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- There’s a lot to potentially respond to in this long anti-voucher piece. While it does have a new-ish twist (voucher-eligible parents who can’t figure out how to refuse them), it ultimately plumbs the same tired depths of misinformation; and if I started pointing them all out, I’d be at it all day. Read it yourself and see what I mean. What I will say here is that if you have THE Aaron Churchill on the hook for information and comment (“These families have been paying taxes for years and not availing themselves of the schools those taxes paid for, he said, and it’s only fair that at least some of that money go toward the education they chose for their children.”), you should definitely ask him to clarify for you how state and local sources work in funding schools in Ohio so you don’t fall into tired old rhetorical canards. Although it would have been a much shorter article if they had. (ProPublica, 1/31/24)
- Here is another anti-voucher story for you—one with no clever twists and positively dripping with the tired rhetoric of opposition, and using a very different version of the term “debate” than the one I am used to. (Review Times, 1/29/24)
- On to the hot topic of chronic student absenteeism. I feel sure that you will all join me in admiration of Toledo City Schools’ Reynolds Elementary for the array of low-cost, low-tech, fun-centric efforts they are deploying these days to curb chronic absenteeism among their student body. Surely many of you cherished the occasional skating party or pizza day just the same as I did back in school. However, I also feel sure that you will join me in freaking out about the astonishingly-high numbers reported by the principal: Nearly two-thirds of the entire school qualified as chronically absent last year. Shocking. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 1/30/24)
- This story feels oddly perfunctory to me, but the premise is crystal clear: Leaders of the LeBron James Family Foundation broke bread with the elected board members that run Akron City Schools recently and re-affirmed their support—clearly, publicly, and with media on hand—of the district and of the I Promise School and its families. (Akron Beacon Journal, 1/29/24)
- “What we do is we get the students excited,” says the STEM integration manager at Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center in this story about a gathering of northeast Ohio science teachers at the center earlier this week. Sorry, nerds. You’re lecturing to the wrong classroom. Not only will all of the school districts these teachers work for be closed up tight out of fear during the April eclipse, one erstwhile educator actually said, “Since I teach chemistry I don’t really get to do that cool stuff.” Out loud. And on the record. They don’t deserve you, NASA Glenn. Or a full solar eclipse. (Cleveland.com, 1/30/24)
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