This is sure to come as a surprise to many, given the decade-long cry from Ohio’s school districts about charter schools “stealing” their students (and funding).  But it’s no surprise to us at Fordham.  In 2010, we commissioned a study of student mobility in our hometown of Dayton.  Among the many findings:

-          Far more students moved among Montgomery County districts, or left the county altogether, than moved between Dayton Public Schools and the city’s charter schools.

-          No charter school or district was “creaming” good students.  High-performing and low-performing students alike were mobile, and families didn’t appear to be selecting new schools based on the school’s academic performance.

-          The greatest indicator of a student’s mobility was his/her score on the state’s third-grade reading test.  The lower the score, the more likely the child was to be highly mobile.

Our Dayton study generated much conversation and debate in the city around questions like, “If nearly half of our students will attend several different schools between kindergarten and fifth grade, should we have a city-wide elementary curriculum to provide education stability?” and “How should we develop and amend the state’s school- and teacher-accountability provisions to properly account for the challenges of mobility?”

The findings from our Dayton study led us to launch a statewide student mobility study in the Buckeye State.  Toward this end, the data referenced in today’s Dispatch is drawn from the initial work on that study to be conducted by Community Research Partners (CRP). The statewide analysis of student mobility will be out later in 2012.  In the meantime, here is what we know about mobility in Columbus, based on CRP’s pilot:

-          One of every four Columbus students moved in or out of the district over the past three years (to say nothing of mobility among schools within the district).

-          Most students transferred (3,488 times) to or from South-Western City Schools (a growing urban district on the city’s south side).

-          More than 2,500 students switched between Columbus City Schools and the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (the state’s largest online school).

The statewide mobility study will go deeper, examining trends for Ohio’s major metro areas and large e-schools, connecting mobility data with data on students’ academic performance and discipline records, and more.  We, and the research team at CRP, hope to provide both interesting and informative data along with sound policy recommendations for legislators and state leaders grappling with issues of school funding and accountability, for local education leaders who guide curriculum and instruction, and for parents and community members who want to better understand who attends school where, and why.  Stay tuned to Ohio Gadfly Daily for more!

- Emmy Partin

So far, however, the state’s STEM network has not yet opened a school that is aimed at the state’s dynamic agricultural sector and all that supports it. Senator Chris Widener (a Republican from Springfield who chairs the Senate Finance Committee) hopes to tackle this void in the state’s STEM sector. There is a whole lot of merit to this effort.

As I learned (somewhat surprisingly) in talking with Sen. Widener, one in seven jobs in Ohio is connected to the “AgBioscience” sector. This sector comprises food, agriculture, environmental, and bio-based products industries. As a whole the sector employs about a million workers statewide with an annual economic impact of over $100 billion a year. It is one of Ohio’s fastest growing sectors with thousands of jobs going unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled Ohioans to do the work. Consider the following statistics provided last week by Sen. Widener:

• Ohio has added on average 59 new bioscience companies a year since 2004, and the state is currently home to 1,300 such companies. These include Bob Evans, JM Smucker Company, Wendy’s International, Kroger, Dannon, Nestle, and WeightWatchers – to name just a few.
• Average salary in the AgBioscience sector is $68,384.
• If the demand for labor can met the sector is set to grow 20 percent this decade in Ohio.
• The planet will add 2 billion more people in the next couple of decades and as countries get richer they eat more meat. 60 percent of the world’s feed corn for cattle, chickens, etc. is raised in just five American states and Ohio is one of those.

Sen. Widener is trying to mobilize allies across the state (his targets include industry leader Battelle and Ohio State University) to help launch a handful of STEM AgBioscienceacademies in some of the state’s rural counties. The Springfield school district in Clark County (located between Dayton and Columbus) is so excited about this project that it has already donated a $10 million building to start the first academy there in 2013.

The big idea here is to attract young people to a growing sector that has not been seen as particularly “sexy” for young people. For most Ohioans and Americans more generally, anything with “ag” in it still means toiling away for long hours on a farm, which is simply no longer the case. But, one of the challenges facing Sen. Widener, and other supporters of such schools, is making the sector more attractive to young people and their parents.

There are also numerous implementation challenges here to tackle; including:

• Crafting an academic program for the academies that includes curricula aligned to the Common Core;
• Finding talent to lead these innovative academies that target fairly unique academic content and student populations;
• Finding and developing teachers who not only excel at math and science but can weave these and other subjects across the AgBioscience sector; and
• Creating a workable governance structure for schools that will need to attract students from multiple counties and school districts.

STEM AgBioscience academies are new territory for educators, and putting together a viable academic program in AgBioscience for middle and high schoolers is sure to be a heavy lift. But, done well and with the right partners this effort could pay serious dividends for the state’s economy and its young people. With 500,000 Ohioans currently unemployed it makes sense to create academic programs that actually help prepare young people for where the jobs are. In Ohio, the jobs are connected to food and all the businesses that support raising it, getting it packaged, and getting it to people across the globe.

-Terry Ryan

See you there!

-Laura Johnson, Fordham Intern

— Joe Redish, University of Maryland physics professor

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool NPR

$2.5 million

Amount the Pearson Foundation paid Montgomery County, MD to produce curriculum materials they would then market wordlwide.

New Questions About Trips Sponsored by Education Publisher New York Times

* This quote does not necessarily represent the views of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

As it turns out, public schools in India, like many in the U.S., are apparently  lousy – “in many states,” write Vikas Bajaj and Jim Yardley about India, “government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often failing to show up.”  But unlike the U.S., where charter schools and vouchers have begun to offer alternatives, In India the poor have turned to a network of private schools to educate their children.  It is much as James Tooley described it in a 2005 story in Education Next (and his subsequent book, The Beautiful Tree), recounting amazing stories from around the world:

[T]he poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

Checker wrote about this phenomenon in India in 2008:

I confess: I was impressed–and slightly sheepish, too, considering I’ve lived and traveled in India and other “third world” countries over many years and worked in the education field forever. Yet, until now I had allowed my gaze to pass over signs of the presence of hundreds of these schools without really noticing them, much less seeking to understand how they work.

This thriving private school market probably has as much to do with the general lassitude of Indian education laws as it does with the human drive to better one’s lot, but what is so tragically familiar in the Times’ story is that India’s new Right to Education Act, which “enshrined,” says the Times, “for the first time, a constitutional right to schooling, promising that every child from 6 to 14 would be provided with it,” has a dark side for those motivated poor private schoolers.  As the Times notes,

Few disagree with the law’s broad, egalitarian goals or that government schools need a fundamental overhaul. But the law also enacted new regulations on teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement in school administration that are being applied to government and private schools. The result is a clash between an ideal and the reality on the ground, with a deadline: Any school that fails to comply by 2013 could be closed.

America, of course, went through its educational my-way-or-the-highway period in the early 1920s when states began passing laws requiring that all children go to public schools – a not-so-veiled attempt to shutter the Catholic education system.  It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance.

But it’s interesting to note that so-called progressive education practices and principles, like class size and parent involvement,  could kill off the private schools in India — and with it an avenue of choice, however decrepit that avenue is, to tens of thousands of dedicated parents.

Let’s hope India will learn something from the United States and create a system that not only educates the poor but does not deny them the chance to educate themselves.  But let’s also hope that the United States might learn something about the power of pent-up education demand among the poor — and the risks of too much top-down education rules and regulations.  One size doesn’t fit all, especially when that size is determined by just a few.

–Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

-Laura Johnson, Fordham Intern

— DeKalb County Superior Court grand jury

Panel recommends special grand jury investigation into DeKalb schools Atlanta Constitution-Journal

38%

Percentage of high school students in Buffalo, NY that are absent for the equivalent of seven school weeks or more each year.

School accord reached on evaluation process Buffalo News

* This quote does not necessarily represent the views of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

1.  The Obama Administration’s war on Stuyvesant and Thomas Jefferson

Mike explained how ED’s crusade for racial diversity may have some unintended and unfortunate effects on America’s best magnet schools.

2. Osama bin Laden: What our children need to know

Checker took a moment to reflect on Osama bin Laden’s death and the lessons we should draw from the post-9/11 decade.

3. The qualities of a good teacher: A student’s perspective

Penelope Placide, a ninth-grade student at Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School who worked at Fordham last spring as part of her school’s Corporate Work Study Program, explained what she found when she surveyed her classmates on what it takes to be a good teacher.

4. K12 Inc. CEO Ron Packard responds to NYTimes’ criticism

The final months of 2011 witnessed a flurry of scathing articles on the merits of online learning from The Nation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others. In this post, the head of the nation’s largest online learning company made his defense.

5. The ends of education reform

Mike tried to bring a sense of realism to what we might expect in terms of improved student achievement for the 1 million poor students entering Kindergarten this fall.

6. Fordham responds to the Common Core “counter-manifesto”

Mike and Checker teamed up to defend the Common Core and counter the counter-manifesto published by Jay Greene and Bill Evers, among others, in response to May’s Shanker Institute manifesto on a common curriculum. (Confused? Read on.)

7. Understanding upper-middle-class parents

Mike wondered what it would take to get all parents fired up for education reform…and whether leaving NCLB alone might be the surest route.

8. Dealing with disingenuous teachers unions: There are no shortcuts

Asking if teachers unions’ political influence has made local control untenable earned Mike plenty of feedback from across the political spectrum.

9. Alfie Kohn: Read your Lisa Delpit

Mike argued that, despite what Alfie Kohn may say, what works for affluent kids may not be right for students growing up in poverty—a point Lisa Delpit made 25 years ago.

10. What Kevin Carey didn’t say about Diane Ravitch, but should have

Disagreeing on policy is one thing, but Mike explained that Kevin Carey crossed a line when he questioned Diane Ravitch’s personal integrity.

…and, to make it an even (odd?) 11 for 2011, the most tweeted post of the year:

11. A Pedagogy of Practice

Kathleen followed up Mike’s take on Alfie Kohn’s “pedagogy of poverty” commentary by arguing the achievement gap is “really little more than a practice gap.” But most critically, she included the following factoid, which quickly went viral on Twitter: “By the time s/he starts Kindergarten, the average middle class student has been exposed to 1,700 hours of one-on-one reading. Do you know how many hours of reading the average disadvantaged student has been exposed to by Kindergarten? 25. That’s 1.4 percent of their middle class peers.”

Get ready for more insightful and entertaining commentary in 2012…and a new look for the blog. Happy New Year!

But there is another story here, that, in many ways, is equally distressing: the amount of food that goes to waste.  As a recent Chicago Tribune story began,

On visits to lunchrooms in Chicago public schools, the Tribune watched as vast quantities of unpeeled fruit, vegetables, milk cartons and other items got pitched into the garbage.

And, of course,  “The district doesn’t track how much food gets thrown away.”

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency did look and in a 2010 study, called Digging Deep Through School Trash, discovered that “[t]he most prominent single material generated by schools was food waste, which was 23.9% of the total waste generated.”

This kind of profligate spending should inspire outrage; instead, indifference. According to Ron Haskins in a 2005 report for Education Next, the lunch and breakfast program costs us $10 billion a year.  Though I am sure that some children benefit, the program is not so much a food program as it is a poster child for government waste — and, in this case, a systemic abdication of adult responsibility.

I participate in a lunchtime reading program at one of our schools and so get a close-up view of the problem: children picking at food, eating little, tossing away lots, including, of course, the Styrofoam tray and plastic utensils.  Whole cartons of milk, unopened, go into the 30-gallon garbage container every day, as do half-eaten chicken nuggets, untouched peas, and a host of other foodstuff.  There is no supervision, no attempt to encourage kids to eat their food, let alone require them to do so.

Indeed, our hearts should go out to poor children, but our schools do these children – not to mention the taxpayers — a great disservice in allowing them to throw their free lunches away.

–Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow