Gadfly Bites 1/14/19 – Pump up the hysteria

1. Fordham is namechecked in this Dispatch editorial on the topic of funding changes for online charter schools. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/13/19)

2. The dastardly scourge of charter schools rears its head in this piece too, in which a couple of folks in suburban Springboro Schools are incensed (incensed, I say!) over the district’s choice of consultant to assist with their strategic planning process. Doesn’t matter that the dude was previously state supe in both Ohio and Oklahoma. Doesn’t matter that he’s already worked with a bunch of districts in Ohio and elsewhere on just this sort of thing. It only matter that he once was part of a charter school network. We must now duck the witch. Duck him, I say! (Dayton Daily News, 1/12/19)

3. Not enough school-choice-based hysteria for you? Try this then: The headline of this DDN piece says that the state’s voucher program is “to nearly double”. What it really means is that the students in a lot more schools across the state are eligible for vouchers due to consistently low academic performance in those school buildings. That is all that really qualifies as news here. The number of vouchers available = old news. The names of participating private schools = super old news. So why make a hysterical headline like that over some bean counting? The second part of the headline—“some suburbs affected” (gotta love the passive-aggressive use of the term “affected” too)—explains it for me. (Dayton Daily News, 1/14/19) A less-impassioned version of the story, including use of the conditional—but still not completely accurate—“may switch”, comes from a TV news outlet in Cleveland. To clarify, though, all the kids in Cleveland Metropolitan School District are already eligible for vouchers. So who are we thinking “may switch” from district to private schools? You guessed it: suburbanites. (News5, Cleveland, 1/14/19) The PD has most of the deets correct in both headline and story, but terms like “massive expansion”, “tax-funded school choice”, and “draining resources” are included to add some juice to the boring old facts. (Kudos to them for shoehorning “Common Core” in there too.) All of the “affected” suburbs are listed fully as well. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1/13/19) Just because it can happen doesn't mean that it will happen. And if it does happen, there's a reason for it other than just because it can happen. And perhaps that latter part should be the real story.

4. I don’t think anyone is going to tell the story of why so many schools have performed so poorly over the last few years so as to be “affected” by school choice. Especially not the suburbs. Case in point is this look at the “scramble” among Butler County school districts to get their academically-lagging seniors to the diploma finish line as quickly as possible now that the legislature has allowed the bottom-of-the-barrel requirements from 2018 to squelch on over into 2019. (Seriously, Hamilton City Schools appears to be running some sort of “capstone factory” if you ask me.) And everyone’s good with it, it seems. (Dayton Daily News, 1/14/19)

5. So what about the mean streets of the big bad city? Dayton City Schools’ superintendent last week shared her state-of-the-district report. It seems that she is fairly confident that a boost in student attendance, one day of professional development, and some in-house videos have turned the tide of the district’s academic trajectory. But it seems like she and some board members are still working their legislators to try and modify or scrap that pesky Academic Distress Commission framework at the same time. Just in case, I imagine. (Dayton Daily News, 1/14/19)

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