Gadfly Bites 7/19/19 – “If we don’t do everything to help them succeed, it’s the kids we are failing. It’s on us.”

1. In case you missed it, Ohio has a new biennial budget at last. The final version accepted by both House and Senate included a number of education-related provisions. You can read all about them from the PD (including a reference to Fordham re: new graduation requirements)… (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/17/19) …and in the Elyria Chronicle (which also namechecks Fordham), although folks there were more interested in a different provision on which more in a moment. (Elyria Chronicle, 7/18/19) The governor signed the bill yesterday—including some strategic vetoes—and so the deeper analysis can begin. First up is Jeremy Kelley’s take on the new graduation requirements (with obligatory Fordham namecheck). While he is technically correct that there has been a lot of agita and change around graduation requirements over the last few years, it would also be correct to say that it all could have been avoided...which is not said here. (Dayton Daily News, 7/18/19)

2. As always, you can trust Gongwer to have all the deets and all of the reactions to important legislative news. That goes double for budget season. Here is their roundup of the education provisions and the wendy ways by which final outcomes were achieved. Our own Chad Aldis is quoted in regard to some very wide-ranging changes (dare I call them “improvements”?) to the state’s voucher programs. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/18/19)

3. The budget’s moratorium on new declarations of academic distress was greeted with whoops of joy and not-at-all-ironic calls to “stay the course” among the leaders of Dayton City Schools. (Dayton Daily News, 7/17/19) As we noted on Wednesday, the budget’s silence on current ADC districts means that they will all remain as-is for now. Reaction seems fairly muted in Youngstown. (Youngstown Vindicator, 7/18/19) Meanwhile, Youngstown’s new CEO Justin Jennings held a community meeting this week to introduce himself. Sounds pretty great all around, but I was struck by the personal details that he chose to share: He was a high school All-American in basketball and went to Purdue University, but was only reading at a third-grade level at that time. He required tutoring by a high school teacher every weekend throughout his college career to get him through. He now has several master’s degrees and has nearly completed his doctorate. If he were not a basketball All-American, would that vital tutoring have been so readily available to him? I think we all know the answer to that. And what did he learn from all of this? “I’m here for the kids,” he told the Vindy. “If we don’t do everything to help them succeed, it’s the kids we are failing. It’s on us.” Well said. (Youngstown Vindicator, 7/18/19)

4. In related news, more folks are scrambling to fill the impending void to be left when the Vindy shuts down after 150 years of service. The Business Journal of Youngstown has received a “major capital infusion” to boost its reportage to cover lots more than just business. Including, you guessed it, education. Perhaps a name change is in order? (The Business Journal, Y’town, 7/16/19)

5. Speaking of the budget and of things that are shutting down, the Joint Education Oversight Commission (pronounced JAY-ock) was eliminated in the final version of the budget and will be ending its work in on October 1. Ironically, the ock-ers held their scheduled meeting this week just as that final fate was becoming clear. Most of Gongwer’s coverage of that meeting depicts folks whining about being eliminated and about how important JEOC is to…somebody. I would suggest that the coverage of the actual testimony—on the hugely important topic of the Progress indicator on state report cards—proves the opposite quite definitively. Seriously: you guys couldn’t find one person who supported the Progress indicator? Not one? Good riddance, I say. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/17/19)

6. In a quick look at school choice news, Albert Einstein Academy in Northeast Ohio is on the grow—and moving too! The three-school network will move its K-12 school from Westlake this fall, taking up residence in the former St. Richard School in North Olmstead. The new space is twice the size of its current building and includes such purpose-built luxuries as science labs, a gym, and a library. You can tell that this is unadulterated good news because the reporter entirely forgets to mention that AEA is a charter school! (Cleveland.com, 7/19/19) Y’all remember “competitive balance”, right? That’s the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s effort to rebalance the state’s sports leagues to better reflect the realities of school choice. How big is a district school’s student body when charter and STEM students can play sports there? How about interdistrict open enrollment? We’ve talked about this before. It is being challenged in court by a group of Catholic schools on those well-trodden legal grounds of “it’s not faaaaaaaaaair!” A state Supreme Court decision this week means that the pending suit will go forward. Rah. (The San Francisco Chronicle, for some reason, 7/16/19)

7. We end today on the sports page. Specifically, on the sports website Bleacher Report. It is here that you will read what is without a doubt the best profile of Akron’s I Promise School ever written. It is thorough. It is beautiful. It is truthful. It is powerful. It misses nothing. The author is a poet and blogger and commentator who is actually a former Fordhamite as well. Hanif Abdurraqib paints perfect word pictures and gets to the soul of his interviewees without hype or exaggeration. He covers the amazing students and families, the dedicated teachers, LeBron James’ life and work, and the intricacies of education policy along with a portrait of real life in Akron. It’s long, but worth every second of your time. Read it now. (Bleacher Report, 7/17/19)

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