Gadfly Bites 2/18/19 – You are Here

1. At least one district treasurer in Butler County finds the biennial state budget process “complicated and scary”. Mainly because the outcome is “unpredictable” for him. However, at least one district treasurer in Butler County finds the biennial state budget process something he has “come to enjoy”. Mainly because he gets to testify in the legislature about nerdy funding stuff. You know what’s really predictable? Conflicting newspaper comments from district treasurers during the biennial state budget process, from before it starts (You are Here) until well after it’s over. (Middletown Journal-News, 2/18/19). Editors in Toledo were on the same topic—surprise!—this weekend, opining in favor or something related to school funding. Or opining against something related to school funding. It’s a bit hard to tell, really. You are Here – in the land of the entirely predictable. (Toledo Blade, 2/16/19)

2. Toledo City Schools, You are Here: Still at least a year and half away from a possible declaration of academic distress. Why at this point you are listening to the folks who have already sent their districts into that condition—wallowing in their still-myopic hindsight—while you have more than one full school year to actually teach students to a higher level and thus avoid that outcome, heaven only knows. Unless you all know something we don’t. (Toledo Blade, 2/15/19)

3. Here we have an exceptionally detailed, factually correct, and largely impassive look at the new list of voucher-eligible schools and students in the Springfield area. Although I would say that the paragraph that references students attending private school “on the taxpayer dime” slipped through whatever filter the News-Sun was otherwise using successfully. There will be quite a jump in the number of eligible schools and students in the area. Will a large enough number take advantage of the opportunity? One can only hope the paper will follow up, with the same clarity and calmness, when we get there next school year. (Springfield News-Sun, 2/17/19) 
4. There is something counterintuitive, I think, about trying to encourage high school students to stay in their area after graduation by exposing them to the inner workings of city government, a la the Boys/Girls State model. The good folks in Stark County are calling it a civics education, showing them their place in the community. Given the scorched-earth style politicking we have seen in various Ohio communities around education (see Item 2, above), I’m not sure they are actually learning what you think they are. You are Here. However, the fact that charter school and non-Catholic private school students appear to have been excluded from the program DOES qualify as an education in civic values. I am Here. (Canton Repository, 2/15/19)

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