School leaders in central Ohio could feel pretty good about the marks they received on the state’s annual report card of achievement.
In Franklin County, the average star rating was above 3.5. Some districts, like Upper Arlington and New Albany, boasted 5 stars.
The state’s largest district, Columbus City Schools, beset with challenges from literacy rates to chronic absenteeism, also celebrated a half-star increase.
Today, we’re digging through the data, for a truer picture of how Ohio’s schools are doing. Because not every district had reasons to celebrate. And even those that did, had room for improvement.
Plus, how does Ohio stack up to the rest of the nation?
Guests:
- Cole Behrens, K-12 education reporter, The Columbus Dispatch
- Aaron Churchill, Ohio research director, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- Morgan Scott Polikoff, education professor, USC Rossier School of Education and co-director, USC EdPolicy Hub
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. School leaders in central Ohio could feel pretty good about some of the marks they received on the state's annual report card of achievement. In Franklin County, the average star rating was over three and a half. And some schools, like Upper Arlington and New Albany, boasted five stars. The state's largest district, Columbus City Schools, beset with challenges from literacy rates to chronic absenteeism, also celebrated a half-star increase.
Today, we're digging through the data for a truer picture of how Ohio schools are doing. Because not every district had reasons to celebrate, and even those that did still had room for improvement. Joining us now is Cole Behrens, an education reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, covering K-12 education in central Ohio and education policy in the state. And he recently reported about Ohio's annual report cards. Welcome to All Sides, Cole.
Cole Behrens: Yeah, thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here.
Juravich: All right, so before we get into details, can you give us an overview of why the report cards matter? Like, why do they exist? What are they measuring?
Behrens: Yeah. So I mean, they serve a couple of functions. I think one is for parents to, you know, or prospective parents moving to a district to see, you know, get a baseline level of how well their school is performing or the school that they might, you know, be interested in sending their kid to is performing.
But on the other hand, it also gives policymakers, it gives districts a sort of road map of how they can improve their district. What, you know. Where they're succeeding and where they might need, you know, to spend a little bit more attention in addressing issues such as early literacy or graduation rates. There's six categories of tract on the state report card.
Juravich: Yeah, you mentioned those six categories. Are some more important than others? Like, do some have more weight?
Behrens: Yeah, so there's the six categories. I'm just going to read them off. Yeah, yeah, so it's gap closing achievement progress graduation early literacy and college career in workforce and Military readiness. It's kind of that one's last one's kind Of a mouthful, but the two of them that are weighted higher are achievement and progress achievement is just basically how you're performing on state standardized testing and progress is sort of a how you did compared to last year, how much effort or progress you're making compared to the previous year. And that moves every year. So for some districts it actually gets harder to continue to demonstrate success on the progress category.
Juravich: If you're doing well, yeah, it's hard to improve from a high score. Okay, got it it what so Talk to me about the stars because there hasn't always been stars, but there's been stars for several years Yeah, what tell me about? The stars versus what used to be letter grades for those of us who have been around
Behrens: Yeah, so in the 2021 they switched from the A through F scale to the star system. And so basically three stars is the state, you're meeting state standards on any of the categories. So it's each category obviously has a one through five star. And if you have one star, you need significant progress to meet state standards. But if you have five stars, you are exceeding state standards to a pretty large degree. So. Each of the categories has a different, of course, metric for what it is.
Juravich: Was it determined that stars were more gentle than letter grades or something, like getting a D or an F looked bad, but getting two stars is like, ah, I don't know.
Behrens: I can't really speak to the sort of motivation of changing that, but I know that for a lot of the districts and a lot of the people like the OEA have sort of said that really isn't necessarily a super correct way of representing A through F.
Juravich: Well, that's the union. Yeah. I mean, they have issues with the report cards anyway, but that's probably another show. But OK, so we also there's this whole idea we switch to a statewide mandate of called the science of reading. And it was to attack literacy rates and improve them. Is it still too early to tell if that's working? Like, can you tell from the report cards if science of reading is working?
Behrens: Yeah, well that was last year, 25, 26, was the first year that every sort of district was on board with the program of science of reading. Some districts obviously had independently adopted this before, but last year was the first year they were really seeing all the districts statewide sort of implementing that initiative. Um, what I would say is that when you introduce new curriculum, it... Sometimes takes years for that to sort of manifest itself because the teachers have to adjust to the new system or you know kids You're not going to see those fruits necessarily immediately. It'll take a couple years for it to for it bear out
Juravich: And when you're assessing something, is it kind of comparing apples to oranges if you were learning reading a different way one year and you changed it or?
Behrens: Well, I mean, this is like a standardized assessment. So you will be seeing sort of an apples to apples comparison there in terms of demonstrating proficiency on early literacy.
Juravich: So the way it's taught has changed, but the test is the same. Yeah, exactly.
Behrens: The same. Yeah, exactly. Well, and the other thing I just kind of want to talk about is that the state also is implementing a new math initiative that was passed at the end of last year. So we'll be starting to see down the line, obviously not this year, but you know, as districts sort of try to find the best practice for math curriculum, we might start seeing changes in the math.
Juravich: Does it have a name? I don't think it's called. It's not called the science of math. Well, yeah. There isn't really a...
Behrens: Well, yeah, there isn't really necessarily a corresponding science of math. Last year, my colleague Sheridan Hendricks and I did a sort of five part series on this because you know, there is a necessarily that, you know corollary apples to apples science of reading. There's also a science of Math because we don't have the best pedagogical practices like scientifically out like how you would with early literacy and phonics based education. There isn't necessarily that direct comparison for math, but the new state law, the sort effort there is to try and find what works best for teaching math, especially as you it's sort of the eighth grade algebra level.
Juravich: All right, then that's another show, too. I need to do a show on how to teach math. So let's move on to explain. You explained the star system, but in some categories, a school can get less than five stars but then still get an overall five star rating. Is that correct? Yeah.
Behrens: Yeah, that has to do with the waiting. I mean, you look at Olentangy, Olentangi didn't have five stars in every category, but they still achieved a five star overall rating because, you know, they actually didn't. I think they only got three stars in the.
Juravich: It's in the college career work for yes, I have a mouthful. So it's in the like post high school readiness category. They got three stars, but then they got five stars overall and they had five stars in that achievement gap closing and graduation rates, which two of those are higher rated. Right. Yeah. The weighted. OK, so coming back down to Franklin County, top earners included Bexley, Upper Arlington, New Albany, Grandview. When you look at these school districts that get five stars like what stands out to you?
Behrens: Yeah, I mean, those are the usual suspects, so to speak, in sort of the five star category. And I think the one through line through all these districts is they're very high income, high wealth communities at just the sort of demographics that feed into those schools. I mean not saying those schools obviously, you know, place a lot of emphasis on their curriculum and you know they have the sort local tax base to support, you you know, strong budgets. But I think that, not to bring back the OEA again, the Ohio Educators Association, they will say that these really are the report cards. They'll say the report card are essentially a barometer of local community wealth. So, that's sort of the...
Juravich: The affluent suburban school districts do better. Yeah. So I mentioned in the introduction, Columbus City Schools, which is the state's largest district, improved by a half star. Tell us what led to that increase. This district went from two stars, now it's at two and a half stars. Tell me about that.
Behrens: Yeah, so they grew a half star because they notched a higher star level on their progress category, which obviously, as we said, is weighted higher, you know, but they're still one star in literacy, early literacy and graduation. I reported right basically when the report cards came out that they're saying that their graduation rate last year is the highest since 2000. Or since the state basically started tracking graduation rates the way they do, which if that continues in the way that the graduation category is like lags a year because they also track a five-year graduation rate and it's like a formula to determine the overall graduation rate. If that continues, they'll actually move up a star in the graduation rate from one star to two stars. Oh, okay. So that would also benefit them. Down the line if that trend continues.
Juravich: Yeah, so Superintendent Angela Chapman called the graduation rate quote a huge sign of progress. Is that, I mean, that's something I know that the district has been working toward. Is it hard for a district the size and scope of Columbus City Schools to work on all the start, all the different categories at the same time?
Behrens: Yeah, it's like sort of like a cruise ship, you know, it is like really hard to turn, but especially when you're talking about a district of 46,000 students, they've really been sort of laser focused on a couple of categories, which is math proficiency and graduation rate and early literacy. Those are their three sort of guardrails, as they call them, that they actually measure her success on in their performance evaluations. So those Categories are really what they've been laser focused on and they've seen some improvements in most of those categories across the sort of demographics Because they track them, you know, obviously by different demographics but the graduation rate is also of kind of a function of the way the state changed their graduation requirements recently there's now a seal system for the graduation rates and I know one thing that the CCS specifically has been really laser focused on is these sort of career workforce opportunities for students. Oh, when you say it.
Juravich: Oh, when you say a seal, it's like you get a certificate in being a mechanic or something?
Behrens: Well a seal is essentially the way that this you can get seals in 12k like there's 12 seals you can get like a math proficiency seal you can a like career credential seal so it's basically just like they add up right and you need a certain amount to graduate on top of demonstrating proficiency on the like state standardized or not proficiency we need to pass the
Juravich: pass the state standardized test, but you can get a seal. So you could have maybe poor grades in school, but you could get these seals too.
Behrens: Yeah, I'm yes essentially but the seals also like, you know, the now that it's the Ohio Department of Education and workforce You know, they're a big thing that they're emphasizing is sort of this post Collegiate or post high school, you Know whether you're going to college whether you are getting a workforce credential whether you have You know some sort of career technical education experience That you'll you know move out of high school with a path actually career Pathway and one thing I want to talk about now that I'm on career workforce is CCS is what you would call the Career Technical Preparatory District, which is at Fort Hayes. Yeah. Downtown. CTE Career Technical. The CTE. So that's actually one of, it's actually tracked separately from Columbus City Schools. Because if you, like, Westerville, other schools sort of feed into this. Oh, I didn't know that. Like, students can go there, like some suburban schools come there too. They actually have 4.5 stars. They're one of the real bright spots in CCS you know they Have you know essentially? Almost an 100% graduation rate out of that programming because of their You know, they really focus on you know, construction mechanic work, whatever it is And you know also downtown high school is part of that too
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7NPR News. We're talking about Ohio's annual report card evaluation of school districts, and we're talking with Columbus Dispatch K-12 education reporter Cole Behrens. I wanted to pivot to more rural districts for a minute. I mean, what did you find when you looked at, I'm gonna use Licking County as an example. So Licking county has a variety of different schools. Granville earned the most in that area with five stars, but then two districts, Newark and. North folk local schools Were lower they had two and a half stars. I mean talk to me about the rural districts and how they do on these report cards
Behrens: Yeah, well, North Fork local schools actually lost a star compared to last year. Newark is kind of still floating at where it typically scores here. But Licking or Newark City, you want to look at. I mean, that's more of it, like less of a traditional rural school that you would think about. I mean it's it's still a city school in some ways. I mean, it might not be like a Youngstown or a Steubenville or whatever it is, but it's still, I mean, it's a larger. Larger community school than maybe some other schools. And they, I talked to their, oh, I received a statement, but I reached out to Newark about that. And they kind of, like schools, they will say, well, this doesn't tell the whole picture. They said, well we're actually making a lot of progress in some of these sort of untracked metrics and we're improving. But rural schools in general tend to typically, I mean, you look at Licking County as an example. I mean you can kind of look around the state. Rural schools tend to perform at the state average or above, generally speaking, when you look them more broadly.
Juravich: And are any private schools or charter schools included in the report cards?
Behrens: Charter schools are, private schools are not, but yes, charter schools are tracked on the state report cards. Okay.
Juravich: Okay, so charter schools are sometimes called community schools. Is that the same? Yeah, the same thing Um, but if your kid goes to a private school, you don't have a way to look up a grade on a report card, right? No
Behrens: No, no you do not.
Juravich: And are these report cards used in any way to determine either state funding or federal funding? Or are they really just a metric?
Behrens: Yeah, they're really they're not determined to because it's they follow a funding formula, which is based off of a variety of things. I mean, I could talk you off about the funding formula. But it is not related to like actual performance.
Juravich: Okay, so getting two stars doesn't mean you lose money or anything like that, or maybe you need more money if you have it, right? Okay, whenever we're looking at these report cards though, it's hard to not, I mean basically you look at them and you see that the affluent suburban districts that we were talking about, it's not hard to notice that they trend well year over year. I mean, tell me about the connection between a district's... Economic outlook and their performance on the state report cards. What have you found?
Behrens: Yeah, you know, the kids would call it pocket watching. But yeah, I mean, when you look at like I'll just take Olin Tangi again, because obviously they're the largest five star school in the state, you know, they I think what you hear and I reported on Olin Tangi in August about, you know, their high performing while still, you know, adding hundreds of students a year. When you look at that, it's these parents, you know, these are destination districts, right? Like, parents are moving to... Whether it's Ollantangy, New Albany, Upper Arlington, you know, these are places that are very desirable to parents to send their kid to the public school there. And those parents are very, very engaged in their students' educational life. And you know it really comes down to, you know in a lot of ways, the investment that parents in. Place into the community you know and I'm not saying that you know that's not the case in Columbus but Columbus City Schools for example just sort of it's like a counterfactual is They have a lot of students with a lot of needs, essentially, a lot of trauma, a lots of single parent households, a lot
Juravich: A lot of parents needing to move around.
Behrens: Housing insecurity, food insecurity, and I mean it's you can't expect, or at least Columbus will say, you can expect us to be the sort of like omni-service to address all of these children, I mean as much as they'd like to, but I mean they have a budget constraints, but they can't address every single student's every need and some of that shows up in the classroom.
Juravich: Yeah, they're not. They're not a school district and a social service organization. Yeah, we've been talking about Ohio's annual report card evaluation of school districts, and we've talking with Columbus Dispatch K-12 reporter Cole Behrens. Thank you so much for joining us today, Cole. Yeah. And coming up as schools celebrate report card gains, an Ohio researcher for one educational think tank highlights the deeper worries about education. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. While there are successes to celebrate with Ohio's latest report card, one education-related think tank is not satisfied. In the words of our next guest, the ratings, quote, offer parents and communities an increasingly dishonest picture of how students fare academically. And here to tell us more is Aaron Churchill, an Ohio research director for the Thomas B. Forden Institute, a think tank that focuses on K-12 education. In his role, Aaron oversees research projects and commentary aimed at strengthening Ohio's education systems. His recent column is titled, "Ohio's Feel Good School Report Card Masks Poor Student Outcomes." Welcome back to All Sides, Aaron.
Aaron Churchill: Glad to be here. Thanks, Amy.
Juravich: We'll get into the nitty gritty in a minute, but I mean, from your view, how important are these report cards? Who pays attention to them? Who should pay attention to them?
Churchill: I think these report cards are incredibly important for the state of Ohio and for parents and communities. Ohio has had a school report card for more than two decades and these report cards provide sunlight and transparency about how students are doing against grade level standards, how many students are essentially passing state assessments, how they're growing over time from year to year. And whether they're meeting college and career-ready benchmarks at the end of high school, whether they're graduating high school on time, whether they are passing the ACT and SAT and have a score that prepares them to go to a four-year college or a two-year College. Or whether you're meeting important benchmarks that can help you prepare for the workforce. The report cards are focused on student outcomes and do provide that sunlight. Without a report card, we wouldn't know how students in Columbus or Whitehall or Westerville are doing, and the report card provides that data. And then as you mentioned at the top of the show at our interview, you know, they provide the ratings that can help parents, you know, sort of select and vet schools for their own kids. So that ratings are important in terms of providing information to parents about overall school quality, and then the data underneath it of those ratings are really important for parents and communities to help understand how many students are on track to be ready for what's after high school.
Juravich: So a lot of districts this year boasted improvements, or there were many five-star districts, there were districts that saw increases in their stars. You wrote in your column that there are some achievements worth celebrating. I mean, what's something, tell me one thing that stood out on the positive side for you.
Churchill: Yeah, absolutely. So when we looked at the district level ratings, 94% of school districts in Ohio received a three star above rating, overall rating. That's a composite mark. That's in a lot of districts in Ohio. At a school level, 78% of schools receive three stars or above. I think there are a lot positive that schools are doing in the state of Ohio. I do think those ratings do reflect in a a lot of places, a lot, the vast majority of students. Achieving grade level standards in math and reading. It does, you know, reflect a lot of... A lot of students, more preparation at high school. Ohio has done a really significant effort in the past decade to try to prepare more students for life after high school, whether that is a college ready track or whether that's career ready track. And we've seen a lot more students achieving some of the career ready type benchmarks on our report cards. That's attaining industry credentials, passing career technical assessments. And so And there's been a real focus on career readiness in our high schools, and I think that is also reflected in some of the ratings as well.
Juravich: So then you also write though that the ratings offer parents and communities an increasingly dishonest picture of how students fare academically. So to have 94% of the districts at three stars or above, I mean that's the state standard, that sounds pretty good to me. So what is dishonest here?
Churchill: Yeah, I think the ratings do paper over some of the bad news that is underneath the rating system. At a high level, the state has not recovered academically in terms of pandemic recovery loss. In 2021, that was sort of when test scores bottomed out. Bye. Students are still behind today, compared to how students were performing prior to the pandemic. So I don't think we should be corking the champagne when students are still behind relative to where students were before the closures and during the pandemic disruption. Students are so particularly behind in math. Reading is a little bit closer to square one, but there's still a lot of work to do in math especially in terms of pandemic recovery.
Juravich: Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, so are you saying that since we're they because since the report cards changed from an A through F system to a star system right around the time of the pandemic, are we not comparing like you're saying we're seeing improvements, you know, and a lot of districts saw improvement year over year. But if you compare it back to like maybe 2018 or 2019, we're not where we were. Is that what you mean? Yeah.
Churchill: That's correct. Yeah, compared to 2019, our test scores are not where they are prior to the pandemic. So students are still behind pre-pandemic cohorts in terms of their math and reading achievement. And, you know, when we say that schools are all virtually all the districts are meeting state standards, that does sort of under undermine some of the the actual student achievement that's happening in our schools. Our school was, you know. On the outside, they look pretty normal. Our school busses are running, kids are out at recess, at least in my district, and things look kind of normal. But underneath the hood, when we actually lift up what's happening in certain terms of student learning, we're still behind. Chronic absenteeism continues to be a huge problem in our school districts. Columbus City schools, more than 50% of students were chronically absent. That means that they missed 10% or more this school year. That's undermining academic progress and the recovery we can make. To try to catch up in terms of learning loss. And then the.
Juravich: Oh, on that karnak absenteeism, you wrote in your piece that you want Ohio, the state, to take a stronger stand against absenteezm. What can the state do that the district isn't trying to get kids in the school building?
Churchill: Yeah, absolutely. I think... One issue is with the report card itself, it gives too much credit for schools with significant chronic absenteeism problems. So, Youngstown City Schools last year, there is an indicator within the report cards that measures chronic absenteeism and gives schools credit or not credit based on their chronic absentaeism rate or their year-to-year improvement in the rate. Youngstow City Schools received full credit last year. They had more than 50% of students chronically absent last year. There's a middle school in Columbus that had chronic absenteeism rates more than 75%. Champion middle school, and they receive full credit on the chronic absenteeism measure. So the state needs to take a more realistic approach in terms of how they hold schools accountable for increasing the student attendance. We should not be giving full credit once, you know, a school or district has more than half their kids missing that much time in school. So I think that is one lever that the state can do to sort of take a stand and Hey, dad. That is not an acceptable rate of chronic absenteeism. We're not gonna give you credit on the report card for that.
Juravich: Are they are you saying they got credit because maybe they improved their absenteeism rate, but it's still bad. Is that what you mean?
Churchill: That's correct. The minimum spas referring to in Columbus, I think they went from 78% to 75% chronic absenteeism year over year. And that's just not a fast enough rate of progress. The state's goal is that 15% of students are chronically absent. That I'm doing math on the fly, but I think that's five times as much the state's goal of chronic absenteeism. And that should not be rewarded in a report card system.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about Ohio's report cards with Aaron Churchill of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. His recent column is titled "Ohio's Feel Good School Report Card Masks Poor Student Outcomes." I mean, overall, we need a way to measure the schools. These report cards might not be perfect, but they show change, they show growth, they show increases, decreases. I mean it's good they exist, right?
Churchill: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I think the report card that Ohio has put in place has good bones and I'll write a little bit about that. It focuses on the right content, student achievement, student growth over time, chronic absenteeism, graduation rates, college and career readiness, the right indicators. What the report cards suffers from is low standards. And you can think of it kind of like, you know, a legal bar exam. You know, the test might have all the right content, the things we care about in terms of what attorneys have to know when they get on the job. But if you require a prospective lawyer to just pass 10% of the questions on the test, then it undoes basically all the good things that the test is trying to assess in terms of the readiness of the legal candidate. And I think something similar is happening with the report card. It has the right content, has the bones, the right structure, but the standards that the state has set for what it means to get a good rating on these various measures. It's far too low. So the chronic absenteeism is one example of that. Another example is with the graduation rates. Our graduation rates have ballooned in Ohio. 88.8% of students graduated on time last year. And the large reason for that is because the state has really low standards for what what it takes to graduate with a high school diploma. In a large number of cases, students do pass the state's Algebra 1 and English 2 high school exams. But there are workarounds that are much lower that students can achieve and still receive a diploma and circumvent the state assessment requirements. And so that's ballooning the graduation rate. And that, in turn, increases the ratings that schools are receiving for graduation rates. I mean I think that is one area where the state should definitely tighten up its standards for diplomas and tighten up the performance standards that schools have to meet in order to get a four or five star rating on that component.
Juravich: Lawmakers changed the report cards in 2021. We've mentioned that they went through them from an A through F grading system to the star system. And many of the changes that lawmakers enacted were recommended by the Fordham Institute. I mean, you were you were a part of helping the state write some of these. So why are you unhappy here? Why are you saying it's too low of a standard if you if you help lawmakers with it?
Churchill: Yeah, I mean, I think where we supported the legislation to move to the STAR ratings and to the new system was that the new system does place more emphasis on student growth over time. So those measures are housed in a measure called the progress component. It does have more emphasis on student improvement over time on state assessment results. And I think that was a positive because under the prior system, If you are a school in Columbus or Cleveland or in many other urban areas, it was incredibly hard to get a good rating on your overall mark. And because of the way the achievement gap works with student demographics. So I think the increased emphasis on value added or in the progress measure has been a step forward in the new report card system. There is more emphasis there, does create a more level playing field for schools of different demographics or different types of students. But as I mentioned, I think that devil is in the details with implementation. And I think, the way some of the report card measures have been implemented. Has undermined some of the positives of the overall structure. So, just showing a couple percentage points on your chronic absenteeism, some of grading scales and the way they convert the underlying data to a star rating, those grading scales are too low. And I think moving forward, the state and policy makers of the Department of Education and the legislature need to look at those standards and raise them to make our report card more honest picture of where students are.
Juravich: But the districts in those low economic areas, the ones that have more of a gap to fill and more of struggle doing that just because of the economics of their district, they would appreciate this level playing field, so that they can't, because you can't compare a Columbus City schools to an upper Arlington or a New Albany. It's completely different in the. In the in the families in the way that in the property taxes I mean it's it's different so it doesn't this make it better for some school districts to show growth because they are working hard.
Churchill: Totally agree. There's a measure on the report card. It's known as the progress measure. It's also known as value-added. It has a number of kind of monikers. Academic growth is sometimes what it's called. It tracks students year over year. And basically the idea is that in order to meet state standards, if your student is, say, average student is say at the 30th percentile in the statewide achievement distribution, the goal is to keep that student at the 30th of percentile. If you go up and move that student up from the 30 at the 40th percent, you get credit. If the student's average student falls back to the 20th percent then you lose credit. But the idea is that all schools, no matter where your average student comes in starting the year can show that growth or regression on this measure. And what it does is it creates differentiation between schools. And so if you're a parent in Columbus and looking for a good school, at least academically, academic wise on in terms of growth, then you would wanna look for a school that's four and five stars on the progress measure. And try to avoid schools frankly that are rated one or two stars on the progress measure because that means that students are actually slipping behind their peers in some respect. What we see in Columbus is that a number of schools do show really good growth year over year on the Progress Measure. Some of them are Columbus City Schools, some of them are public charter schools, some the best public charter school in Columbus receive really strong ratings on the progress measure. Kit Columbus. The United Schools Network, schools that the Fordham Institute sponsors as a charter school sponsor have four and five star ratings on the progress measure and have consistently done that year over year and tried to move students up in the achievement distribution. So they might have kids that are that are behind academically to start the year, but they move them up year over here. And that's a really important measure and something that the report card does communicate in a certain way through the progress readings.
Juravich: We're just about out of time, but I wanted to end on, you said that, you know, the report cards have mechanisms to level the playing field. You just mentioned that, public schools have the report cards, charter schools or community schools, whatever phrase we're using, those have report cards. But private schools do not. And have you ever thought at the Fordham Institute to advocate for private schools to be put into the report card system? Because if I was a parent sending my child to a private school, I'd want to know if school was doing well.
Churchill: Yeah, agree completely. So the private school, the private schools that participate in the Ed Choice program, they do report state, they do you report test scores to the state and those are reported out. Many of the private schools that participate in the program do have their students take the state test. They can also take an alternative assessment. And so you can find those on the Department of Education's website. This coming December, the Department Of Education will be releasing growth results for private schools. And so this is more akin to the progress measure where you're tracking students year over year and seeing what kind of growth they make. That'll be very interesting to see when those results come out. So I'm looking forward to that. It would be helpful, I think if the state did provide parents looking for private school options, a clearer picture and more accessible picture of how students are doing in that school. We at the Institute, we've recommended sort of an information sheet for private schools that shows. You know, rather than downloading an Excel file, basically captures, you know how students are doing on grade level standards and coming next year or in December, how they're doing in terms of student growth. I think that'd be a positive step in the right direction for transparency for all schools.
Juravich: All right. Well, we'll have to follow up when those private school numbers come out in December. We've been talking about Ohio's report cards with Aaron Churchill of the Fordham Institute. His recent column is titled "Ohio's Feel Good School Report Cards, Masks, Student Masks School Poor Student Outcomes." Thanks for joining us today, Aaron.
Churchill: Thank you, Amy, glad to be here.
Juravich: Coming up, we're going to look at student achievement and state report cards through a national lens. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. We've been talking this hour about Ohio's annual school report cards that assess how the state's 611 school districts are doing across six categories of student achievement. Overall, districts saw improvement, even incremental progress worth celebrating, and that includes the state largest district, Columbus City Schools. But there's always more work to do. And what about the rest of the country? Federal law requires every state to publish annual report cards. Joining us now is Morgan Scott Polikoff. He is an education professor at USC's Rossier School of Education and co-director of USC's Ed Policy Hub. He's also the author of a book called "Beyond Standards." And this year is a visiting K-12 policy fellow for Arnold Ventures. And his work focuses on design implementation and the effects of curriculum standards, assessments and accountability policies. Welcome to all sides, professor.
Morgan Scott Polikoff: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Juravich: So from your perspective, how helpful are these state report cards in assessing how a district and an individual school is actually doing? Do you find report cards to be a good way to measure this?
Polikoff: Well, at a high level, I think the answer is certainly yes. I mean, it's important that we have transparency about how schools are doing overall and for different student groups, areas of relative strength and weakness. And that's important because parents deserve to know and we're spending lots of dollars on schools and we deserve to have good evidence about how they're doing. Individual states, I would say, have their own report cards and some of them are more or less useful just because of how they are designed. And so they're. Might be hard to read or hard to access or not very clear, and so I think while the principle of the report card is definitely important, I think at the individual state level there's plenty of states that don't do a very good job of this and make it really hard to know how kids are doing.
Juravich: And Ohio moved in 2021, Ohio used to, prior to 2021, Ohio did an A through F system for schools and districts, and they moved to stars in 2021. What's your view on the way it's graded, letter grades, stars, points? Is there one way that's better than another, or is it just semantics of what sounds good?
Polikoff: I think it's preferences. I think as long as there's some clear overall rating, it doesn't even have to be one rating, but maybe a couple of ratings in different areas. Something that's relatively understandable to, you know, a parent or a lay person who is not gonna have the time to delve into the methodological details on this index that's constructed. I think something is valuable and then also that there are some consequences attaching performance as well. So again, it can't just be, oh, we're going to give your school an F for five years in a row and nothing's going to happen, right? That should be a warning sign that we want to intervene.
Juravich: What is your summary point on the nation's report cards this year? I know it's hard to sum up an entire nation's worth of schools in like one sentence, but what would you say about how? States like overall are doing on report cards
Polikoff: Well, you know, it's interesting because so I would naturally want to turn to the NAEP, which is the National Assessment of Education Progress, which is given, it's a national test, but it's given to samples of kids in all 50 states. And that's probably the sort of safest barometer of how kids are doing it. And that pretty much shows stagnation, right? So there was declines since COVID and actually predating COVID. And we haven't really recovered those declines. There are, of course, each individual state also has its own report card systems. The problem there is that sometimes because the tests that are used for those report card systems are really important, they're high stakes, so there's kind of a lot of coaching to them. They tend to be a little bit, you know, schools get more familiar with them. And so sometimes the state test scores can be a bit inflated relative to the NAEP. And so it's a little bit hard to draw a conclusion just from looking at one state's test. Overall, the national trend, though, is not too great. There's been some stagnation since COVID and we haven't really recovered what's been lost.
Juravich: Yeah, I mean, that's what we were just talking about about Ohio is a lot of school districts on our recent report card showed year over year growth from, you know, the last school year to this school year, a lot of school district saw improvement, but critics are saying that it's still not where we were in 2019. So so everyone's celebrating all this improvement, but not looking at the fact that we lost so much from 2018 2019. I mean would you agree that that's something that's impacting more than just Ohio?
Polikoff: Absolutely, and in fact, you know, as I said before, there's pretty good evidence that those trends, those declining trends started earlier than that, really around like 2012, 2013, is when we started to see declines on national tests. And though it's not clear, and that comes after really 10 to 15 years of sustained growth in student outcomes. And so it's that really clear, I think a lot of folks in my community are trying. Parts out, okay, what's driving this change that seems to have accelerated, you know, and you could guess at the theories of technology being one, COVID being another, and there's other theories as well, the decline of accountability, of sort of consequential accountability. But we don't really know what's causing that. And so, yeah, it's not just an Ohio problem. You know, I was looking at national trends on Nathan. Ohio's trends are very blur to the national average of our scores a little bit. The national average on all the NAIC-TESPA, the pattern is very simple.
Juravich: All right, so we can blame technology dating back to 2012, and then we can blame COVID in 2020. You wrote a column earlier this year for the 74 newsletter, which refers to the 74 million children in our country, in which you describe how decentralized bottoms-up efforts by well-intentioned policymakers and practitioners are gutting our collective knowledge of how well kids are doing in schools. So what exactly are you referring to there? Like well-intentioned lawmakers are making it harder for us to know what's going on.
Polikoff: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's very clear that in that case, what I was talking about was a college level study. So there was a sort of a bombshell report that came out of the University of California system that showed that. A lot of students were arriving in college, you know, they've gotten passed on through the grades, K to 12, they'd gotten a high school diploma, they enroll in college and then it shows up and they can't do high school math, many kids can't even do middle school math. And so a relatively elite school like the University of California is having to do all kinds of remediation that a number used to do. So in that piece, what I talk about is, You know, we have really gutted our accountability systems over the last 12 to 15 years. I think that had to do with the change in federal law from no child left behind to its successor, which is called Every Student Succeeds Act, which a lot of people in my circles think really gutted accountability. I think it also has to do what, you know, in this case at the college level, many colleges have also gotten rid of standardized tests for admissions or gone test optional, and the UCs have. And so all of a sudden, this piece of information that you used to have about student performance, you don't have anymore. And then it's perhaps no wonder that kids are showing up lacking the skills because the thing that you use to give to measure the skills, you don't t give any. So there's a lot of different things working in tandem, but basically, I would say, and increasingly with AI, it's the case that we just don't really know what people know and can do. Because we've sort of got it in all of our various signals. And that's not really gonna, we're not gonna be able to improve if we don't know where we are.
Juravich: Hmm. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the nation's report card and school districts and student achievement. And we're talking with Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC, and he's a visiting K-12 policy fellow at Arnold Ventures in Washington, D.C. For this school year. I wanted to talk about chronic absenteeism, which is a big area of focus for educators everywhere. In Ohio, the average absentee rate is nearly 24%. But it can range from the single digits in certain schools up to over 50% depending on the school district. So in 2025, you talked with a number of parents. I mean, what did you learn? Why are so many students missing so much school?
Polikoff: There's so many reasons why people miss school and some of them are the sort of mundane things, right? Like I think people are just a little bit more sensitive when kids are sick or when people are sick to keep them home and that's a result of COVID. But I also think that there are sort of important cultural changes about the value of education, about the perceived need to show up and do hard work. And we really see that for instance, when we talk to parents, we heard over and over again that they would say that it was really easy for a kid to make up this work, right? That it wasn't a burden. And so if that's the case, then that lowers the cost of keeping them out. If you're sort of on the margin, well, do I send my kid or not today? That lowers the costs. I think, so we heard that, you know, we've heard about a lot of individual circumstances as well, right, various crises, whether it's a family situation or a health issue or a financial one. There's lots of barriers. And I think when the perception is that attendance doesn't really matter, then it's just easier to not show. But attendance does matter very much. There's really compelling evidence of that. And so this issue of engagement and getting kids more engaged so they want to show up in school I think is really important. And it is within school's power to drive better attendance.
Juravich: Have you seen any novel approaches? Can you give me an example of a school district who's really working to counter the high absenteeism rate and doing a good job?
Polikoff: Well, I'm not going to be able to name a specific district for you, but I am absolutely certain that if you look at Ohio's data across the, whatever you said, 600 something or 800 something districts.
Juravich: Six hundred, yeah.
Polikoff: That you'll see that districts that serve very similar kids, some of them will have high absenteeism and some will have low absentees. And probably it has to do with a lot of different factors like the culture of the community, might have to do a transportation, you know, it might have do with just that school, that those districts are places where children want to be, right? And so therefore they show up. And we do see that kind of variation that schools can have. Real direct impacts on kids' attendance and teachers too.
Juravich: What's your take on efforts by the Trump administration to weaken or completely do away with, abolish the U.S. Department of Education? What can that mean for accountability and oversight if we lose some of the metrics at the U S Department of education?
Polikoff: Well, I think that you just hit on it with your question, which is, you know, one of the most important things that the U.S. Department of Education does is monitor the conditions of education in the United States, right? Each state does its own things, but oftentimes, states aren't really gonna do the best things if they're not compelled to do so by the federal government. So they are ensuring that. Civil rights are protected in schools and keeping track of data on that. They are doing the NAEP and other national exams, which fortunately they're not touching NAEP, so that's why. You know, whether it comes to students with disabilities, right, tracking access opportunities for students with disability. We're doing some of the, frankly, large-scale data collections that allow for important research, you know like the kind of research that I might do with my peers. A lot of that comes from the federal government and federal dollars. And so by taking those dollars away and taking away that data collection, we are really losing important information about how kids are doing, that is, frankly, not really possible to get any other way.
Juravich: We have been talking about the nation's report card, we've been talking about school districts and student achievement, and we've been talking with Morgan Scott Polikoff, an education professor at USC. And he's also a visiting K-12 policy fellow at Arnold Ventures in Washington, DC. Thank you so much for your time today, Morgan. I appreciate it.
Polikoff: My pleasure, nice to talk to you.
Juravich: And you've been listening to all sides on 89.7 NPR News. Thanks for joining us. I'm Amy Juravich.