Gadfly Bites 7/1/24—Plaudits where plaudits are due

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1. Woot! Another piece of excellent coverage for Fordham’s recent charter school achievement report, courtesy of the Toledo Blade. But this time, the report’s findings of strong achievement boosts for students in brick-and-mortar charter schools versus their traditional district peers is getting noticed on the editorial page, rather than on the news page. Which leads to this extraordinary (if I do say so myself) sentence: “Oddly, though charter school choice has been an undisputed benefit to the residents of urban school districts, Democrats who dominate the urban districts — like Toledo — have not been fans of the concept, preferring to require that underperforming public schools continue to have a monopoly on the urban environment.” Wow! (Toledo Blade, 7/1/24)
   
   

2. Staying in northwest Ohio (and indeed staying on topic, in my own labyrinthine mind), this piece comes to the hard-hitting BG Independent News straight from the Bowling Green State University Office of Marketing and Brand Strategy. (Yes, the source is noted.) In it, the dean of the College of Education and Human Development lauds the tutoring work of her teacher preparation students, who have been providing reading supports for students in “high-need districts” in the area for the last three years, using federal Covid-relief dollars. You can tell that it’s written by marketing folks because this sentence—“Data consistently shows the practice works for everyone, as pre-service teachers tend to be effective tutors who gain additional experience, while K-12 students enrolled in the tutoring programs often make measurable gains in crucial content areas.”—is the only evidence of the program’s effectiveness for the kiddos provided, despite the fact that it doesn’t say that at all. But that lack of data doesn’t stop Dr. Bosslady from having some grandiose visions for the future of the program, including her insistence that “tutoring is teaching, and increasingly, teaching is tutoring” as well as her plan to get legislators to change state law to allow for more more more of it. All this despite the end of pandemic relief spending dead ahead and the lack of evidence that any of the college’s work has benefitted anyone but her so far. (BG Independent News, 6/28/24) Perhaps I was being a tad unfair in the preceding clip. I mean, we’ve got a lot of evidence—in northwest Ohio and beyond—that teaching often isn’t teaching these days. And we also have evidence—like this story, also from Toledo—that tutoring may matter more. But this comes to us from a small nonprofit outfit working to boost literacy for preschool and school-age kids as well as adults who lost out on instruction in the past. This piece is discussing their series of summer camps for kids age 4 to 8 to fight “summer slide” and to help boost kids up to the proper reading level for their age/grade. It’s free. It’s open to any children, no matter what school they go to. It’s held in a beautiful park right next to a city pool. And parents get books and some lessons on how to continue the efforts at home. And while we are provided anecdotal evidence only and for just a single child, I see clearly that “Read for Literacy” is focused on the right things and has the singular goal of helping kids and families in Toledo. So maybe Dr. Falcon is right after all: tutoring is teaching…when it’s done right. (Toledo Blade, 6/28/24)

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