Gadfly Bites 11/8/19 – The Youngstown Accords

1. In Youngstown, the elected school board and the mayor agreed that the process to replace the elected board, as called for in Ohio’s still-on-the-books-last-time-I-checked academic distress commission paradigm, would be on hold until the Ohio Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of HB 70, which created that paradigm. A judge is expected to sign off on this, with a plan to revisit it in April (April?!) if a ruling hasn’t come down by then. (Vindy.com, 11/7/19) This means that, absent a ruling before then, the newly-elected board members will take their seats and start work in January. And by “newly”, I mean just the one person who is new. All the others are the same old same old. And by “work”, I mean… Well, I think you know what I mean. (Vindy.com, 11/7/19) Interestingly, that board newcomer (who took the most votes of any candidate on Tuesday by the way) was also on the list of nominees to join the new appointed board that HB 70 calls for. The full list of nominees is in the hands of Mayor Jamael Tito Brown, should he ever actually need it. (Vindy.com, 11/8/19)
2. Speaking of Tuesday’s election (meh), an 18-year-old high school senior in Revere, Ohio, was elected to his district’s school board. He credits his experience working for the school newspaper for getting him interested in helping boost the “transparency” of his district’s inner workings. I can only imagine how such statements endeared him to the Gatehouse Getalongs Sunshine Warriors at the ABJ. (Akron Beacon Journal, 11/7/19) Alas, everything is not well in the Redoubt of Righteousness located (for the moment) at 44 East Exchange Street in Akron. Some brazen thief has stolen one of the ABJ’s Pulitzer Prize medals! “Heinous” is not a strong enough word for such a crime, I know. But I have no fear that the ABJ’s clever wordsmiths will both come up with the proper epithet and find the darn thing. Anyone seen Livingston? (Akron Beacon Journal, 11/8/19)

3. Yet more head shaking and hand wringing over the appearance of suburban school buildings on this year’s EdChoice Scholarship eligibility list. This time, it’s Dateline: Shaker Heights. I’m not sure why there’s so much angst over the new schools. As the district’s PR flak explains, another Shaker elementary school was on the previous list, and the result was…well, let’s just call it far short of a catastrophe. “Only five families availed themselves of a voucher to go elsewhere and three of those were kindergarteners who had never stepped foot in one of our schools.” Sounds like no big deal to me. If your schools are working as well as you say, no one should leave. And if they still want to leave, why would you want to stop them? (IdeaStream, Cleveland, 11/5/19)
4. But hey, maybe we just need to start new. A state task force, an offshoot from the graduation requirements debates it seems, is in the market to “reinvent high school”. No no no. Not new governance or learning models. Not acceleration or early college stuff. But things like sequencing of courses, more “life skills” classes (including basic tool use!), and greater “engagement”. Good luck with that, gang. No seriously. Personally, I am glad that my nearly-18-year-old children will neither be serving on a school board nor participating in Ohio’s high school quality race down the drain for much longer. (Dayton Daily News, 11/8/19)

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