- Fordham’s latest Ohio policy brief—focused on strengthening teacher recruitment and retention—is quoted and linked in this piece. Yay! Our Jessica Poiner did not write the brief to address the specific issue—a newly-proposed bill that would allow schools to hire military vets as teachers with relaxed licensure criteria—but the snippets quoted here seem presciently apt nonetheless. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/5/22) Fordham’s Aaron Churchill is among those quoted and linked in this piece on the topic of Ohio report card data. It is a high-level look at the bad and the good written by former Plain Dealer reporter and current freelancer Patrick O’Donnell. Analysis by Fordham friend and OSU prof Vladimir Kogan is included in the discussion as well. (The 74, 10/6/22)
- Education students from the University of Dayton will also be tutoring area K-12 students in response to the pandemic-era learning loss as laid out starkly above. We discussed Wright State University’s contribution to this full-court press earlier in the week. This coverage, from the UD press zone, doesn’t say whether their work will be done after school or during school time (which seems kind of important to me), but it does specify that tutors will be using a lot of testing to determine how their kids are doing at regular intervals and what to focus on next. Also important. (University of Dayton, 10/6/22)
- Speaking of school schedules, the Delaware Area Career Center (DACC) is here touting its new afterschool program which is, by all available evidence, awesome. However, the program is less a cool innovation and more a “mother of invention” kinda thing. Turns out DACC’s programming—think cybersecurity, cosmetology, welding and the like—is so popular that they maxed out their capacity way earlier in the school year than they expected and so created this afterschool programming (and some online programming mentioned later) to accommodate as many additional kids as they could. DACC serves all of the fast-growing suburban districts north of Columbus (including red-hot Olentangy and Delaware), and operates out of a nice facility opened in 2019 with the expansion of its member districts in mind. So while it seems more like a fairly obvious supply issue than a surprise demand issue, officials double down on the latter. (I had to laugh when the center’s PR flak explained their “unexpected” enrollment surge thusly: “Traditional public schools enroll all students – except for those in private schools and some who are homeschooled – in their district boundaries” and so they are able to “fairly accurately predict” enrollment ahead of time. Forgot some students in there, didn’t ya?) So, what it seems to me has happened is that families have chosen to leave their resident district in fairly high numbers to get career education instead, and DACC is working like crazy to keep them from looking for other options elsewhere. I appreciate the hustle, but let’s just be honest about it. (ThisWeek News, 10/5/22)
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