Gadfly Bites 3/4/26—TBD

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1. School districts are not the only ones out there looking to shave time off the calendar, it seems. Meet the “mini-mester”, a newish and expanding effort to condense community college course content into as little as 8 weeks. The key it seems is asynchronous coursework, completed whenever students with job and family commitments can get to it. This piece tells us mini-mesters already exist at community colleges and a national nonprofit looking to boost their use has chosen five Ohio institutions which they will support (and evaluate) as they pilot their own versions. (The Ohio Newsroom, 3/4/26)
   
   

2. Northeast Ohio’s News-Herald outlet is the first to tell us about Ohio House Bill 715, a newly-introduced measure that aims to add data and reporting requirements to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce for private schools accepting students using EdChoice and other voucher programs. These requirements include total enrollment, the number of scholarship students, where those students attended the previous year, and the amount of state funding the school received; the number of voucher students in each school, broken down by family income; and a comparison of the academic performance of voucher students with similar students in nearby schools via some mechanism still TBD. (The News-Herald, 3/3/26)

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