Gadfly Bites 10/15/21—Jarring

1. In case you missed it, Ohio released school and district report cards yesterday for the 2020-21 school year. They are, in general, not pretty. Our own Aaron Churchill was quoted in Gongwer in immediate response to the data…and in response to the state teachers union’s very…“idiosyncratic” hot take. (Gongwer Ohio, 10/14/21)
    
2. Speaking of Aaron, his recent blog post making the case for partisan labeling of candidates in school board elections is quoted and discussed—albeit a little stream-of-consciousness-y—in an editorial by the owner/publisher of the Highland County Press. (Highland County Press, 10/14/21)
   
   

3. As is usual the last few years, Jeremy Kelley is the first reporter out of the gate looking at report card data for schools and districts in his area. Some districts have done decently well for themselves in the measured areas (I’ll bet you can guess who those might be), especially given pandemic disruptions. Some have not. And I’ll bet you can guess those ones too. (Dayton Daily News, 10/15/21) Statewide data is summarized by Robert Higgs and Rich Exner of Cleveland.com. They have noticed some similar patterns in districts across Ohio as in the Dayton area. (Cleveland.com, 10/14/21)
    
4. Getting a bit more local, Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon gave his take on his district’s report card. While he called the generally bad news “not surprising”, he put the onus firmly on the switch to remote learning (“jarring for us all”) and highlighted whatever positives he could. That basically means graduation rate, which somehow managed to climb in districts across the state despite poor performance on other metrics. I am hopeful that some more detailed analysis will find a way to explain this obvious-seeming contradiction. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 10/14/21) Toledo City Schools’ data looked a lot like CMSD’s. In response, Superintendent Romules Durant cast doubt on test score data. “It’s skewed because we had 5,000 students who were in virtual learning,” he explained to the Blade, “for 4,000 of them, the parent chose not to send them in. Which means 4,000 students got a zero. So to put it in perspective...if your child had four tests, three of them they got 100s, but you chose not to send them in for the fourth test and they got a zero, they would then go from a 100 percent average to a 75 percent average.” Interesting idea that parents were somehow selective as to which tests they would or wouldn’t have their children go in for. He goes on to add that state testing “often does not really give us good valid data to measure of off. It would have been much better if they controlled for that variable and just focused on students who were in attendance.” Expect variations on this theme to grow in the coming days…kinda like algae in a dirty pool. (Toledo Blade, 10/14/21)

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