- Those of you with good memories will no doubt recall that eligibility criteria for the state’s Quality Charter School funding was a source of some discussion in 2019 and 2020. A group of charters who were eventually determined not eligible sued the state, arguing that the Ohio Department of Education unlawfully excluded them when funding was awarded. Well, the Supreme Court this week ruled in favor of those schools and the state now appears bound to pay them more than $7 million. Yowza. (Toledo Blade, 5/19/21)
- You will not need as good a memory to recall the most recent time you heard about Dayton City Schools’ transportation travails. Well, supposedly those longstanding issues, affecting largely charter and private school students in the city, have been solved. You can read about how district officials think this will come to pass in this piece if you want. However, there are several other pieces of information completely unremarked upon in that piece, upon which I would like to remark (I’ll bet you can easily remember the last time I said that!) First, we learned that while there are 12,500-ish students attending district schools today, there are at least 9,000 resident students attending charter/private schools. That’s kinda big, right? And indeed that doesn’t even take into account online charter or homeschool students. Does it seem as likely to you as it does to me that there are more non-district students than district students resident in Dayton? Interesting. Second, the ongoing, years-long transportation debacle for those choice students is being “solved” by throwing $17 million in one-time federal coronavirus relief money to First Student to take care of those 9,000 kids. Even if it is successful this time around, where’s the next year’s pile of cash going to come from? Third, there is no discussion at all as to how this third party entity is going to work with charter and private schools to determine routes, schedules, etc. Not that it won’t happen—although similar previous third part payouts didn’t work out at all—it simply seems that no one really cares at this point except charter school leaders. Fourth, the district somehow thinks that this contract is going to solve the lack of bus drivers in the area. Newsflash: It’s the same number of kids, guys! The same number of buses, the same number of routes. You’ve only succeeded in splitting them up between two entities now hiring drivers; no new drivers were evanesced into existence via this plan. Here’s hoping there’s a ton more detail—and a ton more coverage—on the horizon. (Dayton Daily News, 5/20/21)
- And you need only cast your mind back to Wednesday’s Bites to recall the reason why your humble clips compiler finds this piece to be somewhat offputting. It is a look a Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s summer program to make up for “knurled knowledge knowing” (or whatever we’re calling pandemic-induced learning loss these days). On Wednesday, we heard about how excited young Killian Mason was to have a summer school that looked like “a normal year”, what with all the remote learning and stuff. (And CMSD kids had waaaaay more of that than almost anyone else.) But instead we get multiple iterations of “summer school has a stigma” and “kids don’t want to come because it’s a punishment” and the like. Just stop, you people! If there’s any stigmatizing going on, it’s the adults doing so, even if the language they use is inadvertent. Although it seems a bit more deliberate to me. Take for example two quotes from the same teacher in this piece: On the one hand, she tells The 74, “Here’s the reality: The kids who most need to be caught up won’t come to a summer school if they don’t enjoy it. If we think of summer school as more of the same, drilling facts into their heads, the same kids will stay behind.” But later, while talking about the instruction she will lead over the summer, she says, “I am so excited. Four weeks of classes, 80 minutes a day. We are going to get so much done.” We need less of the former, more of the latter, and a handful of math, science, and reading teachers who feel the same. (The 74, 5/20/21)
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