- It’s always interesting when education stories are covered in unconventional outlets. Fordham’s Chad Aldis is quoted in Crain’s Cleveland in regard to the recent closure of ECOT and what it might mean for charter schools in general and online schools in particular going forward. They even let him answer and printed his answer—as if this journalist didn’t already have an answer in mind. Nice. (Crain’s Cleveland Business, 1/26/18)
- Meanwhile, back on more familiar ground, the D reports that ECOT families are being urged to find new schools. Not “urged” like “you should get on this”; “urged” like “you better”. Less nice. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/26/18)
- I regret that I am super late in discovering what is an extraordinary series of ongoing articles in the Plain Dealer. For the last six months, journalist Leila Atassi has been reporting the everyday life of the Korper family in painstaking detail—housing, employment, food, transportation, education, dreams, reality. Seems like the most important reporting I have ever read and once I discovered it, I didn’t stop until I’d read every piece. The entire series is vital reading, but here are two recent items relevant to Gadfly Bites subscribers. First up, four children ages 6 to 13 use the local transit system to get home from school. They must cross busy streets, change buses at a stop where a young teen was abducted last year, and traverse a vacant lot where adults regularly hang out in the afternoons. At least one of the four says it is preferable to taking the school bus. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1/17/18) Why the transit system? Because the Korper children attend a charter school and the busing they were offered by the district was not deemed acceptable to their mother. The family receives free passes to ride RTA instead. The most recent piece, posted this morning, follows Contessa Korper as she attends parent-teacher conferences at that charter school, part of the high-performing Breakthrough Network. For one of her children especially, she must negotiate an intertwined thicket of academic and behavior issues that threaten to hold him back from promotion to the next grade. She is trying to find the line—perhaps impossibly thin—between “nitpicky” and “necessary”. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1/29/18) If after reading these two pieces, you—like me—want to read the full series, it can be found here. This is why we work.
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