Teachers and parents urged senators to follow the House’s lead in using the budget bill to repeal the retention mandate from Ohio’s third grade reading law, among many other requests the Senate Finance Committee heard during a lengthy meeting Wednesday.
Jennifer Bindus, an elementary teacher from Aurora who’s spent most of her career with third graders, said rather than focusing on a single test administration to determine students’ reading ability, schools should be allowed to use multiple measures over time. She also noted that the House-added provision to HB33 (Edwards) not only repealed the retention mandate, but also extended from third to fifth grade the requirement to provide intervention services and improvement plans for students who are behind.
Katie Baker, parent of an elementary student who she said suffered significant stress from the reading guarantee testing, said the design of the guarantee law takes the wrong approach.
“Our system of retention will never allow a student to catch up. By withholding access to grade level standards, and only teaching below grade level, it is no surprise that by the end of the year, they will remain below grade level. To put it bluntly, kids in Ohio are held back with the goal of catching up,” Baker said. “If we stop and think about that idea for a moment, we might realize the shortcomings of that plan. Our system holds back kids who were already behind, thus denying them access to fourth grade content, while their peers continue on to the next grade. Ultimately, while well intended, we created a structure in Ohio’s schools that perpetuate the achievement gap. There has been significant conversation and research regarding the effectiveness of a remediation approach such as this, versus an approach aimed at accelerating the learning growth of students. Remediation and learning acceleration are not the same, as the approaches used in each model are vastly different. Many states across the country have published research and guidance on learning acceleration, yet unfortunately Ohio hasn’t made this shift.”
Northeast Ohio parent Jim Galon described the weeping he heard from his son, Hawk, as his wife called recently to tell him their son was 10 points short of the promotion score. “His realizing it’s a real possibility to fail third grade broke him in a way that I have never seen,” he said.
Galon said retention doesn’t make sense because his son had previously reached the needed score on other administrations of the assessment and had good grades. “I struggled with school too … I imagine if this reading guarantee was in place when I was in school, I would not have passed, and my life would undoubtedly be very different,” he said.
Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), vice chair of the committee, asked what advice the school had provided after they received the test score. Galon said the family quickly met with the teacher and principal to come up with an improvement plan, which includes about 40 minutes of reading or other literacy activities at home per day.
“How was your son’s confidence, his emotions? Is he able to bounce back?” asked Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson (D-Toledo). Galon said he believes he can bounce back, but said he was “really sad” when thinking of how the friends he played soccer with would move on without him. His son has two more chances to pass the test, he said.
Cirino asked Jennifer Glenn, president-elect of the Ohio School Psychologists Association and another proponent of repealing the retention mandate, how Ohio ended up with its current reading instruction problems, noting the dozens of teacher training programs at Ohio colleges and universities.
“We’re churning out all of these majors in elementary education, let’s say, and we also have school systems that should be monitoring what’s going on, what methods they’re using and how effective they are. How did we get to this point where we have such reading deficits?” Cirino said.
Glenn said some schools started taking up alternative approaches beyond phonics and phonemic awareness because they came with additional resources as part of research studies. She said she didn’t think the intention was necessarily to let go of phonics and phonemic awareness in the process, but schools might have looked for shortcuts to cover all the needed content as more demands came down up on them.
Glenn told Cirino she does not believe the state is “at the point of no return,” noting literacy proposals in the budget and the recently enacted dyslexia support laws as ways to address the problem.
Sen. Mark Romanchuk (R-Ontario) asked Julie Lather, an Olentangy Local Schools principal and representative of the Ohio Association of Elementary School Administrators (OAESA), what will prevent schools from “just promoting kids along and then we find out in later grades they can’t read.”
Lather said only a handful of students were retained in her time in her current building. “Retention is rare because of a single factor. One reading test on one day should not decide a child’s future … There is no magic in going from third grade to fourth grade. It’s a boundary that is as ambiguous as ‘We decided that from K to one they need to tie shoes.’”
Sen. Andrew Brenner (R-Delaware), chair of the Senate Education Committee, asked what else the state can do to address, for example, the gap in major urban schools between the large number of students who were promoted to fourth grade during suspension of the guarantee in the pandemic, and the much smaller number who were able to pass the test. “That is setting up failure in the upcoming grades,” he said.
“I would pose the question back to you – is it right to punish the child because the district fell short?” Lather replied.
Ohio Excels, a business coalition focused on education and workforce issues, continued to push for lawmakers’ to keep the retention mandate. Lisa Gray, president of the group, said research shows the educational benefit of the retention law. Ohio Excels plans to release a report on that research at the Statehouse Thursday.
“We believe that retention is intervention,” said Gray.
Romanchuk noted advocates of repeal also claim research supports their position, asking who senators should believe. Gray said her group’s forthcoming report, conducted by the Ohio Education Research Center, will be the first of its kind “on Ohio students that have been retained.” She said it shows a “substantial” improvement in performance for retained students who scored just below the promotion score versus promoted students who scored just above it.
Leaders from Whitehall City Schools and local United Way groups asked for support for a $1.8 million amendment to fund the United Way Collaborative, which would give six local United Ways serving 10 counties the capacity to expand early literacy and family stability strategies.
Doug Shoemaker, who works on community partnerships at Whitehall, said the United Way’s Success by 3rd Grade program is “vital” to students’ success in the district.
“Whitehall City Schools does a good job of providing more than one year’s worth of instruction in each academic year, but we recognize this is not sufficient to meet the needs of all our students. In their pre-K years, our students do not gain the foundational knowledge and experiences required to come to kindergarten as ready to learn as many of their peers attending other districts in Central Ohio and around Ohio,” he said.
“It’s kind of hard to think that a 6-year-old could be educationally behind when they haven’t even started, but pre-K counts for a lot,” he said. “Our kindergarteners come to us not as ready to learn as in other districts.”
Sen. Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls), chair of the committee, said the testimony was disconcerting.
“What we’re hearing is that what’s happening in public schools is not enough, so we have to bring outsiders in. The question is, where does it end? We get hit a lot for ‘Not funding our schools,’ but there’s dollars you want to take away from the schools to give to outsiders to help with what the schools are doing?” Dolan asked.
“The barriers we’re talking about include food, clothing, homelessness, and a lot of mobility. We have a lot of students that are with us one year, Columbus schools the next, Groveport the next, back to us, back to Hamilton Local or wherever. Those are the sorts of barriers we’re talking about.”
“As the partnership director, my job is to try to bring in partners to try to help the students in whatever way we can get help,” he said.
Dolan said Shoemaker had just described the intended use of the student wellness funding included in the prior two budgets and proposed for inclusion in HB33.
Multiple witnesses spoke in favor of a House amendment that created a new Ohio Facilities Construction Commission (OFCC) program for Appalachian school projects.
Nick Detwiller, superintendent of Eastern Meigs Local Schools, speaking also for the Coalition of Rural and Appalachian Schools, said his district faced the prospect of spending $2 million to fix a sinking floor before it could even begin an OFCC-funded project at one school. He said the special focus on big city school building projects enacted about 20 years shows that targeted help for high-need schools can work.
“A one mill levy in our district produces around $100,000. So when we go to our families for our local share of the project it is a big ask. Especially in an aging community where a large portion of our population are retirees on a fixed income. As a district we have worked hard to take care of our facilities over the years and we are proud of what we have, but we want our kids to have some of the same opportunities as other students across the state. This is the reality for not only our district, but for 38-plus other school districts within the Appalachian Ohio region who have deferred, lapsed, or not yet been offered funding through the OFCC. These are hard working families and communities, with a lot of pride, but the realities of the economics of the region make passing levies very difficult and very taxing on our people,” he said.
Numerous witnesses urged the committee to continue implementation of the new school funding formula, including the House’s use of updated cost inputs using FY22 data, versus the FY18 data included in Gov. Mike DeWine’s executive proposal.
Among requests from the Ohio Association for Career-Technical Education (Ohio ACTE), however, was a revision to the formula to implement a floor for the state share percentage that applies to supplemental career-technical education funding. More than 100 districts have seen a decrease in such supplemental funding as an unintended consequence of the formula, said Dee Smith, Ohio ACTE executive director. “I can provide you several examples, but the one that sticks with me the most is a district in Northeast Ohio that will go from receiving over $300,000 to right around $30,000 at full phase-in; and this district runs 13 CTE programs. We are talking about funds used to buy welders, metal, and gas for welding programs; construction materials, tools, and safety equipment for construction programs; and hard drives, software, and networking materials for IT/cyber programs,” Smith said.
Dozens of people spoke or submitted written remarks for the hearing, which lasted from 9 a.m. until nearly 4 p.m., although with a couple of recesses.
Story originally published in The Hannah Report on May 31, 2023. Copyright 2023 Hannah News Service, Inc.
OACTE Senate Finance Testimony Dee Smith.pdf
