Sunday, November 28, 2010
Teach Me How To Factor (WSHS Math Rap Song)
Innovative and fun music video created by Westerville South (Ohio) High School math teachers and students about factoring math equations.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
What is on the Horizon for Ohio Public Education?
What is next for Ohio public education? Since the election of Republican Governor-elect John Kasich in November, there has been an abundance of anxiety in Ohio education circles. Many of the education reforms that outgoing Democrat Governor Strickland enacted, such as the evidence-based funding model, have been pledged by Kasich to be undone. With a looming $8 billion dollar budget deficit facing Ohio, cuts across the board are inevitable and necessary.
Ohio operates much in the same way that it has since becoming a state in 1803. There are 88 counties, each with their own government services, 612 or so public school districts, each with their own Board of Education and operational costs, and literally thousands of township, civic, fire and EMS, library, park, etc systems that are all dependent upon tax dollars to survive, and that often replicate or overlap services. It does seem logical that Ohio's governing system is not only outdated, but inefficient and financially unsustainable. Kasich has said that he will look into the possibility of consolidating government services to reduce the cost and burden on taxpayers.
That does, however, include the examination of consolidating public school districts. Home rule has long been a staple of public education throughout the history of the United States. Slowly, as illustrated later, through the power of financial dependence and mandates, communities and public school districts in Ohio have seen control over their local school districts slowly erode. The United States Department of Education, one of the newer cabinet positions in our country's history established in 1980, have imposed legislation and requirements such as the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA aka No Child Left Behind) that have forced states to comply with its mandates or risk losing federal funding - whose $63.7 billion annual budget most states have now become completely dependent upon. In addition to dependence on federal funding, nearly all of the individual school districts have also become completely dependent upon state funding. In most school districts, over 50% of their annual budget is funded through the State of Ohio. Therefore, when 30 cents of every tax dollar from Ohio's General Revenue Fund is spent on K-12 education, and with the state needing to trim $8 billion in order to balance the budget, it is easy to see why school districts are nervous about their financial future.
Along with the 10% or more funding reduction districts are anticipating from the state, the public has increasingly become tax-weary and have clearly expressed that sentiment with resounding rejections of recent tax levies. In Ohio, school funding is based primarily upon property tax revenue, which the current model has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Ohio. What many people don't realize is that the amount, or millage, that is collected is based upon the tax-assed value of the home. However, as the home increases in value, the collection amount must remain at the value of the home at the time of the levy. Simply put: if your home is worth $100,000 at the time a school levy is passed with you contributing $50 monthly as a result, 10 years later when your home may be worth $200,000 you are still paying the same $50, which mathematically is half of the original millage and is an actual gradual reduction of revenue value for school districts. That is why school districts continually return to voters to approve levies in order to bring collections up to the current home values and/or increase revenue to address the increasing financial needs placed upon school districts. Unlike the private business sector that can create additional revenue by increasing prices or by developing new products, the only way a school district can increase revenue to address rising staffing costs, health care costs, facility operations, transportation costs and to provide services that parents have become accustomed to such as art, music and sports, is to ask its community for more tax dollars.
Many have called our enduring recession more of a "resetting" instead. Many changes have been made to financial systems and other industries that have over time developed unwise or financially unsustainable practices that recently brought us to the brink of worldwide financial chaos. We've been forced to weed out bad business practices and unsound companies in order to "reset" how we function to stay efficient and solvent. Public education will be no different. Over decades, public education has evolved to be "everything to everybody" by providing a wide variety of services to children. In addition to "readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmetic" schools also provide enriching experiences teaching world languages, technology, music, fine arts, athletics and other expected services. However, as many school districts have had their communities send the message of operating within current means without additional tax dollars, some of those services will no longer be affordable to keep. Sadly, many school districts are faced with multimillion dollar deficits and must deal with the difficult task of "resetting" how they operate and the services they provide. In most school districts, approximately 80% of budgetary expenditures go directly to the payment of salaries for staff and health care benefits. The remaining 20% is typically divided among facility operations, maintenance, transportation, food service, and compliance costs associated with state and federal mandates. Therefore, to have any significant reduction in operational costs, there needs to be a significant reduction of staff and services. The elimination of teachers, administrators and support staff in turn means the reduction or elimination of hallowed services and programs for students. When Boards and district officials are faced with gut wrenching choices of cuts, core content areas are what districts must protect, such as math, science, english and social studies and other courses required for high school graduation. Enriching programs outside of the core content that parents want schools to provide their children become no longer affordable. If you've kept up with reduction trends across the state, the first areas that become reduced or eliminated tend to be elementary and middle school "specials" such as art, physical education, and music programs along with secondary electives such as some world languages and other elective programs not required for graduation but that certainly provide a more well-rounded education. Most notably in recent memory were the drastic cost reduction cuts made by the South-Western City School district, which for a portion of the 2009-2010 school year eliminated all athletics and extracurricular programs in the district. Several districts around the state are faced with similar difficult decisions leaving parents frustrated that the services that schools traditionally provided will not be available for their children. Unfortunately, that trend does not look to be reversing soon.
Enough about the depressing financial situation facing our schools and our state. There are also exciting changes coming to the educational system in Ohio that will have a dramatic affect on teaching and learning. When I graduated from high school in 1987, there was relatively no education accountability for schools. There were no state tests and no accountability for the academic achievement of students beyond any that local districts enacted. There was no widely adopted curriculum in the state, which usually caused gross inconsistencies in learning across Ohio. In the early 1990's, Ohio introduced the 4th, 6th and 9th grade Proficiency Tests. The "Proficiency Era" was better than nothing, but still left much to be desired as an achievement accountability measure. For the first time, however, Ohio mandated that students must achieve a minimum testing proficiency level in order to receive an Ohio graduation diploma. Many school districts, especially urban and poor rural districts, scrambled to provide academic interventions for underachieving students that many districts, quite frankly, had not provided to that degree before. From there evolved the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001 which instituted a far greater accountability system in Ohio. Accountability tests were given each year in multiple areas from grades 3 through 8, Ohio Achievement Assessments, with intervention measures mandated for those students less than proficient. At the secondary level, students must pass the Ohio Graduation Test in order to receive a high school diploma. The obvious improvements from the proficiency tests are that the new assessments are in line with a standards-based state curriculum that every district in the state are accountable to. Elementary students are tested annually beginning in the 3rd grade, giving schools a greater opportunity to provide interventions for students.
Perhaps the greatest changes that No Child Left Behind enacted was the use of Value Added measurements in elementary and middle schools, and the accountability for individual student subgroups. Value Added is simply a growth measure that in theory measures the amount of academic growth a student achieves from one year to the next. Therefore, if a student is already advanced, that student and the school are still accountable for growing that student's academic progress. Conversely, if a student performs below proficient, but exhibits great academic gains from the previous school year, the student and the school receive the appropriate recognition for that as well. From grades 3 through 8, the growth of students can be traced back to the classroom teacher allowing schools and districts to determine, based upon assessment results, which teachers have the greatest success growing student learning. That is an unprecedented level of teacher-accountability for student learning in public education.
The most significant evolution resulting from NCLB is AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress. Schools and districts are now not only accountable for the achievement of their students as a whole, but also for each minority or identified subgroup within the schools. Prior to AYP, schools could rest on the test results of the majority, usually White, students and not be held accountable if groups within the school, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged students, were not achieving. Now individual schools and districts are for the first time held accountable for the achievement of ALL students and parents now have the right to opt out of failing schools if test scores do not improve. As a result, intervention programs such as Response to Intervention (RTI), Special Education services, and intervention-level courses and staff have greatly increased in schools causing, despite popular belief, the highest levels of education for ALL students in our state's history. That is why many have dubbed NCLB not just an educational piece of legislation, but a civil rights legislation as well. Proficiency tests were better than nothing, and No Child Left Behind is better than than proficiency, so what is the next progression for public education in Ohio?
Since the days of Socrates, it has been said that education is the cornerstone of any democracy and that the future health of any nation is tied directly to its education system. Our students today are faced with a world unlike any in recorded history. The amount of "knowledge" is increasing at a staggering rate, and the technological innovations that seem to come daily, have made most of the world's citizens and its knowledge available at the touch of cell phone button. If we are to prepare our students for that world, then our educational system must continue to evolve.
State Superintendent, Dr. Deborah Delisle dubbed the coming progress of Ohio's educational system "Next Generation Learning." We do not want our students to tune out and power off when they enter Ohio's schools, but have their minds and natural curiosity activated. The Ohio General Assembly passed House Bill 1 which fundamentally alters the educational accountability system in Ohio and will have a profound impact on current students' learning experience. Ohio, along with 40 other states, have adopted the national Common Core standards in math and english/language arts and have revised and consolidated the state standards in social studies, science and other elective content areas. The standards are intended to ensure college and career readiness for all Ohio graduates. In March, 2011, the General Assembly will adopt the "model curricula", a web-based tool giving instructional and assessment guidance and support for educators integrating the new standards.
By the 2014-2015 school year, the state will no longer use the Ohio Graduation Test, but will enact end-of-course exams in the core content areas and must adopt a national assessment to comply with the current NCLB mandate of a high school assessment. The desire is to move away from low-level, low-skill bubble-in multiple-choice tests to more performance-based, higher level assessments. Although nothing has been finalized or agreed upon by the Ohio Department of Education, it is widely anticipated that students may have to complete the ACT Common Core End-of-Course Exams at the end of their core content area classes, and the state may adopt the ACT as the new state assessment. In addition to possibly the common core assessments and the ACT, students will also be required to complete a senior capstone project and earn a minimum of four math credits with one of those credits being at least Algebra II or its equivalent. Infused in those assessments and in the expected instructional practices used by teachers are an increase of writing compontents and the use of 21st Century Learning skills: communication, creativity, critical thinking and collaboration. Dr. Delisle is correct and adamant that the days of "rote memorization" is a thing of the past. It is far less important, for example, for students to memorize the Bill of Rights than it is to be able to find them and articulate the impact of those guarantees on our society.
As well, beginning this school year, every school district is required to expand its educational options to include Credit Flexibility. Credit Flex means that no longer will "seat time" be the determiner for a student to qualify to receive a unit of high school credit, but the demonstration of mastery of the content instead. Students and their parents now have unprecedented control over the student's educational programming. If a student is advanced in a subject or content, that student will have the option to "Test Out" of the course to earn credit and move immediately to the appropriate level course. A student may also design an educational program, for high school credit, outside of the curriculum or course offerings of a school. Many schools are currently developing policies and procedures, but no provision in House Bill 1 may have a greater impact on the future structure of secondary education than Credit Flex.
To prepare for these changes, Ohio applied for and was rewarded a large sum of Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education. Ohio has also embraced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education initiatives, early college models and is rewarding districts enacting those initiatives with grants and other sources of funding. The goal for Ohio is to increase the number of graduates who are prepared for and enter college without the need for remediation, and are prepared to enter a STEM field of study. The culture of Ohio's students must be WHEN you go to college, not IF you go to college, regardless of the ZIP Code where the student resides. There is a concerted focus from the Ohio Department of Education to also increase graduation rates, and significantly reduce achievement gaps in reading and math.
To realize these ambitious goals, there must also be a large effort to develop high quality teachers through increased professional development, increased access to data, greater public accountability for teachers and school leaders, and working with Ohio's public universities to better align their schools of education's preparation of the next generation of teachers and educational leaders.
Unprecedented times bring about unprecedented changes and Ohio and the nation have the need for and are at the cusp of great educational progress.
Ohio operates much in the same way that it has since becoming a state in 1803. There are 88 counties, each with their own government services, 612 or so public school districts, each with their own Board of Education and operational costs, and literally thousands of township, civic, fire and EMS, library, park, etc systems that are all dependent upon tax dollars to survive, and that often replicate or overlap services. It does seem logical that Ohio's governing system is not only outdated, but inefficient and financially unsustainable. Kasich has said that he will look into the possibility of consolidating government services to reduce the cost and burden on taxpayers.
That does, however, include the examination of consolidating public school districts. Home rule has long been a staple of public education throughout the history of the United States. Slowly, as illustrated later, through the power of financial dependence and mandates, communities and public school districts in Ohio have seen control over their local school districts slowly erode. The United States Department of Education, one of the newer cabinet positions in our country's history established in 1980, have imposed legislation and requirements such as the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA aka No Child Left Behind) that have forced states to comply with its mandates or risk losing federal funding - whose $63.7 billion annual budget most states have now become completely dependent upon. In addition to dependence on federal funding, nearly all of the individual school districts have also become completely dependent upon state funding. In most school districts, over 50% of their annual budget is funded through the State of Ohio. Therefore, when 30 cents of every tax dollar from Ohio's General Revenue Fund is spent on K-12 education, and with the state needing to trim $8 billion in order to balance the budget, it is easy to see why school districts are nervous about their financial future.
Along with the 10% or more funding reduction districts are anticipating from the state, the public has increasingly become tax-weary and have clearly expressed that sentiment with resounding rejections of recent tax levies. In Ohio, school funding is based primarily upon property tax revenue, which the current model has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Ohio. What many people don't realize is that the amount, or millage, that is collected is based upon the tax-assed value of the home. However, as the home increases in value, the collection amount must remain at the value of the home at the time of the levy. Simply put: if your home is worth $100,000 at the time a school levy is passed with you contributing $50 monthly as a result, 10 years later when your home may be worth $200,000 you are still paying the same $50, which mathematically is half of the original millage and is an actual gradual reduction of revenue value for school districts. That is why school districts continually return to voters to approve levies in order to bring collections up to the current home values and/or increase revenue to address the increasing financial needs placed upon school districts. Unlike the private business sector that can create additional revenue by increasing prices or by developing new products, the only way a school district can increase revenue to address rising staffing costs, health care costs, facility operations, transportation costs and to provide services that parents have become accustomed to such as art, music and sports, is to ask its community for more tax dollars.
Many have called our enduring recession more of a "resetting" instead. Many changes have been made to financial systems and other industries that have over time developed unwise or financially unsustainable practices that recently brought us to the brink of worldwide financial chaos. We've been forced to weed out bad business practices and unsound companies in order to "reset" how we function to stay efficient and solvent. Public education will be no different. Over decades, public education has evolved to be "everything to everybody" by providing a wide variety of services to children. In addition to "readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmetic" schools also provide enriching experiences teaching world languages, technology, music, fine arts, athletics and other expected services. However, as many school districts have had their communities send the message of operating within current means without additional tax dollars, some of those services will no longer be affordable to keep. Sadly, many school districts are faced with multimillion dollar deficits and must deal with the difficult task of "resetting" how they operate and the services they provide. In most school districts, approximately 80% of budgetary expenditures go directly to the payment of salaries for staff and health care benefits. The remaining 20% is typically divided among facility operations, maintenance, transportation, food service, and compliance costs associated with state and federal mandates. Therefore, to have any significant reduction in operational costs, there needs to be a significant reduction of staff and services. The elimination of teachers, administrators and support staff in turn means the reduction or elimination of hallowed services and programs for students. When Boards and district officials are faced with gut wrenching choices of cuts, core content areas are what districts must protect, such as math, science, english and social studies and other courses required for high school graduation. Enriching programs outside of the core content that parents want schools to provide their children become no longer affordable. If you've kept up with reduction trends across the state, the first areas that become reduced or eliminated tend to be elementary and middle school "specials" such as art, physical education, and music programs along with secondary electives such as some world languages and other elective programs not required for graduation but that certainly provide a more well-rounded education. Most notably in recent memory were the drastic cost reduction cuts made by the South-Western City School district, which for a portion of the 2009-2010 school year eliminated all athletics and extracurricular programs in the district. Several districts around the state are faced with similar difficult decisions leaving parents frustrated that the services that schools traditionally provided will not be available for their children. Unfortunately, that trend does not look to be reversing soon.
Enough about the depressing financial situation facing our schools and our state. There are also exciting changes coming to the educational system in Ohio that will have a dramatic affect on teaching and learning. When I graduated from high school in 1987, there was relatively no education accountability for schools. There were no state tests and no accountability for the academic achievement of students beyond any that local districts enacted. There was no widely adopted curriculum in the state, which usually caused gross inconsistencies in learning across Ohio. In the early 1990's, Ohio introduced the 4th, 6th and 9th grade Proficiency Tests. The "Proficiency Era" was better than nothing, but still left much to be desired as an achievement accountability measure. For the first time, however, Ohio mandated that students must achieve a minimum testing proficiency level in order to receive an Ohio graduation diploma. Many school districts, especially urban and poor rural districts, scrambled to provide academic interventions for underachieving students that many districts, quite frankly, had not provided to that degree before. From there evolved the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001 which instituted a far greater accountability system in Ohio. Accountability tests were given each year in multiple areas from grades 3 through 8, Ohio Achievement Assessments, with intervention measures mandated for those students less than proficient. At the secondary level, students must pass the Ohio Graduation Test in order to receive a high school diploma. The obvious improvements from the proficiency tests are that the new assessments are in line with a standards-based state curriculum that every district in the state are accountable to. Elementary students are tested annually beginning in the 3rd grade, giving schools a greater opportunity to provide interventions for students.
Perhaps the greatest changes that No Child Left Behind enacted was the use of Value Added measurements in elementary and middle schools, and the accountability for individual student subgroups. Value Added is simply a growth measure that in theory measures the amount of academic growth a student achieves from one year to the next. Therefore, if a student is already advanced, that student and the school are still accountable for growing that student's academic progress. Conversely, if a student performs below proficient, but exhibits great academic gains from the previous school year, the student and the school receive the appropriate recognition for that as well. From grades 3 through 8, the growth of students can be traced back to the classroom teacher allowing schools and districts to determine, based upon assessment results, which teachers have the greatest success growing student learning. That is an unprecedented level of teacher-accountability for student learning in public education.
The most significant evolution resulting from NCLB is AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress. Schools and districts are now not only accountable for the achievement of their students as a whole, but also for each minority or identified subgroup within the schools. Prior to AYP, schools could rest on the test results of the majority, usually White, students and not be held accountable if groups within the school, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged students, were not achieving. Now individual schools and districts are for the first time held accountable for the achievement of ALL students and parents now have the right to opt out of failing schools if test scores do not improve. As a result, intervention programs such as Response to Intervention (RTI), Special Education services, and intervention-level courses and staff have greatly increased in schools causing, despite popular belief, the highest levels of education for ALL students in our state's history. That is why many have dubbed NCLB not just an educational piece of legislation, but a civil rights legislation as well. Proficiency tests were better than nothing, and No Child Left Behind is better than than proficiency, so what is the next progression for public education in Ohio?
Since the days of Socrates, it has been said that education is the cornerstone of any democracy and that the future health of any nation is tied directly to its education system. Our students today are faced with a world unlike any in recorded history. The amount of "knowledge" is increasing at a staggering rate, and the technological innovations that seem to come daily, have made most of the world's citizens and its knowledge available at the touch of cell phone button. If we are to prepare our students for that world, then our educational system must continue to evolve.
State Superintendent, Dr. Deborah Delisle dubbed the coming progress of Ohio's educational system "Next Generation Learning." We do not want our students to tune out and power off when they enter Ohio's schools, but have their minds and natural curiosity activated. The Ohio General Assembly passed House Bill 1 which fundamentally alters the educational accountability system in Ohio and will have a profound impact on current students' learning experience. Ohio, along with 40 other states, have adopted the national Common Core standards in math and english/language arts and have revised and consolidated the state standards in social studies, science and other elective content areas. The standards are intended to ensure college and career readiness for all Ohio graduates. In March, 2011, the General Assembly will adopt the "model curricula", a web-based tool giving instructional and assessment guidance and support for educators integrating the new standards.
By the 2014-2015 school year, the state will no longer use the Ohio Graduation Test, but will enact end-of-course exams in the core content areas and must adopt a national assessment to comply with the current NCLB mandate of a high school assessment. The desire is to move away from low-level, low-skill bubble-in multiple-choice tests to more performance-based, higher level assessments. Although nothing has been finalized or agreed upon by the Ohio Department of Education, it is widely anticipated that students may have to complete the ACT Common Core End-of-Course Exams at the end of their core content area classes, and the state may adopt the ACT as the new state assessment. In addition to possibly the common core assessments and the ACT, students will also be required to complete a senior capstone project and earn a minimum of four math credits with one of those credits being at least Algebra II or its equivalent. Infused in those assessments and in the expected instructional practices used by teachers are an increase of writing compontents and the use of 21st Century Learning skills: communication, creativity, critical thinking and collaboration. Dr. Delisle is correct and adamant that the days of "rote memorization" is a thing of the past. It is far less important, for example, for students to memorize the Bill of Rights than it is to be able to find them and articulate the impact of those guarantees on our society.
As well, beginning this school year, every school district is required to expand its educational options to include Credit Flexibility. Credit Flex means that no longer will "seat time" be the determiner for a student to qualify to receive a unit of high school credit, but the demonstration of mastery of the content instead. Students and their parents now have unprecedented control over the student's educational programming. If a student is advanced in a subject or content, that student will have the option to "Test Out" of the course to earn credit and move immediately to the appropriate level course. A student may also design an educational program, for high school credit, outside of the curriculum or course offerings of a school. Many schools are currently developing policies and procedures, but no provision in House Bill 1 may have a greater impact on the future structure of secondary education than Credit Flex.
To prepare for these changes, Ohio applied for and was rewarded a large sum of Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education. Ohio has also embraced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education initiatives, early college models and is rewarding districts enacting those initiatives with grants and other sources of funding. The goal for Ohio is to increase the number of graduates who are prepared for and enter college without the need for remediation, and are prepared to enter a STEM field of study. The culture of Ohio's students must be WHEN you go to college, not IF you go to college, regardless of the ZIP Code where the student resides. There is a concerted focus from the Ohio Department of Education to also increase graduation rates, and significantly reduce achievement gaps in reading and math.
To realize these ambitious goals, there must also be a large effort to develop high quality teachers through increased professional development, increased access to data, greater public accountability for teachers and school leaders, and working with Ohio's public universities to better align their schools of education's preparation of the next generation of teachers and educational leaders.
Unprecedented times bring about unprecedented changes and Ohio and the nation have the need for and are at the cusp of great educational progress.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Groups Eye Regulatory Relief Under NCLB
With 2013-2014 looming as the year when schools are accountable for having all identified subgroups reach 100% proficiency, it will be very interesting to watch the actions this congress takes in renewing the expired Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA aka No Child Left Behind).
I surmise that now that the national elections have concluded with the Republican party now in control of the House, the expectation of compromise and effectiveness have been clearly sent by the public. This will be the optimal year, with the presidential election in 2012, to rework and reauthorize the act. Stay tuned.
Groups Eye Regulatory Relief Under NCLB
I surmise that now that the national elections have concluded with the Republican party now in control of the House, the expectation of compromise and effectiveness have been clearly sent by the public. This will be the optimal year, with the presidential election in 2012, to rework and reauthorize the act. Stay tuned.
Groups Eye Regulatory Relief Under NCLB
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Classroom Assessments for a New Century
Great classroom instruction ideas for teachers looking to diversify or increase their instructional methods. 21st Century learning skills and preparation for national and state assessments can coexist. It's not new content, but instructional methods to guide and give content in a manner that will prepare students for the world they will one day face.
Classroom Assessments for a New Century
Classroom Assessments for a New Century
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