1. One of the downsides of this news clips lark is how some old stories can stick in the craw memory for a long time. Here’s a great story about a mom-and-pop non-profit which is improving the Old South End of Toledo one house, YMCA branch, and charter school at a time. Pleasantly and quietly and with an eye toward what families there need. But as good as this story is, it unfortunately reminds me of the Old North End “village council”, whose vitriolic members noisily and vindictively forced Toledo City Council to stop the expansion of a successful charter school in their neighborhood some years back, actually closing the school and hosing the YMCA in the process. (Toledo Blade, 4/30/22)
   
   

2. Here’s a fascinating look at the education system that exists inside Ohio’s youth prisons, with particular attention paid to Ralph C. Starkey High School in the Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility. It is detailed and interesting. And some of it should sound kind of familiar from schools beyond prison walls. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/2/22)
   
   

3. Community colleges in the Miami Valley are celebrating all the high school students who are earning associate’s degrees or other credentials through their programs via College Credit Plus. The number of such students has been steadily increasing over the last five years. Kudos to all! (Dayton Daily News, 5/2/22)

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NOTE: On March 7, 2022, seventeen members of the National Working Group on Advanced Education met in Washington, D.C., to get acquainted and to start identifying evidence-based practices to support the success of high-achieving students. The following is a summary of the discussions, with particular focus on the cultivation and identification of high-achieving students and the services they need (in grades K–12) to maximize their academic potential. We also note broader themes that came out of the conversation, areas where further discussion would be helpful, and additional topics to tackle at future meetings.

Two important reminders regarding the purpose of the group and its framing: First, the students we are interested in are students with potential for high achievement and academic excellence, not necessarily “gifted students” per se. Second, our focus in this project is primarily on district and charter network practices, not state policies.

General themes:

• We should acknowledge the past failures of the gifted movement, especially when it comes to equity.
• Tracking in the past was indeed often racist and classist, enrolling disproportionately more Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students in low tracks that led nowhere and failed to provide on-ramps for late bloomers.
• Maximizing the potential of America’s high achievers is important not only for those students but also for their families and for the country as a whole. We need students with potential for academic excellence to become tomorrow’s leaders, scientists, inventors, etc., to solve critical challenges and to boost America’s competitiveness.
• Narrowing excellence gaps is a key goal, and the earlier we start the better.
• Our focus here is students with potential for high achievement and academic excellence, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t concerned about other students. Indeed, we want our schools to challenge all students to maximize their academic potential.

Identification of students with potential for high achievement and academic excellence:

• There is widespread support within the group for universal screening to identify students with potential for high achievement, due to strong empirical support and positive results in districts that have used it. Such screening involves reviewing assessment data for all students at one or more age points to identify students who might benefit from advanced learning opportunities.
• Districts and charter networks should use whatever assessment data they have universally available, though multiple tests (and other instruments) are better than one, because some students will shine on one assessment and not another.
• If diagnostic or interim assessments such as MAP or i-Ready are used universally in the early grades (K–2), districts and networks should use them as initial screeners, but at the latest they should start with third-grade statewide assessments. Officials should be sure to age-adjust the results so as not to miss kids with late birthdays.
• Nonverbal tests may be particularly important for identifying high-potential students who are English learners or from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, although the group acknowledged the mixed research on their effectiveness in this regard.
• We should continue to equitably identify additional students for services in every grade—instead of relying on a single screening point that would overlook late bloomers and/or result in racial or socioeconomic disparities.
• The group supports local (i.e., school-based) norms—especially when students are young. This means identifying and serving the highest-potential students in every elementary school—at least 5 to 10 percent of all students, but higher if more students could benefit from a more advanced curriculum.
• As students move into high school, it becomes more important to reference state or national norms when admitting students so that students are better prepared to compete in higher education and beyond. Thankfully, research shows that students who enjoy access to advanced education in elementary school are more likely to meet national norms by the time they enter high school.
• Local norms should be used in conjunction with “front-loading” models of programming (also called “talent development” or “talent scouting”), with the goal of preparing as many students as possible for gifted programs and identifying gifted students who show potential but are not yet demonstrating high achievement—starting in the early grades but not ending there.

Services (all grades):

• There’s widespread support for ability grouping in grades K–12, meaning that high-achieving students should get to spend at least part of every day with other high-achieving students—ideally in a separate classroom or environment.
• We have concerns that “differentiated instruction,” however appealing it may sound, is rarely used effectively to tailor services to high-achieving students (or anyone else).
• Likewise, “competency-based education” may show promise eventually for allowing all kids, including high achievers, to move at their own pace, but it’s not there yet.

Services (elementary schools):

• In the spirit of ability grouping for at least part of the day, there’s support for pull-out programs (as long as there’s enough dosage) or special classrooms for high achievers within subject areas, though that is usually politically untenable for the earliest grades.
• Within-classroom ability grouping may be the best that some schools can do, but it must be truly tailored and supported to be effective.

Services (middle schools):

• We support ability grouping (such as pull-out programs and separate “honors” classes) in as many subjects as possible, as long as there are equitable on-ramps for students who are late bloomers.
• The group is split on the value of “off-ramps” for students who were high achieving in earlier grades but are not high achieving now.
• Selection into honors courses should be on a subject-by-subject basis.
• High achievers should have the opportunity to take AP courses and/or earn college credit in middle school if they show extraordinary potential.
• Culturally responsive social and emotional supports are especially important in these grades.
• A “Period 0” or “Period 8” can allow for important enrichment activities. Out-of-school-time opportunities show great potential but can lead to equity concerns if not all students have access to them.

Services (high schools):

• We support ability grouping (i.e., “honors” classes) in as many subjects as possible, as long as there are equitable on-ramps for students who are late bloomers.
• The group is split on the value of “off-ramps” for students who were high achieving in earlier grades but are not high achieving now.
• Selection into honors and AP courses should be equitable and administered on a subject-by-subject basis.
• Students who show potential for success in AP and other advanced courses should be automatically enrolled (i.e., advanced courses for such students should be the default). However, AP and other advanced courses should not be the default for everyone.
• Schools shouldn’t resist if other students want to try advanced courses.
• The group is split on whether schools should be expected to offer additional supports to students who are not fully prepared to succeed in AP courses and the like. Some think those students should not be admitted to such courses, while others want schools to try to help them succeed.
• The group is also split about the value of selective high schools (“exam schools”), with some wanting to build many more of them (in order to solve for the scarcity problem) and others wanting to eliminate them (because of the mixed evidence of their effectiveness, as they often do not reflect the demographics of their school districts and more students might be served, and served more effectively, if high-quality programs are available in every high school).
• The group is also split about dual-enrollment courses, with some seeing them as a popular option for high-achieving students—one that leads to valuable, transferable credit—and others worried about their lack of standards.
• There is some interest in setting national standards for what it means to be an honors course.

Areas ripe for further discussion:

• Is it possible to make within-class ability grouping more effective in the typical classroom? How?
• How important is it for districts to use measures beyond achievement tests when identifying students for services? Will nonverbal tests turn up additional students, especially English learners or students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds?
• At which point do we require students to exhibit high achievement rather than potential in order to be identified and receive special curriculum and services (such as admission into AP and other advanced courses)?

Future topics to be discussed:

• Everything related to teachers (training, accreditation, recruitment, selection, etc.).
• Instructional materials and instructional strategies for high achievers.
• Nonacademic supports for high achieving students, including those related to social and emotional development.
• Culturally responsive supports and strategies to prepare high achievers, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, English learners, and first-generation college students, to succeed in selective and highly selective colleges.
• How to make sure services are well aligned across elementary, middle, and high school.
• State policies that create hurdles and disincentives for this agenda.

Areas for additional research:

• More studies on the types of students who are identified for services depending on the type of assessment used.
• Studies that might get “inside the black box” to explain why some initial high achievers remain high achieving all the way to graduation and others don’t, with a special focus on students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and underrepresented racial groups.
• Studies demonstrating the value of advanced learning for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Our champion

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was today named a 2022 Champion for Charter Schools award winner by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS). “Thank you, Governor DeWine, for your steadfast support of public charter schools, their students, families, and communities,” said NAPCS President and CEO Nina Rees in announcing the distinguished award.

Top of the list

Congratulations to the staff, students, and families of Arts and College Preparatory Academy (ACPA) in Columbus. ACPA was the highest-ranked charter school in the state of Ohio in the recent list of best high schools released by U.S. News and World Report. Kudos to all!

Court news

The Ohio Supreme Court this week issued a ruling in a twelve-year-old Dayton charter school case in which a former school leader had been sued to recover funds embezzled by the treasurer. The new ruling noted that the school leader had not “received or collected” the money and thus was not in control of any of the funds that had been embezzled.

Further legal news

Some interesting movements are noted in the pending case where Groveport-Madison Local School District is contesting fines levied on them for failure to adequately transport charter and private school students…although none of those developments are actually part of that actual case. First up, the fine amount has been reduced from $700,000 to just less than $165,000. Second, the amount already deducted from Groveport by ODE to begin repayment is less than half of that fine amount. Third, and most important, the district has also sued one of its transportation vendors over the matter and is looking to replace them for the upcoming school year.

Significant revisions

The Urban Institute recently updated a portion of the findings from a national study they conducted of school funding patterns. Specifically, they fixed the way in which their formula accounted for funds flowing to charter schools. The results now show that students from low-income families in Pennsylvania and Ohio have received slightly less funding for their schools than wealthier students for many years. It is an almost 180-degree difference in the previous findings.

The view from West Virginia

Preliminary data indicate that West Virginia’s first five charter schools—on track to open this fall, if everything goes well—will welcome at least 1,500 students. The enrollment numbers are being led by two of the three brick-and-mortar schools.

*****

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1. Anyone want an update on how the haters’ anti-voucher lawsuit is going? Me neither. But here it is anyway. (Dayton 24/7 News, 4/27/22)
    
2. How about an update on the wrangling between the Ohio Department of Education and one of the school districts that was sued for failure to properly transport charter and voucher kids? Better, right? Some interesting items in this little piece regarding Groveport-Madison Local School’s transportation issues. Such as: For some reason, the district’s fine has been reduced from $700,000 to just under $165,000, although they are still complaining about it. Additionally, the district has turned around and sued one of its transportation vendors and is looking to replace them for the upcoming school year. Somehow, I feel like that court case could reveal some additional, most-interesting information. (Columbus Messenger, 4/28/22)
    
3. Of far more import, here’s the list of the three finalists for state superintendent, announced yesterday. (Cleveland.com, 4/28/22)
    
4. Keeping with the topic of the day, Parma City Schools is touting the updating of its curriculum and materials. It has taken years to complete, they say, during which the district has notched lower achievement and student growth numbers. They are confident that those numbers will start to go back up now that they have all the new goodies bound up in a fetching red tape bow. I, personally, am underwhelmed. (Cleveland.com, 4/27/22)
    
5. And finally, a fantastic way to end the week: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was named a 2022 Champion for Charter Schools award winner by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. A huge and well-deserved honor. (NAPCS, 4/29/22)
   

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NOTE: Chester E. Finn, Jr., Fordham's president emeritus and distinguished senior fellow and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is also the author of the forthcoming book “Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP,” to be published in two weeks by the Harvard Education Press.

How will we gauge the learning loss that young Americans suffered due to Covid-forced school shutdowns? How do we see whether achievement gaps between groups of students are widening or narrowing? How do we know whether kids in Pennsylvania are better or worse readers at the end of middle school than their peers in Colorado?

We wouldn’t know that or much else without a test that may have escaped your notice altogether, unless you’re some sort of education-obsessed policy maker or policy wonk like me. I’m talking about the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known in wonk circles as “NAEP” and among sophisticates as the “Nation’s Report Card.” But what is it, and why isn’t it on your radar? How does it work? Can it keep generating vital data as testing retreats across much of American education, especially since we’re talking about a national test run by the federal government. Two scary thoughts, yes? Also scary is the possible fragmentation of its unusual decision-making body, which so far has done well at keeping NAEP out of politics.

NAEP emerged during the 1960s, followed by major overhauls in the 1980s and again in 2002. Though it has enjoyed considerable support from private foundations, today it’s almost entirely paid for by Uncle Sam and administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. It tests schoolchildren in grades 4, 8, and 12 in ten subjects, though on varying schedules and reporting its results at various levels: always for the country as a whole but sometimes just in one or two grade levels. Since enactment of No Child Left Behind, it has been required to report reading and math results every two years for states (and a handful of urban districts) as well as for the country as a whole, though state results are inexplicably limited to grades 4 and 8.

NAEP is how we learned, for example, that 44 percent of White eighth graders reached the “proficient” level in math in 2019, compared with just 14 percent of Black students, underscoring the persistent “achievement gaps” that recent reform efforts have failed to close.

NAEP is also how we found out that eighth graders in Massachusetts attained proficiency that year at twice the rate of their classmates in Louisiana. And that’s how we’ll soon know the extent of learning setbacks wrought by the pandemic.

Yet few Americans are aware of this test. Nor are many educators. That’s because NAEP tests only a sample of students and reports nothing about individual children, individual schools, or the vast majority of school systems. So it has little impact on the lives of families, teachers, or pupils.

Also shielding NAEP from controversy is that what it tests get decided through a multiyear process overseen by an autonomous policy-setting body called the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB).

That bipartisan body, which I had the honor to chair during its first two years, consists of twenty-six individuals appointed by the Secretary of Education after an elaborate vetting process. It includes two governors, two legislators, principals and superintendents, school board members, testing experts, teachers at every level, curriculum specialists, parents, a private school rep, and several members of the “general public.” The current chair is former North Carolina governor Bev Perdue (D). Her predecessor was Mississippi’s Haley Barbour (R).

For a federal entity, it’s remarkably independent. Its duties include deciding what subjects will be tested, what’s on those tests, and the methods used in gathering and explaining their results. Its 1988 authorizing statute—primarily worked out between the Reagan administration and the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—says the board shall exercise “its independent judgment free from inappropriate influences and special interests . . . independent of the Secretary and other offices and officers of the Department.”

The capacity of such a Noah’s Ark body to reach consensus over the years on all manner of touchy issues has done much to shield NAEP from political crossfire. But because its test “frameworks” need updating every decade or two, and because this is happening in a suspicious, hair-trigger country, agreement within the board is getting harder to forge. A recent fracas over future reading tests grew rancorous before cool heads pushed for compromise and pricklier subjects lie ahead.

Probably the board’s toughest trial has been creating and maintaining NAEP’s trio of benchmarks,” labeled basic, proficient, and advanced. Responding to education goals set in 1989 by Bush 41 and forty-nine governors, NAGB set out to create criteria for student achievement. Nothing like this had ever been done, and it triggered intense controversy among scholars, educators, and statisticians. But NAGB stood fast, refining the level-setting process but never abandoning it. As a result, those cut points on the NAEP scale have turned into the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to stable, rigorous national standards for student learning in the elementary and secondary years.

But can it last? Can the Nation’s Report Card not just sustain its reputation as the gold standard of achievement testing but also stay sheltered from political battles and culture wars over what young Americans should be taught?

Don’t count on it. Divisive issues loom. Can NAGB update its science framework without coming unglued over environmental issues, maybe even evolution? Can it update its history and civics tests without damaging battles over, say, 1619 versus 1776? Can it sustain its rigorous benchmarks when some view even the documentation of learning gaps as racist? Can it sidestep today’s roaring arguments about what kids should and shouldn’t read? Can it stay focused on academic achievement when senior government officials seem to be losing interest in learning outcomes, even in testing itself, and when many educators favor greater attention to kids’ social and emotional well-being? As NAEP grows ever more expensive, will Congress continue to find the money? As outside groups push for reforms and alterations, who will decide which ones deserve to be made—and can NAEP preserve its all-important “trend lines” while modernizing some of its hoary ways?

One of the secrets of NAEP’s success and longevity has been its low profile. As it gets more attention, it’s bound to grow more controversial. And that’s a risky circumstance today, especially for anything associated with Uncle Sam. 

Classical education is a holistic approach that is geared toward the cultivation of students’ minds, imagination, perception, and emotions so that they can be equipped with character traits that will help them to flourish and thrive both inside the school community and well beyond. It moves beyond the idea that education is only about transmitting information and skills and embraces the far more ambitious goal of character formation, both for the sake of a well-lived individual life and for the maintenance a healthy democracy and flourishing communities.

Although I am a proponent of classical education, we do not have to choose between a classical or more mainstream model of curriculum. That’s a false dilemma for educators interested in virtue education. Virtue education can be incorporated into a more mainstream educational setting precisely because it does not need to be an extra subject that is added atop a school’s academic program. Ideally, virtue education should permeate that existing curriculum as much as possible, because every discipline affords appropriate occasions to incorporate lessons about the virtues that the school has decided are important to the formation of its students. In many disciplines, the incorporation of virtue lessons and standards will be intuitive. One obvious example is English language arts (ELA).

Looking at the ELA curriculum standards in my own state, I’m struck by the extent to which the emphasis is on technique and mechanics, even at the earliest stages of literacy. In Kindergarten and first grade, for example, the standards are wholly taken up with phonetics and the identification of the formal features of texts and stories. The underlying assumption is that reading is merely a technical skill and ought to be taught and measured accordingly. Though of course there’s an essential technical dimension, I deny that the educational value of literacy can or should be reduced to this. There is an ineradicable ethical dimension to the study of the literary arts, and we ought to think more carefully about how reading, hearing, and writing stories play an essential role in forming our moral imagination and character.

In teaching children how to read, listen to, and write stories, we are forming their imagination, perception, and moral character. We should be honest and serious about this. Hence it’s wrong to think that kids should read whatever they happen to like or that any reading is good for them. The stories we share with our students are essential to the people they will become because we come to understand ourselves and our world, to a significant extent and from a very young age, through stories. They shape our imagination, which in turn forms our practical deliberation and choices.

As creatures who deliberate and decide for ourselves—who we will become and what we will do with our lives—each one of us faces the task of writing the stories of our own lives through the choices we make, both big and small. Each one of us must decide, to some degree, what sort of character we are going to be and into what sort of dramas we are going to enter as we grow and develop over time and as the narrative shape of our lives comes into view. Furthermore, our choices are not made in a cultural vacuum—we bring to them a stock of stories about heroes (or villains or fools) and their adventures (or misadventures). These stories have watered and fed our imagination over the years and inevitably shape the possibilities we see for ourselves. Stories give us exemplars—characters we might aspire to imitate in our own lives—and show us the potential consequences of certain choices, both for ourselves and others. In this way, stories are essential to the inculcation of virtue (or vice).

From an early age, then, young children need to be exposed to stories that show them what good and bad characters are through plot that reveal the narrative dimension of their lives. They should learn to pay attention to what the characters they read about are doing and why—but also to what these characters are thinking, feeling, imagining, and seeing that helps to explain what they do. Very young readers need to learn how to name their own emotions and life circumstances and to come to understand their own experiences through stories about other people. Older readers need to learn about the difference between good and bad choices and lives. Both stages are necessary for the development of virtue.

To pay attention to the content of literary texts is not to neglect the formal elements that are important to literacy. Rather, it is to notice how, in literary art, form and content are mutually illuminating. The narrative structure of stories is an imitation of the narrative structure of human lives, which is why stories are so essential to ethical formation. A story shows us how its character’s choices shape the arc of the story itself—viz., how these choices can determine the direction of the story itself, leading them to happy endings or tragic outcomes. When we consider what stories we should teach to our students, we should be thinking substantively about what sorts of characters (good and bad) and what sorts of lives we want our students to read about, discuss, and be formed by.

Reading literature is the space where our moral imaginations are formed, so let us think deeply and clearly about how we wish to form our students and why, as well as what literature best helps us to meet our more substantive educational goals.

The Supreme Court decision that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education had a great impact on schools across much of the United States. Even though not every school received the same integration orders, and some did not receive any at all, the desegregation of schools had significant effects on Black students’ outcomes. Those effects, it turns out, varied by region.

Previous studies have attempted to investigate the effect that court-ordered desegregation had on Black students. Yet such studies were often flawed. They were unable to identify when students were exposed to desegregation orders, where the students lived while they attended school, and how the timing of their exposure to integration affected their long-term outcomes. A recent NBER working paper uses a new methodology to address these flaws and provide a better picture of the effects of court-ordered desegregation.

The initial data in this study comprise a set of districts that, in 1968, had at least 15,000 students with 10–90 percent being Black. This created a national sample of 187 medium-to-large districts with racially diverse student populations. The researchers matched each district with its date-of-desegregation order implementation by using data from a 1987 desegregation study as well as from ProPublica and the American Communities Project—each of which contained information on districts’ desegregation plans and court orders. Districts that were in the initial sample but never were under a desegregation order were used, at times, for control purposes. The researchers linked large census and ACS samples to personal identifiers called protected identity keys to determine information about their sample respondents’ counties of birth. All this resulted in 5.1 million individuals, born between 1945 and 1985, who identified as non-Hispanic White or Black. After accounting for repeats and excluding individuals younger than twenty-four or older than fifty-four, the researchers created a new data set to include, for each individual, their birth year, American Community Survey response year, county of birth, race, and sex.

With this sample, they could look at what age students were when they were exposed to court-ordered desegregation, so the researchers could dig more deeply into the amount of exposure students had to court-ordered desegregation. The researchers focused on the indicators of human capital, such as the level of education attained, and indicators of economic self-sufficiency, such as employment and income.

For Black students in the South, analysts found a 15 percent increase in likelihood to complete high school and an increase in one full year of schooling for Black students who spent the most time in desegregated schools. These findings are similar for indicators of economic self-sufficiency, and the effects on economic self-sufficiency impact even more Southern Black students. The researchers hypothesize that the strong effects of desegregation on Black student outcomes in the South may be due to the drastic change that desegregation orders brought to the region.

Although this study is historically focused, it carries important modern-day implications. School segregation is still an issue of public concern in the twenty-first century—79 percent of White students in public schools attend schools where 50 percent of the students are of their same race. In San Francisco, a recent study found that students attending schools that are indirectly segregated based on attendance zones are more likely to take part in risky behaviors. It is clear that more diversified schools have a positive impact on minority students, and it is clear that there is progress to be made. Diverse-by-design charters and other school-choice initiatives may help to break the binds of school zones and help to create opportunities for all students; it is also important to learn from past practices and mistakes to move forward.

SOURCE: Garrett Anstreicher, Jason Fletcher, and Owen Thompson, “The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation,” NBER Working Papers (April 2022).

Cheers

• We must stop the Department of Education’s proposed rule changes from stifling charter school growth. —Michael Bloomberg
• Hawaii had a severe shortage of special-ed teachers, but its targeted salary raise cut the vacancies in half within a few years. —NPR
• Mississippi education superintendent Carey Wright is set to retire after an illustrious career. —AP News
• “Bloomberg invests $200 million in NYC’s high-profile charter school networks.” —NY Post

Jeers

• Republican candidate for Alabama governor Tim James is attacking an LGBT-friendly charter school. —Reason
• After three decades of rising numbers, and partly because of hostile politics, California’s charter enrollment has fallen. —EdSource

• Dropping SAT requirements inflated Ivy-league application numbers and made this year’s admissions cycle the most competitive on record. —Wall Street Journal
• A revised study cited at a trial now comes to the opposite conclusion: that low-income students in Pennsylvania have received slightly less funding for many years. —Chalkbeat Philadelphia
• “Coach’s prayer receives Jesuitical analysis by Supreme Court.” —Education Next
• Experts say child and teen mental health has been declining since 2019, with some calling it a national crisis. —New York Times
• “Enrollment losses in cities prompt talk of school closures.” —Chalkbeat
• Reading Recovery has been found to have a negative impact on children in later grades. —APM Reports

1. Arts and College Preparatory Academy (a.k.a. ACPA) here in Columbus was the highest rated charter high school in Ohio, according to U.S. News and World Report. (Cleveland.com, 4/26/22)  
2. Speaking of public school choice (were we?), Global Impact STEM Academy in Springfield appears to be thriving and looking to expand. More seats, more programs, and more access to postsecondary credits for its super nerdy driven students. (Springfield News-Sun, 4/25/22)  
3. Private school choice? Not so much. St. Joseph Parish School in northeast Ohio announced its closing after 100 years of service to local families due to declining enrollment. (I ask you: how many declining enrollment district schools have we written about here where the next step is to give them more money? 25? 50?) There is mention of parish help in getting St. Joe’s students into other nearby Catholic schools, but sadly no mention of help in transferring any EdChoice voucher. I hope there is and it’s just not covered. Because that is a thing which families can do. Because that’s how they work. And all of the schools are on the list to accept vouchers next year. Just, you know, sayin’. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 4/26/22)  
4. The hard workin’ folks at Medina City Schools were excited to tell their elected school board about a conference they are going to attend this summer in which they will be recognized for their prowess and success with “curriculum and academics” related to “21st Century learning experiences”. This is one of those frustrating articles where you think at the start of every paragraph they are going to actually explain what this work is and why it is laudatory (my kid spitballed that they might have stumbled upon helium after a central office party or perhaps begun teaching evolution) but it never ever gets there and pivots to “in other news…” instead. While they might have talked about what these “experiences” and “academics” were, no one bothered to record what they said. Guess you’ll just have to pay for the conference if you want to know. (Cleveland.com, 4/25/22)  
5. And finally today, I believe this is the textbook definition of the term “hardball”. (Cleveland.com, 4/26/22)  

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