Gadfly Bites 12/14/20 – Fill! That! Room!!

1. ​​​​​​Remember back before the pandemic when school districts were being overly cautious about the student wellness funding approved in the last biennial budget? Many of them, we heard, were hesitant to start efforts to help support students any big new programs when they were not sure that the funding would continue in the following biennial budget. Thus we covered several reports of districts building empty rooms in new buildings (for “future use if the money is available”) or simply using the new money to supplant old. One silver lining of SARS-CoV-2 is that real student wellness needs eventually overcame that misplaced caution and nudged a number of districts to actually use those extra funds for their intendent purpose. Another silver lining: Governor DeWine told Gongwer that he was going to include another round of “very robust funding” for student wellness in his upcoming biennial budget. So, it’s time to open up those empty rooms for business, gang! (Gongwer Ohio, 12/11/20)
    
2. Speaking of empty, this look at Cleveland Metropolitan School District students’ scores on recent NWEA diagnostic tests seems problematic to me for two reasons. The first is the downplaying of the fact that nearly 5,000 fewer CMSD kids took the test this year as compared to last. (We’ll call that the elephant in the empty room.) The second is the overplaying of the idea that parents and kids somehow goosed the remote test results by being “over-engaged” (adults) or by flat-out cheating (anyone whose camera wasn’t working). What I think CMSD officials probably mean to say is that the only way they approve of conducting such tests is on site and with in-person proctoring. Unfortunately, it seems that the subtext accompanying that sentiment—that their kids could somehow not have done this well without cheating—has bubbled up to the surface a little too clearly. And that seems like some important news to me. (The 74 Million, 12/13/20) 

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