June 2, 2026 · Education Committee · 9,829 words · 8 speakers · 86 segments
If you would please take your seats so that we can get started. We have a very robust agenda today. Thank you very much for joining us for this meeting of the House Education Committee. I'd like to begin with an invocation, and the chair recognizes Representative Ritter
to offer the opening prayer. Let's bow our heads. Heavenly Father, we ask you for ears that hear, eyes that see, and a heart that's compassionate for the people we represent. Father, we ask for your guidance as we consider legislation and as we learn about other things today. In your son's name we pray, amen.
Thank you, Representative. The chair recognizes Representative Robinson to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you, Representative. Would the clerk please call the roll?
Chair Falla-Arthur? Here. Vice-Chair Odioso? Checked in. Ranking Member Brennan? Here. Representative Byrd? Yes. Representative Click? Here. Representative Dean? Representative Manning? Here. Representative Miller is excused. Representative Newman checked in. Representative Pickle-Antonio? Here. Representative Ritter? Here. Representative Robinson? Present. Representative Thomas? Here.
We have a quorum present, and we will proceed as a full committee. If members would please review the minutes from the May 27th committee meeting. Are there any objections to the minutes? Hearing none, the minutes are approved. And as a reminder to our guests and our members, we do have forms available if you wish to take photos or videos. We ask that those would be filled out and signed by the chair in advance in accordance with House and committee rules. I believe that they are on the table up there in front of the television stand. Next, today we have several presentations from the Department of Education. and per our committee notice, I just want to reiterate a little bit of how we're expecting today to go. So we're going to have the due presentations on the standards and the rule and then when those have concluded, we will move on to our legislative business. We are going to be recessing no later than 12 p.m. and then we'll come back if there's still business before the committee, I believe, probably no earlier than 3.30, but we'll say at the call of the chair, and we'll reiterate that again toward the end of the committee today. With that, I'd like to invite Dr. Melissa Weber-Mayor, Chief Academic Officer at the Department of Education and Workforce, to present to us the updates to the English Language, Arts, and Social Studies Standards. Welcome.
Thank you. And good morning, Chair Fowler-Arthur, Vice Chair Odeoso, and the ranking members Brennan, members of the House Education Committee. I'm Dr. Melissa Weber-Mayer. I serve as Chief Academic Officer for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. I appreciate the opportunity to present to you today Ohio's updated learning standards for English language arts, long-awaited, and social studies. So I going to start with social studies and this is just a cover page of the old standards just to remind you that the last time that these were adopted were in February of 2018 So timely and somewhat overdue revisions to these standards. The next slide then shows how we were working to strengthen the K-8 learning standards for social studies. So a couple of bulleted points here that you'll see are we were making more connections to Ohio to expand students' knowledge of Ohio history. So currently, Ohio history was focused on grade four. We have included them starting in kindergarten and beyond grade four so that our students in our schools are learning Ohio history from kindergarten all the way through grade eight. We wanted to elevate civic skills and more opportunities to learn about the founding documents. The other piece was to make connections to the science of reading through stronger alignment of social studies and literacy skills. That's when we think about vocabulary for social studies and comprehension. And then we also were working to streamline the standards. One thing we heard from our educators was that there were many social studies standards that they were having a hard time actually covering within one school year. The next slide shows you our social studies standards process. We started this work in summer of 2025 where we reviewed the current standards. In the fall, the K-8 standards writing took place, and with that, it was Department of Education and Workforce experts. They were Ohio's teachers of social studies, and we did include some language arts teachers in those revisions just to weigh in on what it means to connect with language arts, build vocabulary, ensure students have comprehension skills. In the winter, we had educator focus groups, and we had survey feedback, so we put the drafts out for public comment. And in spring, we made the updates to the Strength in K-8 standards, and we are here before you to present those to you. The next slide shows the feedback from our educational community, the positive feedback, and their feedback for improvement. So first, they complemented the clear and concise content knowledge and skill development. They saw that as a difference from prior standards. They really liked the Ohio history connections starting in kindergarten and moving forward. The civics engagement opportunities were also a plus, and the vertical articulation of skills. So as we had them review, we had them review kindergarten, first grade, first grade, second grade, so they could see how skills progress. Their suggestions for improvement included clarity of skill in some of the content standards statements, content connect to students to Ohio history outside of their classrooms, and better integration with literacy. So we took their feedback, and we revised the draft, which is what you have before you. I believe you were sent the draft that it may be color-coded, and that was intentional, so you could see anything that was not any color is the same and stayed the same. Anything that is yellow, the content was unchanged, but we did some clarification of language to make it more clear. If it had a highlight of, I think it's still red, it's still red. It was content under, the content remained unchanged again, but significant language, so much more clarity of language there. And if it was green, it was a new standard that was added to that grade level that was not there before. So this slide gives you an example of one of the, not necessarily one of the pages. We tried to take an example from grade one grade three and grade eight so that you would see the changes between a kind of yellow color a red color and a green color So in first grade you see that we have an example that talks about the responsibility of individuals to take action in their civic duty, and we clarified that to say positive citizenship qualities include individuals making responsible choices, being accountable for choices and actions, and respecting the rights of others. So much more clarity to that language. In the middle, you'll see new language. So in grade three, it just talked about local communities change over time, very general. And we added Ohio history specific there. Ohio's local communities have challenges and opportunities that are shaped by their history and current actions to build a better future. And then the last has a kind of a combination of clarifying language in the yellow and some significant language change added to the bottom to call out specifically the Northwest Ordinance in the standards for grade eight. So that is an overview of the social studies standards and how we have strengthened those moving forward for K-8. Next, I'm going to give you a quick overview of the English language arts standards. And so here you see the slide that is a reminder that the last time these were adopted was in February of 2017, We've had a lot of work on the science of reading since 2017, and I know our department, our team at the department has been chomping at the bit to revise and strengthen these standards to more align to the research on reading and the teaching of reading. So here we looked at the significant changes in literacy instruction through all of the ReadOhio initiatives and the legislation since 2017. We aligned the standards with expectations for high-quality instructional materials, again, to honor that legislative change that happened two and a half years ago. We added reading foundations in grades six through eight. So these are the word recognition skills that initially existed in K3 and did not exist beyond. And we did that for a couple of reasons. One, we're trying to kind of squash this whole notion of learning to read than reading to learn because you're constantly learning to read and you're constantly reading to learn. The second was we now have students in fifth grade, sixth grade, and this upcoming year, seventh grade, that will be required to have reading improvement and monitoring plans. And we want educators teaching those children to understand what that means if they do not have strong word recognition skills. So word recognition skills are phonics, phonemic awareness. They're kind of those foundational basic skills that you need to have in order to read a word, decode a word. So we are now the fourth state across the nation, we will be when we publish these, to actually have those foundational standards through grade eight. And then we added writing foundations in K-8 and included the basics of handwriting and spelling. These existed as separate appendices in the past, and now they are included within the English language arts standards. So the next slide is the process. Again, summer 2025, we reviewed the current standards in the fall of 2025. we started the revisions with educator focus groups and survey feedback. In winter, that was for K-2, so in ELA we did them in blocks. In winter we did three through eight revisions in educator focus groups and surveys. And then in spring, the final revisions, which are what you have before you today. The feedback, the positives were that educators really liked the clarity in handwriting standards. They felt like they were searching for those before because they were in separate documents. vertical articulation of skills and content across grade levels, so to be able to see those foundational skills of phonics all the way from kindergarten through grade eight and alignment to the science of reading Their suggestion to us for improvements were alignment of reading foundations and writing foundations across K so they wanted more about writing and to increase in rigor to match the expectations, again, of high-quality instruction materials. So good news is our educators out there are paying attention to their high-quality instructional materials that they purchased to teach core instruction, and they'd like to see the standards align more closely to those. All those materials are actually aligned to the standards. It needs to be in the reverse as well. The next slide shows you an example again, the color-coded of the differences, same color-coding key, yellow, content and change, clarification of language, red, content and change, significant language change, green, new language. So here you'll see in grade seven, there did not exist a standard around morphological awareness or those foundations, which would be called an advanced phonics skill, we've now addressed that and added the language in here to be very specific. Okay. And now I will move to the integrated model curriculum. So this is, I want to thank the committee also for supporting this work in the last budget and an opportunity to ensure that all Ohio students learn about Ohio history and how to be good citizens. And so we were required at the department to develop a statewide model curriculum that integrated social studies and English language arts with a focus on Ohio history and civics. So what you were sent were looking at the invest in students by strengthening their learning and meaningful connections to the state and local community to complement the high quality and structural materials. So these are not meant to replace the literacy materials that districts are required to use. These are meant to enhance, or they can kind of substitute the integrated model curriculum pieces to build up Ohio history content if their core curriculum does not include that. The use of high-quality evidence-based instructional practices and technologies to promote positive outcomes for all learning and increase access to social studies, content knowledge, starting in kindergarten. And what we were hearing from teachers is they were spending a lot of time in enhancing and growing out their literacy block at the kind of detriment of, well, we had to give up something so we're not teaching social studies every day. And so this helps. The integrated model curriculum process, again, we were very busy, as you can see, in the summer and the fall, the fall and the winter. So we were doing this at the same time that we were strengthening the standards. In spring, we had public comment. we have had teachers testing these out and piloting these since the fall and providing us with feedback. So what you have before you is our final draft and feedback from all of the educators that have been piloting these materials in kindergarten through grade 8. What you see on the screen now is we are calling the integrated model curriculum our source sets. So a source set is a selection of materials and authentic materials from Ohio history. These are all Ohio specific. So we have 11 source sets that we have put together. They are aligned to the content standards, and they can be used in daily instruction. We've also provided support for teachers on if you are using, like, a core knowledge language arts curriculum as your core instruction, here's how you can embed these within that at these grade levels. So we have provided explicit examples for educators. And I think that is that presentation. Very good.
Well, thank you very much for the presentation. on the standards today. I know we sent those out to committee members, and hopefully you had a chance to review them over the weekend, crash course. K-12. Do we have any questions from members? I have ranking member Brennan.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for bringing this presentation. Thanks for your presentation. I appreciate the process. I used to be involved in the process of helping develop these standards for American government. I always appreciate how you include all the stakeholders and experts, not the politicians. Our standards should not be politicized by Democrats or Republicans, for anybody else for that matter. I did look at these over with my daughter, who happens, Colleen, who is a seventh grade ELA teacher in the South Yucadlinhurst schools. And her assessment is overall, I like how they fix the wording because I feel it's easier to read. they did add more which is a question that I have in fact looking over the social studies standards it looks like we're adding more as well and that's always a concern of mine but they are what I feel kids are missing seems like they added to what the science of reading was talking about the reading foundation for 6 to 8 and reading foundation is new is stated mainly goes with speaking and writing maybe kids will learn cursive again which is another concern of mine, that we're going to lose a generation of scholars that can't read primary source documents because they can't read cursive. But my question, first question, with all that being said, is talk to me about the amount of content that compared to what we had under the 2017 standards and now.
Thank you for the question, Chair Feller-Arthur. Vice Chair Odioso I want to make sure I get that right each time and Representative Brennan thank you for asking your daughter who is a current teacher to weigh in on the standards what we did was we deleted any standard that was duplicative so we did delete some so she may not recognize that we deleted some because they were repetitive ones that were there we did add but the additions were to make sure we had Ohio history and civics embedded in there. We tried not to add, and we had the teachers weigh in, anything that would have been like super extra. But again, happy to take teacher feedback, more teacher feedback moving forward, because we do realize, especially in those K-8, that there are still many, many standards within social studies that teachers are trying to cover. Our intention is to support educators starting in kindergarten so that the students are coming with better background knowledge as they get to those older grades. So the plan would be that then teachers aren't spending as much time on some of those because kids are already bringing that background knowledge with them.
Follow-up, or I can wait for my follow-up, Madam Chair.
Brief follow-up. Thank you.
So you brought up what we used to call reading in the content area, which I was always a huge believer. And if I was teaching about World War I, we were reading All Quiet on the Western Front, Civil War, Red Badge. slavery, the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, but time, again, is always of the essence. So if we want to do more reading in the content area, are we, again, given the amount of standards, are we giving teachers the time to be able to integrate that more reading into the social studies?
So Chair Fowler-Arthur and Vice Chair Odioso, So Representative Brennan also a good question Of our ELA materials that we have on our approved list we have I have to get the exact number for you because I can remember but many of them we have reviewed and we have marked as content rich Content rich means they have a plethora of social studies and science content within them so that students are accessing that content during the English language arts block or the reading block that is happening in most schools around 60 to 120 minutes a day. The other piece that we tried to do was make sure these source sets complemented those so that it was easy for teachers to then have a 30-minute social studies block in the afternoon or somewhere else throughout the day or maybe even after to embed that. We've also embedded the technical standards that are for science and social studies. There are English language arts technical standards that used to live in the English language arts standards document and not in the content area document. We've moved those over there. that may also appear to look like it's longer and we added more, but they were there before, but what we were finding was that our content teachers weren't accessing them because they said, well, that's the English language arts teacher's content standards, not the social studies standards. So within there, we have embedded more reading and writing and speaking and listening during a social studies period, regardless of how long that time is. Thank you.
Thank you. Do we have other questions? We have Representative Robinson.
Thank you. Madam Chair, thank you for coming in today. I appreciated your presentation more so than testimony, but I appreciated it. I have a question, maybe a potential follow-up. My question was, you talked about a little bit during your presentation, but just to elaborate, what was some of the feedback from, whether it's administrators or teachers, about the directions going in? Does it seem to resonate? I saw you had the positives and the improvements, but what was your response, and especially about the timeline implementation?
Chair Fowler-Arthur and Vice Chair Odioso, Representative Robinson. Thank you for the question. We have many wraparound resources for the standards as we roll them out in the upcoming year. Especially ELA, the feedback that we received from teachers was that they were not surprised to see the changes that were there. They welcomed the changes. They welcomed the more explicit direction. Because they've had their training in the science of reading and they are using high-quality instruction materials, they see that direct connection. So we're seeing that it could be a possibility that the English language arts standards are easier to take up because they now better align with what teachers are implementing within classrooms. Social studies, we do realize we may need to do a little more there because we have been advocating ever since we started working on literacy work back when I came to the department in 2016. because we did notice that we, in some cases, classrooms tended to go way over into the phonics at the detriment of not teaching language, vocabulary, and comprehension skills or content areas. So we've been working on really being intentional on building background knowledge is key to being literate as you move through and you grow to be an adult, right? The more knowledge you have, the better you can understand text that you're reading, the better that you can decode words. So we have a plan to provide professional learning for teachers. We are working very closely with our regional structure. This year we have a much more tighter process for working with our educational service centers and our state support teams who are the boots on the ground with our, especially our lowest performing schools on how you, how you work with teachers and administrators. Thank you for bringing up administrators within the building to ensure successful implementation. Thank you.
Follow-up? Thank you. Madam Chair I commenting in a follow question That resonated with me when you talked about the balance between ELA and social studies I see it with my daughter in middle school where sometimes it feels like they trying to wrestle how far to go either way and it can impact a student's experience of learning in that process. So thank you for bringing that up. My other question was, was there any learning from other states who have also similarly done this transition, the direction the state of Ohio is going? And not necessarily to tell us what to do, but any learnings we learned from there, things we can implement?
Great question. Chair Feller-Arthur, Vice Chair Odioso, Representative Robinson. Yes, I am part of a state group of chief academic officers or those that are in charge of literacy, math, any content area improvements, and we meet pretty regularly and share with each other where we're going and where we're headed. That's how I became aware that especially with our ELA standards, we were the fourth state, and I can get you the other three states, the fourth state to actually have published, or not yet, but will have published standards for ELA that include those foundational skills through grade eight. And so, yes, we've gotten great feedback from teachers on clarity, great feedback from our other states. We have learned from our other states. Massachusetts, we actually used their same scope and sequence for when we really looked at strengthening that vocabulary and those contents from kindergarten through grade eight. they actually use the language essentials for the teachers of reading and spelling letters you may know that as, it's a professional learning and so we did model after what Massachusetts did and Louisiana also used that same scope and sequence as we revised the English language arts standards
Just to follow up on that if I may I think we had had some offline conversation about what Massachusetts was doing and how it's my understanding Massachusetts really embedded a lot more of the scope and sequence into their standards. Can you touch on maybe why we are not going that route in our standards and how you see this working with our high quality instructional materials list and the rubric for approving those curriculums?
Yes. Yep. Thank you Chair Fowler-Arthur and Vice Chair Odeoso. I got it now. We, so when we took, and I think we gave you an example in writing, when we take it and we look at it at one of those strands by as it progresses through each grade level, you see more of that detail within like moving from simple phonics instruction like consonant, vowel, consonant. I'm taking you guys way back into kindergarten and first grade, right, when you learned consonant, but can, when you learned cat, to more sophisticated language. You see that in the example that I gave you. The other piece that we are required to do is to develop a model curriculum around the English language arts where we will go even further with those. But all of the instructional materials on our list have scope and sequences, and we were very rigorous in reviewing that scope and sequence specifically for the foundational skills that show that progression from going from, I'm not going to say easier, but the basic phonic skills to more advanced phonic skills. So we also want to make sure that our educators are using the high-quality instructional materials with integrity and we don't want to distract them between what do I follow. So that's one of the reasons why we didn't go too explicit within the standards.
Thank you for that Just a follow on that one is you know it did seem like there was a lot of emphasis on the kindergarten grade level which I think you touched in your testimony Maybe that was needed Maybe it wasn available or structured as well in the past Is the intent that when a teacher is looking at first grade students who maybe did not attend a kindergarten program, that they would also be expected to meet those kindergarten standards in the first grade standards? or I know you have a lot of emphasis on making sure that they are providing the scaffolding, but is that the expectation that, okay, you are teaching both of these content standards, or is the expectation first grade and then potentially all these students coming in lacking that foundational knowledge?
Chair, Fowler, Arthur, Vice Chair Odio, so that is a very good question. and that is something that every district wrestles with as far as whether or not, a couple things. All of their kindergartners attend a preschool where they have some foundational knowledge or skills or in a home where there's foundational knowledge and skills that are built. So the same thing happens within kindergarten that will also happen within first grade if a student is not in kindergarten or spends, I think you had a question about half-day kindergarten. What we, the model curriculum is another piece in the professional learning that we are developing, as well as the professional, the refresher courses for the science of reading will address that kind of what if you have students coming into your grade level that you teach that have not mastered the standards or that you are seeing are way below grade level. What we want to avoid is teachers teaching too low. We want them teaching the grade level standards so students have access to grade level standards, but that teachers also recognize when a skill is deficient and what they need to do to bring that child up and to work with their intervention specialists and their multidisciplinary team to make a strong plan for that student's intervention and supports. Thank you. Representative Thomas?
Thank you for your presentation. I appreciate it very much. This past weekend, my second-grade teacher just retired after 50 years of service, so she was a great celebration, and she did a lot for our community. And while I was there, I had a chance to talk to my sixth-grade social studies teacher, and we reminisced, and I expressed my thanks to her for everything she did when I was a youngster and didn't have a full grasp of what I was studying. but it was wonderful to speak with her. I do remember eighth grade, Ohio history, and that was also great. I think a lot of those teachers had a positive influence on me, and that's one of the reasons I'm here today. But one question I have about this is what kind of civic engagement opportunities are being listed here on the positive side? I was just wondering what kind of, are there new opportunities? Can you just expand on that a little bit?
Yes, Chair Faller-Arthur, Vice Chair Odioso, and Representative Thomas. Also another great question. We are working with civics experts in Ohio, so the civic centers that are funded. We are also working with an outside vendor that has reviewed and created some professional learning for our teachers on how better to engage students with civics, as well as we will continue to grow and expand on that integrated model curriculum to include more civics related to the feedback and suggestions we're getting from those outside entities. They are finishing up that work now by the end of June. And so we will work this summer to embed those changes within the model curriculum.
Any further questions from the committee?
Madam Chair.
Yes, ranking member. Thank you.
Thanks again for all that. So my question is, what's the next step with the state tests? Like with the changes in the standards, obviously the tests are going to have to change to meet the new content. So how does that progress? And my other question, not related to that, but are there ways that we can also encourage collaboration between the social studies teachers and the ELA teachers? So that's all I got. Thank you.
Chair, fellow, Arthur. Vice Chair Odeoso and Representative Brennan. I may have to have you repeat that because I was listening, but I got distracted. I'm sorry.
Yeah, the first one was just state tests. State tests, yes.
Okay, thank you. We will follow the same process with revising and looking at questions on the state tests at each grade band moving forward once these are adopted and published. And then what we do is the assessment team and the content area folks, the experts, we will have the social studies folks. We'll probably also have the ELA folks take a look at those questions, too, to look at those moving forward to see how many or if any questions need changed. Most of the content isn't changed in the social studies standards, but it's the addition or the deletion of some that we're really going to have to look at and what questions there are, like, around Ohio history within that. But we'll follow that same process once we publish these, which is, we'll then also include teachers to help look at some of those.
Madam Chair, can I follow up to that? Just briefly. So, you know, one of the things that would frustrate me in the classroom is when we changed the curriculum and then brought on the new test, there really wasn't, it was kind of a guessing game as to what types of questions they might ask, what the focus might be. you know, if the standard was the students shall know about the three branches of government or checks and balances, well, there are 500 examples of checks and balances. Which ones do my kids need to know? Because God forbid I teach 100 of them, and you asked the one that I didn't happen to teach. So how can we provide clarity to the teachers so that they can properly prepare the students for
the tests they'll be taking? Chair Fowler, Arthur, and Representative Brennan, we are working on readiness assessments, which are basically sample questions that would be specific to and aligned to the standards that teachers will be able to access throughout the school year. And then we're happy to take feedback about those questions as well. But we've gotten really positive feedback about the readiness assessments so far across the other grade bands. So we are developing those for social studies as well.
And just for the committee's benefit, could you touch on again the timeline? I know you're looking to adopt the standards and the model curriculum that were presented today. Can you touch on the timeline for that and the timeline that you would expect the assessment to follow?
Chair Fowler-Arthur, the timeline for the standards are once we have, once we presented here, go back with the director. The director is the final approver, I believe, of these standards. We would post those as soon as possible to make sure that we have professional learning and communications out to districts before the start of next school year. Simultaneously once we post those we will start examining the assessment questions and we will work on those as fast as we can to have at a minimum those readiness assessment questions ready for next year for teachers to start using and provide us feedback as we work on the state assessments So when you
say next year, are we referring to the standards being used for the 26-27 school year and the assessment being like the spring of 27, or are we looking to the following school year?
I believe, and I may have to ask Dr. Wooler to step in here for the assessment calendar time,
line on things? Welcome, Dr. Willard. Hi, Chair Fellow, Arthur. I mean, I think that we will be really clear about that runway. It'll likely be if the standards are in 26, 27, any changes to the state test will likely be in kind of the spring of 28. But at the same time, I think that if you, if you, these are not significant structural changes to the standards. This is not a, this is not a complete revamp of the standards of the tests that will look similar. And so we'll be really clear about what to expect. So even there may be a transition year from that standard in that test. It'll be really clear on what's being covered and what's not, so that teachers have that runway of knowing what's going to be part of it. And as Melissa said, getting those readiness assessments that will start to work in some of that new content. And I will add, too, that what we're also trying to do is to more formally integrate social studies content into those questions. So not to try to measure it, but when you see a passage on an English language arts test, that passage should be, you'll see more of our actual social studies content from the standards in those passages as a way to make those connections between those teachers.
Thank you. And I do want to touch on social studies. I think we spent a lot of our conversation on the ELA. But just as a comment, maybe for a continued discussion, I did get some comments back about, you know, we have a number of bills that have been introduced around civics education and trying to ensure that we have a very civically engaged student body. And it seemed like maybe the emphasis is on grade four when we're talking about founding documents, and there's some in grade eight, but maybe not as in-depth. And so maybe just wondering what the conversation has been like leading up to this point for possibly strengthening the standards to be a little bit more focused on addressing the concerns that folks have with civics rather than having to have a whole new standard and process come into play.
Thank you, Chair Fowler-Arthur. We have been having many civics conversations with the outside experts that I mentioned that we were working with, and then also embedding them within those model curriculum source sets. We plan to continue to develop those out further, again, with the communication of how those fit within everyday teaching, not just one day a week or one day a month, but how they fit within the everyday curriculum. Thank you.
I do just want to state for the record that I think it might be a little bit concerning if we are just barely meeting the 20% threshold for the foundational documents and the Ohio history components combined, as opposed to putting a little greater emphasis on that, especially as we're taking time to go through this revision, that we should make sure that we are offering a really robust social studies standard
so that it can be properly assessed and just to make sure that it is leading to a good civics education as well Thank you I see no further questions Thank you so much for the presentation today And now we will turn it over to Dr Woolard
Chief Integration Officer at the Department of Education and Workforce, to share a presentation on the draft rules for the early literacy component of the report card.
Thank you. And you may begin when your presentation is ready, which I believe is now.
All right. Chair Fowler-Arthur, Vice Chair Odioso, So, ranking member Brennan and members of the House Education Committee, good morning. I think it's still morning. It's close. But thank you for the opportunity to share information on a proposed administrative rule update related to the early literacy component of the Ohio School report card. The rule we're talking about is only one small piece of the report card. So, compared to normally when I'm spending a lot of time, I'll try to keep it brief and focused on the early literacy piece. The proposed update to the rule relates to the rating scale for the early literacy components. You know, we have a five-star rating. There are lines that are drawn to determine where the one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star, and so forth is. And this rule change is related to that scale. Most of the details of this component are outlined in Ohio Revised Code. So, again, a little bit of background and context. You know, the early literacy component is aligned to our focus on literacy outcomes. So it's great to be able to follow Melissa as we're talking about that emphasis on the implementation of the science of reading. The early literacy component contains three measures or three pieces to our literacy. It looks at proficiency on the third grade reading tests. It looks at improving K3 literacy in the early grades. And then it includes promotion to the fourth grade. And it's in particular this point, which you can see highlighted in red, which was the change that came out of House Bill 96, the budget bill of last year. When this component was initially created, that piece was tied to promotion rate as related to the third grade reading guarantee. Obviously, there's been some policy changes in statute related to the third grade reading guarantee over the past couple years. And in the last budget, in response to those changes, this third piece was changed. So it previously had been, you know, what percentage of students had been promoted based on the third grade reading guarantee. Based on the House Bill 96 changes, it now is what percentage of students are meeting the promotion score, which is now the same as proficiency. I know it's a technical thing, but it's actually a significant change to that piece of the component. And so by making these changes, it does have some significant impacts on the measure itself. And essentially what happens is, by that change in state law, it sort of substantially changes the nature of the measure. And without updating the rule, we would have a scenario where the vast majority of districts and schools in the state would receive the lowest ratings, either a one or two on this component, simply due to the change of the law and the change of the structure to the measure, not having anything to do necessarily with any change in practice or implementation of literacy work. Just changing the expectation of that measure would drop everybody down to the lowest ratings. And why that is is that when, you know, this was a state board made, several years ago when the state board made these rules for this measure, and we were looking at that third piece, most schools and districts scored really well when it was the promotion rate. In fact, most schools and districts across the state were in the low to mid to high 90s in the percent. So when you add all those together everybody was scoring really really well on this That changed to looking at proficiency Schools and districts naturally don score that well So there sort of just a big drop in scores just because the nature of the components were changed. And what you can see is sort of like a distribution. We ran some simulations here, and what you're seeing in blue on this is the actual distribution of the star ratings for the component on last year's report card. You can see it's a fairly normal distribution, a lot of folks in the middle, a few on the high end, a few on the low end. Doing some simulations based on last year's data, sort of applying the new changes without updating the rule, again, the districts, again, the vast majority of districts would get a one or two star. It's even more noticeable when you look at the school level ratings where you can see that kind of a majority of schools, just by the nature of the change, would receive a one star. And so, again, it's a structural change the nature of the measure, it's now looking at how many students are hitting that promotion or that proficiency and not how many students were just promoted by the nature of the third grade reading guarantee. And because of this kind of structural change to the measure, we are proposing a calibration to the rating scale. And similar to how we've done things previously, I know last year I was here, talked to many of you about the new College of Career Military Workforce Readiness Measure. When we introduce a new measure, we want to make sure one that, especially as a starting point, that it has sort of fair expectations, that it has high expectations, but is also fair. We try to have, like, at least a starting point, a somewhat normal distribution. And so the proposed rules would calibrate that rating scale to result in components on both districts and schools that would be not exactly normal, but a much more normal distribution. It also slightly increases the expectations on the high end. We want to continue to emphasize that we have high expectations for Ohio students, but doing so in a way that we believe is much more fair. We don't want to end up in a situation where basically on this next report card, everybody tanks on this measure, not because of anything they've done, just because sort of the rules of the measure have changed. And so we have proposed an administrative rule, the calibration to this rating scale. This is going through the normal rulemaking process. It was available, of course, for public comment a couple times this spring. It was presented as part of the March DEW public meeting, was open for feedback, and is now sort of at the late stage of the rulemaking process, and later this summer will be filed with JCAR. So again, super brief, a bit technical, but again, trying to make sure that the expectations for this component with the changes in House Bill 96 do represent a fair measure on the report card, and happy to take any questions and comments.
Well, I think we're going to have a lot of questions, but can I just level set really quickly with a, so we are moving, if I understood you correctly on what it said. We're using to use the student's assessment score for the stars that the district is going to get as opposed to their score, their promotion, and I forget what the third option was previously.
Sure. Chair Fallon, yes, but let me just repeat myself just to confirm. I'm going to have him go back to the second slide. There are three pieces to this measure, right? So there's proficiency on the test. That's the first piece. It's 40%. There's no changes to that in law. That's been there.
There's the second piece, which is improving the improvement piece, which is the K to one, the one to two.
That is not changing. The piece that changed in law is the third piece. Previously, it had been the promotion rate, which was... percentage of students that were promoted to fourth grade by meeting the third grade reading guarantee. The change in law now says the percentage of students that are meeting the promotion score on the state test, which also in state law now is equal to proficient. So it's basically what's the percentage of students that are proficient on the state test.
Okay. So I'm going to repeat it back to you one more time just because, so all three of them are tied to the state assessment, but in different, the calculation is different for the report card, but each of those three components are still tied to the state assessment.
Chair Fowler, the first and the third are directly tied to the state assessment. The second one, the improving, is tied to the diagnostic assessments that aren't the state tests but are those diagnostics in kindergarten, first grade that are required for the third grade reading guarantee.
Thank you for that. Sorry if that was confusing anyone else. Representative Byrd is recognized for the question.
Thank you, Chair. I know you're talking about changes. Could you just give the committee a brief redo on how long is the report card? How many pages long is the report card?
Chair Father Arthur, Representative Burt. I don't know that I can necessarily answer it in that because we are an online system. So when you go to the report card, it is a page. There are several pages and subpages where you can click in and drill down and get into data. So it's not back in the day when we had PDFs and we could say it was like a 12-page document. I don't know that it's a fair description. There's a lot of data there. Now, when you do go to the report card right now, there is a front page overview, which has an overview of all the measures. It's that one thing. But there's a lot of data there.
Follow up?
Thank you. So my recollection back in the day is that it was pretty lengthy. In fact, I would say 40 to 50 pages in length. And so I guess my question to you is, is it so exhausting in detail and so lengthy? Is that because of the requirements of Every Student Succeed Act, or is that because of requirements that Ohio law has placed on you?
Chair Father Arthur, Representative Byrd, I would say it's all of the above and then some. Again, every student succeeds that. The federal law does have a series of requirements that includes things like disaggregation of data to shine a light on subgroups so there are certain details that have to be included. State law includes several measures and reported measures that aren't rated but are informational measures that are included. There's a long list of things in state law that are informational. And then there's always great interest in kind of additional information. That's been a lot of the feedback over the years is like when you see a score for a grade, the ability to like drill down and look at it at third grade or drill down and look at it at trends over time. So that's also sort of in response to stakeholder feedback on wanting more information. We find that different users have different interests in how much information, but there is a lot of things there due to kind of federal law, state law, and sort of general interest over the years.
Do I have other questions I thought I seen a few hands Yes Ranking Member Brennan
Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for the presentation. Could you tell us the nature of the public comments?
Yeah, Chair Father Arthur, Representative Brennan, we did receive public comments on this. I think it's fair to say any time that we have report card rules open for public comments, we do get a lot of comments. Many of them, and it's true this time, often fall into the category of comments that are related to federal law and state law that aren't necessarily directly tied. We got a lot of comments offering commentary on federal law and report cards, for example. I think that the comments that we did receive that were related to the specific rule change, which was the calibration based on the change, were positive and people were supportive of this change. Again, lots of commentary about report cards themselves. but as far as the rule, they were positive.
Follow-up?
Continue.
Were there any comments that provided constructive criticism or suggestions that you incorporated and any changes?
Chair, Father Arthur, Representative Brennan, I'd say that I don't know that we ended up making any changes to the rule based on feedback. I do think there were things that are future considerations. as it relates to this rule, and that would likely be a statutory thing. If you go back, and when the chair and I were talking about sort of the three pieces that were in this measure, one of the initial proposals in the executive budget last year got rid of the third piece and just focused on proficiency in K3 as being the two pieces of this measure, because now you sort of have proficiency tied to the first piece and proficiency tied to the third piece. And so there was some feedback of like, well, why is proficiency there twice? That was sort of the nature of the way things played out. So that idea of, you know, in the future is an opportunity to maybe look at just having the two pieces, something that we may want to consider. Again, not something that could have been done in the rule, but was probably a fair piece of feedback that we heard related to the measure.
Final follow-up?
Yes.
Thank you. What do you see as the timeline regarding the rules and when they'll hit the JCAR agenda, and do you anticipate any JCAR prong violations?
Chair Father Arthur, Representative Brennan, again, I believe that we're looking at mid-June to be on the JCAR agenda. I don't know if they've been filed yet, but that is our attention post this presentation. Because, again, this is for the report card for the September. So there is a bit of, there's kind of a pressing need to get things fixed. I would hope that we have no prompt issues. Again, I think we're being responsive to kind of a need and sort of stakeholders' interests in making sure that we calibrate this. But obviously, we will follow the process as we need it.
Thank you.
Thank you. Representative Piccola Antonio is recognized for a question.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Director, for being here today. And thank you for the presentation. The question that I have I not 100 sure that you will be able to answer but you here on behalf of due so I going to ask the question and if it requires follow that's fine. So I know that there is a federal waiver that is pending right now with some pretty significant changes proposed, and the question that I have is really, do you see any potential impact if that waiver is granted to our districts or to our buildings' ability to meet the report card requirements as they are, I guess, proposed to be changed. I don't know if that question makes sense.
Chair Fowler-Arthur, Representative Pickle-Antonio, I'll address that at a high level, and we might want to have some additional follow-up, but I can speak to it a little bit. There are some things being proposed as it relates to ESSA and, in fact, an ESSA plan amendment. None of the things that are included in that have any impact on the state report card. In fact, the accountability pieces are trying to align to the state report card. So there are federal requirements, there are state requirements, there are some places where the federal requirements have veered off slightly. We believe that it makes sense to have an aligned accountability system if you're going to have an accountability system. So the asks of the federal government now are to try to align these as much as possible. So any changes that would result from this, we would be asking the federal government to allow us to align to this as much as possible.
Thank you, Chair. So thank you for the answer to that question. Just a little bit further, I guess I am trying to wrap my head around, and I have not, to be fair, like I have not had a chance to delve deeply into the waiver request. My concern, I guess, with the waiver request as it relates to this is that there is a potential for resources to be directed in a way that is different than they are currently being directed and really what I'm trying to understand is if those resources are directed differently, do you think that that will impact your school building, let's say a Title I building, their ability to meet the standards in any way?
Chair Father Arthur, Representative Pickle-Antonio, I would suggest we maybe have some follow-up to get into some of those details because it is a lot of information related there. The short answer is I do not believe so. What this is doing is just trying to make a calibrated change to state law about what we're expecting for that early literacy measure. these are the pieces when we talk about accountability when it comes to when schools are then identified federally, how we identify them and being clear about what the expectations are. So while there are some things in there about how that plays out on the back end I don't know that this is going to negatively impact that. There's a lot of other details in that I think we're probably happy to have some follow up conversation.
Thank you. I think that the committee might be interested in follow up reading material if you like to send any along and just along those same lines we kind of been hearing this talking point that the cut score is also being lowered So I don know if you would be able to provide that as a supplement maybe on what the third grade reading promotion score currently is what it had been, and just to make sure that we aren't diluting our expectations in the process of kind of calibrating this to the law change.
Chair Fowler, can I address that a little bit with the promise to send more information?
I love both ideas. Okay, yes. So again, the third grade reading guarantee cut, again, are different cut scores. There's different scores that we're talking about. The expectation for the third grade has not changed. It is still proficient on third grade. What has changed in state law is that third piece here, which used to be, did you get promoted or not? And at the time, that was a much lower, as that score has gone up and down, that was a much lower expectation. So what we're trying to do is to calibrate the measure. And in fact, we have raised the expectation on the high end. You'll notice in the simulations that we provided, it is a somewhat higher expectation on the high end. We actually simulate that there'll be fewer schools and districts scoring at the highest levels. But because, you know, the whole distribution drops down, it's a calibration of that grade scale. So I want to be clear that we're not lowering expectations.
I think maybe we're talking two different scales. So you're talking the scale that's being used for the report cards, and then I'm talking as well that we would like to see the scale that's being used for the actual promotion score for the student as far as the specific scores that we're using to cut or to determine the levels of performance for each of the students. Because obviously if we are basing this all on the promotion score and the promotion score goes down to make our numbers go up, that would be somewhat problematic. So if we could have those as supplementary materials, that would be very helpful.
Of course.
Madam Chair?
Could I ask a follow-up as well? Kind of asking for more information on another topic. So I'm really...
I'm sorry, on another topic or a topic related to the presentation? If it's not related to the presentation, could we email them and have them send it to us? Is it related to the piece?
Well, I mean, it's all interrelated somehow, but it might be a stretch.
How about you talk to Aaron afterward, and if you need it to be sent through the committee, we'd be happy to send it out. We are coming up on 12 o'clock. I don't see any further hands. If you do have further questions, it sounds like we have a few more weeks that we could provide comment to the department before these would be finalized. So please do get your comments in quickly. Thank you for the presentation and for the time, and we look forward to all follow-up materials. Thank you very much. The committee is now going to recess, and we expect to reconvene around 345 this afternoon, and we expect to be in this room. If there's any changes to that, we will let you know. Thank you.