Gadfly Bites 12/12/25—Three options; all of them good.

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1. Only one clip worth talking about today, but it is a) technically three stories in one, and b) a doozy…as is often the case on these one-clip days. A new report “by the left-leaning New America’s Education Funding Equity initiative” (as journalist Laura Hancock puts it) explores the impacts of three different plans for redrawing school district boundaries in Ohio (the full report does the same for almost all of the Lower 48 states). Those three models are: Countywide districts, selective merging of neighboring districts, and a “blank slate” option that eliminates the status quo entirely and creates brand new school boundaries/districts from scratch. All three would reduce the number of school districts in the state (from the current 600+ to 163 or fewer), and would make the resulting districts more equal in terms of tax-base and more racially and economically integrated than the current configuration. I imagine there’s a catch in there somewhere that I’m missing at first blush, but my hot take is that if the left-leaners and the right-leaners (sorry, the non-partisaners) are now both advocating for blowing up every current school district boundary in the name of…whatever windmill they’re tilting at…then I feel like there’s a “let’s meet in the middle” plan just waiting to be had. Who’s with me?! (Cleveland.com, 12/11/25)

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