Education has become a hot topic in Ohio due to budgeting issues, concerns for schools with low academic performance and, most recently, the passing of Senate Bill 5, which affects public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Although higher education is not directly affected, Ashland University has partnered with the Mansfield City School District in an effort to improve Ohio’s public schools.

AU is developing a School Turnaround Program, designed to help school districts with low academic performance on state achievement tests improve their students’ scores. The Mansfield City School District will be the case site for testing the program, but the hope is for other schools to be able to use the program as a model for creating similar programs in the future.

Dr. James VanKeuren, dean of the Schar College of Education, developed the idea for the program, requested a grant to help support it and is now serving as the project coordinator.

“What I’m trying to do is to make this a model that other schools and institutions of higher education can look at,” VanKeuren said. “The whole purpose behind this is to make it so that it can be replicated by other schools.”

AU’s program will focus on seventh and eighth grade math classes due to Mansfield’s scores on achievement tests, which were lowest in math, but the same concepts could be applied to other areas of study or ages.

VanKeuren said he is “not aware” of anything like this being done before.

“I’m pretty excited because I can see this being a difference-maker,” he said. “We’re taking the lead – the first university in Ohio to take this kind of approach.”

The program will begin this June and continue throughout the 2011-12 school year. It includes three major components: an online learning management system to incorporate technology into the classroom, a Principal’s Leadership Academy to train principals and assistant principals, and the Student Success Indicator Model, a computer program designed to help students budget their time.

“Rather than money, it’s giving them tools to work with their students,” VanKeuren said. “A lot of it will be focused on using these skills to improve student achievement.”

Approximately 12 principals, 430 students and six teachers from MCS will be involved.

The learning management system will take the form of Moodle, a free open-source software package.

VanKeuren said it’s similar to ANGEL, the program AU uses, which allows professors to post material and lessons online, host online discussions for classes and post students’ grades.

He said he sees the software becoming an organizational tool for teachers.

“We have all kinds of programs out there and they do different things, but it’s not focused,” he said. “That’s what this does.”

Deanna Romano, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, will be overseeing the Moodle training for teachers and has already begun working with the program.

Oscar McKnight, director of counseling services at AU, is developing the Student Success Indicator Model.

He has created similar programs for schools in Massillon and Youngstown in the past.

The Massillon program asked students a series of questions designed to predict their GPA based on past students’ performance.

For example, students were asked how many hours each night they spend on homework and how many hours a week they spend on athletics, religious practices, chores, work and other activities.

The program was based on actual students’ responses and grades.

McKnight said the goal of the program is to put the students in control and show them how they can improve their own academic performance.

“When students aren’t succeeding, there’s a tendency to attack the teacher or the parents,” he said. “If they want to succeed…there are behavioral indicators they can [change]. This says, listen, you’re in control of these things. If you put in minimal effort, you have no one to blame.”

McKnight said the program he’s designing for the School Turnaround Program in Mansfield is better because it doesn’t just look at GPA.

“This model is more sophisticated,” he said. “It’s sensitive to academic ability.”

While older programs were concerned only with GPA, the Student Success Indicator Model measures the amount of effort students are putting into their education based on their natural abilities and their daily activities.

The scale for the program has not yet been determined, but it will measure the amount of effort the student is exerting, or how much he is trying, based on the student’s IQ or achievement test scores in comparison to his GPA, McKnight said.

For example, if a student has a high IQ but a low GPA, that could reflect a problem with the way he budgets his time.

Or, if a student has a moderate IQ and an above average GPA, the program would show that the student is doing his best.

“A 2.9 might be the absolute max and they should be jumping up and down,” McKnight said. “They’re getting everything out of their education they possibly can. They might be getting a C plus average, but for who they are, that’s the best they can do.”

McKnight said teachers can show their students how to use the program, or they can use it to assist parents and students during conferences.

Parents often ask how they can help, and teachers have limited answers if they aren’t sure what problem that specific student has, but this can help students, parents and teachers see areas where a student can change.

“It’s a good training program for everybody involved,” McKnight said of the School Turnaround Program as a whole.

For the final component of the program, the Principal’s Leadership Academy, VanKeuren is working with Dr. Jeffrey Russell, dean of the Dauch College of Business.

Collaboration between business and education is the key, VanKeuren said.

“A principal is a CEO of a company, really,” he added. “It takes more than education to run a school these days. You need business expertise, and I think that’s why we’re on the cutting edge.”

The academy will consist of a series of workshops to help train principals and assistant principals in areas such as operations management, marketing, leadership and planning a school’s budget.

Eventually, this partnership could lead to a change in curriculum for Ashland as well.

Currently, business and education are housed in separate colleges without any shared courses, but VanKeuren said he’d like to see more integration between the two in the future to help prepare AU students for careers in school administration.

The changes would start at the graduate level and eventually be incorporated into the undergraduate programs, he said.

The Martha Holden Jennings Foundation awarded the university a $33,000 grant for the School Turnaround Program, according to the AU press release. AU will financially support the project with an additional $16,300, while the Mansfield City School District will give $5,200 and another $5,000 was donated.