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- We almost didn’t have enough content for an edition today. Might have been better that way. First up, we learn that a dozen state education leaders signed a letter to putative U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon with whole lot of bullet-pointy “initial ideas” for her to prioritize whenever she gets the job running whatever is left of that department. Ohio’s Steve Dackin is among the signatories. (The 74, 2/6/25)
- There probably aren’t a lot of folks who want to revisit 2020 in this level of detail, so let’s give it up for Cleveland’s Angie Schmitt in that regard. She’s thinking back on the New York Times’ “Nice White Parents” podcast from back in that day, in which the nominal parents are pretty soundly pinned down as “what gets in the way” of building a better education system. Ms. Schmitt was all in for Cleveland Metropolitan School District in 2020, working to get her child into a district preschool as her one and only desired placement. Turns out it was way harder than it should have been; she was made to feel very unwelcome and it seems she never forgot that. There’s more to her story that’s not here (including CMSD’s pandemic response and enrollment in charter schools), and there’s a lot more about NYC and Boston in this piece than there is about CLE, but here’s a cryptic little north coast nugget to leave you with: “I had enrolled my own son at a Cleveland public preschool and was trying to kind of host discussions in my neighborhood with other young parents about enrolling kids in the neighborhood public schools, which imo, had been (kind of unfairly) treated as out of bounds, in a way. (There is a wider “social exclusion” of Cleveland public schools — one or two “magnet” schools excepted — that I still believe is profoundly damaging. However, it is just one of many, many problems imo.)” The mind reels with what that all might mean. (Kappan, 2/10/25)
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