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Ohio's public schools serve 1.6 million children - 90 percent of students in the state! What happens in the classroom has impacts far beyond the walls of the K-12 school building or higher ed lecture hall. So, on behalf of the 120,000 members of the Ohio Education Association, we're taking a deeper dive into some of the many education issues facing our students, educators, and communities. Originally launched in 2021 as Education Matters, Public Education Matters is your source for insightful conversations with the people who shape the education landscape in Ohio. Have a topic you'd like to hear about on Public Education Matters? Email us at educationmatters@ohea.org
Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.
Scott DiMauro 0:14
This is Public Education Matters brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.
Katie Olmsted 0:15
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted and I will be voting in person on November 5th. I tell you this to remind you that you need to make your plan to vote, whether that's early in person, absentee by mail or on Election Day with me and my kids this year, the future of public education in Ohio depends on the outcome of this election in everything from the race for Ohio's seat in the US Senate to the seats in the Ohio General Assembly to the races to serve on Ohio's State Board of Education as that body continues to navigate forward in its new role. And through the OEA fund screening and endorsement process, OEA members have said Dr. Chris Orban is the best candidate to represent District 6 on the State Board of Education in the future. Dr. Orban is a physics professor at The Ohio State University on both the Marion and Columbus campuses, and as he tells us, he's ready to be a strong advocate for Ohio's public schools, just as he has been doing in his previous work, which has included steps to really transform math curriculum in Ohio and expand crucial access to Computer Science education for Ohio's public school students. Let's listen.
Dr. Chris Orban, thank you so much for sitting down with us for this podcast to really help us understand who you are and why you are a great candidate for the State Board of Education. Why do you want to run for the state board?
Chris Orban 2:05
I think, for me and for anyone who's on the ground trying to improve the schools, the more that you do that work, the more that you see the way that policies affect what we're able to deliver for our kids. And the more you do that work, the more that you see just how much influence the statehouse and the governor's office has over those policies. And so I think that's a reason why anyone would run and run for the State Board of Education to have access to the most powerful people in the education system. Now why do I want to run? Particularly, about six or seven years ago, I started attending statewide teacher meetings - so math teachers, science teachers, computer science, physics, engineering - and I began to realize that in the course of a typical year in Ohio, the heads, the presidents of these and other wonderful teacher organizations are rarely if ever asked to testify to policymakers about new policies. They're rarely if ever consulted about new policies, and if they ever are invited to be a part of the process, it's only at the 11th hour when some change that's already been vetted in 1000 ways is about to go into effect, and they're jumping in to try to intercede before some vote happens. And the first germ of an idea that I had to run for the state board was the thought that I might be able to do a world of good if all I did was sit on the State Board of Education and try to hand the microphone to some of these organizations.
Katie Olmsted 3:28
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
Chris Orban 3:30
Sure, so I was conceived in Dayton, Ohio. My DNA is in Ohio, and my father joined the Navy. Because he was in medical school, he joined the Navy. And so I was actually born out of state in Virginia, but I came back to Ohio later. An interesting story is that my parents actually met in the marching band at Ohio State, and my dad dotted the I in the script Ohio in 1977 so I have family all across Ohio. My mother, at the time that I was conceived, she was a public music teacher in in Dayton, Ohio, and both my mother is a music teacher, my brother is a middle school and high school band teacher, and I have an aunt who's a retired art teacher from Wooster. And so I have family all over Ohio, and everyone's just thrilled that I'm I'm running for this position.
Katie Olmsted 4:20
Ohio in your blood. Education in your blood. I know you're very passionate about how high school math is taught, and it's been changing in Ohio. What can you tell me?
Chris Orban 4:29
So we're in the middle of one of the biggest experiments in high school math education in generations. So for the longest time, uh, sometimes it's called the algebra sandwich. It's it came out of, out of the space race and the Sputnik era that everybody had to have algebra. But they did some experiments in the mid-2000s where they required everybody to have Algebra Two, and it didn't always work as well as they hoped for. And so what we're trying now is something very new, where students take Algebra One, they take geometry, and then they have a buffet of options that's available to them to take after that point, and depending on what career that they want to go into, they might choose a different option there.
Katie Olmsted 5:12
What are some of the options? I mean, I graduated public schools in Ohio in '06, and I I did the sandwich.
Chris Orban 5:20
Right, so I'm involved in one of those options, which is called discrete math. And there's other great options. So data science is another option. Algebra Two is still an option, right? And I helped to design this discrete math class in partnership with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, and I got to be part of the team that figured out, how are we going to take high school mathematics concepts and connect it with computer science concepts so students can leave this course with some valuable workforce skills that maybe they might not otherwise be able to have access to.
Katie Olmsted 5:55
How do we do that? I mean, that sounds like an extremely daunting task.
Chris Orban 6:00
Yeah. Well, it was a project that was started in January of 2020 so I think good timing, yeah. So we had an in person meeting downtown at Ohio Department education in January 2020, and then the pandemic hit two months later, and we designed the entire course online in Microsoft Teams meetings for months and months after that point, and it took a lot of work to kind of decide what are the goals of the course. How are we going to do this? We were fortunate to have Covid Relief dollars ended up being spent on these, these initiatives. So covid dollars are spent on this and on data science and on an applied quantitative reasoning course as well, and so they had the funds to work with the educational service centers to make it all happen.
Katie Olmsted 6:49
What has the process been like seeing it rolled out now?
Chris Orban 6:52
Well, a joy of mine was to - and by the way, I don't speak on behalf of this project - so I'm a professor at Ohio State, and I do a lot in education, but, but the one thing I don't do is speak on behalf of Ohio government agencies. So whatever
Katie Olmsted 7:07
Not yet! If you're elected....
Chris Orban 7:11
So I just want to be so any any authority, any authoritative information should you should consult the experts over there. But a joy it was to be in the very first discrete math classroom which which happened in at Metro High School. So I managed to find a teacher who was brave enough to actually try out this curriculum we had been designing for two years up to that point, and I actually got to sit in on the class as much as I could, day after day, trying to iron out all these details so that when we did scale it up, as it is now - So currently, it's an over, I think it's in over 40 high schools across Ohio - and so we, I was there at the ground level to try to make sure that was all working, and that sort of thing.
Katie Olmsted 7:59
And that kind of ties back to what you were saying about what you want to accomplish on the State Board of Education. Just hand the people the microphone. When you're hearing that feedback from the educators who are implementing the curriculum, how important is that?
Chris Orban 8:12
Oh, we had to redesign entire things. Like it's - even just with feedback from one teacher, you've really got to do your homework. And, you know, I'm a college professor. I teach, you know, 19 year olds how to do physics most of the time. But if there's, if we get feedback from a teacher saying this isn't working, I mean, we've got to go back to the drawing board and iron it out. Can I tell you about some of the fun things we put into the course?
Katie Olmsted 8:37
I would love to hear it. Also, I feel dumb asking, what is discrete math?
Chris Orban 8:41
So discrete math, it's about - discrete math. It's a lot of different things. It's about situations where there's a finite number of countable possibilities, or a finite number of countable objects and things like that. So think of in a room full of people. Everyone's introducing themselves. How many unique introductions is that? Or if you are, there's, there's a there's a classic problem called the traveling salesperson problem, in which you, you have to go from house to house to house, and you have to figure out what is the shortest path between all the different houses, things like that. We get into what you might call game theory. So where you have these two player games, where these two player games, where you're trying to outsmart the other person that gets into a little bit of that. Network theory. So with, like with the pandemic, you know, I'm connected to you today in this podcast, and then you're connected to your family and to your friends and things like that. And if you diagram that all out, it makes what's called a network or a graph. And discrete math is all of these things. And it's sort of a different spin on math than what you get from Algebra Two.
Katie Olmsted 9:56
And it feels, no offense to the wonderful high school math teachers that did their very best with me, who just does not get math very well. It feels more useful than a lot of the stuff that I learned. And then you were mentioning, there's some really fun stuff in this curriculum. What? What were you mentioning there?
Chris Orban 10:13
Yeah. Do you remember Minesweeper?
Katie Olmsted 10:14
I do!
Chris Orban 10:15
Like, think back to, like, Windows 95 computers and that sort of thing. Do you remember how hard it is?
Katie Olmsted 10:22
Once you understood what you were trying to do, it got a lot more fun, but randomly pushing things ended up with a lot of not good results? Yeah.
Chris Orban 10:29
Yeah, so it's, it's, it's a surprisingly tricky game, but if you can use Minesweeper to teach kids an aspect of discrete math called set theory. So there's a mathematical notation to say this collection of objects is part of a set, and this other collection of objects is part of a set, and maybe one or two objects are part of both sets, and that sort of thing. And so what you can do is you can use Minesweeper, just you tell them to play, play Minesweeper on the on the hardest difficulty -
Katie Olmsted 10:58
Oh, I never did that
Chris Orban 10:59
- in 15 minutes. And then let's talk about how we can use mathematics to navigate this game. That's just one of the fun things that we did. Students play the game of Risk for a day.
Katie Olmsted 11:10
Oh, also, one of my least favorite things.
Chris Orban 11:13
Well, it takes a long time. So, I mean, the students don't often get through the entire game. There's like, a shorter version that they can do, but that gets into probability and understanding, okay, we got three dice against two dice, and what's the likelihood of winning, and things like that. So it's just, it's just fun stuff like that that has solid mathematical concepts behind it that makes up the course. And something that I'm the most proud of, I think, is that the this course is bringing computer science skills to many students who didn't otherwise have access to it. Many of the teachers that we worked with are in schools that don't have a computer science teacher. Currently in Ohio, and this is a rough number, but only about half of Ohio high schools have a computer science teacher, right? And so that's a lot of students who just would never be able to take computer science. And whereas this course, this discrete math course, provides a way that math teachers, even who do not have the credentials to teach computer science, they can bring computer science to their school by following this curriculum, which is just really exciting to me. Currently only maybe one in six - Currently only one in six Ohio high school students actually manages to take computer science before they graduate. There's only about 1000 high school computer science teachers in the state, and so by working with math teachers. There's something like 10,000 math teachers in the state, very roughly. And so there's so many more math teachers than there are computer science teachers. This is, I think people don't appreciate just how monumental of a change this is to to expand access to computer science in our state.
Katie Olmsted 12:58
And that's something you're already advocating for in other ways. Back in 2023 you were testifying at the state house to improve access to computer sciences.
Chris Orban 13:08
Yeah, so I got involved in this project, like I said back in January 2020, and I got involved in the statehouse. So spring of '23 was, was the was one of the budget years, right? So that was the big budget bill. And myself and other people in the computer science world went down to the Statehouse to advocate for more computer science funding, and I got good news for you, Katie, which is that funding was approved to allow licensed Ohio teachers to go to Ohio colleges to learn, to teach computer science for free. Millions of dollars was approved by the state legislature. So for example, you can go to, there's many different schools. Ohio State is going to be one of the schools starting in spring of '25 and it's just great that people can pick up new skills and go to college. It's just, it's such a common sense thing, right? It's kind of mind blowing that that wasn't true beforehand, if that makes any sense. But I was very, I was very, I never, I had never testified in the statehouse before.
Katie Olmsted 14:15
What was that like for you?
Chris Orban 14:17
It was a little intense, but when you're talking about something that you know so much about, it was just kind of fun. I mean, there's, there's a video of it on my website for people to check out, but when you're talking about something that you know about, it's, it's really fun to get up there and just speak truth to power a little bit and advocate for the school system.
Katie Olmsted 14:36
And that's what you would do if you're elected to represent District Six on the State Board of Education. What are your big goals in that role? What do you what do you hope to accomplish?
Chris Orban 14:48
Yeah, so there's a lot to talk about. I mean, there's a lot of things that have changed with the state board. Over the last year, the state board essentially no longer appoints the person who is in charge of K-12 education in Ohio, which is pretty sad. They also are not in charge of the academic standards, the education standards anymore. Instead, both of those duties are now under the governor's office. And in terms of what I want to accomplish, you know, I don't know that acting myself, that I can reverse the decision that the state board no longer appoints the director of K-12 education, but I'll be darned if I don't do everything I can to put the academic standards back in the State Board of Education, right? Because it's personal for me. Because before I was doing the high school math Pathways project, I was contributing to the science standards. The first committee I ever volunteered for for the Ohio Department of Education was the 2017 science standards revision. And so I updated the astronomy standards. I updated the physical sciences. There were all these links that were out of date, that didn't work anymore, and it just it was standard work. But I was just so happy to be a part of it. And then I started volunteering for more Ohio Department education committees. I got involved in the computer science standards a little bit. And so it kind of kills me on a personal level, that those standards are no longer under the State Board of Education. The education standards are now under the governor's office. And so the governor's office controls what we tell students about the age of the universe, for example. You know, it's just sort of a bizarre
Katie Olmsted 16:23
yeah, I didn't really think about that.
Chris Orban 16:25
Yeah, so for me, having an astronomy and physics background, that's that just sort of gets to me, and that's something I'm going to be working on pretty closely. And the reason I think I can succeed is because those standards were moved to the to the governor's office arbitrarily. The governor's office, never asked to be in charge of the education standards. And I think as arbitrarily as they are moved to the governor's office, they can arbitrarily be moved back. I think that there's people on both sides that would like to see that happen, and I'm gonna find those people, and we're gonna put our heads together and see what we can do.
Katie Olmsted 16:58
Step one, get elected. And thank you for coming in to help us understand who you are as a candidate and who you are as an educator.
Chris Orban 17:05
Thanks a lot for having me.
Katie Olmsted 17:09
You can learn more about Dr. Orban and his work in the show notes for this episode. And while you're there, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode in the future. Next week, we are talking about the big things every local association should be trying to negotiate in their contracts the next time they sit at the bargaining table, and we will continue to bring you these important discussions every week, because in Ohio, public education matters.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai