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- Apparently if we want to do these clips three times a week, we have to talk about icky political stuff occasionally. So here it is. Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Warren Morgan’s heart may be full after his district’s levy win last week, but his coffers still have a big hole in them even with a new pile of tens of millions of dollars to shovel into them. No idea what he’s going to do about that, but we do learn in this piece that the Cleveland-area charter schools with which the district partners to share local funds are in for a windfall due to the levy win….just without the budget hole part. (Cleveland.com, 11/8/24)
- Additionally, term limit rules meant that many of the incumbent elected state board members were prevented from running again this year. Thus, other than a former appointee who returned to a seat via the ballot box, all of the members voted in last week are new to the board. Welcome to a whole new board, y’all, in more ways than one. (Ballotpedia, 11/9/24)
- Finally today: This is a non-political story (isn’t it, really?) but still not exactly out of the shadow of ickiness for me. Dayton City Schools is touting its efforts to boost third grade reading scores for its students, crediting everything to their own work and (IMO) downplaying the state’s ironclad mandate to root out bad curricula and get proven science-of-reading-based curricula and materials in front of every student. And since that district-specific work includes a path from “this two-teacher method that was used for two years didn’t work” to “this other two-teacher method worked” to “we can’t afford any two-teacher method anymore” to “we realized before anyone told us that our longstanding curricular materials weren’t any good”, hopefully you’ll understand why my ick-detector is pinging. (Dayton Daily News, 11/9/24) In this companion story, my ick-detector went off once when reading the headline (“All Dayton Public teachers now required to understand how kids learn to read”) and then again when I got to the end of the story and it didn’t talk about that topic in any detail at all. In fact, it sounds like older kids especially just
tragicallymagically don’t learn how to read when younger and continue that way until some magical opportunity arises for them to try and help themselves to change that situation. Oh, and absenteeism is an anchor on kids’ reading proficiency. (Dayton Daily News, 11/10/24)
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