Ohio Teacher Data: Charters Flooded with First-Year Teachers

One of the signs of a healthy charter school sector is whether teachers want to teach in the schools. Teachers are like the canary in a coal mine; if they flock to the school, it's probably doing all right, regardless of the test scores; if they don't, well, perhaps the performance data means more.

So even though charter schools overall perform worse than Ohio's local public schools, perhaps teachers want to teach in them because of the innovative environments they create, regardless of performance data. And if the schools can attract those kinds of teachers, perhaps the performance data will turn around for these schools.

After all, charter schools were started by teachers who wanted to do their thing without as much bureaucratic intervention.

What's fascinating is that in about 15% of Ohio's charter schools, the average teacher experience is 0 years. What's that mean? It means the typical teacher in these schools have never taught before. That's just stunning, frankly. How stunning?

Two of the 3,127 traditional public school buildings that reported teacher data have an average teacher experience of 0 years. There are 59 charters out of the 289 charters that have average teacher experience data listed at the Ohio Department of Education whose average teacher experience is 0. That number could be higher because about 100 dropout recovery charters aren't included in the state's building-level teacher data. So out of Ohio's 3,415 schools that reported teacher data to the state and have average teacher experience of 0 years, all but 2 are charters.

So what that tells us is in many cases, charters are populating their teacher ranks with freshly minted teachers who couldn't find jobs in their local public school districts. In other words, Ohio charters are the stepping stone to a public school job, not the destination.

This is not the case everywhere, though. There are 19 charters with average teacher experience levels that are 10 years or greater, which is about 5% of all charters. About 84% of local school buildings have that level of experience.

In fact, 0 is the most frequently reported average level of teacher experience in an Ohio charter (the mode, for you statistical nerds). For local public school buildings? Try 12. The average level of experience in an Ohio charter is about 6 years. In local public schools, it's about 13.

Much of this, you may say, is driven by pay. The median Ohio charter pays its teachers, on average, $33,905. In a local district building, that's $55,815. However, take the level of experience into account (at this point experience remains the biggest cost driver on teacher salaries) and the numbers don't seem so disparate. The average starting salary in Ohio (remember that Ohio charters are filled with starting teachers) is $33,096. So considering that most teachers in Ohio charters are on the lower end of the experience spectrum, that salary isn't far off. In other words, beginning teachers may actually make about $900 a year more in a charter than the average Ohio district.

And while charter proponents may jump on the fact that charters spend about $1,400 less than local public schools, as I've pointed out in this space, because charters don't pay for busing and are exempt from many regulations, they could spend the same per pupil amount in the classroom as districts, if they would spend what districts do on administration. Instead, charters spend about $1,000 more per student on administrative, non-instructional costs.

I should say that more experience doesn't necessarily mean better teaching. According to Linda Darling-Hammond's work, the evidence indicates that while experience tends to trump inexperience, after about 5 years, the experience factor is far less determinant of teacher quality.

In other words, a 15-year teacher is probably more effective than a first-year teacher. But the performance difference between a 15-year teacher and a 5-year teacher is far less noticeable, if it's there at all.

We see this play out in Ohio's experience. Some of the highest performing charter schools in the state, like Columbus Prep and the Intergenerational School in Cleveland, have an average teacher experience level of 5 years.

However, more unsettling is that 199 of the 289 charters reporting teacher data to the state -- about 70% -- have experience levels less than 5, which means in about 70% of Ohio charter schools, the research tells us that teacher inexperience is likely having an impact on teaching quality. And that could be helping to drive down charter performance.

Ultimately, though, these state teacher data tell us where the destination schools are for teachers -- where they want to be. And in the many cases, it appears that here in Ohio charters are NOT the places they seek. Charters are, instead, their fall back.

Making charters more of a destination for the state's brightest and best teachers should help these teacher experience figures as teachers enter the charter and stay for many years, creating the innovative and awesome teaching environments these schools were originally intended to foster.

Until that happens, it appears that Ohio charters remain fall back options for Ohio's teachers, not the kind of place they want to spend a career. And that's a problem.

Study: Teaching has one of Worst ROIs of Any College Degree

For some, teachers are paid too much. The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Studies has made its name by publishing teacher salaries for years. Heck, even I have used their salary database from time to time. During the Senate Bill 5 fight in 2011, much of the argument from that bill's proponents consisted of proving that public workers are living high on the hog.

However, there were more than a few of us who looked at Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Ohio and found that the vast majority of its teachers weren't exactly living on Easy Street.

Now comes a study from Salary.com -- an imprint of IBM. What they found was that teaching has the sixth-worst return on investment of any college degree. Here's what they say:

Ah teaching. One of the noblest professions. And while it stands to reason we'd pay great sums to the chosen few who shape the minds of future generations, it doesn't quite work out that way.

What the study found was that the average elementary and high school teacher in this country will only receive about an 85% return on their college investment, if they attend a public university. If they attended a private college, that return will be as little as 24%.

There are many in the education policy and reform community on all sides of the debate who believe that teachers need significant pay increases. How those different people want to achieve that salary hike diverges, though. There are those who say we should pay only the best teachers like rock stars. However, without any additional revenue, that will mean driving down the pay for the vast majority of teachers.

Teacher pay is an intensely debated issue that needs addressed. I agree with Secretary Arne Duncan that we need to pay teachers like we pay doctors and lawyers. Teachers in other countries receive huge sums of money and entrance into the profession is highly coveted and competitive. Not surprisingly, student performance is among the highest in these countries.

However, moving toward higher teacher salaries requires more investment in education by state, local and federal governments. And right now, I am not seeing a huge push to infuse school coffers to the point that young men and women who choose our country's most important profession will receive a better return on investment than 25-85%.

Until we make teaching a highly regarded and compensated profession, we may continue to struggle to attract the best and brightest of our youth into the profession. So much of what we need to do in the classroom hinges on the quality of the classroom leader. As a parent, I want that leader to be someone who had to fight to be a teacher just as hard as someone who fought to be a doctor.

Startling Charter and Traditional Teacher Data

Now that the Ohio Department of Education has released its full report card, it is possible to examine in-depth data about various aspects of Ohio's educational landscape. Given that this week is Charter Week in the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee, I decided to look at teachers in both Charter and Traditional Public Schools.

As with prior years, the average teacher salaries in Charter Schools are about 40% lower than traditional public schools. The Charter School average is $33,993 and the average in a Traditional Public School is $57,303.

But where I found the comparison fascinating is in the other data points.

The typical Traditional Public School building has teachers with an average of 14.8 years of experience. In a Charter School building, that average is 6.3. However, the most telling statistic here, I think, is the mode.

The mode tells you which number appears the most often in a set of data. The mode on Traditional Public School buildings' teacher experience is 14 years, which means more Traditional Public School Buildings have teachers with an average of 14 years of experience than any other number of years.

Charter Schools? Their mode is 0. That's right. More Charter School Buildings have an average level of teacher experience of 0 than any other.

That is amazing to me.

Two equally stunning statistics.

1) The average Traditional Public School building has about 2/3 of its teachers with a masters degree. The average Charter School building has about 1/3 of its teachers with a masters degree. Granted, there is some debate about the impact of masters degrees. But I don't think they hurt student performance.

2) About 1 out of 3 Charter Schools in Ohio have at least some core courses taught by someone with a temporary teaching certificate. Of the more than 3,200 Traditional Public School buildings in the report card data, not a single one has core courses taught by teachers with temporary certificates.

Given this rather remarkable data regarding teachers -- the single largest cost in any school, I'm even more curious why Ohio's brick-and-mortar Charter Schools cost $54 more per pupil than Traditional Public Schools.

Cautious Optimism in Cleveland

Progress was made yesterday on the Cleveland Plan, as Mayor Frank Jackson agreed to the Cleveland Teachers Union's proposal to base layoffs first on teacher evaluations, then on tenure and seniority.

While a big step, major hurdles remain on the following issues, according to the Plain Dealer account:

The two sides remain far apart, however, on Jackson's push to wipe out all previous contracts and start fresh with new contract negotiations. The union also disagrees with Jackson's proposal to give district Chief Executive Officer Eric Gordon broad powers to lay off or fire teachers to remake any failing school.

Union President David Quolke likened those items to Senate Bill 5, the controversial state law that limited collective bargaining but was repealed sharply by voters in November. Quolke objected to Jackson seeking to have the disputed provisions introduced in the legislature this week, instead of trying to resolve them with the union first.

"The legislation should not be introduced with these two Senate Bill 5 pieces," he said. "We do not believe if we're having productive dialogue that we should jump to legislation." 

Again, as I've said before, why the Mayor and other Cleveland Plan supporters put anything remotely resembling SB 5 into their plan a few months after SB 5 was defeated by more than 20 points at the polls, I will never understand. It seems politically tone deaf to me.

Regardless, it was a good sign that the Mayor was willing to listen to the teachers about their significant movement on the layoff provision. While tenure and seniority will still play a roll, the teachers' compromise effectively eliminates tenure and seniority. That's because those two provisions will only come into play if teachers' evaluations are the same. Evalutions will determine all but a few layoffs, for the likelihood of two teachers' evaluations being exactly the same seems remote to me.

It is impossible to overstate how significant a concession this is for Cleveland's teachers.

The Plain Dealer story did not mention other concerns with the plan, like giving local revenue to Charter Schools, but if yesterday's agreement is any indication, it looks like Mayor Jackson and the Cleveland teachers are working together toward a better day for Cleveland's kids.

And that is a good thing.