- Please don’t let the focus of this piece on school transportation woes in central Ohio school districts fool you. Numerous issues of accuracy and lateness have been building in districts large and small for years—long before anyone ever heard of SARS-CoV-2. Just ask charter and private school families. (As if!) It is only to be hoped that now that they have a proper scapegoat (remember that Dayton City School was pointing the finger at parents as recently as two weeks ago) and scads of money, districts will actually manage to make some useful fixes to those old yellow bus problems. Unfortunately, I am not at all confident that this will indeed come to pass even now. Note that Columbus City Schools just now hooking up a real time GPS tracking system to its buses and that only transportation staff will have access to that information. The mom interviewed here seemed to be willing to give the district a pass on how long the trips took (very nice of her), but simply wanted to know where her kid was and when he would arrive. There’s an app for that, Columbus City Schools. Buy it! (Columbus Dispatch, 9/20/21)
- All three of my loyal, long-time Gadfly Bites subscribers will recall that Youngstown City Schools faced a slew of those old transportation problems way back in 2016 and incoming CEO Krish Mohip fixed them all. But he was hyper focused on student- and family-based solutions back then. Fast-forward to today where we see that the improvement plan put forward by the elected school board (inexplicably still in existence), focused only on the base goal of returning nominal full control of the district to themselves, is being criticized by some for soft-pedaling student academic achievement in favor of “low goals” which are easier to achieve. As the reporter puts it: “District leaders are not expecting to see huge jumps in the percentage of students being able to read and comprehend materials at their grade levels, according to the plan. Improvements are expected to be incremental and based on age and grade levels.” As perpetual Gadfly Jimma McWilson, director of the African Education Party, puts it: “They are saying that 84 percent of the third- through fifth-grade students taking math in the 2024-2025 school year will not be proficient. How can you make a plan in which 84 percent of the students are projected to be below grade level in their understanding of a subject?” Have we come a long way, or no way at all? Or perhaps it is a long way…only in a circle. (Vindy.com, 9/19/21)
- The reference to “the state’s performance index” measure, as mentioned in the above piece, is worth noting. Because Ohio’s new school and district report cards are also top of mind in this piece, in which the elected board of Berea City Schools tries to come to grips with its spring test results. The numbers seem pretty bad to me, like they are most everywhere, but the Bereanites (for surely that is what they are called) put as much lipstick on them as possible. But, along with the usual protestations that traditionally follow the release of test data (“The goal is not to ace these tests, but to understand the material. The kids are more than a number on tests” and “[T]he goal is always to try to get better…[and] to increase student achievement”), I am detecting a new mantra sneaking in (“Test scores are the by-product of student growth” and “These results create the District Report Card, and it is an evolving assessment”) that has an eye toward
future excuses that will need to be made due to the new and improved (?) report cards on the waythe future. (Cleveland.com, 9/17/21)
- In perhaps not as straightforward a sentiment as I would like, the mom of some Ohio Virtual Academy graduates (who is also VP of the National Coalition of Public School Options) opines in favor of more (and better?) virtual education options for families. (The News-Herald, 9/17/21)
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