayne 96.3
Greenville 96
Houston 95.6
Preble Shawnee 95
Fairlawn 94.8
Jackson Center 94.7
Tri-Village 94.2
Frankin 92.7
West Carrollton 90.9
Mississinawa Valley 90.6
Trotwood-Madison 90.2
Northridge 89.5
Bradford 85.8
Jefferson 80
Colonel White 79.7
Patterson 78.4
Belmont 76.6
Meadowdale 73.2
Arise Sports Management Academy 71.6
Dunbar 70.8
Mound Street Military Academy 68.3
Mond Street Health Care Academy 64.1
Mound Street IT Careers Academy 64
Summit Academy Secondary School 61.6
Peterson Entrepreneurial Training Enterprise School 52.2
Tech Con Institute 49.8
Life Skills Center of Dayton 57.8
New City School 42.2
Main Street Automotive Magnet School 25.1
General Chappie James Leadership Academy 14.7
For the top 50 elementary schools, as rated on state report cards, go here.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Testing
They’re baaaaack!
UPDATE: Miamisburg opens Wednesday, Aug. 23. It was incorrectly listed as Thursday in today’s paper.
Schools are back in session today in 13 local school districts. Nearly all will be open within two weeks.
Wondering when your district starts back? Check here for the complete list of schools starts in the Miami Valley.
Permalink | |
The valley’s top 50 elementary schools
(Then 5-year-old Jesse Albritton arranges flowers at Gorman Elementary School in 2002)
There’s a heck of a story hidden in the news today about how Dayton’s charter schools compared with the city school district this year.
It just so happens that a small school in the city that exclusively serves handicapped students (some of them with severe handicaps) was rated the top school in the area on state reports that came out last week.
THE top school!
Gorman Elementary School’s “performance index score,” which judges test performance across all tested grades, was higher than any school in Oakwood, Centerville, Springboro, Mason or any of the other traditionally top rated school districts. In fact, the Gorman kids darn near recorded a perfect score.
There are 275 elementary and middle schools in the Miami Valley, too many to list them all here. But I did pull the top 50, for those who are interested. (Go here to see the rankings for Miami Valley HighSchools.)
Here they are with their index scores (top score is 120):
Gorman (Dayton) 117.3
Broadway (Tipp City) 112.9
Whittier (Sidney) 111.4
Western Row (Mason) 110.4
Prass (Kettering) 109
J.F. Burns (Kings) 108.8
Sugarcreek (Sugarcreek) 108.5
Englewood (Northmont) 107.9
Phillipsburg (Northmont) 107.8
Mason Intermediate (Mason) 107.7
Harman (Oakwood) 107.6
Demmitt (Vandalia-Butler) 107.6
Nevin Coppock (TIpp City) 107.2
Helke (Vandalia-Butler) 107.2
Driscoll (Centerville) 107.1
Hamilton-Maineville (Little Miami) 107.1
Weller (Centerville) 107
Smith (Oakwood) 106.7
Mason Middle (Mason) 106.3
Valley (Beavercreek) 106.2
Magsig (Centerville) 106.2
Botkins (Botkins) 106.1
Oakwood Junior High (Oakwood) 105.8
Murlin Heights (Vandalia-Butler) 105.6
Emerson (Sidney) 105.5
Englewood Hills (Northmont) 105.2
Columbia (Kings) 105
Clearcreek (Springboro) 104.8
Main (Beavercreek) 104.6
Fort Loramie (Fort Loramie) 104.6
Beverly Gardens (Mad River) 104.6
Newton (Newton) 104.5
Concord (Troy) 104.5
Russia (Russia) 104.4
Shaw (Beavercreek) 104.3
Parkwood (Sidney) 104.1
Kyle (Troy) 104.1
Hadley E. Watts (Centerville) 103.7
Menlo Park (Huber Heights) 103.7
Westbrook Elementary School (Brookville) 103.5
Normandy (Centerville) 103.5
Tower Heights (Centerville) 103.4
Kings Mills (Kings) 103.3
Northmoor (Northmont) 103.3
Ferguson (Beavercreek) 103.1
Morrow (Little Miami) 103.1
Bellbrook Junior High (Sugarcreek) 103.1
Greenview (Greenview) 102.6
High Street (Piqua) 102.6
If there is a school you’re interested in that’s not on the list and you REALLY want to know how it ranks, send me an email at selliott@daytondailynews.com and I’ll look it up for you.
To see how school districts ranked, and other data from the state’s report card release, go here.
Coming tomorrow: The Miami Valley’s high schools ranked from top to bottom.
(Image credit: Skip Peterson, DDN)
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Charters and the district — Siamese twins?
(Parent volunteer Charmaine Trayvick with fourth-grader Kevin Russell at the Richard Allen charter school’s Edgemont campus last year. Richard Allen’s schools have consistently rated among the best in Dayton)
In today’s paper, I did my annual comparison of charter schools and district schools, based on state test performance.
This comparison, which I’ve done since 1999, has gotten increasingly tricky as the state has changed, several times, its method for evaluating schools. What I’d love to do is compare the overall performance index for Dayton Public Schools with a similar figure for the city’s charter schools. That would tell you who did better using the state’s best comparison measuring stick.
But I can’t do that.
To run the performance index for charters, I’d need the raw data the state used to create each school’s index score so it could be aggregated and the calculation run for the group in total. I don’t have that data.
It’s tempting to simply take the index scores for all the charters, add them up and divide to get an average. But since index scores essentially are averages of passing rates already, that would be averaging an average. I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure you can’t do that and get a valid figure.
Instead what I did was rank all the city’s public and charter schools by their index scores and see what it looks like.
Well, their scores look a lot alike. And that’s a lot different from how this chart looked just a few years ago.
Charters still dominate the bottom of the list, as they have most of the years I’ve run the comparison. But otherwise, they look much like the district — a few very good scoring schools at the top, some very low scorers at the bottom and a bunch in the middle.
So there’s two ways to look at this. Either it’s evidence that charters are improving steadily, in which case we would expect them to eventually outperform the district, maybe in a few more years.
Or you could look at the $45 million plus the state is spending for charter schools in Dayton this year and ask if it is worth the money to essentially recreate the school district’s performance?
What’s your take on charter performance?
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts, Testing
Houston, we have an edblog!
Well, a couple weeks ago one of the best MSM education bloggers, Matthew Pinzur who writes Gradebook for the Miami Herald, announced he will soon switch beats to cover Miami city hall — another challenging job — leaving open the question of whether Gradebook would survive. That was a bummer.
But I have some good news. A new major MSM education blog appeared last week in Texas.
It’s called School Zone and it’s written by the education reporters and editors at the Houston Chronicle.
The Chronicle, which was named the “best blogging newspaper” earlier this year by a team of reviewers led by Jay Rosen (NYU professor and PressThink blogger), is an important addition to the edusphere, I think, given the key role Houston has played in national education politics as the birthplace of the ideas that gave us No Child Left Behind.
School Zone (I think they owe the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a nod for bogarting their ed blog’s name) is off to a strong start. For a taste, check out this commentary by education editor Jason Spencer, who takes on schools that blame a small group of kids for their low state ratings.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Journalism
Charter sponsors play “not it!”
(Rhea Academy founder Monica Rhea)
Just a couple weeks ago, I talked to Todd Haines, who heads up Ohio’s charter school monitoring operation, about how he planned to get tough with charter school sponsors and prevent “sponsor-hopping,” a phenomenon that has resulted from Ohio’s pioneering new law that leaves it up to sponsors to monitor charter schools day-to-day.
So far, troubled schools have become hot potatoes — they hop from sponsor to sponsor, evading consequences for bad performance or other problems, and the sponsors are more than happy to toss them along.
My story today about the apparent demise of Dayton’s Rhea Academy, is a perfect example of how sponsors run in the other direction when the time comes to do the most unpleasant of all sponsor duties — be the hammer and close a school for good.
Ohio’s new approach to charters has the potential to be revolutionary. The theory behind it is that sponsors, invested in the success of the schools they manage, will be better monitors than the state.
But the new law has hit some early bumps, none bigger than “sponsor shopping.”
Hanes told me weeks ago that troubled schools should not be allowed to run — that good sponsorship requires action to either improve those schools or to shut them down.
But here’s what happened with Rhea Academy.
The school’s primary troubles over its seven-year existence have been financial. Here’s an excerpt from my story in December:
“Dayton charter school operator Monica Rhea again owes more than $30,000 for school expenses she cannot document, the second straight year the state auditor has leveled “finding for recoveryâ€? against her. In all, Ohio Auditor Betty Montgomery’s office found $31,164 in operating expenses they could not verify was used for legitimate school functions during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2003. That equates to 5 percent of the school’s total operating expenses.”
And another excerpt from that story:
“In 2004, the Ohio audtor issued a finding for recovery against Rhea, the school’s founder and superintendent, for $33,000 for checks she wrote but could not document, money transfers from the academy’s bank account to her personal account and other cash withdrawn or signed off on without documentation. An auditor’s office spokeswoman said the past debt was resolved, but she could not provide details. This time, more than $7,000 worth of school expenses had no invoice or supporting documents, including $4,958 for a life insurance policy on Monica Rhea. There also was $9,152 in debit card spending for travel, including expenses for trips to California and Great Britain and $2,596 in debit card expenses without proof that those purchases were school related.”
After all that, its sponsor, Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, decided not to renew Rhea’s contract this year. So the school went looking for a new sponsor and thought it had found one in Education Resource Consultants of Ohio. An ERCO representative called Buckeye and asked them to assign Rhea’s contract over.
But then ERCO’s board reviewed Rhea’s record and it was the financial trouble that dissuaded them from taking Rhea on, a lawyer for the sponsor told me. The board turned Rhea down, and the school went looking for another sponsor. That effort was apparently unsuccessful.
So the question is what happens now? Rhea cannot open without a sponsor. But if it is to close, who is responsible to make that happen?
“Not it,” said ERCO, arguing it never even entered into a contract with Rhea.
“Not it,” said Buckeye. It claimed it was finished with Rhea when it declined to renew the contract and assigned it to ERCO.
Finally the state had to ask ERCO to do the dirty deed and close the school, which apparently it will, barring a last minute affiliation by Rhea with a new sponsor.
It’s not a very good sign that sponsors are ready to get serious about enforcing accountability for their schools.
(Image credit: DDN)
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
Rhea Academy expected to close
(Rhea Academy students at recess in Cooper Park downtown)
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
The troubled Rhea Academy charter school apparently will close its doors for good, resolving a sponsor dispute that left no one in charge of the school.
The Ohio Department of Education finally stepped in this week and asked a Cincinnati sponsoring group to close the school after nearly two months of confusion over who was responsible for Rhea Academy under Ohio’s year-old charter sponsorship law.
The trouble began in June when Rhea Academy’s sponsor, Columbus-based Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, declined to renew the school for another year.
Director Patricia Hughes said the group received a request a request to assign Rhea’s contract to Cincinnati-based Education Resource Consultants of Ohio and did so on June 30.
But Phyllis Brown, legal counsel for ERCO, said it’s governing board declined to sponsor Rhea on July 1. Brown and Hughes said as late as this week Rhea had not reported finding a new sponsor and they both expect the school will close.
The question was who was responsible to see Rhea Academy through to its end.
Hughes said Buckeye considered itself finished with Rhea once itnotified Rhea it would not be renewed and assigned to contract to ERCO. But Brown said ERCO never had a contract with Rhea and therefore was not responsible either.
Under a new law that went into effect last summer, the Ohio Department of Education no longer directly monitors charter schools. Instead, sponsors like Buckeye and ERCO handle those tasks, including closing down schools that don’t pass muster.
Steve Burigana, the education department’s chief operating officer, said the state considered ERCO to be the sponsor, but was unclear whether the severed relationship should be treated as a contract termination, which would force the school to close, or a non-renewal, which would allow it a sliver of hope to find a new sponsor in time for school to start.
Brown said that while ERCO finally agreed to the state’s request to close the school and resolve the situation.
“To my knowledge, they’re going to close,� Brown said.
Monica Rhea, founder of the school, did not return a phone call seeking comment. Rhea Academy in the past has opened in early September. It’s website shows only the school calendar for 2003-04 school year.
The latest funding report shows about 50 kids enrolled. Last year Rhea had about 85 in kindergarten to 10th grade.
Rhea Academy has had repeated trouble with its state audits, with the state twice issuing “finding for recovery� seeking to have money repaid and describing the school’s books as “unauditable.�
(Image credit: Jan Underwood, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite DDN Stories
The cost of free textbooks
Great news! At some colleges, students can now get free textbooks, downloadable to their computers!
There’s just one catch. Shakespeare now comes with coffee and American history with 5-cent copies.
That’s right. The Associated Press reports new textbooks may come with advertisements:
“Now, a small Minnesota startup is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6 billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. Students, or anyone else who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF file of the book, which they can store on their hard drive and print.”
Some may consider textbook ads “undignified,” as the story says, but on the other hand saving as much as $900 a semester for books would be a Godsend for many students.
What do you think of this idea? Student salvation or corporate insanity?
(Image credit: www.easterfilms.com)
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Who’s in the Miami Valley?
A couple of commenters have asked for state report card results for places that are pretty close to Dayton but are not in our list of “Miami Valley” school districts. For school reporting purposes, the paper considers the 60 districts in Darke, Greene, Miami, Montgomery, Preble, Shelby and Warren counties to be part of the “Miami Valley.”
I know this area does not exactly jive with what some of you think of as the Miami Valley. Our paper, for instance, has loyal readers in Mercer, Auglaize, Champaign, Clark, Clinton and Butler counties, too. In some cases, we leave other counties to our sister papers. The Springfield News-Sun covers Clark and Champaign counties for us, for instance. You can find stories on those districts at their website. Likewise, districts in Butler County are covered by the Hamilton and Middletown papers.
For other areas, we just have had to make some tough decisions about how far our coverage can reach.
But here’s the great thing about an education blog. There’s no reason we can’t put all that data here. So here is a summary of how districts in other nearby counties did on the state report cards, with an explanation at the bottom for what it all means:
Butler County
Excellent
Fairfield — Met 24 standards, PI of 100, AYP not met, at risk
Lakota —Met 25 standards, PI of 103.2, AYP not met, at risk
Effective
Edgewood — Met 23 standards, PI of 97.5, AYP not met, at risk
Hamilton — Met 16 standards, PI of 92.4, AYP not met, improvement year 1
Madison — Met 18 standards, PI of 94.5, AYP not met, ar risk
Monroe — Met 23 standards, PI of 99.3, AYP not met, at risk
New Miami — Met 19 standards, PI of 97.8, AYP not met, at risk
Continuous Improvement
Middletown — Met 7 standards, PI of 84.8, AYP not met, improvement year 3
Ross — Met 24 standards, PI of 99.6, AYP met, OK
Talawanda — Met 22 standards, PI of 99.8, AYP not met, at risk
Champaign County
Excellent
West Liberty-Salem — Met 25 standards, PI of 102.6, AYP not met, at risk
Effective
Graham — Met 20 standards, PI of 94.6, AYP met, OK
Mechanicsburg — Met 20 standards, PI of 91.4, AYP not met, at risk
Triad — Met 16 standards, PI of 92.6, AYP not met, at risk
Continuous Improvement
Urbana — Met 16 standards, PI of 92.8, AYP not met, at risk
Clark County
Effective
Clark-Shawnee — Met 22 standards, PI of 98.2, AYP not met, at risk
Greenon — Met 23 standards, PI of 98.3, AYP met, OK
Northeastern — Met 20 standards, PI of 95.8, AYP not met, at risk
Northwestern — Met 19 standards, PI of 95.4, AYP not met, at risk
Southeastern — Met 23 standards, PI of 99, AYP met, OK
Tecumseh — Met 15 standards, PI of 92.8, AYP not met, at risk
Academic Watch
Springfield — Met 2 standards, PI of 77. 5, AYP not met, improvement year 3
Auglaize County
Excellent
St Marys — Met 24 standards, PI of 99.3, AYP met, OK
Minster — Met 25 standards, PI of 107.2, AYP met, OK
New Bremen — Met 25 standards, PI of 104.5, AYP not met, at risk
New Knoxville — Met 23 standards, PI of 100.5, AYP met, OK
Effective
Wapakoneta — Met 23 standards, PI of 97.3, AYP not met, at risk
Waynesfield-Goshen — Met 17 standards, PI of 90.6, AYP not met, at risk
Mercer County
Excellent
Coldwater — Met 25 standards, PI of 106.6, AYP met, OK
Marion — Met 25 standards, PI of 106.1, AYP met, OK
St Henry — Met 25 standards, PI of 106.3, AYP met, OK
Fort Recovery — Met 25 standards, PI of 106, AYP met, OK
Effective
Celina — Met 22 standards, PI of 97.7, AYP not met, at risk
Parkway — Met 15 standards, PI of 95.5, AYP not met, at risk
Clinton County
Excellent
Clinton-Massie — Met 24 standards, PI of 100, AYP not met, at risk
Effective
Blanchester — Met 23 standards, PI of 99.9, AYP not met, at risk
East Clinton — Met 20 standards, PI of 95.5, AYP met, OK
Continuous Improvement
Wilmington — Met 20 standards, PI of 94, AYP not met, at risk
What these things mean
Rating categories — There are five, from best to worst they are excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch and academic emergency
Standards — This year, there are 25. Districts must have 93 percent attendance, a 90 percent graduation rate and at least 75 percent passing achievement tests at grades 3 to 8 and on the Ohio Graduation Test to meet all 25.
Performance Index Score (PI) — This is a measure of how students performed across all tests at all grades.
Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) — Under No Child Left Behind, districts are required to meet minimum passing percentages in reading and math, plus show improvement in any minority subgroup (blacks, hispanics, poor children, special education students, etc.) that trails behind other kids.
Improvement status — Depending upon AYP, schools are either rated OK, at risk, or in “school improvement.” The first year AYP is not met, the school district is “at risk” for entering school improvement. After two straight years of missing AYP, the district is in “year 1” improvement status. That status progresses (year 2 to 6) every year that the district fails to meet AYP, with improvement plans and sanctions required at each step. The only way out of school improvement is to meet AYP two years in a row.
For all the links to our report card coverage, go here and scroll to the bottom.
(Image credit: Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission)
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The Miami Valley’s report card winners and losers
With the flood of data that comes with the district report card release, and the state’s ever-changing rules and terminology, it’s not always easy to figure out what the big surprises and disappointments are.
Here’s one way to judge. I looked at last year ranking of the 60 Miami Valley school districts for performance index score (the state’s measure of test performance across all grades) and compared it to this year’s ranking to see what the biggest changes were.
From that comparison, here are the Miami Valley’s biggest report card winners and losers this year:
Biggest winners
No. 1 Tipp City — Last year ranked 27, this year ranked 12
No. 2 Botkins — Last year ranked 17, this year ranked 3
No. 3 (tie) Piqua — Last year ranked 51, this year ranked 41
No. 3 (tie) Yellow Springs — Last year ranked 28, this year ranked 18
No. 5 Franklin Monroe — Last year ranked 32, this year ranked 23
Biggest losers
No. 1 Lebanon — Last year ranked 13, this year ranked 24
No. 2 (tie) Northmont — Last year ranked 6, this year ranked 14
No. 2 (tie) Miamisburg — Last year ranked 14, this year ranked 22
No. 2 (tie) Greenville — Last year ranked 43, this year ranked 51
No. 2 (tie) Mississinawa Valley — Last year ranked 45, this year ranked 53
For the complete list of Miami Valley School district performance index rankings, go here. For more highlights from district report card data release, go here. To see each district’s state rating, go here. for results from school districts near Dayton but not included in our definition of “the Miami Valley,” try here.
And check out today’s DDN stories on the report card release here and here.
(Image credit: www.mynewbeginnings.ca)
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Miami Valley schools ranked top to bottom
Here’s how the Miami Valley’s 60 school districts ranked for “performance index score,” a state statistic that gauges test performance across all grade levels:
No. 1 Oakwood 108.6
No. 2 Mason 108.5
No. 3 Centerville 105.4
No. 4 Botkins 105.4
No. 5 Russia 105.2
No. 6 Sugarcreek 104.7
No. 7 Kings 104.4
No. 8 Vandalia-Butler 104.3
No. 9 Springboro 103.9
No. 10 Anna 103.8
No. 11 Fort Loramie 103.8
No. 12 Tipp City 103.7
No. 13 Beavercreek 103.6
No. 14 Northmont 103.4
No. 15 Versailles 102.3
No. 16 Cedar Cliff 101.7
No. 17 Wayne 101.3
No. 18 Yellow Springs 100.8
No. 19 Newton 100.6
No. 20 Kettering 100.5
No. 21 Little Miami 100.5
No. 22 Miamisburg 100.4
No. 23 Franklin Monroe 100.2
No. 24 Lebanon 99.9
No. 25 Milton-Union 99.8
No. 26 Brookville 99.8
No. 27 Troy 99.4
No. 28 Arcanum 99.2
No. 29 Covington 99.1
No. 30 Valley View 98.7
No. 31 Tri-County North 98.4
No. 32 Miami East 98.2
No. 33 Bethel 97.9
No. 34 Greeneview 97.3
No. 35 New Lebanon 96.5
No. 36 Huber Heights 96
No. 37 Hardin-Houston 95.8
No. 38 Fairlawn 95.7
No. 39 Eaton 95.1
No. 40 Ansonia 94.7
No. 41 Piqua 94.2
No. 42 Mad River 94.1
No. 43 Carlisle 94.1
No. 44 Sidney 94
No. 45 Twin Valley 93.7
No. 46 National Trail 92.4
No. 47 Franklin 92
No. 48 West Carrollton 91.7
No. 49 Preble Shawnee 91.7
No. 50 Fairborn 91.4
No. 51 Greenville 91.3
No. 52 Xenia 91.2
No. 53 Mississinawa Valley 90.6
No. 54 Jackson Center 90
No. 55 Tri-Village 89.9
No. 56 Northridge 87.7
No. 57 Bradford 86.2
No. 58 Trotwood-Madison 82.7
No. 59 Jefferson Township 75.5
No. 60 Dayton 73.2
For more highlights of today’s district report card data release, go here. To see each district’s state rating, go here.
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What’s your district’s rating? Find it here
Her’s how the Miami Valley’s school districts fall into the state’s five rating categories:
Excellent
Oakwood, Mason, Centerville, Botkins, Russia, Sugarcreek, Kings, Vandalia-Butler, Springboro, Anna, Fort Loramie, Tipp City, Beavercreek, Northmont, Versailles, Cedar Cliff, Wayne, Yellow Springs, Newton, Kettering, Little Miami, Miamisburg, Franklin Monroe, Lebanon, Milton-Union
Effective
Brookville, Troy, Arcanum, Covington, Valley View, Tri-County North, Miami East, Bethel, Greeneview, New Lebanon, Huber Heights, Hardin-Houston, Fairlawn, Eaton, Ansonia, Piqua, Mad River, Carlisle, Sidney, Franklin, West Carrollton, Mississinawa Valley, Jackson Center
Continuous Improvement
Twin Valley South, National Trail, Preble Shawnee, Fairborn, Greenville, Xenia, Tri-Village, Northridge, Bradford, Trotwood-Madison, Jefferson Township, Dayton
Academic Watch
None
Academic Emergency
None
For more highlights of today’s district report card data release, go here. To see Miami Valley school districts ranked by performance index score, go here.
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Lots of report card improvement
(Beach Haven, New Jersey)
I have to say, I love technology on days like today. I planned a beach vacation in New Jersey this week months before the state picked today to release state report cards. But no worries. I’ve spent the morning parked in front of a “chocolate bar” that offers a free wireless Internet connection, downloading report card data, crunching it for tomorrow’s paper and analyzing the results.
Overall I can tell you that it’s going to be a happy day in many school districts. The new state rating system, which now rewards test score growth, has pushed a lot of district’s ratings up.
Here is some of what has jumped out at me:
State rating categories
There are five rating categories — Excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch and academic emergency.
For the first time since the ratings began eight years ago, there are no districts still rated in academic emergency in Ohio this year. In the Miami Valley, 20 of 60 districts improved their rating designation. None saw a decline.
Of the 75 worst ranked districts by “performance index score,” 68 were ranked in “continuous improvement” because of test score gains.
And how about this for an interesting ratings quirk? Hilliard in Frankin County meets all 25 state standards but ranked in “continuous improvement” and labeled “at risk” for not making “adequate yearly progress” for test score gain under No Child Left Behind. Otherwise, it would have been rated “excellent.” Meanwhile, Dayton met 1 of 25 state standards and is sitting right next to Hilliard in “continuous improvement” because of its test score gains.
AYP
(NOTE: These next two lists for AYP were mistakenly reversed when I first put up this post. They are now correct)
Local districts who didn’t meet AYP last year but did this year include Tipp City and Tri-Village.
Districts who met AYP last year but not this year include Little Miami, Kings, Carlisle, Sidney, Jackson Center, Eaton, Northridge, Northmont, New Lebanon, Miamisburg, Brookville, Miami East, Greenview, Mississinawa Valley, Ansonia.
Trotwood, Xenia, Dayton and Fairborn are in “year 3” improvement status for consistently failing to meet AYP.
Dayton
Despite Dayton’s test gains, it still ranks second worst in Ohio for performance index score, a measure of student test performance across all grades. Cleveland ranks last in the state but was just 2 points behind Dayton and met no indicators while Dayton met 1.
Dayton’s test score gain, which propelled it up two rungs on the state’s rating scale to continuous improvement, was just the sixth best gain the Miami Valley. It also looked less spectacular when compared to other gains around the state. A total of 68 school districts in Ohio saw better “performance index score” improvement than Dayton.
Five of eight largest Ohio urban school districts now are in continuous improvement, all but Youngstown, Cleveland and Columbus
Jefferson Twp
Jefferson Twp, which ranked last in the state in 2005 for performance index score, moved up to the fourth worst rated district in Ohio. Jefferson had the biggest improvement of test performance index score in the Miami Valley, a gain of 12 points. That was also the second biggest gain in the state.
Oakwood
Oakwood ranked No. 1 in Miami Valley and 4th in state for performance index score. Last year, Oakwood ranked first locally and second in the state.
Mason
Mason ranks No. 2 in the Miami Valley and 9th in state for performance index score.
Lebanon
Lebanon was the only local district that saw a slight performance index score decline, but it still met 24 state standards and earned the top “excellent” rating.
Miami County
Four of eight districts improved their state rating designation, including economically challenged Milton-Union and Piqua, now rated “excellent” and “effective” respectively. Piqua is an interesting story. They’ve been on a long upward climb for test results and state ratings.
Montgomery County
Six of 16 districts moved up a rating category, including West Carrollton, now rated “effective,” which a few years ago took a lot of criticism for its low scores.
Warren County
All eight districts are now rated at least effective.
Want to take a look at all the state data for yourself? You can download it here.
To see each district’s state rating, go here. To see Miami Valley school districts ranked by performance index score, go here.
(Image credit: vacationhomerentals.com)
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Ouch! University president going to prison?
(Priscilla Slade appears in court)
Wow. Earlier this year, my pal Matt Tresauge, higher education reporter at the Houston Chronicle, began writing about the odd spending habits of Texas Southern University President Priscilla Slade, such as letting the university pick up the tab for $138,000 worth of landscaping at her million-dollar mansion.
Tresauge’s stories have continued to unearth more questionable financial dealings. Now a grand jury has indicted Slade and her lieutenants on charges that could send her to prison!
(The don’t kid around about law enforcement in Texas.)
Altogether, an investigation now alleges $1.9 million in mis-spending on furniture, entertainment, artwork, club memberships and spa treatments, Tresauge writes.
How nice did Slade’s landscaping look? Well, she just sold the place to Mario Williams, the NFL’s top draft choice who went to the Houston Texans, for $1.5 million. Now that’s curb appeal!
(Image credit: Houston Chronicle)
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Starting at the top — a new breed of principals
(Charity Adams Earley Academy Principal Peggy Burks)
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
DAYTON — The words to the song “What a Wonderful World,” carried by a little girl’s voice, echoed across the cavernous basketball arena while 2,500 people cooed.
But it wasn’t just this first-grade vocal powder keg wrapped in a blue dress and topped with white hair bows that Superintendent Percy Mack noticed during convocation earlier this month.
As he delighted in Briennon Saddler’s rendition Louis Armstrong’s famous song, Mack thought also of the former music teacher seated next to her, rolling out a melody on a small keyboard — Peggy Burks, the principal of Charity Adams Earley Academy for Girls.
“That beautiful singing, that voice, I know that probably was already there,” he said of Briennon. “But her poise, and that little curtsey at the end? That was all Peggy Burks.”
Burks is part of a new class of leaders in the district, principals hand-picked by Mack to reshape Dayton’s schools.
Since Mack took the reins in 2002, he has replaced more than half the district’s principals. While more than a quarter of Dayton’s principals are newcomers from outside like Burks, the majority of Mack’s picks were top teachers and assistant principals groomed through leadership programs he beefed up or put in place.
Today’s Dayton principals are a little greener than in the past, but the atmosphere they work in has changed. More is expected and evaluations are tougher, but the pay is better and new school concepts are helping Mack attract good candidates.
“He wants a class act — people he can be proud of,” Burks said.
Judy Hennessey already had a good job. She was just the superintendent in Oakwood, Dayton’s wealthiest and most school-centric suburb — and one of the best scoring school districts in Ohio.
Back then, in 2004, Hennessey knew Dayton Superintendent Percy Mack as a thoughtful, collaborative colleague who came to monthly county superintendent meetings, something prior Dayton school chiefs rarely did.
So when Mack and University of Dayton education dean Tom Lasley asked her about heading up the Dayton Early College Academy experimental high school, Hennessey didn’t hesitate. She left Oakwood and became a Dayton principal.
“I was inspired,” she said. “I don’t think that’s an overstatement.”
The year before Mack took over, in 2001, Dayton school principals were a mostly static, insular bunch. Only four of 38 came to their jobs from outside the district. More than a quarter were also district principals in their prior jobs.
Even with the district ranked among the worst in the state, none had been evaluated in two years and every one received an acceptable rating in 1999.
Today, 10 of 38 came from outside and just six were district principals in their last jobs.
Mack has put a new evaluation system in place that measures test score growth and attendance, but also seeks to quantify how well principals lead, use data, help parents and handle conflict. It’s one of the changes he credits with helping to lift the district out of the state’s lowest rating of “academic emergency.”
“You have to get your best people in those schools,” he said. “That’s where the rubber meets the road.”
Mack started with one-on-one meetings with principals that first year, laying out his expectations and asking, “Do you have the energy?”
Many answered yes. Some were ready to retire. A few heeded his caution and found other roles.
“There’s nothing wrong with admitting you don’t have the will,” he said. “Some realized their strengths were elsewhere in the organization.”
Pay was upgraded, too. The average principal now makes $76,243, up $13,048 from 2001 — a gain more than twice the rate of inflation.
To find good candidates, Mack first looked inside, asking Willie McGrady, the executive director for school operations he brought with him from Georgia, to create a leadership academy for top teachers with potential.
“We had to start developing our own people,” Mack said. “People who have good skills sometimes won’t step out there. You sometimes need to tap them.”
Jalma Fields, second-year principal of Meadowdale Elementary School, was one of those who needed a nudge.
Fields, the district’s teacher of the year in 2004, had turned down prior invitations to become a principal. But soon, she was drafted for the leadership program. McGrady paired her with former Meadowdale Principal Barbara Goins as a mentor. When Goins retired, Fields finally felt ready.
“It was being in the leadership program and having a chance to work with Willie McGrady,” she said. “I learned so much from him.”
Fields counted at least six others from her leadership class of about 12 who are now principals or assistant principals.
Mack also took a personal interest in leaderhip, selecting finalists and conducts interviews for every principal and assistant principal job.
New ideas and experiments also created interest. Hennessey’s school, DECA, is one of the few in the nation that seeks to graduate seniors with a diploma and an associate’s degree.
David White was comfortable as assistant superintendent at the ISUS Trade and Tech Prep High School, a highly regarded charter school for dropouts. But he loved the idea of the Dayton Technology Design High School, a last chance program in which kids collaborate to build an educational video game.
“How cool is it to start your own school?” he said. “I couldn’t pass up trying to get that job.”
And there was Peggy Burks.
Like Hennessey, she had a good job, leading a Wright State University research project on inner city teaching practices. At a meeting with Mack he mentioned the idea of a girls school.
Right there she told him she wanted to be the principal. Starting a new school, rather than taking one over, was a perfect challenge for Burks.
“School climate and culture is already set and changing it is like using a short-handled ladle to stir a big cauldron,” she said. “You never can reach the bottom or get the mix just right.”
Mack took a wait-and-see approach. People always say they want big jobs, he said, but not everyone is cut out.
“I knew she had great skills, but principalship is different from just about any other job you can do,” he said. “It takes a skilled technician. It takes high energy. It takes someone who in a lot of ways puts the school ahead of themselves.”
He asked Burks to craft a five-year plan for the school. As he read it, her enthusiasm jumped off the page.
“When I saw that plan, that’s when I knew she was the one,” he said.
(Image credit: Dave Munch, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite DDN Stories
Hmmm. Will Dayton really move up?
Norris Brown
It’s good news for Jefferson Twp., but possibly bad news for Dayton. Like Dayton Superintendent Percy Mack, it looks like his Jefferson Twp. counterpart, Norris Brown (pictured above) will have a better day than last year when state report cards are released Tuesday.
Dayton’s been celebrating its impending move out of academic emergency for more than a week now.
But perhaps the district won’t be the only ones moving up. And at least locally, it might still end up ranked last despite test score gains.
A good source tells me Jefferson Twp, which last year was the only Ohio district ranked below Dayton by the state, has actually outgained the city schools this year and will rank higher for its “performance index,” a measure of student performance across all tests taken.
Hmmm. Does it diminish Dayton’s accomplishment if it moves up to “continuous improvement” but remains last in the Miami Valley?
Probably Dayton’s best chance to not be last is if it can catch Trotwood (ranked 58 out of 60 in the Miami Valley last year). Dayton and Jefferson Twp. were at the bottom among all Ohio districts last year, but its likely their dual gains will be enough to at least not be last in the state again.
I know Mack wishes Jefferson and Trotwood no ill will, but I’m also sure he doesn’t want Dayton at the bottom on any list again.
(Image credit: DDN)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, Testing
Ohio colleges get some respect
(Move in day 2005 at Miami U. — Ohio’s fourth best college?)
Washington Monthly has an axe to grind. Its editors don’t like the U.S. News and World Report annual rankings of U.S. colleges. Instead of just complaining about U.S. News’ approach, they got a better idea — they did their own list.
And overall, Ohio’s schools come out looking pretty good. Ohio State and Ohio U. are among the big winners. But local colleges Miami and Dayton are among the big losers.
I spotted this first at the Roanoke Times’ Campus Watch blog.
Washington Monthly thought schools should be judged not by academic reputation alone, but by how well they spend our tax dollars. So they looked for colleges that moved kids up the income scale (helping poor kids get rich, for instance), did good research and promoted community service. More on Washington Monthly’s methodology here.
The full list is quite different than U.S. News. Here’s how Ohio schools ranked, with their U.S. News rating in parenthesis:
No. 27 Ohio State University (60)
No. 40 Ohio University (109)
No. 56 Kent State University (Not Rated)
No. 102 Miami University (66)
No. 118 University of Cincinnati (Not Rated)
No. 140 University of Dayton (104)
No. 146 Bowling Green State University (Not Rated)
No. 171 University of Toledo (Not Rated)
No. 179 University of Akron (Not Rated)
No. 205 Wright State University (No Rated)
No. 215 Cleveland State University (Not Rated)
(Image credit: Cox News Service)
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Do schools even matter?
(Teacher Jessica Chilbert with first graders on the first day of school last year at Orville Wright Elementary School, one of Dayton’s many high poverty schools)
I’ll tell you my answer to the question in the headline right now — yes, schools matter. Anyone who believes otherwise (I honestly don’t think there are many) should not be involved in education, or writing about it for that matter.
There is big edusphere buzz about this topic, fueled by Diana Jean Schemo’s thought-provoking On Education column in the New York Times this week called “It Takes More than Schools to Close Achievement Gap.” (Alexander Russo at This Week in Education has a decent round-up of some of the blogging commentary on the column.)
Here’s a taste from Schemo’s piece:
“In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas. To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families. For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.”
The whole topic made many edubloggers uneasy. If there was one barrier NCLB indisputably crossed it was to force the idea that the nation, or at least the federal government, believed schools could make a difference and expected them to do so.
Even so, Schemo, who covered education in Washington, D.C., for the Times, raises an interesting topic that deserves discussion. Few dispute that the background and resources of the family correlate to some degree with how well a child scores on standardized tests. My recent study of this question using Miami Valley school districts even offers supporting evidence of a fairly strong correlation between median income and school district success on state report cards.
But by now there is certainly evidence out there that a good school can educate poor kids well despite their challenges and even make a difference in standardized test scores. (A couple of my favorite examples are the SEED charter school in D.C., a public boarding school, and Dayton’s own Dayton Early College Academy, an the campus of the University of Dayton. Both are successful, if expensive, examples of schools educating kids from challenging backgrounds.)
The bigger question in education right now is which strategies employed by successful schools can best be replicated on a wide scale, not whether we should even bother to try. I’d love to hear your thoughts on family background and its impact on test scores or good schools and how they can make a difference for poor kids.
(Image credit: Bill Reinke, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Eight years of upheaval
(Jackson School demolition in 2003)
I think often about kids like Aire’Anna Stevens — kids who were in kindergarten on the day I started covering Dayton schools in the Spring of 1999.
Aire’Anna was featured in my story Tuesday on the first day of school in Dayton. In eight years of education, she’s attended six different schools and every one of them closed after she left.
How did that happen? Aire’Anna and her classmates have rode along while the district has traveled a bumpy route over the course of their academic careers.
The day I started work, the school board was swirling in controversy. Just days before a state audit report unveiled a previously undisclosed, multi-million dollar deficit and the board was already moving toward what would be an unpleasant ousting of then-Superintendent James Williams.
Also that year, the first charter school opened, and in short order Dayton became one of the nation’s hottest charter school markets.
Those combined trends — a leadership vacuum at the top and intense financial pressure from enrollment losses to charters — created quite a bit of turmoil for those first five years I was writing about Dayton. As interesting as the debates and trends were to cover, down in the trenches the kids lived through a lot of uncertainty.
More than 15 schools have since closed — some because of enrollment declines, some to make way for new schools that will be built through the district’s massive construction program.
Kids in Dayton tend to be mobile anyway. It’s never been unusual to find a kid who’s been to lots of different schools. And the tend to roll with the punches. It was interesting to me, for instance, that it was the adults, not the kids, who seemed most affected by the closing of Roth Middle School last year.
Even so, that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. School board member Mario Gallin told me recently she hoped the district’s move toward neighborhood schools would have a calming effect on kids’ lives over the next several years. Perhaps it will mean more kids spend more of their growing up attending schools near their homes that are, she hopes, more connected to their communities. That will be something to watch for as we move ahead.
Meanwhile, there will always be Aire’Anna and her classmates, the kids who’ve been bounced from school to school and for whom these Titanic changes in Dayton were very much up close and personal. Anytime you wonder how much what’s happening at the top politically in a school district really affects the kids at their desks, think of them.
(Photo credit: Jan Underwood, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts
One year later …
That picture above is the Yankees traveling down the Canyon of Heroes, celebrating their last World Series victory over the Mets in 2001. (What, you didn’t know I was a Yankee fan?)
That’s how I feel today, exactly one year after launching Get on the Bus. Put simply, it’s been fun.
But I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Six months before Get on the Bus launched, I had never visited a blog and wouldn’t have been able to explain to you how one worked. At that time, if someone had suggested to me I should write a blog, I’d have thought it was a stupid idea.
With one year under my belt, I’m pleased I did. Get on the Bus has been a bigger success than I had hoped, ranking consistently at or near the top among the best read blogs here at the Dayton Daily News.
For me, Get on the Bus offers a chance to connect with our local readers in a new way. Feedback about what interests you, angers you, perplexes you, etc., is very useful to consider as I write about education in Dayton. The blog also gives me a place to write about interesting stories or education issues that don’t necessarily lend themselves to news stories.
But this venue has also created connections with new audiences beyond Dayton. I’ve said for a long time that our issues here matter nationally because of Dayton’s place of importance in the national school choice conversation. It’s been nice to see Get on the Bus occasionally linked to by edblogging big shots like Eduwonk, Edwize, Edspresso and Joanne Jacobs. I’ve also benefited by connecting with other edubloggers around the country (especially the Education Wonks and those who regularly contribute to their brainchild, the Carnival of Education) and learning about the issues that matter to them.
But if I have one disappointment, it’s that the conversation here has not been as lively as I had hoped it would be by now. Part of this is “blog envy.” To some extent I modeled Get on the Bus after Patti Ghezzi’s excellent Get Schooled blog at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Take a look at her comments and the great back and forth, especially among parents and teachers, and you’ll see what I hoped to recreate here.
I very much appreciate the generally intelligent comments posted here, especially by a core group of loyal readers. I’d just like to expand the conversation so it includes more voices.
Besides asking you to urge all your friends and relatives to read Get on the Bus, I am interested in suggestions any readers may have for connecting this blog with more people, especially teachers, parents and students.
And don’t stop there. What else would you like to see here at Get on the Bus? What do you think would make it better? Tell me what you like most, or find most annoying, about this blog.
And, above all else, thanks for reading and caring about education.
(Image credit: AP)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Journalism
Sesame Street owes me a merchandising cut
Abby Cadabby
Abby Elliott
Sunday’s New York Times has an interesting story about the creation of a new muppet character for Sesame Street who joins the show when the new season begins Aug. 14.
They call her “Abby Cadabby.” She is a three-year-old “girly-girl,” with fair skin (OK, pink skin) and curly hair. My daughter Abby just turned four, has fair skin, curly hair and a classic “girly-girl” outlook on life.
From the photos above, it’s pretty clear the Sesame Street character is based on my daughter.
That’s cool. I think she’s great, too. Just tell Big Bird to forward our merchandising share. Make the check payable to my wife, Jennifer. The kid’s her mini-me.
(Image credits: NY Times, Jennifer Elliott)
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Young Children
“Infidel books” here in the Midwest?
A ban on teaching “sectarian, infidel, or immoral doctrine” and “infidel books” forbidden? No, it’s not Taliban Afganistan.
It’s just over the Ohio River in Kentucky.
And it’s state law.
My pal Frank Lockwood, a fine reporter who blogs about religion for the Lexington Herald-Leader at Bible Belt Blogger, unearthed a Kentucky state law from the 1800s that is still on the books and still in effect.
Seems harmless enough, right? Ohio has its own bizarre, old laws that are not enforced and practically irrelevant. And in fact, sections of Kentucky’s law require instruction in the Bible, allow the teaching of Biblical creation and permit the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public school, all specifically struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court and, therefore, unenforceable.
Yet, as Frank writes, the Kentucky School Boards Association recommends districts follow this law. And Frank has a guest post from Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein calling on the Kentucky Legislature to repeal the law. Fein says Kentucky lawmakers are “stunting public education” by not taking action.
Take a look at what Frank and Fein have to say and then answer this question — are old laws like this something to chuckle at, or is serious action required?
(Image credit: www.bookthink.com)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Schools and Politics
School starts in the Miami Valley
UPDATE: Since this list first ran a few weeks ago, I’ve corrected Miamisburg to Aug. 23, Kettering to Aug. 29 and Tipp City to Aug. 22.
The first day of school in Dayton is Monday. Wondering when your kids are due back in class? Here’s the list for the Miami Valley:
The first day of school for Miami Valley school districts will be:
Aug. 7: Dayton
Aug. 21: Valley View
Aug. 22: Brookville, Fairborn, Jackson Center, Kings, Mad River, New Lebanon, Newton, Northmont, Piqua, Preble Shawnee, Twin Valley, Xenia, Tipp City, Waynesville
Aug. 23: Botkins, Cedar Cliff, Covington, Fairlawn, Fort Loramie, Franklin, Hardin-Houston, Jefferson Township, Little Miami, Milton-Union, National Trail, Northridge, Oakwood, Russia, Huber Heights, Miamisburg
Aug. 24: Anna, Lebanon, Sidney, Vandalia-Butler
Aug. 28: Bethel, Bradford, Carlisle, Eaton
Aug. 29: Arcanum-Butler, Beavercreek, Centerville, Greeneview, Miami East, Mississinawa Valley, Sugarcreek, West Carrollton, Kettering
Aug. 30: Ansonia, Greenville, Yellow Springs
Aug. 31: Troy
Sept. 5: Trotwood-Madison
Sept. 6: Mason, Springboro
Dayton Public Schools bell schedule
Classes start Monday in Dayton. Time to get the little boys and girls to school on time. Here’s the bell schedule for the district’s schools:
7:15 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. Fairview, Wilbur Wright and Stivers middle school students and Gardendale Academy
7:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. Belle Haven, Eastmont, Edison, Franklin, Meadowdale, and Longfellow Alternative elementary schools
8 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Dunbar, Meadowdale, Patterson and Stivers high schools students
8:10 a.m. to 2:50 p.m. World of Wonder elementary school
8:35 a.m. to 2:50 p.m. Allen, Carlson, Cleveland (at Lincoln), Cornell Heights, Horace Mann, Van Cleve (at McGuffey), Wogaman (at Miami Chapel) elementary schools
9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Belmont, Colonel White and Longfellow Alternative high schools
9:05 to 3:35 p.m. Dayton Early College Academy
9:25 a.m. to 3:40 p.m. Fairview, Charity Adams Earley Academy, Dayton Boys Prep Academy, Gettysburg, Gorman, Jefferson, Kemp, Kiser, Loos, Orville Wright, Patterson-Kennedy, Valerie elementary schools
Permalink | | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Unions in education
(Teachers rally near San Diego)
It’s been one of those weeks. I’ve been so focused on Dayton’s big news, I’ve written about almost nothing else on the blog. However, there were a couple very interesting posts out there in the edusphere I wanted to mention, because I thought together they were a fine example of how blogs can, at times, prompt an interesting and honest discussion on a sensitive issue.
If you read blogs regularly, you know there is a lot of shouting and name calling out here, which is why I enjoyed a recent debate between Leo Casey, who blogs for the United Federation of Teachers’s Edwize blog, and Joe Williams, a former education journalist and author of the book “Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education” who blogs on behalf of the New York Charter Schools Association at The Chalkboard.
Joe’s book details several examples of unions behaving badly when it comes to schools, and he kicked off this debate at the end of a long post in which he gently asked some pointed questions about unions:
Does relying on traditional collective bargaining agreements to ensure “respect” take the heat off management to otherwise treat employees “respectfully”??? Does it force the union to constantly make sure the rank-and-filers are as miserable as humanly possible so they will exert angry pressure every time a contract comes up for renewal??? Is this the best we can do for teachers and students?? Is it possible there is a better way to do this??
Back at Edwize, Leo responds with a very personal account of why unions matter for teachers and for kids in his view.
If you’re interested in the debate over unions in education, both posts are worth reading. And kudos to Leo and Joe for tacking an emotional issue with passion but also with level heads.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Light at the end of the tunnel for Dayton?
A couple minutes after the huge celebration of Dayton’s escape from “academic emergency,” Superintendent Percy Mack was wrapping up a press conference when a television reporter shouted out one more question:
“Do you feel like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel?”
Mack smiled and said, “Well, at least now we know the light is on.”
It was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of what today, after all the hoopla, we probably should remember — Dayton schools still have a long way to go.
Think of it this way. Last year, Dayton’s performance index score (a measure of performance across all state tests taken), ranked 609 out of 610 Ohio school districts. Only nearby Jefferson Twp. schools did worse. Despite a strong jump in test performance over two years, and good gains this year over last, Dayton’s new performance index score is going to be 73.2, the district says. Last year, that would have ranked 604th in the state.
This is not to say the celebration isn’t justified. It is. A 73.2 index score last year would have been better than both Jefferson Twp and Trotwood. It may not sound like much, but finishing third to last in the Miami Valley after years of finishing dead last would be something to shout about.
The move to a “continuous improvement” rating has other important ramifications. Among them:
—Everybody wants to be on a winning team. Mack said this in yesterday’s press conference. Whether he’s trying to hire principals and teachers or trying to sell families on keeping their kids in the district, it sure helps to push state-sanctioned evidence in front of them that the district is moving in the right direction.
—The timing is ideally converged with the opening of new school buildings. Four new schools will open this year alone and all 28 new buildings should be operational over the next four years. This is advantageous in several ways. First, it serves as a sub-conscious reward to students and staff for continued hard work on academics. Second, the new buildings have loads of built-in advantages that should aid instruction and, if well utilized, could help the scores gain momentum. Third, it’s great public relations. The community can feel better about the tax money they are shelling out for the new schools if they think the district is making them pay off.
—On that note, this helps the cause for the upcoming tax levy. Dayton voters approved new taxes for school buildings in 2002 but have not seen a levy for operating expenses in nearly 15 years. That’s an almost unheard of run of no new taxes for a school district. But part of the reason the district hasn’t asked for new money is the fear of a voter backlash while it was ranked worst in the state. An improving district is a much easier sell for tax levy. Expect to see one on the ballot as early as 2007.
—It’s crucial politically for Gail Littlejohn and the school board. Gail and company absolutely bet the farm on serious academic gains on their first day in office when they began work on a massive reform plan. It’s been frustrating for them that five years later the best they could say academically was “the scores have moved up some.” That has become an increasingly hard sell despite many other obvious improvements in the district under Gail’s leadership. It will make a HUGE difference for her to be able to say to potential community partners that the district is out of academic emergency and making big gains in the state’s accountability ratings.
Now the challenge is keeping it going. Any slippage on future report cards would be a major setback in all these areas. Wednesday was a glorious day of celebration for Dayton, but Monday’s opening of schools brings more hard work ahead.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Big news on Dayton Public, Roosevelt HS
Dayton Superintendent Percy Mack made if unofficially official this morning — Dayton will jump up two rungs on the state’s accountability ratings to “continuous improvement” when the ranking is released Aug. 15.
That sparked a joyous explosion among 2,500 teachers and support staff at the district’s annual convocation event at UD Arena, punctuated with the Colonel White High School band marching in and banging out celebratory rhythms on the drums and cymbals, waving gold pom-poms and flags.
“Two years ago that band had 12 people in it,” Mack shouted over the music from a group of about three dozen kids. “It shows we can do it. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s here.”
It’s a big news day for the district, totally overshadowing the other big story from last night’s school board meeting — the final nail in the coffin for historic Roosevelt High School.
No matter how you look at it, moving out of academic emergency is an accomplishment for Dayton, a district that for three years has been buried at the bottom of Ohio’s report card ratings.
I asked Mario Gallin, one of just two board members who pre-dates the Gail Littlejohn era, what she thought were the most important factors in the district’s turnaround. Here’s what she said:
—First, a real emphasis on accountability. “People were unable to hide any longer behind who they knew or how long they had been here,” she said. “We don’t have that attitude, for the most part, anymore.”
—Second, teachers and staff bought into the idea of consistent instruction across the district. “Putting together consistent curriculum and teaching can have an effect,” she said.
—Third, a self-informed school board that doesn’t just rely on the superintendent for information. “This board is very open and reached out to various parts of the school district,” she said. “We had round table discussions with teachers, parents and others and we forged relationships around the district with people we could go back to and get advice and input from. And the superintendent was willing to work with those relationships.”
Check back later today for more from convocation.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Shocking news: Dayton out of “academic emergency”
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Percy Mack has some stunning news for 2,500 district staff when he delivers his convocation speech this morning:
The district is no longer in “academic emergency”
And the good news may not stop there.
It appears from numbers Mack (pictured above) reported Tuesday night that Dayton Public Schools will jump two rungs on Ohio’s rating system and settle in “continuous improvement,” the middle of five rating categories.
That would be an enormous change of fortunes for Dayton, which for the past three years has been last or tied for last among all 611 Ohio school districts for report card results.
Friday was the last day to submit data and corrections to the Ohio Department of Education, which will issue its ranking of districts Aug. 15.
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Mack said Dayton reported a performance index score of 73.2. That score — a measure of district performance across all tests taken — is up from 66.4 last year and 61.3 the prior year.
According to the state’s rules, any district with a performance index score of at least 70 can be rated no lower than “academic watch.” And those that grow the score by 10 points in two years, including growth of 3 points in the most recent year, move up one more rung to “continuous improvement.”
Dayton can thank the state’s new system, which rewards test score growth, for its escape from academic emergency.
But not only was its growth enough to reach “continuous improvement,” Mack said, the district fell just short of making “adequate yearly progress.”
That standard, measured by the federal No Child Left Behind law, requires districts to meet pre-set test scores and attendance at several grades, and ensure all minority groups make gains.
Mack said Dayton met all the requirements for adequate yearly progress except one. Poor students classified as “economically disadvantaged” attended school 92.9 percent of the time last year. The federal standard requires 93 percent attendance.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Omega’s principal problems
Not even two weeks ago, I met with the new leadership of the Omega School of Excellence, including the upbeat new principal, Tracy Ross. Two days after my story about the school appeared with a large photo of Ross, she was fired.
The management company leading the school, called KIDS (Keys to Improving Dayton Schools, Inc.), won’t explain why it let Ross go less than a month after she was hired and just a few weeks before school starts.
In an unfortunate coincidence for the school, three days after Ross was fired, the woman she replaced sued the school over her termination in March. Although KIDS says it didn’t make the call to fire Michelle Frazier Trotman, the group was hired prior to Trotman’s dismissal and took over running the school when she left.
The school’s founder, the Rev. Vanessa Oliver Ward, indicated she thought Omega did right by Trotman when it paid her salary three months after she was let go until her contract ended. But Trotman’s contract states she must have 180 days notice to be fired and she was given just 108 days notice.
KIDS, a new group that hopes to make a business out of “reconstituting” low scoring schools with new, effective academic staffs, appears to be off to a bit of a bumpy start.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
