- In case you missed it, late on Monday the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would not be offering testing waivers to states for this school year. That kind of deflated the various legislative efforts to enact a moratorium on testing here in Ohio. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/24/21) Even though it turned into a soul-searching pity party for testing opponents, the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee still heard testimony on a test-cancellation bill yesterday. Fordham’s Chad Aldis, an opponent of the bill, was questioned about his views…which seemed very much in alignment with the feds’ guidance. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/23/21) Earlier in the day, State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria testified before the House Finance Subcommittee on Primary and Secondary Education. He was mainly talking about education provisions in the proposed state budget, but the topic of testing came up and he, too, seemed to be on the same wavelength as the feds. (WKSU-FM, Kent, 2/23/21)
- Another hot button education issue is school reopenings. Count the editors of the Vindy among those in favor of returning kids to school buildings ASAP. (Vindy.com, 2/21/21)
- And while you may think that those two issues – testing and school reopenings – are separate, I think evidence indicates that they are intertwined…especially in the minds of certain powerful folks. For example: students are scheduled to be back to fully in-person learning in Grandview Heights City Schools on March 15. One elected board member voted against that return plan and her reasoning centered entirely around testing, although it’s not entirely clear to me what she was concerned about. (Expect to hear more about testing rates and opt outs in the coming weeks, dear readers.) In other news, those Grandview families still wanting remote-only learning will have to move—virtually—to Florida. Third-party vendor Florida Virtual Academy, that is. (ThisWeek News, 2/22/21)
- Next Monday seems like an eternity away as I write this. But I can imagine that it will arrive all too quickly in Dayton. For that is the day that Dayton City Schools returns students to its school buildings—in a hybrid-learning model—after almost a year away. In this piece, student transportation is said to be a “key issue” for the success of the transition. This is especially true for charter and private school students—who have had exclusive use of the district’s yellow buses so far this school year—given the various wacky plans
that have crashed and burnedput forward over the previous two year, all of which have put non-district riders very far down the list of priorities. (Dayton Daily News, 2/23/21)
- Another day, another story of a Toledo high schooler earning a pilot’s license before graduation. This Toledo City Schools program is probably the best thing I’ve heard about among Ohio’s big-city districts in a good while. It would probably be popular in Dayton, too, if only because it would allow kids to avoid having to navigate the bus system. (Toledo Blade, 2/22/21)
- This small-town plan school district plan—turning a school’s kitchen into a ghost kitchen location to incubate local for-profit businesses—raises some questions for me, however. (Springfield News-Sun, 2/23/21)
- Finally today, we learn that Cincinnati Classical Academy—a charter school clearly marked as such for a change—will be opening its doors in the Queen City in the fall of 2022. Nice! (Cincinnati Enquirer, 2/23/21)
Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
Policy Priority:
Topics:
