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There’s an interesting blog post today from Cleve Ricksecker on the “Right Now Downtown” blog titled In Search of a City: Schools That Rock. There, a short summary of the Columbus City Schools (CCS) system is given along with a quick analysis of what the latest round of proficiency scores could mean for the future of young families considering a move into the CCS district.
Some additional commentary on the topic can be found at The Columbus Homes Blog here: Columbus City Schools….Getting Better All The Time?
Does anyone have any stories to share about any specific schools within CCS?
I’m interested in this topic, so I was hoping for some more substance on the downtowncolumbus.com link. Basically it says Columbus Public Schools have some great options without telling you about any of the options. Does anyone have a link to the rankings by individual school?
I don’t have any stories to tell but it’s good to finally hear something good about CCS. I think it gets a bad rap from people who have never even stepped foot in one of them. I will look for a link. I have MANY friends who work in the the district including my mother.
johnwirtz Says: Does anyone have a link to the rankings by individual school?
This is the latest 2008-2009 School report cards:
http://ilrc.ode.state.oh.us/schools/School_District_List.asp?CountyName=Franklin%20County
You have to pull up each school individually to see their report cards, but with a quick glance it looks like Indianola (K-8) may be the top elementary/middle school and Centennial and CAHS are top high schools. Quite a few others that are ranked Excellent, Effective, or Continuous Improvement though.
This article in the Dispatch was pretty informative. Down the right column (under Local Results), there’s a link to an interactive tool to see how the districts ranked on various metrics, and a link to a table of all the results. There’s also a link to “all school info” or something like that (it was the 3rd one) that you can use to look up individual schools: LINK
As yes, time for my usual spiel about me going to Columbus schools from K-12, graduating, going to OSU, getting a degree, and now having a good paying job.
However, here’s the rub: Although you can get a good education from a majority of the Columbus schools, most parents will have nothing less than the best (or at least what’s perceived as the best) for little Johnny. More than anything, the Columbus schools has an image problem because of exceptionally poor public relations. Certainly Dr. Harris is pretty good at dealing with the media, but she’s just too busy to talk to them most of the time. The remaining spokespeople never seem to step up and say anything meaningful so the local TV news or whoever takes a story and runs with it however they like (i.e. whatever plays to peoples pre-conceived notions).
Almost nobody I’ve talked to knows about the excellent ratings of Centennial, CAHS, and Fort Hayes. Fewer still know that schools such as Whetstone, Eastmoor, and Independence are actually rated at effective. Everything gets lumped into the one big rating and people assume homogeneity across an incredibly large (biggest in Ohio) and diverse district. I really need to get around to writing a good summary of CCS today with lots of citations and submit it to CU.
Thanks.
BTW, Fort Hayes appears to be effective, but not excellent:
http://www.ode.state.oh.us/reportcardfiles/2008-2009/BUILD/068239.pdf
Both of my children attend alternative schools, and my wife and I have been very impressed. I myself am a product of CCS Alternative schools (Oakland Park, Ft. Hayes grad). Personally, if my kids were not in alternative schools, they would not be in CCS. Too many other options. I think the alternative schools do a great job, but my problem lies in the fact that the programs/teachers that help make kids in alternative schools successful have not been duplicated in the “regular” schools. It is a seperate and unequal operation. Now, I will admit that parents of alternative school children are very active an engaged in school activities. I still sit in on my son’s classes and he is in 7th grade. But it just seems like every kid in the district should have the same opportunities for success. I think Dr. Harris has done a great job in turning things around, and hopefully she will be able to expand on that!
johnwirtz Says: BTW, Fort Hayes appears to be effective, but not excellent.
I noticed that and was wondering if perhaps they might not quite have as high of scores on the standard proficiency testing as other schools because of their focused art program? A student might leave Fort Hayes ready to excel at CCAD although their 10th grade science proficiency might be slightly below the state requirement.
When I went there, our academic programs were as rigorous as our arts programs. I felt prepared for just about any focus area, but VERY prepared for arts. We had kids at the time that went to CCAD and excelled, but we also had folks that got full rides to Yale, on Academics. I hope that Ft. Hayes is still producing these types of students, and I would imagine if the arts were included in state testing, Ft. Hayes would rate higher than any other school in Columbus, CCS or otherwise.
Yeah, I’ve read good things about the non-arts curriculum at Ft. Hayes. I was just thinking that since these state tests are really just an average of student performance then perhaps the scores were lowered as those students with more of a core focus on arts may not test the same way with the standardized testing. Just one of the problems with standardized testing.
Also standardized testing is not friendly to minorities. There’s lots of white culture unknowingly placed within the test which makes things more difficult if you didn’t grow up in the “normal” environment.
^Such as?
1. What color is a banana?
A. Yellow
B. Brown
C. Red
D. Purple
I once had a professor tell me that this is an example of how standardized tests are biased based on socioeconomic status. The “theory’ on this is that folks from a poor neighborhood have less access to fresh fruits and therefore “may” pick B. (Brown) as the answer to this question-not understanding that the correct answer to the test requires the student to pick the “best” answer which would be A.(Yellow).
My response to him was that I could not believe that average people did not know that banana’s were yellow, but his task for me was to go to a corner store in inner city Toledo and report back to him what color the bananas were, “If you can find any.” I did go about searching for some, and after a few failures, I found a store that indeed was selling bananas. Now, the bananas were not all the way brown, but they were “very’ ripe (browning). This was not a grocery, so I called myself lucky (after my initial failures) to have found them. Giant Eagle or Krogers would not be selling these, but the corner store was. I could imagine a kid whose parent bought these bananas taking a test and saying that brown was the color of bananas.
I know that is oversimplified, but looking at food availability surrounding the schools that have consistently underperformed you can see this as a problem for this particular test question.
Even in Columbus, the number of corner markets vs. actual grocery stores is troubling.
I would also like to add that the bias in testing was not presented as a racial bias, but as a socieoeconomic one. Poor white kids, according to him, would pick brown too.
One reason why Clintonville is such a popular place to live is because of the Columbus City Schools that populate it. The elementary and middle schools especially are all solid schools, especially as compared to other parts of Columbus with that size of a geographic neighborhood.
This is also a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. As a nurse in the Columbus City Schools, my wife has seen some of the worst and some of the best and time after time she has said that the number one deciding factor surrounding the effectiveness of the school is the degree of involvement of the parents.
Not just in the school community, but also in the lives of their children. A community like Clintonville has more involved parents than a community like my neighborhood where the assigned elementary is Trevitt. Kids are attending Trevitt and doing well but many others are not and it really is more of a reflection on the child’s home life than the school itself.
Some of my wife’s favorites schools include 5th Avenue alternative and Spanish Immersion, both with highly diverse student populations and caring school communities.
I agree that the alternatives in Columbus City Schools are especially attractive for parents. For us, that means Indianola Alternative and Berwick Alternative, both of which recently added middle schools. For some districting reason, we can’t choose Berwick as an option and Indianola is not easy to get into via the lottery.
While I love that our kids are growing up in a racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood with easy access to downtown’s culture and attractions, they attend Columbus Montessori Education Center on James Road because the Montessori method is so intuitive to how children learn and the school has a fantastic community. I look forward to them most likely attending a Columbus City High School.
In elementary and especially High School, Columbus City Schools seem to have some very good options, less so it seems to me in middle school (which they are talking about doing away with all together).
Interesting JawJack. I was more curious about what aspects of “white culture” are perceived to be unfair on tests, but your example is though-provoking. Are yellow bananas a luxury good only available to the non-poor? Perhaps, but I didn’t realize it until now.
small update on some info I just received with some good links……
Columbus City School Students Gain More Than a Year’s Worth of Academic Growth on State Report Card
District Achieves “Continuous Improvement†for Third Consecutive Year
Columbus City Schools has met the Value Added Green measurement, as determined by the Ohio Department of Education. The rating is a critical measure of student success and takes into account a student’s academic starting point. Specifically, it demonstrates marked academic progress from year to year.
Traditionally, achievement test scores alone have largely determined district performance levels. While achievement test scores demonstrate a student’s level of proficiency at one point in time, the Value-Added measure takes into account a student’s starting point and reflects how much progress was made since the prior year.
Columbus City Schools also has a graduation rate of 73.9%, which is the highest in its state report card history.
Click here to read more!
Click here to download the ODE’s Report Card for CCS.
Click here to read more about the ODE’s Value Added Measurement tool.
Click here to compare and contrast the Ohio Core Requirements & the current CCS College Prep Requirements.
What kind of standardized test would ask kids what color a banana is?
^Haha, I was thinking that too (after I replied to JawJack). No wonder graduation rates are up.
Columbus school-closing list gets shorter
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 3:07 AM
BY BILL BUSH
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Ten schools effectively were crossed off the Columbus district’s potential closing list yesterday. They will be renovated or rebuilt as a result of a bond issue that voters approved last fall.
READ MORE