Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I had the pleasure to hear from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on the important steps he and the Florida Legislature took on moving Florida out of the education cellar and into a higher performing state that is continuing to make progress. Some of his ideas are intriguing and I’d like to hear thoughts from other people on this. You can let me know what you think by leaving comments here or submitting them through Twitter or Facebook.

I’m also including a copy of his powerpoint slides: Florida Education Reform Story – Oklahoma briefing.

IDEA ONE: Give Schools Grades Parents Can Understand: A, B, C, D or F
Our current school assessment system grades schools on a scale from 0-1500 and delivers those results to parents. If your school scores a 1350, is that a good score or a bad score? Who has any idea? Florida adopted a model of school grades based solely on academic achievement. 50% of the school grade was on the percent of students achieving grade performing at grade level. The other 50% was based on the percentage of students increasing more than a year’s worth of knowledge, regardless if they were at grade level and the percent of lowest performing 25% students who are making a year’s worth of progress. They then are awarded a grade of A, B, C, D or F.

IDEA TWO: Rewards and Consequences for Results
In Florida, if a school gets an “A” there are financial awards ($100 per student per school). If the school improves a grade, then there are financial awards then as well (again, $100 per student per school).

Oklahoma has a similar program called the Academic Achievement Awards. These awards go only to the highest performing schools in the state and those who show the most improvement each year. The numbers are limited and there simply aren’t as many schools who are doing an excellent job who also are receiving the award. Adopting the Florida model could better inform parents on how their school is truly performing and also could expand the Academic Achievement Awards to more schools around the state for doing a job well done.

If a school performed on the “F” side, however, then there were consequences which, until recently, provided an incentive for the school to improve performance. Students who attended a school that was graded as an “F” for two out of four years were eligible for a scholarship to attend another school inside the district or through a private provider. The Florida Supreme Court has since ruled that portion which goes to religious schools as unconstitutional under the Florida Constitution. Prior to the ruling, schools that attained an “F” score showed a record of improving great than those which were graded as a “D”. However, once the ruling took effect and the threat of losing student enrollments largely disappeared, the number of schools who improved declined.

Now for those who have zero tolerance for the “voucher” term – I’d like to point out that Harvard, Cornell and the Manhattan Institute all determined that the opportunity for the public school to lose enrollees (and therefore the dollars attached to those students) increased student performance.

IDEA THREE: End Social Promotion and Increase Rigor of Graduation Exams
Florida ended the policy of social promotion with the important step of being able to read at grade level in the third grade. While they did provide for six exemptions to this, mainly for students with learning disabilities, English Language Learners (ELL) and for those who take an alternative assessment. The research done on this shows that those students who were retained in third grade actually made bigger gains academically than those who were promoted without being on grade level. In fact, the gains were larger for the second year after being retained than for the first year.

On the Graduation Exam side, Oklahoma requires students to pass an Eighth Grade reading assessment in order to get a driver’s license (which shot the passage rate way up, btw). We also require students to pass four out of seven possible End of Instruction tests (a/k/a EOI). Two of them are required by federal law to be taken: English II and Algebra I. The other five offerings are English III, Algebra II, Geometry, U.S. History and Biology I. If they fail these tests, they are allowed to take them again or take alternative assessments.

Florida simply changed the rigor of expectations for passing the high school exam from eighth grade to tenth grade rigor. While he pushed for a 12th grade expectation, Governor Bush said the best he was able to get was a compromise to 10th grade. If you were told that they were going to increase the expectations and raise the bar on what it took to pass, I would assume you would have the same reaction I would have – that the passage rate would go down and more students would fail. The exact opposite happened. The percentage of students who failed the exam went down from 10% of all students taking the test to 8%.

It is important to note that the result of this “raising the bar” in Florida is the exact same result projected by Achieve and other national leaders in education who tell us that raising expectations will result in raising the achievement. Unfortunately, Oklahoma schools had the bar raised on them and still don’t exactly know what to expect when their students take the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Tests. Despite our best efforts to inform educators about what is passing and failing before the exam, the cut scores are still set afterwards. To me, that is an unfair treatment of our teachers and administrators. It also makes raising the bar on rigor more difficult to do because of the fear that success will be less likely.

IDEA FOUR: Funding for Student Success
One novel concept which will be very difficult for us to achieve in Oklahoma is funding the reforms first and then the general education budget afterwards. One cry which we hear at the Capitol quite often is “fund us adequately first, then start messing around with what we do.” While I appreciate the sentiment that we aren’t spending as much money as anyone would love to have available, the reality is that we have a limited budget and have to not only consider education’s needs, but also those in healthcare, transportation, public safety, etc…

But the funding reforms Gov. Bush advocate are for a student success centered approach – free PSAT exams for all 10th graders, professional development for those teachers who will teach AP courses for students to be able to take college level work, bonuses for teachers for each student passing AP courses, including double bonuses for those teachers getting students past the AP exam who are also teaching in a “D” or “F” graded school.

Oklahoma has to look at funding adequately by being more efficient with our dollars. Gov. Bush was dealing with 67 school superintendents, not 535.

IDEA FIVE: Choices, and lots of them
This one will not be popular with many in the existing school systems. But Florida is one of the leaders in school choice, including private and public options from which students may select. Oklahoma did take the positive move forward this past year by adopting the Henry Scholarship, named for Governor Henry’s special needs daughter who passed away at an early age. It is very similar to the Florida McKay Scholarship for students with disabilities.

Florida also is a national leader in Charter Schools, which are public schools that are free from many of the restrictive mandates placed on regular schools. They are more free to innovate and experiment with student learning, so long as the results are positive for the students. Oklahoma’s charter school law is fairly restrictive, despite it being expanded in the last legislative session. There is a fear that if a charter school were to be allowed to open, it would be a threat to the traditional school – therefore, people oppose the expansion of charters outside of the metropolitan areas. But for a charter school to succeed, parents would have to want to place their children in that school. It wouldn’t forcibly take students against their parent’s will.

Florida also has a very successful virtual school program which allows for students to catch up when they are behind or accelerate their learning if they are above their peers. Oklahoma is starting to look at virtual schooling, but the bias against them is fairly strong. One of our public schools, White Oak, offers virtual enrollments. When students enroll there instead of their local districts, the funding from the state goes to White Oak to administer the student’s education. The local district gets the property tax revenue for the child, but not the additional revenue. Because they aren’t getting that additional revenue, some of the districts want to force that student to not have virtual schooling as an option, and be forced to attend their local school. I have had some administrators lodge legitimate complaints about the current system – such as who would the student count towards on accountability reports. Those should be clarified, but virtual schooling is becoming more and more of a standard tool available to educate and we shouldn’t accept bias against it to keep it from being available.

Gov. Bush also praised the scholarship programs that funded school choice programs. The students are required to be on free and reduced lunch and may select from either a $500 transportation scholarship to attend an adjacent public school or $3,950 to attend a participating school.

Lastly, Gov. Bush was proud of Florida’s Pre-K program. On this one, Oklahoma has Florida. The National Institute for Early Education Research ranks Oklahoma as the top state for Pre-Kindergarten. Florida is second, just to us.

MY THOUGHTS:
1. Oklahoma needs to adopt the A-F grading scale. That should be done next session as a priority for the Senate, House and new Governor.
2. Oklahoma also needs to do a better job on rewarding all teachers who do a great job of educating their students. Therefore, we should repurpose the Academic Achievement Awards into bonuses for all “A” graded schools and those who make the leap upwards by a letter grade in one academic year.
3. We are not able to implement a full blown school choice program because of our Blaine Amendment which prohibits private religious schools from receiving state dollars. But we still can and should work on continuing to lay the groundwork to allow parents to have more selections on where their students attend school, starting with allowing students to transfer from the public school district in which they reside to other schools outside their district or through an online source.
4. We should re-look at our EOI exams and make sure they are of a high enough rigor to satisfy student needs. We also need to better inform educators on what it takes to be successful on those exams.
5. We need to address the issues surrounding social promotion and figure out ways to best promote higher reading achievement by third grade.
6. Our focus needs to be less about the adults in our system and more on the students and what it takes for them to be successful. By prioritizing programs and dollars where student success is paramount, results will quickly follow.

A bill changing Oklahoma’s testing system from a once a year, multiple day event to shorter, multiple assessment is closer to becoming a reality. Senate Bill 2213, by Senator Clark Jolley (R-Edmond), would change the Oklahoma school end of year core curriculum tests from the current model to one that would alleviate counselors of their job in administrating tests and provide almost instant feedback to teachers on the performance of their students. “Teachers are given test results from the students from the prior academic year. They can have the tools to modify their instruction to fit the students’ needs if we’ll simply give it to them,” said Jolley. “By moving to growth model testing, we can track where a student or group of students need more focus and provide the teachers with that data three times a year within 24 hours. Compared to the current system, this would be a huge tool for teaching professionals.”

The bill would eliminate the annual testing in the April/May testing window and would implement three state-wide assessments what would take around an hour per student. The class time away from instruction would be minimized, as would the need for counselors to spend their time proctoring exams for the entire school. Similar tests are currently being done in large and small schools in Oklahoma in addition to the required testing at the end of the school year. It is believed that the new testing system would actually be less expensive than the current use and would provide better information for teachers. The bill will now be considered by the State House.

OKLAHOMA CITY — State Sen. Clark Jolley, R-Edmond, has been appointed vice chairman of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Standing Committee on Education. The appointment was made by current NCSL president Georgia State Sen. Don Balfour. NCSL is a bipartisan organization made up of lawmakers and staff from all 50 state legislatures.

“I’m extremely honored to be entrusted with this leadership position and to have the opportunity to work with key lawmakers from across the country as we look for ways to improve public education, reduce dropout rates and ensure our children are better prepared to become tomorrow’s leaders,” Jolley said.

Jolley serves as vice chairman of the Oklahoma State Senate Education Committee. He also serves on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education and previously has served as its co-chairman. In addition, Jolley is a member of the NCSL Task Force on Dropout Prevention.

“The bottom line is the better job we do educating our children, the better the future will be for all of us,” Jolley said. “Being part of a national dialogue gives our entire state an excellent opportunity to contribute to this discussion and to benefit from what we learn.”