- Our own Aaron Churchill appeared on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas yesterday, as part of a panel talking about charter schools in Ohio. Great discussion with some important details and nuance presented. You can check out IdeaStream’s brief report on the story here. And you can get the full audio here. Big thanks to WCPN and host Mike McIntyre for doing a whole hour on this important topic and for having us join in.
- There’s no denying that charter schools are the biggest area of interest in education policy in Ohio at the moment. Editors in Columbus once again opine on the subject of charters today, giving kudos to the Ohio Department of Education for their tougher stance on the “recycling” of closed schools and the authorizers who, well, authorize such things. And then they call again upon the General Assembly to overhaul Ohio charter law. (Columbus Dispatch)
- We’ve talked a bit about expansion of dual enrollment in Ohio the last couple of weeks. That is, high school students taking college courses for credit through various avenues. Officials at Dayton’s Sinclair Community College are celebrating a record number of high school students doing just that via their programs this term. Nice. (Dayton Daily News)
- As predicted, editors in Akron published their take on the very interesting series of stories from earlier in the week on the topic of “racial lopsidedness” in many of Ohio’s classrooms. Worth a read, as is the series itself. (Akron Beacon Journal)
RESEARCH BITES 1/9/15: Fewer children (proportionally) in Ohio and elsewhere
Compared to 1990, a smaller share of the overall population of Ohio was children in 2010. We observed on Wednesday that the percentage of children under eighteen declined from 26 percent to 24 percent between 1990 and 2010. This suggests that the age-distribution of Ohioans is shifting toward the older age groups. But how does this population trend in Ohio compare with other states? The chart below displays Ohio in comparison to eight other states (four Midwestern states, plus the four most-populous states in the U.S. in 2010). Interestingly, the states displayed in this chart show declines similar to Ohio in their under-18 populations as a share of overall population. These data would seem to be consistent with the national trend of Americans generally living longer and bearing fewer children. So while it is somewhat stark to see that Ohio’s downward trend in the child-age population, considered as a proportion of the overall population, at least the Buckeye State isn’t alone.
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Source: United States Census Bureau.
