Gadfly Bites 10/25/21—Sometimes, you don’t need to dig deeper

1. Here is a story about the status of the three Ohio school districts currently operating under the (nominal) aegis of an Academic Distress Commission. Having followed this story in detail for the last six years, I didn’t need to read any further than this sentence—“Since 2016, two different CEOs have run the district [Youngstown], thanks to the Ohio legislature.”—to know that it was not going to be worth my time. It is the third sentence. Unfortunately for me, our own Aaron Churchill is quoted further down, so I had to read more. My impression of the piece did not improve. (Cleveland.com, 10/25/21)
    
2. Back in the real world, here is a piece mainly focused on higher-education but it caught my interest for two reasons. The first is that a robotics nerd at Bowling Green State University got to demonstrate some serious acronyms technology for the Governor and the First Lady. And he seemed to have had a whale of a time showing off for them. You love to see it. The second is that the student’s story (career-tech school graduate who goes off to college only to find—oops!—that he could learn and do even more cool tech stuff than he even knew about; then gets an internship, followed by a fancy-a$$ job even before he gets to show off to Mike DeWine graduates) is exactly how all this education stuff is supposed to work. I say it again: You love to see it. Right? (Toledo Blade, 10/25/21)
   
   
3. And finally today, all six of my dedicated Gadfly Bites subscribers know that I don’t care about sports. Despite that, and despite the fact that I understood the impenetrable acronyms and tech speak of the robotics piece above way more than I understood the football jargon used here, this look at KIPP Columbus’ football team—and the effort to build a sports tradition rare among charter schools—is still pretty good. (ThisWeek News, 10/21/21)

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