Encarnacion Pyle

The Columbus Dispatch

Technology will never replace a good teacher.

But more Ohio teachers could use technology to better prepare students to succeed in school and life, a new state report finds.

“Just as literacy has the power to reduce barriers to success and advancement, technology has the ability to open new doors and opportunities by transforming the learning and teaching environment,” said Kate Harkin, executive director of eTech Ohio.

The state agency, which promotes educational technology in Ohio, announced yesterday that it has submitted a five-year plan to Gov. Ted Strickland and lawmakers to prepare students for jobs and help grow the economy.

The group found that although most Ohio schools and colleges use computers and the Internet to teach students, they don’t do enough with new technology.

“Existing technologies allow high-school students to assess their skills and prepare for college online, college students to develop lower-cost educational plans that will land them a career in a growth industry, and educators to access the latest, most effective curriculum without having to leave their classrooms,” said Eric D. Fingerhut, Ohio’s higher-education chancellor.

ETech’s plan calls for the state to provide more training to help teachers use handheld devices, podcasts, social-networking sites and other technology. The report doesn’t provide details about how this might be done because it wants school districts and colleges to create individual programs to deal with their particular needs, Harkin said.

“Educators have long recognized that people learn in a variety of ways, whether reading textbooks, watching lectures or listening to tapes,” she said. “All can be delivered by technologies that currently are readily available.”

The agency also would like schools and colleges to provide more online classes and to take better advantage of the state’s network of public radio and television stations, which have provided educational content for years.

High-school students, for example, can take Advanced Placement or early-college courses online, earning credit for college and saving money. And underqualified and laid-off workers can gain skills to get better jobs.

Columbus State Community College has a center that teaches instructors how to use new technology, said Tom Erney, dean of institutional services. The school is the state’s largest provider of online classes.

Erney said he likes eTech’s focus on emerging technologies, such as smart phones, digital recorders and electronic textbooks.

The state plan includes 12 ways to measure how many students and teachers use technology for learning and teaching and how many of those students later go on to college, including classes online.

Mark Real, who heads KidsOhio, a nonprofit education-research group based in Columbus, said the plan provides a good starting point.

“I think it is absolutely the right direction and helpful because it outlines next steps,” he said.

epyle@dispatch.com

The Columbus Dispatch editorial

Those who care about public education should know by now that long-established methods haven’t been serving poor urban or rural students for a long time. More and more effort and money have been poured into traditional approaches but yielded only modest improvement in student achievement.

Significant improvement is going to require, in many cases, dramatic change.

That alone should be reason enough to welcome Teach for America to Ohio, by making it easier for members to be certified to teach in Ohio schools. The program, founded in 1989, recruits top graduates from America’s best universities to make a commitment to teach for two years in the nation’s neediest schools.

But good intentions and talented recruits are by no means all that TFA has to offer. The program has a track record of success in helping struggling students catch up. It has been the backbone of most Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, which have produced excellent results with some of the nation’s most disadvantaged students.

The Ohio Senate should keep this in mind and pass Senate Bill 180, which, among other reforms, would ease some of the obstacles to obtaining teacher certification for TFA teachers.

KIPP Journey Academy, Columbus’ KIPP school, has turned to Teach for America members to help improve over its disappointing first year. Some observers attributed the Columbus school’s atypically poor performance on standardized tests last year to the fact that the school in its first year didn’t follow the standard KIPP model closely enough, including the fact that it had no TFA-trained teachers.

This year, KIPP Journey is staffed with TFA members putting in the 15-hour days typical of KIPP teachers, but officially they’re only long-term substitutes, because Ohio law doesn’t allow them to be licensed as teachers without completing the education-methods courses required as part of the standard path to teaching.

Teachers unions have fought allowing anyone to teach without standard training.

Of course those allowed to teach Ohio’s children full-time should be subject to standards; the question is whether traditional teacher preparation is the only way. The passion and intelligence of Teach for America graduates — they’re at the top of their classes, and many postpone lucrative private-sector careers to try to make a difference as teachers — have worked wonders in school districts where they’ve been hired.

The program uses data on individual student performance to judge the effectiveness of each teacher. That should make a decision about welcoming TFA teachers easier for Ohio policymakers: They’d be considering not an untried new idea, but a proven program.

Adhering rigidly to traditional teacher-preparation programs cuts off one of the most important avenues of innovation in schools where innovation is desperately needed.

Lawmakers needn’t and shouldn’t let just anyone teach in Ohio’s classrooms. Teach For America graduates aren’t just anyone. They’re part of an established program that has been a boon to schools that have used it. Ohio schools should have the same opportunity.

Jennifer Smith Richards

The Columbus Dispatch

The Columbus school district and its teachers union are among a few groups statewide that have agreed to adopt reforms needed to secure millions in federal grant money for Ohio schools.

The federal Education Department has said the more than $4 billion in Race to the Top grants will go to states that adopt policies such as measuring teachers’ performance based on their students’ academic growth, evaluating teachers more often and using merit pay to reward effective teachers. Those policies have been controversial in many states.

President Barack Obama’s administration is pushing for such politically difficult reforms, saying the changes will improve the quality of education, especially for poor, urban children.

Ohio would be eligible for up to $400 million in Race to the Top grants. Columbus is the largest district in the state and has the largest local union, so education experts say Columbus’ willingness to collaborate could signal others to do the same.

“We’ve been doing a lot of these things already,” said Columbus Education Association President Rhonda Johnson.

Columbus teachers already work with administrators to help low-achieving students, and the district has financial-reward programs for successful teachers, she said.

Ohio has 613 school districts. So far, 59 have returned memoranda agreeing to the reforms to the Ohio Department of Education, a department spokeswoman said. Many more are expected to arrive next week when school is in session again.

Other Franklin County districts and unions say the timeline for evaluating the agreement has been tight and comes during schools’ winter break. The state Education Department sent forms for the reform agreements two weeks ago. State officials want them signed by the superintendent, school-board president and teachers-union president and returned by Friday.

The state needs districts to sign the memoranda agreeing to the reforms because money is being awarded, in part, on how many districts decide to participate.

Applications to the U.S. Department of Education are due by Jan. 19. The fact that Columbus’ union is on board with sweeping reform ideas is significant, said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit education-research group called KidsOhio.  Real has been working with consultants who are helping Ohio prepare its Race to the Top application.

Several Franklin County districts, including Bexley, Grandview Heights and South-Western, say they are scrutinizing the agreements now. Some, including Canal Winchester, Groveport Madison and Reynoldsburg, say they have a tentative agreement and are awaiting a union sign-off when school resumes.

“It’s in the middle of the (winter) break. I’ve got a new board of education that has to be sworn in to have authority,” said Bexley Superintendent Michael Johnson. “I don’t know what to do. Everybody wants questions answered.”

Bexley’s new school board won’t be sworn in until after the state’s deadline.

Some districts and unions in Ohio and other states have said there are too many strings attached to the Race to the Top money. Still, most of the complaints here have been about the rush and not the reform plan.

“The spirit of the reforms looks wonderful. If Ohio gets this, it’s going to enable us to do a lot toward reforming public education. But it’s a ‘hurry up and rush,’ ” said Diane Conley, chief of academic affairs for Westerville schools.

Urban school districts stand to gain the most money. If Ohio wins, much of the money will be divvied up largely on whether districts enroll large numbers of economically disadvantaged students.

jsmithrichards @dispatch.com

Jennifer Smith Richards

The Columbus Dispatch

KIPP Journey Academy teacher Jenna Davis says of licensing: “It’s the enigma of it all. Just tell me what I need to do.”

Teachers at KIPP Journey Academy have college degrees in areas such as education, philosophy, political science, communication and business. Many have master’s degrees in education.

They have experience teaching urban kids and the data to show how effective they are. What they don’t have are professional teaching licenses in Ohio.

That could give parents a false impression that KIPP’s teachers aren’t qualified, the charter school says. It also could make it harder to attract prospective teachers, KIPP officials fear.

State legislators are considering a change that would allow full licenses for teachers who, like those at KIPP, completed a two-year stint in an urban or rural district under the Teach for America program but might be missing normally required college courses or credentialing tests.

The KIPP teachers are working this year under long-term substitute licenses.

The Ohio Department of Education says state law sets the number and types of courses required to become a teacher. Officials can’t award full licenses to people just because they are considered good educators by some other standard, the department says.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Dayton, which oversees KIPP Journey and Columbus Collegiate Academy along with four other charter schools in the state, is pushing for the exemption.

“These aren’t people who popped out of the woodwork and decided they wanted to spend some time in a classroom and see what it’s like,” said Kathryn Mullen Upton, who is in charge of charter-school sponsorship for Fordham.

Teach for America takes top-of-their-class college graduates, trains them to teach in urban or rural settings, uses data to track their impact on each student and sends them to a high-need district for two years.

Having fully licensed educators would send a message to parents that teachers, in the state’s view, are of high quality, said KIPP school leader Hannah Powell.

Most of the school’s teachers are licensed as long-term substitutes, but a couple have been working under a regular substitute license, something that requires a college degree but no teacher training. That meant the school had to write to parents telling them that substitutes were teaching their kids’ classes.

“‘Licensed’ means we don’t have to send a letter home. It’s a hard process for the teachers to go through all this,” Powell said.

Schools in the Knowledge is Power Program network, which has been praised nationally for successes with students who don’t typically succeed, often hires former Teach for America teachers. So do Columbus Collegiate Academy and a couple of charter schools in Cleveland.

KIPP Journey teaches fifth- and sixth-graders in a former Columbus City Schools building in North Linden; Columbus Collegiate has sixth- and seventh-graders in its University District building.

KIPP teacher Jenna Davis graduated from the University of Dayton with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education but has been told she doesn’t qualify for a full license.

“I stayed in Ohio (to train to become a teacher), and I’m not even recognized as a teacher at all,” she said. “It’s the enigma of it all. Just tell me what I need to do.”

Kaela King, the sixth-grade reading teacher, said she’s been told she needs to take an extra class. She worries that her already-15-hour days will become longer and cut into time with her students.

“Although I have a master’s and all the coursework I need, Ohio isn’t honoring it,” said King, who is originally from Grandview Heights. “I want to be certified by the end of this year.”

Jennifer Kangas, associate director of the Education Department’s office of educator licensure, said the former Teach for America teachers aren’t being denied licenses. They just have to follow the rules like everyone else. The department, she said, doesn’t have the power to bend the license rules that are spelled out in state law.

Kangas said there was a time when former Teach for America teachers did have a harder time getting a license in Ohio because the program was so new. That’s not true anymore, she said.

“It seems like perhaps there was an assumption that these candidates were having more difficulty than they actually were,” Kangas said.

The schools think the state is shutting great teachers out with tangled bureaucracy. At Columbus Collegiate a math teacher has been trying to convince the state that her college-level math courses should count toward her math-teaching license, said Principal Andrew Boy. The teacher taught through Teach for America and, like the other educators seeking a license at KIPP, has data to show her effectiveness, Boy said.

“There were so many other hoops she had to jump through, so many people she had to talk to. As if her experience, and what she’s done in the classroom, meant nothing,” he said.

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com

New York Times

Benedict Carey

BUFFALO - Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.

But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.

“You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here,” he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. “That’s it. See?”

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head - that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 - much later than many have assumed.

The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.

And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program atHarvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up - giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.

Beyond Counting

In a typical preschool class, children do very little math. They may practice counting, and occasionally look at books about numbers, but that is about it. Many classes devote mere minutes a day to math instruction or no time at all, recent studies have found - far less than most children can handle, and not nearly enough to prepare those who, deprived of math-related games at home, quickly fall behind in kindergarten.

“Once that happens, it can be very hard to catch up,” said Julie Sarama, a researcher in the graduate school of education at the University at Buffalo who, with her colleague and husband, Doug Clements, a professor in the same department, developed a program called Building Blocks to enrich early math education.

“They decide they’re no good at math - ‘I’m not a math person,’ they say - and pretty soon the school agrees, the parents agree,” Dr. Clements said.

“Everyone agrees.”

In a Building Blocks classroom, numbers are in artwork, on computer games and in lessons, sharing equal time with letters. Like “Sesame Street,” Building Blocks has children play creative counting games; but it also focuses on other number skills, including cardinality (how many objects are in a set) and one-to-one correspondence (matching groups of objects, like cups and saucers). Teachers can tailor the Building Block lesson to a student’s individual ability.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at the Makowski center, Buffalo’s Public School 99, Pat Andzel asked her preschool class a question:

“How many did you count?”

She had drilled them on the number seven. She held up a sign with “7″ and asked her students what number they saw (”seven!”); had the group jump seven times, counting; then had them touch their nose seven times. As the class finished counting seven objects on a poster, she asked again:

“How many?”

“I never used to ask that,” Ms. Andzel said in an interview after the lesson. She asks it all the time now, she said, because it drives home a subtle but crucial idea: that the last number they said in counting is the quantity; it is the answer.

“Many of these kids don’t understand that yet,” she said.

The curriculum includes a variety of math-based lessons and activities, as well as software programs, all drawing on findings from cognitive science. When it comes to understanding numbers, for example, recent research suggests that infants can distinguish one object from two, and two from three.

By preschool, the brain can handle larger numbers and is struggling to link three crucial concepts: physical quantities (seven marbles, seven inches) with abstract digit symbols (”7″), with the corresponding number words (”seven”). Lessons like the one Ms. Andzel taught are meant to fuse this numeric trinity, which is crucial for understanding basic math in kindergarten.

Children begin recognizing geometric shapes as early as 18 months, studies find; by preschool, the brain can begin to grasp informal geometric definitions.

It can when taught properly, that is. Many books use a pizza slice to illustrate a triangle, for example, even though slices are rounded at one end. Once a child has fused the word triangle with a specific shape (triangle = pizza slice), it is hard to break that association later on.

“The definition,” Dr. Clements said, “is a three-angled shape. Period.” Building Blocks teaches this definition, illustrating it with triangles skinny and fat, squat and tall.

In all, this curriculum and others link numbers to objects, to rhythms, to the chairs and plates around a table - to the physical world.

“If children have games and activities that demonstrate the relationship between numbers, then quantity becomes a physical experience,” said Sharon Griffin, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who found in a series of careful studies that a curriculum she devised, called Number Worlds, raised the scores of children who lagged in math. “Counting, by contrast, is very abstract.”

In a study published last year, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University reported that playing what seems a simple childhood game, similar to Chutes and Ladders (sometimes called Snakes and Slides), accelerates the understanding of numbers for low-income preschoolers.

“Being told 8 is 2 times 4 is one thing,” said Robert S. Siegler, a psychologist who is one of the authors. “It’s another to see that it’s twice as far to the number 8, and that it takes twice as long to get there.”

The Number Instinct

“Use your eyes like cameras,” said Lara Lazo, one of the teachers at P.S. 99, after the midmorning break. “Get ready to take a snapshot.”

The children bracketed their eyes with their hands, making “cameras,” and Ms. Lazo showed them a paper plate with three dots on it - then quickly covered the plate.

“What number did you see?”

A cacophony of “threes” and “fours” erupted.

“O.K.,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

The lesson is intended to teach a skill called subitizing. “The idea,” Dr. Sarama said, “is to get them to recognize quantity - to say, ‘I see three’ - not by counting, but by instantly recognizing how many are there by sight.”

A crude “number instinct” is hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain, recent research has found. Mammals can quickly recognize differences in quantity, choosing the tree or bush with the most fruit. Human beings, even if they live in remote cultures with no formal math education, have a general grasp of quantities as well, anthropologists have found.

In a series of recent imaging studies, scientists have discovered that a sliver of the parietal cortex, on the surface of the brain about an inch above the ears, is particularly active when the brain judges quantity. In this area, called the intraparietal sulcus, clusters of neurons are sensitive to the sight of specific quantities, research suggests. Some fire vigorously at the sight of five objects, for instance, less so at the sight of four or six, and not at all at two or nine. Others are most active in response to one, two, three, and so on.

When engaged in a lesson or exercise, these regions actively communicate with areas of the frontal lobe, where planning and critical thinking are centered.

“This is what we believe focused math education does: It sharpens the firing of these quantity neurons,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris and author of the books “The Number Sense” and “Reading and the Brain.” The firing of the number neurons becomes increasingly more selective to single quantities, he said; and these cells apparently begin to communicate with neurons across the brain in language areas, connecting precise quantities to words: “two,” “ten,” “five.”

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until about age 11.

“As these kinds of findings come in, they will have implications not only for teaching, but also education policy,” said Daniel Ansari, an assistant professor in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Western Ontario University.

Explaining Five

In math, there is no faking it. Children either know that five is more than three, or they do not. Either they can put number symbols in exactly the right order, or they cannot. In their studies, Dr. Clements and Dr. Sarama test children one on one and videotape the results for comparisons.

Over the past four years, the couple has tested Building Blocks in more than 400 classrooms in Buffalo, Boston and Nashville, comparing the progress of children in the program with that of peers in classes offering another math curriculum or none at all. On tests of addition, subtraction and number recognition after one school year, children who had the program scored in the 76th percentile on average, and those who did not scored in the 50th percentile.

By the end of kindergarten, a year after the program has ended, those who had had it sustained their gains, scoring in the 71st percentile, on average.

Many hurdles remain for this and similar curriculums based in cognitive science, experts say. Schools may move away from the curriculum; teachers move around, as do students; and in later grades there is always the risk that children who have mastered basic math will not get the attention they need to advance even further.

But for now at least, education based on brain science has helped hundreds of Buffalo children refine their native abilities in math. In one videotaped exam, a 4-year-old boy in a FUBU jersey and long dreadlocks who entered P.S. 99 in 2006 was unable to count or match cards with 3, 5, 2, 1 and 4 on them to cards with equivalent numbers of grapes.

In a video of his post-Building Blocks exam, six months later, he instantly says there are 10 pennies placed in front of him, without counting. He easily matches the number cards to their corresponding grape cards - and puts the mixed-up numerals in the correct order.

“What’s the biggest, nine or seven or five?” asks the teacher giving the exam.

The boy thinks for a moment. “Nine,” he says. “Five is the littlest.” Then he holds one palm above the other and says: “Five is like this. See?”

“Do you see what he’s doing?” Dr. Clements said, interrupting the video. “Right there. He wants to explain. He wants to explain five.”

Volume 25, Number 5
September/October 2009

Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools

An Interview with Karin Chenoweth

By CHRIS RAND

In her 2007 book, “It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, former Washington Post columnist and Education Trust senior writer Karin Chenoweth used a strict set of criteria to identify fifteen schools with challenging student demographics that were nonetheless achieving academically. In her new book, How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools, Chenoweth visits eight new schools with a significant number of low-income students and students of color and reveals just how these educators are achieving their success. She spoke with Harvard Education Letter about the successful approaches and methods that she believes must be systematized at the district, state, and national level. To read the 2007 HEL interview with Chenoweth about her first book, click here.

What does How It’s Being Done have to offer educators as a sequel to your last book, “It’s Being Done”?

“It’s Being Done” laid out the case that the work of educating all kids can be done, and that we know it can be done because it’s being done in a variety of schools. I received two types of criticism for that book. The first was that these schools are outliers and that it’s unfair to expect all schools to be operating at that level. I ignored that criticism. The second was more compelling, and that was from educators. They said, “Okay, so it can be done, but I still don’t have enough information about how.” This book is an attempt to provide educators with more specific information as to how these schools succeed.

The “How It’s Being Done” Schools

These are the eight schools featured in How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools.

P.S./M.S. 124 Osmond A. Church School
Queens, New York

Imperial High School
Imperial, California

Ware Elementary School
Fort Riley, Kansas

Lockhart Junior High School
Lockhart, Texas

Norfolk Elementary School
Norfolk, Arkansas

Wells Elementary School
Steubenville, Ohio

Roxbury Preparatory Charter School
Roxbury, Massachusetts

Graham Road Elementary School
Falls Church, Virginia

——————–

To read the remainder of this Harvard Education Letter article, please click here.

]]> http://www.kidsohio.org/2009/12/09/ohios-wells-elementary-school-highlighted-in-how-its-being-done-urgent-lessons-from-unexpected-schools/feed/ http://www.kidsohio.org/2009/12/02/columbus-school-board-balks-at-theater-plan-superintendents-request-for-8-million-go-ahead-surprises-members/ http://www.kidsohio.org/2009/12/02/columbus-school-board-balks-at-theater-plan-superintendents-request-for-8-million-go-ahead-surprises-members/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:15:39 +0000 Mary http://www.kidsohio.org/?p=2495 Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Columbus Dispatch

Bill Bush

Under Columbus schools’ “policy governance” method of oversight, Superintendent Gene Harris is supposed to run the district with minimal interference from school board members.

But Harris learned last night that doesn’t extend to building a 2,500-seat theater for student productions and staff meetings.

In what was a rare moment of defiance since the ushering in of policy governance, the board voted 6-1 to table the $8 million plan.

The vote came during the same meeting that the board heard a presentation to close nine schools because the district has too much unneeded space.

Board members Stephanie Groce and W. Shawna Gibbs said they’re not necessarily opposed to the theater but said they want to see more of the plan. It’s designed to renovate two aging buildings at the Downtown Fort Hayes campus, which includes a high school, middle school and career center.

One building would become a large theater that could convert into a room with tables that would seat up to 1,500. The other would house administrative and classroom space. Together, they would add 35,000 square feet, with a structure connecting them.

Board President Carol Perkins was left as the only board member wanting the project to go forward last night.

Groce and Gibbs requested a delay, saying they only vaguely understood what they were voting on.

“If we’re going to authorize spending $8 million on a renovation project, I want to talk about it,” Groce told the panel.

Perkins tried to force a vote, asking the board at one point whether they wanted Fort Hayes to be redeveloped or not.

“I just want a copy of the entire plan,” Groce said, noting that she’d like to know, for example, how many administrators might be housed in the building adjacent to the theater.

The proposal that Harris brought to the board would have authorized her to spend $11 million on Fort Hayes improvements and was included as part of a consent agenda with the other mostly routine expenditures that the board must approve every two weeks.

The project would have been funded in part with $9.8 million that the district received when The Limited purchased the former Northeast Career Center in 2005.

Gibbs said she didn’t “have a total picture of what we’re about to spend” and had other questions concerning the long-range Fort Hayes master plan and how this project fit into it.

“Eight million might not be much to somebody, but that’s 8 million,” Gibbs said.

Harris said her staff recently briefed the board on the overall plan for Fort Hayes, if not on this particular project.

“What I think they’re asking for is a little more detail,” Harris said.

“The best part about (the board’s reaction) is that they didn’t say, ‘go away,’ they said ‘bring me back some more information,’ and that’s what we’re going to do.”

In other business, the school board approved $250,000 in federal stimulus money for a United Way of Central Ohio effort to offer readiness screenings and referral services for pre-kindergarten children.

The money will be added to $370,000 from The Limited Brands Foundation; $60,000 from the JP Morgan Chase Foundation; $50,000 from Franklin County; and $10,000 from private donors in the effort to prepare up to 12,000 preschoolers for kindergarten.

bbush@dispatch.com

The Columbus Dispatch editorial

Superintendent Gene Harris came under some mild criticism from Columbus Board of Education members at a recent public meeting. That shouldn’t be noteworthy, because school-board members ought to question the work of district employees when they aren’t satisfied — and they should do so publicly, because it’s their job as representatives of the taxpayers.

Harris, in her ninth year as superintendent, enjoys the support of her board and much of the public, and she has earned it with competent hard work.

But that doesn’t mean board members won’t sometimes take issue with her actions.

At the Nov. 17 board meeting, when Harris presented a report on the schools’ academic progress, three members said the report carried too much positive spin and too few hard facts about the district’s weaknesses. Vice President Stephanie Groce said not presenting a complete picture was “a disservice to the board.”

Harris said later that board members had been given documents with all academic-achievement data and that she thought the board’s policy called for the summary report to focus on progress made.

The attitude of those school officials who are uncomfortable with any such give-and-take points to a problem in how some are interpreting the board’s “policy governance” operating model. The model was adopted nearly three years ago, partly as a way to keep personal politics out of board actions and discourage members from micromanaging.

Under the governance guidelines, the board establishes policies and goals for Harris and largely leaves it up to her how to achieve them. The board is to monitor progress.

The Dispatch supported and continues to support that approach. Qualified, competent professionals should be given latitude to meet the goals set for them. School boards often have attracted people with axes to grind who want to personally run the district.

Unfortunately, some have interpreted policy governance to mean not only avoiding micromanaging, but also avoiding public comment on district operations.

While discouraging personal attacks is the right thing to do, the policy certainly doesn’t forbid public questioning and criticism.

Board members are elected to keep watch on the district administration and not to become servants to its bureaucracy.

Harris said she understands this and welcomes discussion and debate with board members. Board should take their watchdog role seriously and let the public see that they are doing so.

The Columbus Dispatch editorial

Four months ago, The Dispatch opined that the state budget’s mandate for all-day kindergarten next school year is ill-defined and too expensive for many school districts. Since then, little has changed except that the State Board of Education has gotten into a squabble over the issue.

School districts still will receive no more state money next year than this year, and additional classrooms won’t appear out of thin air.

The mandate should be reconsidered in light of the budget crunch facing all Ohio government entities. A bill put forth by four Republican state senators, including Gary Cates of the Cincinnati area, would give some breathing room by postponing the kindergarten mandate for two years, to July 1, 2012. That would be helpful, but lawmakers should consider entirely rethinking the issue.

All-day kindergarten can be effective in helping poor children, who often start school unprepared and behind the curve, to catch up on basic reading and other learning fundamentals. Some families in which both parents work appreciate the stability of having their children in school all day instead of shuttling from a half-day kindergarten to a day-care program.

But, for children fortunate enough to attend preschools and who have books and involved parents at home, research suggests that a full day of kindergarten doesn’t provide much more benefit than a half day.

Since Gov. Ted Strickland sold his education plan as evidence-based, it makes sense that a kindergarten mandate be imposed only where the evidence says it will be effective.

A year when the state is struggling to maintain just level funding is not the right time to force schools to embark on an expensive new program that, for some districts, won’t be useful.

Strickland, who proposed the mandate, has promised a waiver option, under which districts can make the case to be excused from the mandate. But his Department of Education has yet to specify the criteria for a waiver.

If waivers are too easy to get, the mandate will be meaningless. If they’re too hard to get, Ohio school districts will suffer even greater cuts, to free up money for expanded kindergarten programs.

Meanwhile, the State Board of Education, which is supposed to provide policy guidance to the department and the governor but often is ineffective, has muddied the issue.

Earlier this month, board members voted 15-1 to support the Cates bill, despite the fact that the board endorsed Strickland’s education recommendations in May. As the Cates bill does only two things — postponing the effective dates of the kindergarten mandate and one other school-related provision of the budget — a vote supporting it can be interpreted only as a statement that the all-day-kindergarten mandate should be postponed.

But when Strickland’s office questioned board President Deborah Cain about the vote, she unilaterally wrote a letter to legislators, saying the board still supports all-day kindergarten. That apparent backpedal has rankled some board members and further confused a contentious issue.

Lawmakers should start over, first examining the premises of the mandate, then, if it is needed, figuring out how to pay for it.

Michael D. Owens, who currently is assistant principal at Arts Impact Middle School, will run the boys school. Theresa A. Pettis, principal at Southmoor Middle School, will run the girls school.

Both will start work on preparing to open the schools next fall. No word yet on where they will be located.

The district promised to open four specialty schools if voters passed a 2008 levy and bond issue. The single-gender schools are in keeping with that and a task-force recommendation from years earlier that the district offer single-sex options.

Posted by Jennifer Smith Richards on November 19, 2009

from The E Team Blog