- We start with a curious little story from Dayton. It is ostensibly about the reaction of several Dayton-area colleges to a new report predicting a decline in the overall number of high school graduates produced by U.S. schools over the next 20 years (e.g. – erosion of their customer base). Most of the word count is dedicated to that reaction (in short: look for new college students elsewhere and work hard to attract those U.S. students who are around). However, the more interesting question – why there is expected to be such a precipitous decline – is unaddressed here. You, like me, will have to read the latest edition of Knocking on the College Door from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in order to answer that question. To be fair to the DDN, it was 30-some pages into said report before we even got an inkling of the reasons. Weird. (Dayton Daily News, 12/27/16)
- As we noted when those ratings first came out, school districts across the state fared particularly poorly on charter sponsor evaluations. One such district, Oregon City Schools in suburban Toledo, is formally appealing its rating in a bid to keep its dropout recovery charter school, turning the irony level up to 11 in the process. (Toledo Blade, 12/27/16)
- Finally today – what is the opposite of “fake news”? Doug Livingston is. I know Dog is not back on the education beat, but unless and until he actually returns, we can rejoice in this typically detailed (over 1600 words!) and twisty profile of Cambridge Education Group, an Akron-based education management organization which runs a number of charter schools in Northeast Ohio. Published on Christmas Day no less! Doug got some unprecedented access to documents, people, schools, and meetings (far more than he ever got from White Hat Management, as he tells us several times) and uses it to the full. While he takes great pains to indicate that another shoe will likely fall – and spends a fair amount of time describing the shape and size of said shoe – it seems to me like he doesn’t totally hate CEG or its schools. Fascinating. (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/25/16)
