- Today’s clips are just catching up with news from late last week. The first charter school in Ohio with a unionized teaching force is one in the “I Can” network in Cleveland. I wonder if they’ll have to change the name? (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/16/16)
- School districts across the state learned last week that it is too late for them to switch from online back to paper test administration for the imminent round of spring testing. You can check out coverage from the D (Columbus Dispatch, 3/17/16) and the PD (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/17/16). Someone somewhere is contemplating the paradox of folks simultaneously wanting to regress to 20th century test administration processes AND wanting to invent time travel at the same moment. But not me.
- Speaking of time travel, it seems like a double dose of the butterfly effect might be in action in Cincinnati. Stay with me here, because my interpretation of this story is slightly different than that of the Enquirer. It definitely starts at a different point in time – circa 2005, when Cincinnati City Schools decided to close up a century-old school building in the Clifton neighborhood. It was too rundown to use and too costly to upgrade and so they built a new school across the street. However, the district decided they wouldn’t offer the old building for outright sale at that time, despite their intention not to use it again. Why? Because they would have been obligated to give one of those (dun dun duuuun) charter schools first crack at it, inviting the “competition” to locate right across the street. Instead, they hammered out a deal with the local arts council to take it over for $1 a year and responsibility for rehab and maintenance. Fast forward to last year when that new school building had grown into one of those infamous “campout” schools that everyone wanted to get into but only a few ever could. When a proper lottery replaced the Survivor-style campouts, the district was suddenly aware of how much demand there actually was and made efforts to expand that school’s capacity. Where better than right across the street? After all, the district actually owns that now-spiffy old arts building. Well, negotiations to rent out space for classrooms and offices in the Clifton Arts Council building appear to have hit a wall over price. There are now discussions of the district revoking the rental agreement, although that path may also lead to some alarming costs for the district. That last bit is the version of the story the Enquirer wrote. Yowza. Is that a sound of thunder I hear; or just a truckload of karma? (Cincinnati Enquirer, 3/17/16)
- Dayton City Schools’ board OK’d the creation of (and a budget for) the Office for Males of Color Achievement starting in the 2016-17 school year. Its goals (cribbed from a similar program in Oakland): “reducing the disparity in suspensions and the number of expulsions for males of color by 20 percent; increasing graduation rates by 20 percent over four years for males of color; reducing chronic attendance problems by 20 percent, and increasing the number of students involved in advanced coursework by 10 percent.” Said one board member voting in favor of the effort: “It’s so sad that the issues young men are facing today, I faced as a young African-American. It says a lot for where we haven’t come, even though we’ve made strides… Nobody’s going to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves.” Said another: this is possibly “one of the most important things we can do to avoid state takeover.” Should be an interesting project to watch. (Dayton Daily News, 3/17/16)
