KidsOhio.org May 7, 2008 PowerPoint Presentation Slides

Gates Foundation Paper on Portfolios of Schools

KidsOhio.org Nonpartisan Guide to the Proposed 2008 Columbus City Schools Levy 

The Ohio Channel will rebroadcast the program on:

Digital: Channel 34.5 (on air)
Time Warner Digital: Channel 96/Local On Demand Channel 1111
Insight Digital: Channel 765
WOW Digital: Channel 150

Times:
Fridays and Sundays: 4pm and Midnight
Mondays: 11am and 7pm

David Ferrero, Senior Education Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Josh Edelman, the Director of New Schools for the Chicago Public Schools, will participate in a panel moderated by KidsOhio.org board chair, Abigail Wexner.

Last year’s event was sold-out, so please contact the Columbus Metropolitan Club at (614) 464-3220 or by email at staff@columbusmetroclub.org to reserve your place.

3/12/2008

School districts returning to the ballot box in August or November, as many are sure to do, must focus their tax requests on their needs, not their desires.

There’s no other way to sell a tax increase, or in many cases a renewal, to a cautious public with money problems of its own and made nervous by talk of a recession, high energy costs, layoffs and housing foreclosures.

Many people support their public schools, but they have to be convinced - really convinced - that schools need more money.

As so often happens, scores of school districts had trouble making that case on March 4. The list of levy failures was long.

In some communities, voters drew a line between new money and old. Parma, for instance, passed a renewal levy, but 72 percent of voters rejected a new issue that sought almost $14 million to pay for technology, textbooks and other resources. The district is looking at $2.5 million in cuts, said a troubled Superintendent Sarah C. Zatik.

The Richmond Heights schools also face cutbacks. The district’s fourth attempt to pass a levy failed, but by a smaller margin, which bodes well for the future. It probably didn’t help matters that school board members decided to dump Superintendent Walter Calinger just a few weeks before Election Day - a move Calinger vigorously opposed.

Voters don’t need many reasons to say no during hard times, but a controversy like that can send a message that a district is paying more attention to politics than the pocketbook.

Even relatively placid districts that boast of good leadership often have a tough time proving they deserve an increase. In financially uncertain times, making the case becomes both more important and more difficult. And voters have an easier time rejecting district pleas.

© 2008 The Plain Dealer

© 2008 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.

The New York Times

3/13/2008

American students’ math achievement is “at a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide, according to a new report by a federal panel. The panel said that math curriculums from preschool to eighth grade should be streamlined to focus on key skills - the handling of whole numbers and fractions, and certain aspects of geometry and measurement - to prepare students to learn algebra.

“The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,” said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. “Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as likely to graduate from college, compared to students with less mathematical preparation.”

The report, to be released Thursday, spells out specific goals for students. For example, it says that by the end of the third grade, students should be proficient in adding and subtracting whole numbers; two years later, they should be proficient in multiplying and dividing them. By the end of sixth grade, it says, students should have mastered the multiplication and division of fractions and decimals.

The report tries to put to rest the long and heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers in school districts across the country have fought passionately over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to solve problems and then are drilled on them, as opposed to reform or child-centered instruction, which emphasizes student exploration and conceptual understanding. The panel said both methods have a role.

“There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction,” said Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, at a briefing for reporters on Wednesday. “People may retain their strongly held philosophical inclinations, but the research does not show that either is better than the other.”

Districts that have made ‘’all-encompassing decisions to go one way or the other,” he said, should rethink those decisions, and intertwine different methods of instruction to help students develop a broad understanding of math.

“To prepare students for algebra, the curriculum must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency and problem-solving skills,” the report said. “Debates regarding the relative importance of these aspects of mathematical knowledge are misguided. These capabilities are mutually supportive, .”

The president convened the panel to advise on how to improve math education for the nation’s children. Its members include math and psychology professors from leading universities, a middle-school math teacher and the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Closely tracking an influential 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the panel said that the math curriculum should include fewer topics, and then spend enough time on each of them to make it is learned in depth and need not be revisited in later grades. This is how top-performing nations approach the curriculum.

After a similar advisory panel on reading made its recommendations in 2000, the federal government used the report as a guide for awarding $5 billion in federal grants to promote reading proficiency.

The new report does not call for a national math curriculum, or for new federal investment in math instruction. It does call for more research on successful math teaching, and recommends that the Secretary of Education convene an annual forum of leaders of the national associations concerned with math to develop an agenda for improving math instruction.

The report cites a number of troubling international comparisons, including a 2007 assessment finding that 15-year-olds in the United States ranked 25th among their peers in 30 developed nations in math literacy and problem solving.

The report says that Americans fell short, especially, in handling fractions. It pointed to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized-test results that are known as the nation’s report card, which found that almost half the eighth graders tested could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions.

After hearing testimony and comments from hundreds of organizations and individuals, and sifting through 16,000 research publications, the panelists shaped their report around recent research on how children learn.

For example, the panel found that it is important for students to master their basic math facts by heart.

“For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills - the fast, accurate, and effortless processing of content information - which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,” the report said.

Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science that kids have to know the facts.”

“In the language of cognitive science, working memory needs to be predominately dedicated to new material in order to have a learning progression, and previously addressed material needs to be in long-term memory,” he said.

The report also cites recent findings that students who depend on their native intelligence learn less than those who believe that success depends on how hard they work. Dr. Faulkner said the current “talent-driven approach to math, that either you can do it or you can’t, like playing the violin” needed to be changed.

“Experimental studies have demonstrated that changing children’s beliefs from a focus on ability to a focus on effort increases their engagement in mathematics learning, which in turn improves mathematics outcomes,” the report says “When children believe that their efforts to learn make them ‘smarter,’ they show greater persistence in mathematics learning.”

The report makes a plea for shorter and more accurate math textbooks. Given the shortage of elementary teachers with a solid grounding in math, the report recommends further research on the use of math specialists to teach several different elementary grades, as is done in many top-performing nations.

The report also recommends a revamping of the math content on the national assessment test, to focus on the same skills that the report emphasizes.

Here are the panel’s recommended benchmarks for elementary school math education:

Benchmarks in Math Education Fluency With Whole Numbers

1 By the end of Grade 3, students should be proficient with the addition and subtraction of whole numbers.

2 By the end of Grade 5, students should be proficient with multiplication and division of whole numbers.

Fluency With Fractions

1 By the end of Grade 4, students should be able to identify and represent fractions anddecimals, and compare them on a number line or with other common representations offractions and decimals.

2 By the end of Grade 5, students should be proficient with comparing fractions and decimalsand common percents, and with the addition and subtraction of fractions and decimals.

3 By the end of Grade 6, students should be proficient with multiplication and division offractions and decimals.

4 By the end of Grade 6, students should be proficient with all operations involving positiveand negative integers.

5 By the end of Grade 7, students should be proficient with all operations involving positiveand negative fractions.

6 By the end of Grade 7, students should be able to solve problems involving percent, ratio,and rate and extend this work to proportionality.

Geometry and Measurement

1 By the end of Grade 5, students should be able to solve problems involving perimeter andarea of triangles and all quadrilaterals having at least one pair of parallel sides (i.e.,trapezoids).

2 By the end of Grade 6, students should be able to analyze the properties of two-dimensional shapes and solve problems involving perimeter and area, and analyze the properties of three dimensional shapes and solve problems involving surface area and volume.

3 By the end of Grade 7, students should be familiar with the relationship between similar triangles and the concept of the slope of a line.

Source: National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008.

The Columbus Dispatch

3/12/2008

The state’s largest teachers union urged its members to speak out against a hike that more than tripled the cost of a five-year teaching license.

Thousands of teachers e-mailed State Board of Education members, either by filling out a form or crafting their own, cramming members’ inboxes and crippling some computers. Some of the e-mails were abusive, threatening and profane.

Many school-board members were outraged and said so today just before they rejected pleas to reverse the board’s February decision that raised the cost of a five-year license to $200.

In an 11-6 vote, the board decided not to return to a $60 fee. Then, in a 10-7 vote, the board rejected a bid to delay the new fees four months, which would have started them July 1.

About 11,000 teachers submitted applications before the fees changed March 1. Typically, 1,000 apply at this time of year.

Reversing the February decision “would send an unfortunate message that this board will turn its decision by a high volume of form letters,” said board member Robin C. Hovis, who is from Millersburg.

“I received many, many, many, many cruel e-mails,” said Lou Ann Harrold, a former teacher and superintendent from Ada.

“I hope you never use that technique again,” she told the teachers and officers of the Ohio Education Association who testified at today’s board meeting.

Member Michael H. Cochran, who is from Blacklick and received about 1,200 e-mails from teachers, said: “I found that method of lobbying to be offensive. It was juvenile. I would expect the OEA to know better.”

One of the e-mails to board members said: “It’s politicians like you that make me sick to my stomach! I have no idea where you get off pulling some stunt like this … and I hope your children and their children’s children get screwed over by the educational policies you and your ignorant cornies (sic) develop.”

Teachers licenses cost more because the department now has to review more background checks before it issues them, said Lou Staffilino, associate superintendent for the Center for the Teaching Profession.

Before a couple of changes in state law last year, background checks were required only when teachers first received a license. Now, teachers must have both a state and federal background check every time they get a new license or renew an old one.

Teachers directly pay for the background checks, but the Department of Education reviews them to look for problems that would prevent someone from teaching.

Also, the department is buying a new computer system to better track educators accused of wrongdoing. The new state law also requires the department to start telling school districts when teachers are arrested. The price tag to do all that is about $2.3 million.

The fee increase was the first significant one in the last 14 years. Eight years ago, the department raised rates by $2.

The new fees are “a real hardship,” said Rhonda Johnson, president of the Columbus teachers union, which is affiliated with the state one. “It’s like, ‘Let’s make the good teachers pay for the crooks we’re trying to catch.’ ”

The Ohio Education Association argued that the rate hike was too large and a surprise to teachers. Because it’s a fee that relates to public safety, taxpayers should foot the bill, the union said.

“These dramatic increases feel unreasonable and unfair,” said the union’s vice president, Bill Leibensperger.

Board members countered that talks about the changes began in December, and the union was present for many, if not all, of them.

“To now stand up and say members didn’t know it was coming is more of an indictment of OEA,” Cochran said.

The union says it will keep fighting the increases and will continue to lobby by e-mail. Leibensperger apologized for the e-mails that were “unprofessional in tone.”

“But part of being a public official is being able to take it,” he said after the meeting. “I’m sorry that the board has chosen to not partner with us on this issue.”

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com

By Bill Bush

The Columbus Dispatch

3/12/2008

A national campaign launched yesterday by an advocacy group called the Center for Union Facts needs to do a little more fact-checking, Columbus school district officials said yesterday.

The center said teacher contracts nationally are keeping bad teachers on the job, and said the proof in Columbus City Schools is that only five teachers had been fired in the past four school years. The center is based in Washington, D.C.

But a district spokesman said at least eight times as many had been fired or forced out, and that Ohio law — not the Columbus Education Association contract — is really what makes it time-consuming and expensive to fire a teacher.

“There’s not additional protections afforded through the CEA contract,” district spokesman Jeff Warner said.

By state law, educators can defend their jobs in a hearing similar to a trial, where they can subpoena people and records. A nine-day hearing in 2006 for former Mifflin High School Principal Regina Crenshaw cost at least $37,700, not counting hundreds of hours of district officials’ time.

“When I say ‘union rules,’ I’m using that loosely to also incorporate state laws that are backed by the unions,” said Tim Miller, spokesman for the Center for Union Facts.

He would not say who funds the group, which cited Columbus’ and 22 other teacher unions on its campaign Web site, www.teachersunionexposed.com.

Beyond the five firings cited by the center, an additional 37 Columbus teachers resigned or were fired as a result of the district’s Peer Assistance and Review program, Warner said. The PAR program was developed jointly by district administrators and the Columbus Education Association to weed out bad teachers.

The program matches up new hires and teachers who need improvement with veteran educators. A PAR panel that judges their progress recommended yesterday that seven more teachers be terminated, said Rhonda Johnson, president of the CEA.

At least three other teachers resigned rather than be fired after disciplinary investigations during its four-year study, the Center for Union Facts acknowledged yesterday. The Center knows this because of “settlement letters” in the teachers’ personnel files, Miller said.

In addition to forcing teachers out, the district assigns teachers to home or some administrative job that doesn’t put them in contact with students when they are suspected of wrongdoing that could result in termination, Warner said. Nine teachers are currently in that condition.

Most teachers who are on track to get fired simply resign, so the number of teachers forced from their jobs for poor performance or wrongdoing will be undercounted, Johnson said. Oftentimes, their resignation letters say they are resigning “for personal reasons.”

“Most people resign rather than get fired, you know, how it works anywhere: ‘You can’t fire me, I quit,’  ” Johnson said.

The debate over the numbers does not change Miller’s belief that the union “wraps the district up in red tape.”

“If they want to drag it out, they can and they do it.”

bbush@dispatch.com

State law makes it time-consuming to fire teachers, a district spokesman said.

Copyright © 2008, The Columbus Dispatch

The New York Times

3/12/2008

PHOENIX - One morning last August, Yvonne Watterson, the principal of GateWay Early College High School here, sat in her office, grimly scrolling through the database of its 240 students.

At the behest of a new state law she detested, she looked for which ones listed a Social Security number and which did not. Without a number, it was virtually certain that a child was in America illegally.

Ms. Watterson wound up with 38 names, many of them of boys and girls she had personally recruited to the school. Under the statute popularly known as Proposition 300, illegal immigrants could not receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities in Arizona. Nor could school administrators like Ms. Watterson use state money to pay it.

GateWay’s students, while still in high school, are able to take courses at a community college in the same building, with in-state tuition paid by the high school. Ms. Watterson knew her students could not afford to pay the out-of-state rate, generally $280 a credit. And without the college classes, there would be less reason to stay in school.

So she made the list and sent letters home and began to call in the affected students one by one to tell them that their tuition was no longer subsidized. A girl named Karla crumpled to her knees in the principal’s office, and said, “But I’m a good person.” A few weeks later, Ms. Watterson heard, Karla was riding a bus back to Mexico.

Yvonne Watterson vowed to do something so she would not lose any more of her students. She made the vow because of what happened every July 12 back in Antrim, Northern Ireland, her hometown.

On that night, the local Protestants celebrated their forebears’ victory over a Catholic army three centuries earlier in the Battle of the Boyne. Even in the Arizona desert, Ms. Watterson remembered the sound of Loyalist anthems and the smell of burning tires and the sight of the pope being burned in effigy. Though she was a Protestant, even as a child she had always cringed imagining how July 12 felt to her Roman Catholic playmates up the block.

“I thought, ‘Here we go again, segregating kids, putting kids on a list,’ ” Ms. Watterson, 44, said recently in her office at GateWay. “It’s that hatred. It’s that separation. Not having to look someone in the eye. It’s a horrible, cowardly - I don’t know what to call it. I wouldn’t have believed I was in America.”

In her career as an educator, Ms. Watterson had been nothing if not decisive. When she became principal at GateWay in 2003, she threw out a progressive curriculum and replaced it with a traditional variety. She required all 10 teachers on the staff to reapply for their jobs and hired back just one. After visiting early-college high schools in New York City and Stockton, Calif., and seeing how well they served immigrant teenagers, she brought the model to GateWay.

So she went immediately into advocacy mode, giving an interview to The Arizona Republic, the daily newspaper in Phoenix. In the subsequent article, she was quoted describing the plight of her undocumented students and talking about her own experience as an immigrant after she came to America in the mid-1980s.

She mentioned Jose Razo, heading into his senior year, on track to accumulate more than 50 college credits in courses ranging from macroeconomics to video-game design. At home, he had a cologne box filled with certificates for the honor roll, perfect attendance, good citizenship. But he was not a citizen, and because of Proposition 300, he was already thinking about going to Mexico, a country he had left at age 2.

Ms. Watterson reaped the whirlwind of the blogosphere, as readers responded to The Republic’s article.

From Gilbert19: “These children are dishonest law-breakers; why do we want them going to our schools?”

From gbishop01: “You have totally destroyed your integrity.”

From AWhite: “All I have to say to these criminals is ‘DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT’!!!!!”

The attacks attested to the vox populi. Proposition 300 had been approved with 71 percent of the vote. It won alongside three other ballot measures denying various rights to illegal immigrants and declaring English the official state language.

“In my heart of hearts,” Ms. Watterson said, “I thought, ‘Honestly, people can’t vote for something that would hurt kids who are taking college classes.’ I thought they just didn’t understand. Honest to God, that’s what I thought. But the overwhelming reply was, ‘That’s exactly what we intended.’ ”

Still, the response was not unanimous. A lawyer who doubled as a television host, José A. Cárdenas, called Ms. Watterson and arranged for Jose Razo to appear on his show.

About a week later, GateWay received an anonymous donation of $25,000 to help undocumented students pay their tuition. Mr. Cárdenas recommended that Ms. Watterson approach the Stardust Foundation in suburban Phoenix, and it gave $50,000.

Ultimately, Ms. Watterson received $83,000 from various donors. In January, she was named one of seven winners of a Phoenix-area award in memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After having her students write autobiographical thank-you notes to donors, she had the letters collected and published as a bilingual book, “Documented Dreams.”

Still, this ending is not quite happy. The donations came in too late for the affected students to take their college classes in fall 2007.

About $27,000 of it went toward their tuition for the spring semester of 2008, and the rest will cover next fall’s needs. Beyond that, there is only uncertainty.

“I don’t wake up every day to steal purses,” said Noemi Ariza, a 17-year-old student at GateWay. “I wake up to try my hardest to succeed. And for people to despise me, to tell me I have no right to be here, to look at me like a murderer - it’s so dehumanizing. All I’m trying to do is make something of myself.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

The Plain Dealer

3/11/2008

The security chief for the Cleveland schools says the district is building a “bubble of safety” to protect students and staff.

Relying on a combination of measures - from hiring more security guards to installing metal detectors and X-ray machines - Chief Lester Fultz said the district hopes its tactics will cut reported incidents by 10 percent.

Cleveland began reviewing its security measures in earnest after a SuccessTech Academy student shot two other students and two teachers before killing himself last October.

Fultz said the new “bubble” should be wholly in place when the new school year begins in August.

In the meantime, improvements are being phased in.

Schools Chief Eugene Sanders and several of his top staffers outlined the district’s security plan to Plain Dealer reporters and editors on Monday.

That plan includes increasing the number of security officers so that each school has at least one in the building. In addition, metal detectors - which Fultz said are now in all high schools - are to be installed in every building by this summer.

The high schools and most of the K-8 buildings also are slated to get X-ray machines by July.

More than 2,000 closed-circuit television monitors will watch over school buildings. While the district has had cameras for a number of years, Fultz said they haven’t all been operational. New buildings are being equipped so there are no blind spots for the cameras there.

The district also is redeploying a bicycle unit to help with security and is increasingly targeting the gang activity that Fultz acknowledged is a problem in the schools.

In addition, the district is paying Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes of Research $337,000 to take stock of what mental health and community support services are available to students and to determine how the district can best put those services to use.

The idea is to head off trouble in the schools by addressing some of the problems students face.

“We could just continue to dump more and more money [into programs] without figuring out what are sufficient resources,” said chief academic officer Eric Gordon.

Included in the resources audit is a survey of students in grades 5-12, supplemented by focus groups of students, staff and residents that will begin meeting later this month. (To see the survey questions, go to cmsdnet.net/parents and click on links below “2008 Conditions for Learning Survey.”)

Sanders said he hopes the audit will identify better ways that the district can align its current services with those of its community partners.

“We found an outside lens for what we needed to do,” he said.

The district’s stepped-up security is to be commended, said teachers union President Joanne DeMarco.

But the key lies in providing additional staff and teacher training, and separate training for students and their parents, she said.

“Most of the teacher assaults come from teachers intervening to break up fights,” she said. “It’s going to take more resources. Obviously, the problems of the neighborhood are coming into the schools.”

DeMarco said efforts such as metal detectors, X-ray machines and an expanded gang unit represent “a foot in the door. The problems are massive. We need to keep at it.”

Reported drug offenses for the first six months of the school year are up 37 percent over the same period last year.

Fultz said the increase is evidence that the district’s partnership with other law enforcement agencies has been effective in finding more contraband.

Overall, reported incidents in the schools are down slightly, according to the district.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

atownsend@plaind.com, 216-999-3894

© 2008 The Plain Dealer

© 2008 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.

3/11/2008

By August, the district will increase its security staff from the current 161 officers to 215, putting at least one in each school.

All high schools now have metal detectors. By summer, every district school building will have a metal detector.

By July, X-ray machines will be installed in all high schools and the majority of K-8 buildings, selected in part on the basis of student population, surrounding neighborhood and number of serious reported incidents.

By summer, more than 2,000 closed-circuit television monitors will be operating in district buildings.

The district will strengthen its anti-gang measures and do periodic drug sweeps inside the schools. Eventually, the district hopes to create its own K-9 unit to conduct more regular sweeps.

By summer, all buildings will be equipped with at least one security camera and buzzer at the front door. About one-fourth of buildings do not now have such precautions in place.

© 2008 The Plain Dealer

© 2008 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.

By Mark Jewell

The Columbus Dispatch

3/11/2008

Associated Press

BOSTON — An advocacy group that has targeted unions representing grocery employees and service-industry workers is setting its sights on public teachers unions — with a pledge to offer 10 teachers it deems the nation’s worst $10,000 each to quit teaching.

The Center for Union Facts is to launch a campaign today arguing that teachers unions block education reform such as teacher merit pay and impose rules that make it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers.

Teachers unions say the group is spreading misinformation.

The Washington-based nonprofit group is spending $1 million on ads and a billboard in New York’s Times Square. It’s also launching a Web site with data it says it collected from public-records requests documenting what it considers extreme lengths that unions go to protect bad teachers.

It’s also inviting nominations for a contest to determine the nation’s worst unionized teachers. The “winners” will be offered $10,000 each if they permanently resign or retire from any career in education — if they sign a release agreeing to have their name and the reasons for their selection published by the group.

The head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, called the Center for Union Facts’ executive director, Rick Berman, an “ethically challenged attack dog” and “a shameless lobbyist who has shilled for pesticide, alcohol and tobacco companies.”

“Berman has a record of using hidden funders to attack groups that contribute a great deal to society,” said Edward McElroy, president of the federation. “Now, he is coming after teachers at a time when most Americans support education and want to make improving education a top national priority.”

Reg Weaver, a spokesman for the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, said school districts’ evaluation policies include strict criteria to ensure that teachers face consequences for falling short of performance standards. “This union does not support a person’s incompetence. This union supports a person’s right to due process,” Weaver said.

The campaign targets about two dozen districts, from Boston to Anchorage, Alaska. The group says that unions support policies that protect all but the worst teachers and force school districts to pay legal fees of $100,000 or more to replace a teacher.

In Columbus, the group says, teachers who have at least five years’ experience are nearly impossible to fire because of policies set by the Columbus Education Association, which represents the city school district’s teachers.

The Center for Union Facts said five teachers were fired in four school years: 2003-04 to 2006-07. That’s fewer than 0.03 percent of the district’s teachers each year.

“It’s a near-impossibility that fully 99.95 percent of its teachers deserve to be in front of kids,” the group said. “Any group of people that size is bound to have at least a few more bad apples than the ones noted.”

Rhonda Johnson, president of the Columbus Education Association, said the statistics didn’t account for teachers who resign before their contracts are terminated. The district’s peer-assistance and -review program helps weed out unfit teachers, she said.

“Some teachers see the handwriting on the wall, and they chose to leave instead of being fired,” Johnson said. “That’s what you don’t see.”

Copyright © 2008, The Columbus Dispatch