Bolder action is required and the pace of improvement must be accelerated. We must find ways to scale up our successes. We can no longer defend—or tolerate—an industrial-age school model that is out of step with the demands of the 21st century in which jobs, careers and workplaces are learning-intensive, and where people often have many jobs over the course of their lifetimes. We can no longer be satisfied with a school model that structures instruction and learning for a fast disappearing industrial era.
Ohio needs to (1) significantly increase education attainment levels for all of its citizens, (2) align much more closely the knowledge and skills of its high school graduates with the expectations of college and the workplace, (3) close persistent achievement gaps, (4) better prepare its young people to compete internationally, and (5) make learning more relevant to young people’s lives.
Ohio Grantmakers Forum (OGF) and its partners engaged in an open and honest assessment of the performance of Ohio’s schools and the students they serve. That is the basis for the recommendations presented in Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today’s Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come:
Recommendation #1: Create Ohio Innovation Zones and an Incentive Fund. Seed transformative educational innovation by attracting and building on promising school and instructional models; introduce district-wide innovations that personalize and deepen teaching and learning; and eliminate operational and regulatory barriers.
Recommendation #2: Focus on transforming low-performing schools. Develop a statewide plan targeting the 10 percent of lowest-performing schools; focus on research-based best practices; Ohio Grantmakers Forum | January 2009 3 create a coordinating body to lead the work; and reassess and reallocate school improvement dollars.
Recommendation #3: Develop a statewide P-16 education technology plan. Develop a plan that addresses technology as a diagnostic tool and an approach to instruction and data management; improves teacher capacity in using technology; identifies ways to close the “equity gap”; and enhances agility and flexibility.
Recommendation #4: Develop a “graduate profile.” This profile, which will be used to establish the next generation of academic standards, should identify the foundational content and skills (i.e., work-related skills, international workplace expectations, technology skills, learning and thinking skills, citizenship skills and other competencies identified by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) that all graduates should master.
Recommendation #5: Reevaluate and revise Ohio’s academic standards. Ensure that standards are aligned to college and career expectations, benchmarked internationally and streamlined to focus on depth vs. breadth, and include 21st century skills. Grade-level standards should be replaced with course-specific standards in grades 7-12.
Recommendation #6: Revise the state’s assessment and accountability framework. Develop a new system that informs and improves the quality and consistency of instruction and learning, has multiple measures, ascertains whether students are meeting important mileposts during their school careers, and holds schools accountable. Specifically, expand K-8 assessments so there is a greater focus on performance assessments and significantly revamp the current grade 9-12 exams: • Replace the Ohio Graduation Test with endof- course exams (grades 9-12). • Participate in an international assessment that allows for international benchmarking and comparisons. • Adopt EPAS battery of assessments—i.e., Explore (8th and 9th grades), Plan (10th grade) and ACT (11th and 12th grades). • Institute a 12th-grade Capstone Project. _ Recommendation #7: Provide instructional supports to promote high-quality teaching and learning. Facilitate the development of performance assessments and corresponding rubrics; act as a clearinghouse for curriculum frameworks, lesson plans and instructional methods; and provide high-quality professional development.
Recommendation #8: Strengthen standards and evaluation for teachers and principals. Amend the teacher and principal standards in key areas; develop a deployment strategy for the standards; create model hiring and evaluation protocols based on the standards; and provide teacher-level, value-added reports with the appropriate privacy precautions.
Recommendation #9: Improve Ohio’s teaching and learning conditions. Provide financial incentives to encourage schools and districts to implement changes to improve teaching and learning environments; strengthen the awarding of tenure; ensure high-quality professional development; and reconcile the language of teacher dismissal to that of other public employees.
Recommendation #10: Develop a new educator compensation system. Create a task force to develop new educator compensation system models that broaden and strengthen the pool of individuals who are attracted to and retained in teaching and school leadership; and improve the connections among compensation, teaching excellence and higher levels of student learning.
Recommendation #11: Ensure an equitable distribution of high-quality teachers and principals across all schools. Develop and implement strategies that ensure effective educators teach and lead in all Ohio schools; provide innovation and incentive grants to develop graduate-level teacher residency programs and principal leadership programs; and design programs that provide time for teacher collaboration and planning, team teaching, reorganization of the school day/year and other innovative practices.
Full report: http://www.ohiograntmakers.org/FileDownload.cfm?file=OGF%5FREPORT%5FFINAL%5F1%2E20%2E09%2Epdf
National graduation rates are not accurate
Groundbreaking analysis of the Current Population Survey (CPS) finds that the reported national graduation rates are not accurate, according to a new report from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Policy Information Center.
The analysis finds lower graduation rates and larger gaps between majority and minority populations than was reported by the Census Bureau and generally lower rates than reported by individual states.
Chasing the High School Graduation Rate: Getting the Data We Need and Using It Right examines data indicating that a much greater investment is needed in the national Census Bureau survey showing what percentage of the population, from different age and sub-groups, has graduated from high school. In addition, the report specifies the additional data and quality control needed to enable the National Center for Education Statistics to make more accurate estimates of state graduation rates. The report was written by Paul E. Barton, a Senior Associate for the ETS Policy Information Center.
“Despite the prominence of this issue, we are still unable to produce statistics that would offer accurate data on the percentage of students that graduate from high school each year,” says Barton. “We are unlikely to obtain the data needed to address the dropout problem without the necessary funding to accurately measure graduation rates.”
Barton recognizes the major efforts being made in many states, led by the National Governor’s Association, to develop longitudinal student tracking systems for accountability purposes. But, he says, “We need multiple measures of high school completion, a single one won’t do the job.”
Job opportunities have become increasingly scarce for young people starting their adulthood without a high school diploma. The proportion of teenagers without a diploma who have jobs has decreased, and the wages of those who do get jobs has fallen. Beyond the hardship to those who leave school without a diploma are the consequences for society — dropouts pay less in taxes, are more likely to depend on subsidized health care and public assistance, and are more likely to be incarcerated.
According to Barton, the difficulty in determining the graduation rate stems from a number of factors including how the information is gathered by the Census Bureau and how it is reported by the states.
Findings in the report suggest that the following steps be taken to greatly improve graduation rate estimates:
• Schools should report the number of students entering the ninth grade at the beginning of the year, not just total enrollment.
• States, in addition to reporting enrollments by whether students are freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors, should also report whether they are first-, second-, third-, fourth-, fifth- or sixth-year students.
• States should break down the number of diplomas issued each year by the number of years the student was enrolled in a high school and what the student has reported about previous enrollment in other high schools.
• Identify diplomas by type, since more and more types have come into play.
• Assure that the data collected on gender, race and ethnicity are of sufficient quality to disaggregate the estimate.
In 2008, the Census Bureau took a major step forward by transferring the collection of graduation rates from the CPS to the American Community Survey (ACS), which includes the prison and military populations and has greater coverage of the population. However, Barton says, “The single question they ask now is insufficient, and we need to have the same reliability for a measure of the graduation rate that we have for the national unemployment rate.”
Barton says, “The ultimate goal here is to help more students graduate and to create incentives for schools to accomplish this. To do this we need to be able to accurately measure the rate at regular intervals and apply what we learn in constructive ways that increase graduation rates.”
Download the full report, Chasing the High School Graduation Rate:Getting the Data We Need and Using It Right:
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICCHASING.pdf
Foreign-Born Exceed the Native-Born in Advanced Degrees
A larger percentage of foreign-born than native-born residents had a master’s degree or higher in 2007, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationally, 11 percent of foreign-born — people from another country now living in the United States — and 10 percent of U.S.-born residents had an advanced degree.
These statistics come from Educational Attainment in the United States: 2007, a report that describes the degree or level of school completed by adults 25 and older.
In the West, the percentage of foreign-born who had completed at least a bachelor’s degree or higher was less than the percentage of the native-born (24 percent compared with 31 percent). Among the foreign-born, those living in the Northeast had the highest percentage of bachelor’s degrees or more (32 percent), which was the same as their native-born counterparts. The foreign-born in the South (26 percent) and Midwest (31 percent) were more likely than native-born residents to have at least a college degree (25 percent and 26 percent, respectively).
Across all regions, a smaller percentage of foreign-born than native-born adults had completed at least a high school education.
This is the first Census Bureau report on educational attainment to use data from both the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. Combining these two data sets not only provides a state-by state comparison of educational attainment, it allows an examination of historical trends.
Other highlights from the report include:
• 84 percent of adults 25 and older had completed high school, while 27 percent had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree in 2007.
• A larger proportion of women (85 percent) than men (84 percent) had completed high school, but a larger proportion of men had earned a bachelor’s degree (28 percent compared with 27 percent).
• The percentage of high school graduates was highest in the Midwest (87 percent), and the percentage of college graduates was highest in the Northeast (32 percent).
• Men earned more than women at each level of educational attainment. The percentage of female-to-male earnings among year-round, full-time workers 25 and older was 77 percent.
• Workers with a bachelor’s degree on average earned about $20,000 more a year ($46,805) than workers with a high school diploma ($26,894). Compared with non-Hispanic whites and Asians, black and Hispanic workers earned less at all attainment levels.
The data in this report are from the 2007 American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 2008 and earlier. Statistics from surveys are subject to sampling and nonsampling error. For more information on the source of the data and accuracy of the estimates, including standard errors and confidence intervals, see Appendix G at http://www.census.gov/apsd/techdoc/cps/cpsmar08.pdf
Physically Fit Kids Do Better in School
A new study in the Journal of School Health found that physically fit kids scored better on standardized math and English tests than their less fit peers.
Researchers examined the relationship between physical fitness and academic achievement in a racially and economically diverse urban public school district of children enrolled in grades 4 – 8 during the 2004 – 2005 academic year.
Results of their study show that there is a significant relationship between students’ academic achievement and physical fitness. The odds of passing both standardized math and English tests increased as the number of fitness tests passed increased, even when controlling for gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status.
School time and resources are often diverted from Physical Education and opportunities for physical activity such as recess. However, this study shows that students who do well on fitness tests also do well on math and English standardized tests.
“For families and schools, these results suggest investments of time and resources in physical activity and fitness training may not detract from academic achievement in core subjects, and, may even be beneficial,” the authors conclude.
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