NOTE: This is our first regular Gadfly Bites edition for 2021, covering clips from 1/1 through 1/6/21. Huge thanks for reading and subscribing!
- While this piece on the Covid slide is mainly focused on states other than Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch editorial written by Fordham’s Aaron Churchill in December and making the case for conducting standardized testing this school year is both linked and quoted in the intro. It’s not hard to see why. (The 74 Million, 1/3/21) Meanwhile, Fordham’s Chad Aldis is paraphrased on the importance of and on his support for standardized testing this school year in this Ohio piece. And, interestingly, he is not the only one sending that message for a change. (Dayton Daily News, 1/3/21)
- While parents are noted first in the headline of this story looking at “lessons learned” in education in the Dayton area during the fall pandemic-influenced semester, it is mostly teachers’ and school leaders’ voices that are heard. As usual. While the inclusion of insight from the head of Dayton Leadership Academies is welcomed here, I might have thought that the full shutdown of Dayton City Schools for the last six weeks of 2020 merited at least a mention. One assumes the lessons learned by parents bereft of all schooling for weeks are a bit different than the few others we are actually given. (Dayton Daily News, 1/3/21) School is back in session now in most places – even in Dayton City Schools, I think, wonder of wonders – after the holiday break. But the formats vary widely…and for varying reasons. (Local 12 News, Cincinnati, 1/3/21) Fully in-person learning is the most-desired outcome across the board, so the media tell me, also for varying reasons. The administration of Covid vaccines to the point of herd immunity is seen as the path to that goal, but the media tell me that outcome could still be many many months away. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/4/21) School personnel are quickly rising to the top of the list of those to be vaccinated in Ohio, according to Lt. Governor Jon Husted. But the state is tying vaccine distribution and in-person learning a bit more tightly and specifically together than perhaps originally imagined. (Fox8 News, Cleveland, 1/5/21)
- Going back to the topic of lessons learned, here’s an in-depth story of a grandmother stepping in to raise her grandson when circumstances required it. A rough start gave way to a positive situation today and Grandma is sharing her hard-won wisdom more widely to others for the future. A great story all around, even to this cynical curmudgeon, but two things stood out to me (for purposes of the clips, of course): We learn that Grandma worked for many years at Dayton City Schools (scheduling buses!) until retirement and currently sends her grandson to a private school using an EdChoice voucher. Just sayin’. (Dayton Daily News, 1/1/21)
- Looking at the near term, we learned yesterday that Philanthropy Ohio and the Ohio Department of Education awarded $2.6 million in grants to help schools and districts improve their remote learning efforts while the pandemic still requires it. (And maybe longer…?) The Gongwer story doesn’t note it, but the detailed list of awardees includes a number of charter schools and networks across the state. Kudos to all! (Gongwer Ohio, 1/5/21)
- My memory is not what it once was, but certain things tend to stick in there. The weirder they are, the stickier. Thus it is that I am doomed to recall the week in late 2019 when Youngstown City Schools’ elected school board was, by dint of the Academic Distress Commission law, supposed to be dissolved and replaced due to four straight years’ worth of overall F grades for the district. Remember? A moratorium on dissolution was agreed to at that time, pending an Ohio Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of ADCs. While the ruling came in May, 2020—upholding ADCs, as I’m sure you will recall as well as I still do—the advent of a global pandemic in the interim seemed to bring along amnesia as well as its other, better-known symptoms. How else to explain this story in which the elected school board of Youngstown—the Board that Should Not Exist—voted in its new president, who is the son of the outgoing president due to term limits, like clockwork just last week? (And that the membership of that board is exactly the same as it was in 2019?) While I am utterly gobsmacked to realize that ADCs are still the law of the land here in Ohio after everything that has happened (my memory keeps coding those events under the term “abject folly”), it is clear that no matter what the law said, the effort was never going to succeed in its true aim to improve education for kids in chronically-underperforming school districts. Not one tiny bit. (Mahoning Matters, 1/5/21)
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