Indiana’s grading curve runs uphill for high-poverty schools

NOTE: This post was written before Glenda Ritz upset Tony Bennett in last week’s election for Indiana superintendent of public instruction. Ritz has been critical of the state’s school-grading system. As superintendent, she can’t change the law that requires the rating of schools or the rule that sets the grading rubric. She argues that she can influence how the system is implemented.

The school grades that the Indiana Department of Education released recently may tell us a little about which schools are effective. But they also reinforce a false and ugly stereotype: “Good” schools enroll students from families that are well off financially; schools that serve poor kids are likely to be “bad.”

This would be obvious to anyone who scanned the results. In Indiana’s wealthiest school districts, most if not all the schools get As. Most of the schools with Fs are clustered in urban districts with high poverty, especially Indianapolis, Gary, Hammond, Evansville and South Bend.

Matt DiCarlo shows what’s going on in this post at Shanker Blog. He breaks down the Indiana data and demonstrates clearly that there’s a high likelihood low-poverty schools will get good grades and high-poverty schools will fare poorly with the grading metrics that Indiana adopted this year.

The problem, DiCarlo explains, is that Indiana’s system relies heavily on absolute performance – the percentage of students who pass ISTEP-Plus exams in math and English. And those percentages are highly correlated with family demographics. Schools can improve their grades a bit if many of their students show “high growth” on the tests from year to year. But with a few striking exceptions, most high-poverty schools are starting in too big a hole to dig out.

The bias, DiCarlo writes, “is a feature of the system, not a bug –

AEI: Implementing Indiana’s ed-reform agenda no sure thing

A new report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute raises questions about the education policies that Indiana has adopted under Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett – not whether they are good policies, but whether they’re likely to succeed.

Titled “Implementing Indiana’s ‘Putting Students First’ Agenda: Early Lessons and Potential Futures,” the policy brief highlights the gap between the top-down adoption of the policies by Republican state officials and their eventual implementation by local schools boards, superintendents and principals.

“Unless state and local implementers seize opportunities present in the law, efforts such as Putting Students First likely will prompt new rounds of compliance-oriented behavior, wasted money, bureaucratic busyness, frustrated teachers, and few or no substantive gains,” it concludes.

Authors are Rick Hess, AEI director of education policy studies; Paul Manna, an associate professor of government at the College of William and Mary; and Keenan Kelley, a William and Mary student. Hess is known as a strong supporter of what’s usually called education reform. In Indiana that’s the Daniels-Bennett agenda: an expansion of charter schools, state-funded vouchers for private schools, performance-based evaluation of teachers and limits on collective bargaining.

Even if you don’t agree with the authors’ perspective, however, the report is worth reading. A few highlights:

// “Indiana’s Republican leaders opted for wielding brute political force in passing the Putting Students First agenda in 2011,” the report says. Every Senate Democrat and all but one House Democrat voted against all four bills that made up the agenda.

Lawmaker: Board of Education disregarded legislative intent with IREAD-3

Was the Indiana State Board of Education just complying with the wishes of the Legislature when it adopted a rule last year that says third-graders must be retained if they don’t pass a reading test? Not according to the author of the bill in question.

Rep. Greg Porter, D-Indianapolis, told School Matters that lawmakers clearly weren’t saying kids should be held back on the basis of their performance on a single test.

“The state superintendent and board of education essentially usurped what we said we wanted done as a legislature,” he said. “They went beyond the intent of the legislation.”

Porter was chairman of the House Education Committee in 2010, and in that role he was the lead sponsor of HEA 1367 – also known as Public Law 109 — which called for for improving reading skills for students in primary grades.

The legislation, Porter said, was a compromise that reflected strong reservations about the push by Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett to require students to pass a reading test in order to be promoted to fourth grade. It said retention should be used only as a last resort.

Porter said lawmakers were aware of research showing that students who are held back are much less likely to graduate from high school, and they also questioned implementing such high-stakes accountability when Indiana trailed other states in funding early-childhood education.

Legislative oversight for the Indiana Department of Education

School Matters’ recap last week of Indiana’s 2012 education legislation missed this interesting and potentially significant item: Lawmakers voted to create a “select commission on education” to evaluate certain operations of the Indiana Department of Education and the State Board of Education.

The measure, added late in the process to House Enrolled Act 1376, a catch-all education and public administration bill, calls for specific focus on two areas: 1) the process and content of creating new metrics for giving schools A-to-F grades; and 2) the implementation of the new teacher evaluation system that the legislature approved last year. It adds that the commission may also take up any other education issue that members and legislative leaders deem necessary.

Why might lawmakers think that the Department of Education and State Board of Education could use some oversight? We can speculate:

// In 2010, Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett pushed for a law that said third-graders who don’t pass a state reading test wouldn’t be promoted to fourth grade. After considerable debate, the legislature declined to approve the law. Instead, it passed a compromise measure that called for taking steps to ensure that all third-graders can read at grade level, “including retention as a last resort, after other methods of remediation have been evaluated or used, or both …(emphasis added).” The State Board of Education then adopted a rule that exactly mirrors the failed 2010 legislation: It says third-graders who don’t pass a state reading test won’t be promoted.

// In a classic case of putting the cart before the horse, the State Board of Education in November 2011 voted to let the state take over schools that get an F on state ratings for four consecutive years or a D or F for five straight years.

Ohio experience raises concerns about Indiana ‘turnaround school operator’

Another warning has been sounded about the Indiana Department of Education’s proposal to hand management of “failing” schools over to for-profit EdisonLearning – and from an unexpected source.

Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, writes on Flypaper, the organization’s blog, that Edison hasn’t delivered on improving results at two charter schools that it manages in Dayton.

The Fordham Institute, of course, isn’t some anti-charter, anti-reform organization. It is a longtime supporter of school choice, charter schools, education entrepreneurship and high-stakes accountability. In fact it authorizes charter schools in Ohio, including the Edison schools in Dayton.

“Fordham president Chester E. Finn Jr. helped launch Edison in the early 1990s, and Fordham has served as authorizer of the two Dayton schools operated by Edison since 2005,” Ryan writes. “These two schools have been in operation for nearly a decade, and despite declining enrollment that resembles a ski slope … have received more than $93.5 million in public funding. Yet after all that time and money, one school’s academic performance is middling at best; the other has struggled mightily to deliver students to even basic levels of achievement.”

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett announced last month that the Department of Education had selected Edison, Charter Schools USA, and EdPower as “turnaround operators” to potentially take over seven Indiana schools that have been stuck on academic probation. The department claims the three were selected through a rigorous Request for Proposals process.

You would think a rigorous selection process would include checking out Edison’s record in neighboring Ohio. Or maybe not.

“The only Hoosier who I spoke to about our experience with Edison was Scott Elliott at the Indianapolis Star,” Ryan said in response to an email query.

Ryan said he doesn’t know how Edison’s “weak to mediocre” performance with Dayton charter schools will translate to turnaround efforts in Indiana. “But I’d strongly urge Indiana officials to keep serious pressure on Edison to deliver everything they promise,” he told School Matters. “I’d also urge outside groups to pay close attention to whether or not Edison — and any other groups brought in to turn around schools — actually deliver.”

The State Board of Education is expected to decide Aug. 29-30 which of the schools will be taken over, and by which turnaround operator.

Indiana merit-pay bill: Still waiting for details

Forget vouchers and charter schools for the moment. Senate Bill 1, a merit-pay bill that establishes new procedures for evaluating, compensating, hiring and firing teachers, is arguably the most far-reaching education legislation being considered this year by the Indiana General Assembly.

But what exactly will it do? Maybe we’ll have a more complete picture Monday, when the House Education Committee considers the bill and long-promised amendments may be made public.

We know the bill is a big deal because of the effort that’s going into passing it. Stand for Children, an organization based in Oregon, was brought to Indiana to lobby for SB 1. Aiming Higher, which advocates for Gov. Mitch Daniels’ initiatives, is running TV ads supporting it. The ads urge viewers to ““Tell legislators to pass reforms to pay teachers for their excellence and results, not seniority.”

Paying for excellence and results sounds obvious. But it gets messy when you try to define excellence and implement a fair system to measure and encourage it. And recent studies of merit pay in Tennessee and New York have raised questions about whether it will produce better results. The biggest challenge may be scaling up the resources and personnel to implement this system in 2012.

The SB 1 centerpiece is a mandate for annual evaluations that place teachers in one of four categories: highly effective, effective, improvement necessary and ineffective. Teachers in the two lower categories wouldn’t get raises. If rated ineffective or improvement necessary multiple times, they could be fired.

The bill says that “objective measures of student achievement and growth” must “significantly inform the evaluation.” That means results or improvement on ISTEP-Plus tests for teachers who teach subjects that are covered by the exams, and other measures for teachers who don’t.

Unlicensed teachers in charter schools? On what ‘BASIS’?

The Indiana Department of Education has generally done a pretty good job of responding to rumors and concerns about legislation it supports. But one recent communication from the department – about a provision to let up to half the teachers in charter schools be unlicensed – raises more questions than it answers.

Dale Chu, the DOE’s assistant superintendent for policy, attempted to explain it last week in a message to educators and others. Oddly, the licensing language is in Senate Bill 1, the teacher performance-pay bill, not in House Bill 1002, the charter-schools expansion bill.

“Some nationally-recognized, high-performing charter sponsors currently operating in other states are interested in sponsoring schools in Indiana,” Chu writes, “but they will not come to our state unless we offer them this flexibility (BASIS is one example, and they have achieved great results …).”

So we’re changing the rules for everyone because a charter sponsor might come to Indiana and it doesn’t like the rules?

It’s true that BASIS, which runs three charter schools in Arizona and plans to open three more, has achieved “great results.” But its story isn’t one of those inspirational tales about turning poor and minority children into high achievers, a la KIPP and Harlem Children’s Zone charters.

The original BASIS school, in Tucson, has been named one of “America’s Best High Schools” by both Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report – designations that rely on test scores and, especially, results from Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams.

Its formula is a super-rigorous curriculum and a demanding workload that drives away all but the most motivated students and parents.

“Most of its students are ambitious children of engineers, attorneys and doctors,

State releases results for End-of-Course Assessments

The Indiana Department of Education released scores last week for the first round of End-of-Course Assessments, marking a transition from one regime of high-stakes testing to another.

Passing rates for Monroe County school districts were at or above the state average. Still, from one-third to more than one-half of local students didn’t pass the tests the first time around.

The ECAs replace the Graduation Qualifying Exam, which will be given for the last time in the spring of 2011 to this year’s high-school seniors. Starting with the Class of 2012, students will be expected to pass the ECA for Algebra I and English 10 to graduate.

A third End-of-Course Assessment, for Biology I, fulfills a federal requirement for assessing students’ progress in science but isn’t required for graduation.

Because the spring of 2010 was the first time the ECAs were given, it’s hard to know just what to make of the scores. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said they create a baseline for future comparisons,

Indiana announces Education Jobs Fund allocations

The Monroe County Community School Corp. will get almost $2 million in federal funds from the Education Jobs Fund program approved by Congress this month.

According to information posted by the Indiana Department of Education, the MCCSC’s allocation is $1,965,296. Richland-Bean Blossom Community Schools will get $508,224. The Bloomington Project School, a public charter school, will get $37,326.

While school officials are welcoming the money, it comes too late to reverse the job and program cuts that the MCCSC and many other districts made this year.

Gov. Mitch Daniels submitted Indiana’s application for $207 million in federal money on Friday, well ahead of the Sept. 9 deadline, Department of Education CFO Lance Rhodes said in a memo. State officials expect that school districts can start receiving their share of the money in November.

Schools will have until Sept. 30, 2012 to spend the funds. According to federal guidelines, they can be used to pay salaries and benefits for teachers and “other employees who provide school-level educational and related services,” including principals and assistant principals, instructional aides, school nurses, custodians and cafeteria workers. The money can’t be used for general administrative expenses, such as central office and school board operations.

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, in a letter Friday, urged superintendents