We’re back after the long holiday weekend with lots to talk about. Let’s get to it!
- Probably the biggest news: Outgoing Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon announced his next gig on Friday. He’s moving into the world of higher ed, starting at a new position called senior vice president of student development and education pipeline” at Cuyahoga Community College in July. Happy landings, sir! (Signal Cleveland, 5/26/23) The Editorial Board of Cleveland.com is even more effusive in their praise of CEO Gordon and all he has wrought. (Cleveland.com, 5/28/23) Relatedly, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb will have a chance to appoint his first board members to help new CEO Warren Morgan run CMSD. You can check out all 12 of the finalists here, including four of the five current members who are looking for re-appointment. (Signal Cleveland, 5/26/23)
- Here’s a nice piece out of Loudonville, Ohio, where we learn that state Student Wellness Fund dollars are being used to provide free passes for students to the local public pool this summer. (Ashland Source, 5/26/23)
- Laura Hancock of Cleveland.com digs into a recent ODE report on the state of Ohio’s teacher corps and pipeline and, generally, comes up aces. Although there’s a lot of noise in this piece (courtesy of the usual suspects), she reiterates there’s no mass exodus of teachers as yet (what she calls “a lack of large swarms of teachers exiting the profession”), student-teacher ratios are smaller than ever, that the biggest hiring difficulties are in specific subjects—in specific locales—that have been hard to fill for many years, and that the potential for larger-scale shortages has been brewing for at least as long. Honestly, though, I was sure our own Jessica Poiner gave us the definitive analysis of that ODE report earlier in the month. Just sayin’. (Cleveland.com, 5/28/23)
- There are a lot of questions begged in this piece, especially regarding the widespread and seemingly long-entrenched educational deficits it highlights. But as the main point of it is that a Cleveland area mother and son are working to earn their GEDs together with the help of a well-meaning non-profit organization, I will refrain from listing my unanswered concerns at this time. Although you may have the same ones if you read it. (Cleveland.com, 5/29/23)
- Unfortunately for everyone involved in this story (except the students, because they’re just as awesome as the family in the piece above), I will be listing my beefs with this piece about Columbus high schoolers earning college credit. First of all, there appears to be nothing new or unique in this “Seniors to Sophomores” lark that isn’t covered fully in either traditional AP (namechecked) or College Credit Plus (which is how these kids earned their college credits while in high school). Columbus City Schools is being given a lot of praise for doing what appears to be not much at all—CCP is open to every college-ready student in the state from seventh grade onward. The kids (and probably their families) should probably get all the kudos. In fact, if the district’s program focused only on college credits being earned during twelfth grade, then five additional years of early college credit opportunities were lost to all of the able students profiled here. Imagine if these go-getters knew they could have accessed college classes as early as seventh grade? They might be even further along than they are now. “No offense to high school,” says the most-accomplished of the profiled students, magnanimously. But as a devotee of real early college education—and as someone who believes middle and high schools should bake in the pathway to college courses—I feel like some possible high-flyers were way undersold by their school district and, thus, some offense is definitely required. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/30/23)
- Speaking of our big city school districts, here is a prime example of why we must question all of those educational status-quo-ers who are protesting the retention requirement of Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee. Their main argument is that retention is stigmatizing, with many downstream consequences for little kids. My counter is that the adults who run the schools are creating the stigmas and building in the consequences. It was like that when I was in elementary school; it was like that when my kids were in (certain) elementary school(s); and it sounds like it is the same now. Don’t believe me? Check out how Toledo City Schools is operationalizing third grade retention as detailed in this piece. Parents and students whose reading scores do not (or might not) reach proficiency face an agonizing wait and/or a summer school “punishment.” And everyone seems OK with that set up. (Toledo Blade, 5/29/23) Of course, the simplest means for any school district to solve their retention problem is to teach their third graders to read up to proficiency in the first place. No
lobbyingstate intervention required. Case in point: Riverside Local Schools about an hour north of Dayton. Prior to 2016, third grade reading scores in the district were abysmal: “They were lucky to get to 50% in the spring. So it wasn’t good and everyone was doing their own thing,” said the longtime literacy specialist. “Everyone was talking a different language, and that makes it very difficult if you don’t have that cohesion across grade levels.” And, thus, many of them were using the low-quality curricula and materials they had been trained on in college. “So if the teachers don't understand how children learn to read, and they don’t understand what to do when a child struggles with reading, then you can’t help them.” Devastating. All that changed, we learned, when the district was chosen by the state to be part of a voluntary early literacy pilot program. By 2019, the district had a 91 percent passage rate on the third grade reading test. Jettison the bad stuff, train up on the good stuff, don’t let kids flounder, and hold the line on proficiency. I’m no expert, but even that seems simpler than making the General Assembly change state law for everyone. (Spectrum News 1, 5/24/23) - Speaking of school choice (were we?), here’s a nice profile of Newark High School graduate and co-valedictorian (one of 29!) Makenzie Adams. She and her mom give credit for her early educational success to local charter school Par Excellence Academy, boosted by the opportunities she took advantage of in Newark City Schools later on. Now, she’s off to college at Ohio University with the help of The Gates Scholarship, awarded to only 750 students nationwide out of 51,000 applicants. Nice! (Newark Advocate, 5/28/23)
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