Morning Shots

Gov. Ted Strickland announced on March 14 that he intends to roll back Ohio’s tiny school voucher program to save money in the next budget. The problem is, it would cost a lot more to send the thousands of children in the program back to the failing schools from which they escaped.

The EdChoice program provides to the parents who apply vouchers of no more than $4,250 for K-8 and $5,000 for high school, which enable approximately 2,500 children to get out of inadequate public schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, after adjusting for inflation, it costs about $10,500 for the average public school to educate a child, and only about $5,300 for the average private school. So it’s not hard to see how a state could save huge sums through school choice.

If Strickland wants to save money and improve education for Ohioans, he should follow the lead of other Democratic governors and expand school choice by creating a high-impact, low-cost education tax credit program, like the ones that are saving money in other states.

These programs allow businesses or individuals to take dollar-for-dollar credits on donations to scholarship-granting organizations that help lower-income families pay for a school of their choice. If a business owed the city $5,000 in taxes and donated $5,000 for scholarships, it would pay nothing in taxes. Individual credits allow taxpayers to take the same kind of credit on education expenses for their own children, and even for the children of relatives and friends.

Existing tax-credit programs save states substantial sums. A Cato Institute study estimates that under its old $27 million cap, Pennsylvania’s business tax credit program saved the state between $150 million and $200 million annually, because the amount spent on each scholarship is so much less than the amount spent per

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As I started reading this Sacramento Bee column by Peter Schrag, I was feeling pretty good. I thought that Peter and I were on the same page regarding the "Getting Down to Facts" study. Then Peter took a left turn out of nowhere that left us on opposite sides of this street.

But its iteration of California’s weak student test scores vis-à-vis other states on NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, ignores the big gains California has made on the very standards and tests it expects to drive the system.

In the years between 1999, when California’s accountability system was put in place, and 2005, California’s lowest ranking elementary schools — the bottom 10 percent — gained 190 points on an 800 point scale, exceeding the academic scores of the state’s midrange schools in 1999. All schools in the ninth decile in 2005 would have been in the top rank in 1999. More improvements are expected when new rankings are released next week.

Similarly, in the period from 2003 to 2006, the number of students rated proficient in algebra, regarded as essential to later success, rose from 103,000 to 163,000; in biology the number went from 124,000 to 174,000.

What the heck? Peter is so wrong on this one. He’s being so selective in his statistics that it led me wonder if he was Jack O’Connell’s long lost brother.

First, the Academic Performance Index (API) is not a great year-to-year measure of success. Actually, it isn’t a good snapshot measure of success either, but that’s for another diatribe. The API gets adjusted each year by the California Department of Education (CDE). They change weights of tests, add tests, drop tests, change confidence intervals and a whole myriad of other "adjustments" that make it impossible to fairly compare one year to the

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I’ve argued elsewhere that we should begin to treat students as customers, not products, of the system. This invariably raises questions about grade inflation – “if students are customers, and have the ability to take their money elsewhere,” the argument goes, “then they’ll use that newfound leverage to demand higher, undeserved grades!”

And you know what? Based on the way the system has been managed to this point, that’s exactly what would happen. In fact, it’s already happening: this press release, for example, highlights the widening gap between reported grades and NAEP scores, while this article showcases the gap between reported grades and performance on state tests.

But it doesn’t have to be that way; in fact, one simple change has the potential to flip the entire dynamic to make the most challenging schools the most desirable.

That change is independent assessment.

In the current, grade-based system, there’s no independent verification of learning: the person who teaches is the same person who assigns grades. And, since assessment is subjective – there’s no external evidence of achievement – it’s easy to game the system. There’s no way for anyone outside the classroom to know what kind of learning went on. If you got a high grade, was it because you excelled in a rigorous class, because you stayed awake in an extremely easy class, because the teacher liked you and gave you those mysterious “extra points for effort,” or because the teacher grades on a scale, and you were the best of the worst? There’s no way to know – and that flings the door wide open for demands for undeserved higher grades.

And of course we have to give a hat tip to the administrators who override those teachers who are trying to maintain standards. While I’ve not seen

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