The Education Gadfly
7.17.2026
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CHEERS

Cheers (again!) to the Lone Star State, via Chad Aldeman (again!):

In 2023, the Texas Legislature passed its version of an automatic enrollment policy. Going forward, school districts would have to automatically enroll students who scored in the top 40 percent on the grade five state math test into advanced coursework in grade six, putting them on a pathway to complete Algebra I by eighth grade. The idea was simple: Too many capable students were being left out of advanced math pathways not because they couldn’t handle it, but because no one told them they could.

After two years, the latest STAAR results show double the number of students accelerating in math, with low-income students gaining access at the fastest rate. Plus:

When TEA analyzes math results by students’ enrolled grade level rather than the specific test they took, proficiency rates increased across every middle school grade in 2026.

JEERS

In The Hechinger Report, Kate Taylor reports on how Cambridge (MA) Public Schools placed all eighth graders in Algebra I—and how the majority of those students will have to repeat the course. Expanded access to advanced math is an important element in providing better opportunities to under-identified students, but it only works for students who are academically prepared to succeed. In other words: Not everyone.

—

The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany visits psychologist Peter Gray to learn about his work on the value of play, and what it means in a digital world. His views range from provocative (“Kids should be free to play without their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online”) to outrageous. Gray, who sent his own son to a school with no formal coursework, blames Common Core for kids’ mental health struggles because a survey showed increasing stress between 2009 and 2013, before and after the standards’ adoption. What he didn’t know until Kaitlyn pointed it out was that the questions on the survey had changed, explaining the massive shifts in student responses. Plus, did he consider that the aftermath of the Great Recession—also happening back then—was awfully stressful? But whatever, #ThanksCommonCore.

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a twice-weekly free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation.

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Dale Chu
7.16.2026
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Look closely at the push for career and technical education and you’ll see schools being asked to do three different things. First, provide students with a rigorous academic foundation. Second, offer high-quality CTE coursework and pathways leading to valuable industry credentials. Third, serve as the connective tissue between students and regional labor markets through employer partnerships, apprenticeships, and work-based learning.

The first two responsibilities fit naturally within the mission of K–12 education. The third is much more complicated. It requires aligning schools with a sprawling employment ecosystem—employers, colleges, workforce agencies, and others that operate under different incentives, funding streams, calendars, and even legislative oversight. Without recognizing that distinction, schools risk being held responsible for challenges that extend well beyond their reach.

All of this sits within the broader effort to reinvent the American high school, a theme explored in these pages as part of Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon. Watershed Advisors’ Kunjan Narechania and Jessica Baghian provided a sobering analysis of why the secondary experience remains largely unchanged from 50 years ago and why the pursuit of CTE is so daunting:

Today, workforce improvement efforts are funded by a variety of federal agencies and spread across a potpourri of state bureaucracies, public institutions, nonprofit organizations, and industry groups… They point to a system so fragmented that it’s hard to navigate for state and local agencies, let alone a high school guidance counselor or rising sophomore… For years, we’ve looked to superintendents and principals to single-handedly reimagine high school. That’s not realistic. We can’t expect local educators alone to reorganize a system that stretches outside of education and beyond city and state lines.

That observation is not an argument against CTE. High-quality pathways matter. So do industry-recognized credentials that carry real labor market value. Schools should help students explore careers and graduate from high school with viable and productive options.

None of these efforts, however, can substitute for the primary credential that all students leave with: the diploma. If that no longer reliably signals readiness, the rest of the workforce agenda is left trying to compensate for a problem it cannot solve. The students who coast to graduation on mere attendance today are the workers who will struggle to navigate training requirements tomorrow. And the employees who cannot handle the jobs they were told they were ready for.

Finishing high school nowadays requires persistence more than proficiency, and even that low standard has been weakened by credit recovery programs. Grade inflation has worsened the problem, making graduation rates one of the least credible metrics in education today. The result is a diploma that no longer certifies what people assume it does. Teachers know this. So do employers.

Former Indiana governor and Purdue president Mitch Daniels has described these deficiencies as a “breach of warranty.” The remedy, he argues, begins well before students reach high school:

Through one of the educational reforms for which I advocated as governor, Indiana prohibits the so-called social promotion of children… too many schools choose to shuffle along kids who are not ready, dooming them to struggle and failure later on… A little accountability can go a long way. But whenever the K–12 system can devise ways to disguise its shortcomings, it will. Oregon made a cryingstock of itself by ending proficiency exams for its high school graduates… A lot of losing football coaches in Oregon wish they, too, could just stop keeping score, but, of course, football is too important for such nonsense.

The toolkit available to states and districts is not limited to retention policies. If policymakers were serious about ensuring that a high school diploma meant something, they could commit to higher grading standards. They could revisit end-of-course exams and graduation requirements. They could also make fuller use of A–F grading for schools, not only to hold them accountable but also to give parents clearer information about school performance while there is still time to act on it. These are reforms that lie squarely within the authority of K–12 education.

Higher education is already responding to the weakening of the diploma’s signal. Over 3,000 faculty across the University of California system recently signed an open letter calling for reinstating the SAT and ACT, citing “severe preparation deficits” among incoming students. While tightening testing requirements is a welcome correction, it also underscores the need for higher expectations much earlier in the pipeline. It further explains why employers continue to rely on the college degree as a proxy for readiness, given that the diploma itself carries little informational value.

That is why restoring the diploma’s credibility should be the centerpiece of both workforce preparation and college preparation. CTE coursework and valuable credentials can strengthen that foundation. Work-based learning can build on it. But none of those initiatives can compensate for a diploma that has lost its meaning.

CTE deserves its growing bipartisan support. Schools should continue to expand high-quality pathways and help students earn credentials with real value in the labor market. But they should not be expected to solve the cross-sector coordination problems in connecting education to employment. The most important contribution K–12 can make—and the one it fully controls—is ensuring that every high school diploma is a trustworthy credential.

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Curriculum & Instruction
Governance
Teachers & School Leaders
Kathleen Porter-Magee
7.16.2026
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The question of whether, when, and how public funding may flow to religious schools has been contested for more than 150 years, animated by the tension between the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which bars the state from sponsoring religion, and its Free Exercise Clause, which restricts the burdens that can be placed on religion.

Over the past 25 years, the Supreme Court has resolved that tension in stages: first holding that the Constitution does not forbid public dollars from reaching religious schools through parents’ free choices (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002); then that states cannot deny religious schools a benefit freely available to their secular counterparts (Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, 2017; Espinoza v. Montana, 2020); and, finally, that states cannot evade that rule by drawing a line between a school’s religious status and its religious use of funds by saying, in effect, “we will fund a religious school, but not if it does religious things with the money” (Carson v. Makin, 2022).

Now the Court has agreed to hear yet another case in this realm, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which raises a different and perhaps more vexing question: What happens when the free exercise of religion collides with a state’s anti-discrimination laws? How the Court answers could determine whether states may attach conditions to public benefits that religious institutions cannot, in conscience, accept.

St. Mary centers on a conflict over Colorado’s universal preschool program, which promises every family in the state a free year of early education at the provider of their choice. To participate, a preschool must sign an agreement pledging not to base its enrollment decisions on a list of characteristics that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Two parish preschools in the Archdiocese of Denver—St. Mary’s in Littleton and St. Bernadette’s in Lakewood—say that signing such a pledge would require them to adopt policies that contradict Church teaching on marriage and the human person. The case was joined by Dan and Lisa Sheley, parents whose children attend St. Mary’s, who argue they are shut out of the universal program their own taxes help fund.

The Tenth Circuit sided with Colorado, reasoning that the state’s nondiscrimination requirement is neutral, generally applicable, and not motivated by hostility toward religion. Which is to say, the appellate court ruled against the schools and the Sheleys.

The Supreme Court agreed to review that holding, but on deliberately narrow grounds. Specifically, the justices declined the preschools’ invitation to reconsider Employment Division v. Smith, the 1990 decision that governs when religious objectors must obey neutral laws. That means this case will focus narrowly on two questions. First, whether Colorado’s requirement is truly “neutral and generally applicable,” a question complicated by the fact that Colorado already allows some providers selective exemptions from its enrollment rules. Second, whether the “status/use” logic of Trinity Lutheran and Carson applies here. In Trinity Lutheran, the Court held that a state could not exclude an institution from a generally available public benefit because of its religious status—that is, simply because it was religious. Carson went a step further, holding that a state cannot exclude a school based on religious use—that is, because it would use the benefit to teach the faith. The question now is whether a state can attach conditions to participation in a public program that would force religious schools to choose between their beliefs and their participation.

That first question hinges on an inconvenient fact: As things currently stand, Colorado does not actually require every provider to enroll every child. Participating preschools may reserve seats for certain children for a variety of state-approved reasons. Preference can be given to students with disabilities, for instance, or to children of the school’s employees. What’s more, the state runs a case-by-case process for approving a school’s customized enrollment preferences and has granted 17 so far, including preferences for fully vaccinated children and even for children with dual-language needs willing to eat a vegetarian diet. The parishes argue that a state making room for vegetarian diets, but not religious mission, is not applying its rule neutrally.

The conflict here is real, with potentially far-reaching implications for private school choice programs. The earlier precedents focused on programs that excluded religious institutions by design. Colorado’s program is open to religious and nonreligious schools alike, and the law in question was written to prevent discrimination and protect families—including LGBTQ families, whose fear of being turned away at a schoolhouse door is not hypothetical. The state has a sincere and legitimate interest in protecting families against discrimination, just as the parishes have a sincere and legitimate interest in maintaining and operating according to their beliefs.

Whichever way the Court rules, the implications will run far beyond the Archdiocese of Denver’s 36 Catholic preschools.

If Colorado prevails, other states may have a roadmap for excluding religious schools from state-funded programs without ever saying so. That is to say, a state program only needs to attach a condition to participation in a publicly funded program that religious providers cannot, in conscience, accept.

If the preschools prevail, on the other hand, the Court will have extended the logic of Carson to its natural conclusion: What a state cannot do through exclusion, it cannot do through conditions. But a ruling for the preschools means that some families will encounter, in a program their taxes support, schools whose conditions of enrollment they regard as a closed door—a cost that deserves to be acknowledged.

Regardless of the outcome, states will remain free not to fund private schools. What the Justices will decide is whether the requirement that states must extend private school funding to religious schools can be undone in the fine print. Or, said more simply, whether a guarantee the Constitution will not let states deny openly can instead be denied by condition.

Policy Priority:
Quality Choices
Topics:
School Finance
Curriculum & Instruction
Governance
Private School Choice
Mike Schmoker
7.16.2026
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Good evidence shows that we’re stuck in a “learning recession.” We also need to consider the likelihood of a connected recession in something indispensable to student learning, namely effective teaching.

I often invite audiences to identify the same missing word in three eerily similar quotes by reputable educators over two decades. Each laments the gradual disappearance of something central to effective schooling. By the second quote, most of the audience correctly guesses that the missing word is indeed teaching.

The most recent example comes from author and consultant Michael Sonbert, whose observations in thousands of classrooms demonstrate that, however hard they work, “teachers aren’t teaching.” That is, they rarely provide explicit, sustained, whole-class lessons.

Instead, they’re more prone than ever to facilitate—to have individuals or groups complete assignments on screens or worksheets, often at their own (sometimes dawdling) pace. Sonbert dubs this shift the “biggest trend in teaching today.” It is tacitly confirmed by the photos that dominate education publications, which illustrate the pervasiveness of group activities involving crayons and colored markers.

None of my audiences balks at these findings.

Alarmed by this trend, a superintendent and assistant superintendent in Connecticut did some digging and reported their findings in an article titled “What’s Missing in Teacher Prep.” They made two discoveries. First, that their teachers had graduated from 17 different pre-service programs. Second, that none of them had received any “practical experience” in the most vital elements of instruction—like “checking for understanding.”

Similarly, in a Fordham Institute piece in 2020 called “Training teachers to fail,” two Minnesota teachers decry the preparation they received from two well-known ed schools. “Oddly enough,” they write, “we were not trained in how to actually teach” (their emphasis). They were warned, moreover, not to be seen “at the front of the room” during observations. Good thing, as they received “minimal to nonexistent training in effective whole-group instruction.”

I’ve observed this pattern in countless classroom tours. In one large district, we set out to find teachers who taught in a sequence of calibrated steps punctuated by checks for understanding and re-teaching. We couldn’t find any, even in A+ schools. The teachers knew the terminology but not the execution.

We need not despair at these grim findings. They represent an opportunity for schools to make rapid, substantial achievement gains.

Explicit, structured instruction—inclusive of frequent student interaction—has a prodigious pedigree. It accounts for the success of the highest-achieving teachers and is indispensable to effective literacy-based lessons across the curriculum. In a study of urban school systems, it was found to have a “whopping” impact on student outcomes—but was as rare as it was effective. 

Only hardened purists now reject the evidence that the right kind of direct, frontal instruction is hugely effective at every level, from kindergarten to university. As literacy expert Mark Seidenberg makes clear, it is integral to and must often precede successful discovery- or project-based teaching, which must be “closely coupled with explicit guidance and instruction.” Experts increasingly acknowledge that the best, conceptually oriented assignments typically combine appropriate amounts of “productive struggle” and “inquiry” with adequate amounts of modeling and guided, sequential, whole-class instruction. With proper training in such teaching, virtually every teacher would achieve significantly higher outcomes, almost immediately.

And there’s the rub.

Starbucks once had a nationwide, one-day shutdown to thoroughly re-train every employee on how to pull a good double shot—the foundation of the espresso business. We need a similar—if lengthier—pause to train or re-train every teacher in the fundamentals of effective teaching.

But what we glibly call “training” is more often mere presenting. That must change. Serious instructional training must be conducted like an effective lesson: Each element of effective, whole-class instruction must be explained and modeled, in manageable steps, with participants taking turns to practice with peers until they demonstrate adequate competence. That’s how I learned them in just a few hours, after which I benefited from targeted coaching. It’s how the best alternative certification programs operate.

Our promiscuous use of the word “training” has kept us from enjoying the fruits of what the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki has called a performance “revolution” in every sphere. He cites just one profession where rigorous, mastery-based training has yet to have a game-changing impact: education.

Small wonder. As Seidenberg observes, “Prospective teachers aren’t trained to teach.” Or as Robert Pondiscio tells us, “training is a dirty word” in most teacher-prep institutions. Among the most bizarre, quietly calamitous facts about U.S. education is this: Its premier research organization, the venerable American Educational Research Association (AERA), officially spurns the very idea of training practitioners because that doesn’t jibe with the Association’s ideologically driven culture.

Schools can’t afford to wait until ed schools outgrow, or are forced to shed, their longstanding hostility to praxis. Our best hope, right now, is to take on the difficult task of reorienting school- and district-based PD toward mastery-based training. Upon completion, teachers should immediately collect, share, and celebrate positive, measurable assessment results, starting with those from individual lessons. As Tom Guskey points out, such frequent “small wins” are the key to continuous, energized effort—and professional morale. We could use some of that right now.

This ain’t rocket science. It’s organizational effectiveness 101. Determine, then focus ferociously on, the highest-leverage practices; train and re-train to mastery; monitor and coach to ensure and refine implementation; praise and celebrate successes, early and often. 

Any school or district could begin doing these things. How about this coming school year?

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Teachers & School Leaders
Brandon L. Wright
7.16.2026
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Low-income children face many disadvantages that impede academic success. But how much do those disadvantages matter, and how early do their effects become visible? Test scores—the standard tool for answering such questions—can take us only so far because, by the time children sit for them, family background, socioeconomic status, and early educational experiences have already shaped much of what they measure. The scores reflect not only students’ capacity to learn, but also the language, instruction, stability, and opportunities they’ve encountered—or not—along the way. The data therefore cannot cleanly distinguish underlying potential from the accumulated effects of disadvantage.

A recent working paper from the U.K. by John Jerrim, Maria Palma Carvajal, and Tim Morris takes an unusual, and surely controversial, approach to this problem. Rather than identifying high-potential children based on early test scores, the authors use a measure derived from children’s DNA—entering already-contested terrain, given the long and fraught history of efforts to distinguish innate ability from environmental advantage.

Their measure, called an education polygenic index (PGI), combines thousands of small genetic differences associated with spending more years in education. (See my colleague Mike Petrilli’s review of a book about education PGI for background.) It’s important to note that the measure is not a genetic IQ test, does not determine any child’s future, and is far too noisy and entangled with family and social circumstances to justify decisions about individual students.

Instead, its value here is narrower: Because a child’s DNA is fixed before birth, the measure lets researchers compare children with similarly high scores on the researchers’ education-linked genetic index, then examine how sharply their early skills and later academic outcomes diverge depending on family income. (For readers worried that the index is too imprecise to support much, the authors test a range of assumptions about its reliability, and the basic findings hold.)

The authors define low-income and high-income families as those in the bottom and top quarters, respectively, of a measure of average family income collected across multiple years on the United Kingdom’s Millennium Cohort Study, which has followed children born between 2000 and 2002 from infancy through adolescence. Their analysis includes 6,118 children with available genetic data, more than 99 percent of whom are white—a major limitation reflecting both the difficulty of using current polygenic indices across ancestry groups and the researchers’ effort to avoid mistaking ancestry-related social differences for genetic effects.

Of particular interest are the 143 low-income and 674 high-income children whose PGI scores fall in the top quartile of the measure. The researchers conduct comparisons in four areas: early cognitive skills, including vocabulary; literacy experiences at home; attitudes toward school; and self-reported grades on national exams taken around age 16.

The first notable result, on early cognitive skills, is how soon the gaps appear. The authors estimate that low-income three-year-olds with similarly high PGI scores perform about 0.4 standard deviations below their high-income peers on a vocabulary assessment. By age five, the estimated gap is roughly 0.7 standard deviations. Both gaps are statistically significant, though the evidence that the gap itself widened is less definitive.

Beyond vocabulary, the findings on early cognitive skills are less uniform. Income gaps also appear on tests of nonverbal pattern recognition, but they do not widen between ages five and seven, and the authors find no robust difference in math scores at age seven.

Family-income gaps also appear in children’s early literacy experiences at home. Parents in the low-income group report reading to their children and taking them to libraries less often. Those gaps are not enormous, but they suggest that differences in early literacy experiences may help explain part of the vocabulary divide.

The results on attitudes toward school are mostly inconclusive. One curious exception is that low-income children with high PGI scores are more likely to say they enjoy math at ages seven and 11.

By age 16, the academic divide associated with family income is hard to miss. Low-income children in the high-index group are roughly 20–30 percentage points less likely to earn a top grade in English or math on national exams than their high-income peers. But the gaps are smaller and less consistent when the outcome is merely clearing a basic passing threshold. Most low-income students in the high-index group manage to meet that standard, even as far fewer reach the highest levels.

These are sobering results, though the usual cautions apply with heightened force here, given the use of DNA. Because the group at the heart of the analysis includes just 143 low-income children, several estimates are imprecise. And the genetic measure remains noisy and partly entangled with the very social and environmental influences that the study is trying to distinguish. The paper therefore does not isolate the causal effect of income, nor does it tell us which particular features of disadvantage matter most. It also does not show that low-income children at the top of the researchers’ polygenic index inevitably fall behind. Indeed, the uneven findings across subjects and ages caution against that sort of deterministic reading.

What it does show is that children with similarly high scores on the authors’ genetic measure can have sharply different academic trajectories associated with family income. The divergence is visible in language skills by age three and in top-level exam grades by age 16.

For other researchers, the study demonstrates both the promise and the limits of using genetic information to study academic prospects before test scores have absorbed years of environmental and school influences. Larger and more diverse samples—and better measures—are plainly needed.

For educators and policymakers, the lessons are more immediate. Schools should help all students fulfill their potential, including advanced learners. Yet that is not happening consistently for low-income students. These U.K. findings echo what Fordham has documented about high-achieving, low-income students in the United States: Too many lose academic momentum along the path from K–12. If schools could better identify and cultivate their talents, many more would be prepared to succeed in college, including selective colleges, and beyond.

What this study reinforces is that present achievement is an imperfect guide to future academic success, especially for children whose early opportunities have been constrained by family income. Schools should therefore identify advanced learners broadly and repeatedly rather than screening only once or twice at fixed ages. By then, part of what educators hope to discover may already have been obscured by unequal opportunities.

SOURCE: John Jerrim, Maria Palma Carvajal, and Tim Morris, “Academic outcomes amongst children from rich and poor backgrounds with a genetic disposition for educational attainment: Evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study,” University College London working paper (2026).

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Evidence-Based Learning
Advanced Education
Aaron Churchill
7.15.2026
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Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has long provided the clearest yardstick by which states can compare their students’ math and reading performance to other states. Results from these exams—given biennially in fourth and eighth grade—drive important national and statewide conversations about improving achievement in these two key subjects.

Yet those aren’t the only subjects worthy of such conversations. A solid civics education is essential if our nation is to remain a vibrant, self-governing republic. Regrettably, students’ knowledge of civics often goes unchecked and underdiscussed. Without a federal testing requirement, assessment in social studies is spotty at best. Ohio gives only two such exams, both during high school. At the national level, the NAEP civics assessment has only been given to eighth graders in recent years and results have not been available for states.

What we do know from NAEP is that too few American youngsters understand how their government functions and the principles of citizenship. On the last round of civics testing (2022), not even a quarter of eighth graders met the “proficient” standard, while almost a third scored “below basic.”

But how did Ohio students fare on this assessment?

Answer: We have no idea. Unlike the math and reading results, NAEP civics data have never been reported state by state. Thus, we’ve had no way of comparing Ohio students’ civics knowledge to the national average or to students from Massachusetts, Michigan, or Mississippi.

Fortunately, Ohio now has an opportunity to start seeing how its students stack up nationally. NAEP’s governing board recently announced that states can, at no cost, opt into state-level reporting for the civics assessments.[1] Ohio should absolutely sign up (through the state department of education), not merely for the sake of getting additional data, but also as a catalyst for stronger civics education across this state.

That will happen in several ways. State-level reporting will definitely call more attention to civics. When was the last time anyone saw a news story about Ohio students’ civics or social studies knowledge? A quick online search found no recent local stories about the national NAEP civics results—not surprising given the absence of state-specific data—nor any serious coverage of the state’s own social studies assessments. With nary a peep from the media, it’s easy to pretend that civics doesn’t matter. On the other hand, Ohio-specific NAEP civics data would draw much-needed attention to this subject.

Participation would also challenge Ohio to strengthen civics education. One of the greatest benefits of state-level NAEP reporting in math and reading has been the kick-start it’s given to reform efforts. Leaders of Southern states used their once-lagging NAEP math and reading scores to press for bold school reforms, which have since delivered big for students. And other states have followed their example (Ohio’s literacy initiatives, for instance, are based on Mississippi’s impressive work). Over the past two decades, a number of states have drawn lessons from high-scoring Massachusetts, particularly around its strong standards and accountability systems.

When it comes to civics, it could turn out that Ohio leads the pack. If so, let’s be ready to share lessons with the rest of the nation. More likely, however, Ohio is somewhere in the middle, with much work ahead to reach the summit. Efforts to strengthen civics education are more likely to occur when policy leaders can pinpoint Ohio’s current position and have a clear and measurable goal of becoming the nation’s best state for civics education. 

***

For Ohio to remain a great place to live and raise a family, future generations must learn what it takes to be responsible, engaged citizens. Unfortunately, education’s civic mission is often ignored or taken for granted. As a result, way too many kids receive a subpar civics education. Signing up for state-level NAEP reporting could be just the accelerant that Ohio needs to get moving in the right direction.

[1] States can also participate in state-level reporting of twelfth-grade NAEP math and reading, as well as eighth-grade science, all of which Ohio should also opt into.

Policy Priority:
Standards & Accountability
Topics:
Accountability & Testing
Jeff Murray
7.15.2026
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News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned.

  1. How things are supposed to work: The Summit Academy charter school network was the successful bidder to purchase a closed Canton City Schools building earlier this week. Canton’s elected school board voted in February to close Belle Stone Elementary as part of its effort to consolidate buildings, right-size their footprint, and to boost their precarious budget. At the end of the school year in late May, the closure was immediate. And by mid-July, the process was complete. Belle Stone had multiple charter operators interested and the resulting auction finished with a sale price nearly three times higher than the appraised value. No inefficient underutilization of the property, zero future maintenance costs, and nearly three quarters of a million more bucks in their coffers. Win win win.  (Canton Repository, 7/14/26) How things are not supposed to work: Elected leaders of North Canton City Schools and the City of North Canton voted this week to approve a complicated land swap deal (which we talked about before) in which a number of properties changed hands for a total of about $4. All this despite community objections to several aspects—especially the lack of concrete plans for any of the land or buildings. But as we have previously reported—and as is repeated in this piece—the driving force of the deal is the district trying to avoid the state mandate to sell their soon-to-close middle school to charter or private school competitors. Transparent, disrespectful, and fiscally irresponsible. (Canton Repository, 7/15/26)
     

  2. To end on a happier note: Linden Tree Montessori is a brand new PreK-2 charter school opening soon in Columbus. The school currently rents space from a church in the North Linden neighborhood, but a) it’s almost full up already, and b) leaders plan to add a grade per year until it reaches PreK-8. Which means Linden Tree will be looking for a bigger building in the next couple of years. Will there be an unused district building they could buy? Will an ironclad state law be able to help them do so? Let’s hope they get a Canton outcome and not a North Canton outcome when the time comes. (ABC 6 News, Columbus, 7/13/26)

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Policy Priority:
School Funding
Topics:
Governance