Gadfly Bites 8/26/20 – “We know our math proficiency is going to suffer.”

We’re back on the clips beat from our Monday break. Lots to catch up on, so let’s go.

1. Well, this giant boost in enrollment (and teacher hiring) in Ohio’s online charter schools was the easiest prediction I’ve ever made. Hope all the students and staff have a great and productive school year. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/22/20) Apropos of nothing: Here’s an excellent profile of a teenage coder/Christian rapper/online charter school student who is probably going places real soon. Nice! (Toledo Blade, 8/22/20) Another easy prediction, supported by this commentary piece from a veteran teacher: She and lots of her colleagues would prefer to work in a fully online setting for the year. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/22/20)
    
2. Sylvania City Schools seems to have experienced some serious hiccups in its effort to reopen in a hybrid fashion this school year and has reversed course to become fully remote for the foreseeable future. (Toledo Blade, 8/24/20) Sylvania families have questions about the abrupt switch, the answers to which appear to be being swept into the back room of central office under the heading “HR Issues”. (Toledo Blade, 8/25/20)
    
3. But it ain’t like fully remote learning is going perfectly well in every traditional district opting for it either. Check out this heartbreaking laptop fail in Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Hopefully this can be worked out before the delayed school year actually starts. (The 74, 8/24/20)
    
4. Look, this is huge stuff that districts are trying to work through. Deciding “fully remote learning” or “hybrid learning” is only the tip of the iceberg. There are as many versions of both models as there are grains of sand on a beach (which you shouldn’t be visiting anyway yet; just take my word for it). Take a look at this “examination” of the myriad education models happening in the Dayton area. We hear assurances that remote learning this fall will be far better than it was back in the spring, but I think that evidence is lacking. It reads like a black box of disembodied procedures and incomprehensible jargon to me. How will work be collected? How will it be graded? How will it be returned? What about quizzes and tests? To be fair, those questions are ones we would never ask—or perhaps not even care about?—in any regular school year. Which leads me to the conclusion that those schools which were not serving students very well in the pre-rona times will likely do the same again, no matter what model they are using. (Dayton Daily News, 8/23/20)
    
5. It seems to me that it would have been so much simpler if Ohio just boosted the enrollment caps for existing online charter schools and let all the parents who wanted that kind of education (and the teachers who wanted to teach that way) just go there. I mean, it’s not like we got more school age kids around here in the last five months, is it? Wonder why no one but me thought of that? Of course, that still wouldn’t answer all the questions. Such as what about kids learning remotely who don’t have adult supervision available at home. The state of Ohio is coming to the rescue here, launching a “Temporary Pandemic School-Age Child Care” license, which will allow the state’s daycares to open their doors for remote schoolers too. (Cleveland.com, 8/24/20) Luckily for those providers, the state has promised to pay for the services provided to eligible families using the program (from what copious pot of money it will flow is not explained). Because it sounds from this story that daycare staffing is already hard to find in some areas of the state and one of the problems is that centers don’t have copious pots of money from which to offer “incentives” to potential employees. I don’t know if these two things are related, but I sure hope someone is looking into Ohio’s copious pot of money for this—and the fact that two entities will, apparently, now be paid to educate kids simultaneously—because I have questions. (News5, Cleveland, 8/21/20)
    
6. But as we have said here before, there’s a lot of media speculation about what will happen in “the fall” even while many schools have already opened their doors while it’s still summer. Here’s a look at four of those schools in the Dayton area—three hybrid in-person and one fully online—and their “good first day” experiences this week. (Dayton Daily News, 8/24/20)
    
7. And in non-rona news, she’s now gone from two jobs to no jobs. I feel somehow that this hard-charging go-getter will still land on her feet. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/24/20)
   

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