Gadfly Bites 3/6/20 – Bits and Bobs

It’s one of those days where the clips don’t seem to want to cohere into a story of their own, so how about the story of same news, different day? With a side order of “perhaps Murray’s been doing this too long”. 

1. First up, nearly forty Lorain High School students are getting associate degrees along with their high school diplomas this year, and that number is way up from previous years. Good for them, for sure. Personally, I can still remember years ago covering the announcement that Lorain County Community College was being given prime, specially-built space in the district’s schmancy new high school building while the “New Beginnings” kids—pronounced “knuckleheads”—were being shunted off to a dank, cramped, off-campus building shared with the local Catholic Diocese to make sure that LCCC had space to help these other students achieve just what they are now achieving. Thus I can’t help but wonder how the “New Beginnings” kids have done in the last few years, and also where the reporting is on their situation as their putative graduation day approaches. (The Morning Journal, 3/4/20)
    
2. Here we have yet another charter school story—indeed another Lorain Horizon Science Academy story—which is so good that the words “charter school” do not appear in it. Seriously, do these guys just do this to mess with me? (The Morning Journal, 3/4/20) The words “charter school” are all over this rare duck: an op-ed published in the Dispatch written by a charter school teacher who loves her job, the scholars she teaches, and her school. Now that’s something you don’t see in the paper every day. (Columbus Dispatch, 3/5/20)
   
   

3. In Maybe Report Cards Don’t Lie After All news: District leaders in Bexley (yes, that Bexley), are joining the ranks of bougie, big-dollar districts across the state that are realizing what parents in their district (and those leaving their district) have probably known for a while now: not every one of their students is equally well-served. And they are now changing their instructional practices in order to try and address the gaps. Sadly, the rich-district-leaders Bexleyites apparently went about this process in a typically rich-district-ish Bexleyish way: they hired three instructional coaches (elementary literacy, elementary numeracy coach, and a secondary generalist coach) to work with teachers to analyze their student achievement data. From there, they identified the gaps and then the district “significantly improve[d] our processes for writing reading intervention monitoring plans for our K-3 children who need that result.” Sounds complicated. And expensive. It should be noted that Bexley’s district report card—an overall B—was dragged down by a C grade it achieved in the component titled (you know what I’m going to say, don’t you?) “Improving At-Risk K-3 Readers”, an assessment which they got for free many months ago. (ThisWeek News, 3/2/20)
    
4. On Wednesday, we were talking about food delivery robots. The bleeding edge, man. Today, we take a huge step backward and hear about “exciting” technology being rolled out to students in Avon Lake City Schools such as (I kid you not) button makers and sewing machines, TV production equipment, live streaming, and Skype. Honestly, even a 3D printer seems to harken back to five years ago. The only thing that sounds vaguely new is something called “lithophane”, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a single productive thing you could do with that widget technology. Guess these guys will have to content themselves with their overall report card grade of A (Basic math and English? Check!) and hope that no future employer wants them to do anything more. (Elyria Chronicle, 3/6/20)

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