Gadfly Bites 7/28/25—Dispatches from dystopia

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Today’s education news reads like a Bizarro-World version of what I expect adults to be doing to help students learn and grow over the summer and to get ready for the return of school in a few weeks. We’ll start out gently for our first example: I love everything about this summer camp program in Dayton…except the name, which cannot have been spoken out loud by anyone before it was adopted. (Dayton Daily News, 7/27/25) By contrast, this summer “cooking” class in Akron has a cool name and the chef in charge sounds great…but literally everything else we learn about it is off-putting to me and sounds in some cases like the opposite of what should be taught. Fractions, household budgeting, bargain shopping at the grocery, batch cooking. Were any of these common sense things on the curriculum?! Sure doesn’t sound like it from this coverage. (Akron Beacon Journal, 7/28/25) This year’s “Back to School Bash” held in Lorain over the weekend looks to be 110 percent style over substance per this coverage. The event featured an Ashland-based Instagrammer (who knew?) called “Clawed Beauty”, makeovers for little ones who were already told they looked awesome no matter what, and kids dancing for the cameras in multi-colored horse heads, among other things. I have no idea whether the recipe for this event was the same last year, but I feel like an $8,000 drop in funds raised from last year to this is probably a sign to do it differently next time. (Chronicle-Telegram, 7/28/25) Meanwhile, the elected adults supposedly in charge of Akron City Schools were busy pointing fingers at everyone but themselves to pin blame for the “dysfunction” that everyone admits is rampant in their fiefdom during a special meeting over the weekend. To try and help, a facilitator told them to think of their superintendent as an Uber driver and themselves as the passenger who gets to dictate the route the driver takes to their destination. I have never experienced any rideshare that functions that way, but the elected school board members seemed to take the nonsensical advice very seriously indeed. I’m sure things will turn around up there soon. (Akron Beacon Journal, 7/27/25)
Also over the weekend, the president and CEO of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce penned an op-ed urging the elected school board of Dayton City Schools to partner with the business community to help create a new transportation plan for high school students. I know word count is limited in these things, but it feels to me like some concrete ideas would have been a more effective motivator than just a list of the times the previous administrations have failed to partner or to solve the longstanding issues. I am definitely tired of talking about those and I don’t even live there! (Dayton Daily News, 7/27/25)
Signal Cleveland (sorta) digs in deep on the status of the Say Yes college scholarship program in Cleveland. In my opinion, they are far too concerned about the data that has not been released and the questions that program administrators will not/have not yet answered and much of the word count in this piece focuses unhelpfully on those two points. But here’s the thing: Even if you doubled the numbers that we do know—scholarship amounts, users, graduates, etc.—the program would still not yet have met the hype that its enthusiastic supporters rabidly touted (yes they did; you were all here and read it the same as me) when the program was launched six years ago. Which means that the gamechanging outcomes promised (yes; they did) were outlandish and irresponsible when they were made—no matter what additional data the administrators are going to eventually cough up. Save your breath, get your heads out of the clouds at last, and buckle down to give kids a strong K-12 education—with high expectations, rigorous teaching, and immediate accountability for results—and leave the rest of that stuff for later. (Signal Cleveland, 7/28/25)
Kudos at least to the editorial board of the Toledo Blade for limiting themselves to the realm of the possible in this piece from yesterday. They opine in support of cell phone bans for students in schools, but a) they make zero promises for any measurable positive outcomes other than the ban itself actually being implemented, and b) they don’t exempt adults, including themselves, when they opine that “many of us have become attached to our phones for the fun and communications services they provide, as well as the cameras, the games, the link with the internet, and the search functions.” Thus I am confident these folks will not be at all surprised to learn a year from now that exceptions to those total bans were rampant and evidence of positive impacts is limited to anecdotes only. (Toledo Blade, 7/27/25)