Ohio High School Education
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December 7, 2011: The Analysis of the Public School Districts in Ohio's Four Largest Cities - 2011 is 
now available. The report compares the large urban districts in Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Toledo. As with the Top Academic Ohio High School report, many of the schools in these cities showed nice improvement from 2010.
You will need to read the report to see which city performed the best, but it will not be a surprise.
November 23, 2011: The schools in southwest Ohio received 
additional recognition from the Cincinnati Enquirer today. The Cincinnati Enquirer provided a summary of the Top Academic Ohio High School document. If you get the Enquirer, it is below the fold on the first page of the Local section.
To read Jessica Brown's entire article, click on this link or on the image to the right. This is the third year that the Enquirer has provided a summary of the report.
Ohio High School Academic Champions - 2011 |
|
| St Charles Preparatory | |
| St Joseph Central | |
| Hathaway Brown | |
| Seven Hills | |
| Ursuline Academy | |
| Columbus School for Girls | |
| Columbus Academy | |
| Walnut Hills | |
| Solon | |
The school names are linked to the school's web site, and the "G.A. Info" links take readers to more information on the Gerber Analytics web site.
To view the report that contains the entire list of 84 schools, please click here.
November 11, 2011: The 2011 data is now available. If you have any questions, please submit a Feedback message.
November 1, 2011: Processing of the 2011 data is underway. The results are better this year. Approximately 84 schools will make my list of Top Academic Ohio High Schools versus 63 in 2010 by achieving the 91% passing rate on all five subject tests.
August 11, 2011: This excellent article from the Washington Post provides more information about the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy web site provides educational videos to supplement what students are learning in class. Perhaps there is already an effort underway, but why aren't the various Ohio Graduation Test topics linked to this site?
Every student now has access to the Internet, let's use all of the tools available to allow them to excel on the OGT.
August 2, 2011: Before the summer comes to a close, please consider reading, Saving Schools -- from Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, written by Paul E. Peterson. As you likely already know, I am not an education professional so I found this book to be extremely enlightening. It has finally helped me understand why public secondary education has been in the decline while education costs have risen dramatically.
Mr. Peterson has written a number of books about Ohio schools. The book above includes mention of the Shaker Heights school district.
The Columbus Metropolitan Library owns 16 copies of this book, or you may purchase it online via the Amazon link.
June 24, 2011: Congratulations to the central Ohio high schools on their performance on the most recent Ohio Graduation Test. It was reported in The Columbus Dispatch that 45 of the 49 central Ohio schools improved on their performance of getting a higher percentage of their students to pass all five portions of the test on their first try. For the entire article, please click here.
This "Pass All Five Tests" percentage is a statistic that I closely watch and the statistic for 2010 versus 2009 was weaker for most schools. I had hoped that last year's results were an anomaly and it is great to see a rebound.
For a school to be included on my Top Academic Ohio High Schools report, it must have a "Pass All Five" percentage of 91% or higher. Based on The Dispatch article, it appears that central Ohio's Bexley, New Albany, and Grandview Heights will be included in the report next year. Neither New Albany nor Grandview Heights have been included in my report in the past.
February 23, 2011: The Analysis of the Public School Districts in Ohio's Four Largest Cities is now available. In this analysis, the academic performance of the Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo districts are compared using the March 2010 data. This is the second year for this document.
February 20, 2011: The state requirement for schools is to have 75% of its students pass each subject test. Which subject is the hardest for schools to achieve 75% proficiency? It is Science. Which subject have the schools shown the most improvement? Social Studies. The easiest subject for the schools to obtain proficiency is Writing. The percentages below for the various subjects represent the percentage of schools that met the state requirement of 75% proficiency. The breakdowns are in the table below.
PERCENTAGE OF SCHOOLS OBTAINING 75% PROFICIENCY RATES BY SUBJECT |
|||||
Year |
Math |
Reading |
Science |
Social Studies |
Writing |
2010 |
75.8% | 82.0% | 61.9% | 74.2% | 84.0% |
2007 |
75.6% | 85.5% | 58.0% | 66.8% | 87.7% |
Differ-ence |
0.2% | -3.5% | 3.9% | 7.4% | -3.7% |
As stated in my other documents, 2010 was a poor academic year, and hopefully it is not the start of a trend.
While any decreases are disturbing, it was my understanding that schools were doing a better job of identifying the students who were having problems with specific subject areas. The second table is a bit harder to understand but it represents the schools that had 75% proficiency rates on all five tests. In other words, if a school had 80% of its students pass Mathematics, Reading, Social Studies, and Writing, but only 70% of its students were proficient in Science, then it would not be included in this group.
PROFICIENCY ON ALL FIVE TESTS |
|
| Year | >=75% on All Five Tests |
| 2010 | 33.7% |
| 2007 | 33.4% |
| Differ-ence | -0.3% |
I will be doing more analysis with Social Studies in the near future. It was my perception while crunching through the numbers over the past four years that the better schools quickly showed improvement with Social Studies as they fine-tuned their curriculum. I am still curious why Social Studies lags Reading. If a student can read, why can't the student do well in Social Studies?
Please note that I had posted this analysis briefly yesterday, but I thought it was confusing. I had also used the majority of the schools' students passing (>50%) as a threshold rather than 75%.
I have been extremely busy with development on my tennis site (which is going state-wide), but I have devoted more time to the OGT project during the past week. Look for more OGT analysis in the coming weeks.
January 28, 2011: One mother in Ohio's Akron area is in the news for illegally placing her children in the Copley-Fairlawn school district. Copley High School, which is in a northwest suburb of Akron, is a very good school. It is not clear to which school the children should attend (or their ages) but Akron Early College is an excellent charter high school in the area.
Click on the academic performance map to view the performance of the schools in that area.
January 16, 2011: A new report is available. It is High Schools of Ohio's Representatives in the Ohio Statehouse and U.S. Congress. Not all of the elected officials are included. More will be added as the information becomes available.
If you would like to include the high school of your representative, please submit a Feedback.
December 16, 2010: Objectives of this web site are to recognize Ohio's top schools, the league champions, and the schools that are showing the most improvement. Today's entry is to highlight the schools with the greatest improvement in their Performance Index Scores.
The ten schools that had the most significant percentage increases in their Performance Index Scores (PIS) are in the table below. Please note that only slightly more than 20% of all Ohio schools had improvement in their tenth grade scores in 2010. The schools are sorted by their PIS percentage change.
The school names are linked to the Ohio Department of Education's Interactive Local Report Card reports. Gerber Analytics reports are also available for two of the schools -- Columbus South and Southern.
Congratulations to these schools.
| School | Gerber Analytics Report? |
County |
Metro Area |
# Test Takers |
PIS 2010 |
PIS 2009 |
PIS % Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maritime Academy of Toledo | - |
Lucas | Toledo |
25 |
94.8 |
75.1 |
26.2% |
| Life Skills Center - Youngstown | - |
Mahoning | Youngstown |
22 |
75.9 |
62.4 |
21.7% |
| New Day Academy Boarding & Day School | - |
Cuyahoga | Cleveland |
16 |
94.1 |
78.6 |
19.8% |
| Life Skills of Northeast Ohio | - |
Cuyahoga | Cleveland |
20 |
67.1 |
56.8 |
18.1% |
| Premier Academy Of Ohio | - |
Franklin | Columbus |
43 |
89.3 |
77.5 |
15.3% |
| Summit Academy Secondary- Akron | - |
Summit | Cleveland |
15 |
88.5 |
78.8 |
12.3% |
| Focus Learning Academy of Southeastern Columbus | - |
Franklin | Columbus |
19 |
83.5 |
74.7 |
11.8% |
| Life Skills Center - Summit County | - |
Summit | Cleveland |
25 |
80.4 |
72.3 |
11.2% |
| South | Franklin | Columbus |
93 |
92.3 |
83.1 |
11.1% |
|
| Southern | Meigs | 47 |
98.4 |
88.9 |
10.7% |
December 5, 2010: Welcome Cincinnati Enquirer readers. The Top Academic Ohio High School report mentioned in the Enquirer article is available here.
For those interested in education and high school tennis, please contact me via a Feedback message if you would like for your team to be included within the tennis portion of Gerber Analytics. The plan is to slowly roll out the tennis results state-wide. Click on the following links to obtain the tennis reports for the Upper Arlington boys and girls teams.
December 1, 2010: While the Top Academic Ohio High School report is beneficial as a one-year snapshot, the sports league reports may be more insightful because they provide a three-year history of each school relative to the other schools in the league. Here are the links to Miami Trace of the South Central Ohio League (my alma mater) and Liberty Benton of the Blanchard Valley Conference (my parent's alma mater). From these reports, it is easier to see which schools in the leagues may have better approaches to teaching the various subjects.
Looking first at the South Central Ohio League (SCOL), Clinton Massie won the league this year and last with rather dominant performances. However, the most interesting school in the SCOL is Greenfield McClain. McClain had the worst results in the league with their "% of Students Who Passed All Five Tests" in 2008, but they have steadily improved over the last three years. In Social Studies, McClain has shown substantial improvement and they are now second in the league in Social Studies.
Liberty Benton beat last year's champion, Van Buren, to win the Blanchard Valley Conference in this tightly contested league. The interesting school in this league is Arcadia. Arcadia was fourth in the league with their Performance Index Score but first in the league with Mathematics. Their Mathematics performance was very strong (and improving) relative to their other subjects and in comparison to the other schools in the league.
November 30, 2010: The following article from the NYT will interest many reading this blog. It is titled, "Growing up digital, wired for distraction". It covers a few of the issues included in the Top Academic Ohio High School report
As stated in the past, Cincinnati is the area of the state that appears to be the most focused on high school education. The Google usage map to the right reflects the number of Gerber Analytics site visitors. It was not surprising to see from where most of the visits originated -- Cincinnati.
After just one full school day of activity since the Top Academic Ohio High School report was released, this site has been accessed by people in 22 different states. Links from Facebook appeared to be the biggest driver of visitors.
November 29, 2010: Changes were made to the School Report pages over the long weekend. For those exceptional schools that are on the Top Academic Ohio High School report, it is now easier to see how frequently these schools appeared on the yearly list. For example, Seven Hills has been on the list all four years. These links point to a "list only" document -- not to the long version of the report.
The Top Academic Ohio High Schools document was modified over the weekend in an effort for this author to hopefully achieve a "basic" score in writing. For those who have already suffered through this document, none of the numbers changed.
November 25, 2010: The Top Academic Ohio High Schools for 2010 is now available.
November 23, 2010: Welcome to the newly remodeled Gerber Analytics, LLC web site. This remodeled site should make it easier for readers to navigate throughout the web site.
The Top Academic Ohio High Schools document for 2010 will be released before Thanksgiving.
Please send me a Feedback message if you have any specific questions or comments.
Background for the League Reports: The goal for the sports league academic reports is to encourage communities to look at academics differently. While the Ohio Graduation Test is just one piece of the puzzle on how to measure schools, communities should be aware of how their tenth graders performed on the various subject tests (mathematics, reading, science, social studies, and writing) versus the other teams in their league. Schools should also be aware of their strengths and weaknesses in academics just as much as they are aware of their basketball teams' foul shooting percentages.
Every school in Ohio can do better. It all starts with knowing where a school stands versus its peers, and what its goals should be for next year. Can you beat your rival school in Social Studies next year? Can you be first in the league in three years? Hopefully, these reports will provide readers with guidance on what their goals should be.
These reports have been custom-created to make it easy to quickly navigate throughout the document. For best results, follow the directions in "red".