- In case you missed it, Mike Petrilli was part of a panel in All Sides with Ann Fisher yesterday, talking about standardized testing in Ohio and parents who are opting their students out of said testing, especially in Columbus. As awesome as he was, Mike’s perspective is one that ed reformers and others know pretty well. I personally enjoyed listening to Columbus City Schools’ Machelle Kline. As executive director of accountability in the district, hers was a calm, informative and very welcome perspective that folks may not have heard before in the midst of other overheated rhetoric. Dr. Kline is a guest throughout the show; Mike comes in at about the 40 minute mark. (WOSU-FM, Columbus)
- We told you yesterday about a new study conducted in Mahoning County on the achievement of students opting for open enrollment to other districts nearby. The Akron Beacon Journal have read it and have taken the unusual step to do what appears to be a review of it, using their own previous look at Summit County’s open enrollment numbers as their basis. That piece, from last year, was primarily about the program’s funding mechanism and about racial disparities seen in utilization. Neither of these issues was addressed in the Mahoning report. That doesn’t stop the ABJ from defining open enrollment as a program “which allows mostly white and middle class families to send children to neighboring school districts.” Of course the ABJ knows that it allows anyone who wants to go to do so. But who is and is not utilizing the program could indeed be an issue, if addressed without resorting to such incendiary language. The ABJ’s story rightly notes transportation as an impediment to utilization. In fact, most school choice options might as well be invisible without easy transportation. All the more reason to dissociate student transportation from districts and instead make it regional, directly funded, and student-centric. But I might also suggest that focusing analysis on financial “winners” and “losers” from a district perspective, as this and previous pieces do, gives potential “losers” an incentive to hang on to whoever they can. Even if, as the Mahoning study and the ABJ’s own research shows, the benefits to students could be high. (Akron Beacon Journal)
- We love to talk about how schools and districts are using their Straight A Innovation Fund grants to enhance student learning across the state. Today, we look at Canton City Schools. When it was announced, Canton’s nearly $1 million winning grant was described as “restructur[ing] all of the 14 elementary school buildings to create seven literacy- and math-centered school centers. The program will also include additional training for educators on best practices for achieving math and literacy proficiency”. While the teacher training aspect is touched on in today’s piece from the Repository, the gee-whiz nature of dry-erase tables seems to have trumped discussion of the fact that the nature of elementary school has been fundamentally changed in Canton! (Canton Repository)
