Gadfly Bites 7/3/24—I’m backing the kids over the adults, every time

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

1. I’m going to try hard with this clip to direct my concerns/irritations toward the folks who are responsible for raising them: The adults of Canton City Schools. And specifically not toward the young boys whom this new district program is meant to serve. Future 40 is a club dedicated, we are told by responsible adults, to help the participating students (a small, specific group selected solely by adults) to “become their best selves”. Specifically, to provide them with “core values of excellence, leadership skills and help them build community”. The adult leaders of the club “want to expose the kids to the success stories of students who walked the same hallways and lived in their neighborhoods” in hopes the youngsters will follow in those footsteps someday. “They realize I can be somebody. I can do that,” said one of the adult leaders, adding “It’s amazing to see the kids pay attention.” Well, see. From everything ELSE we are told, the young boys (fourth graders, 10 years old-ish) don’t really seem to have much choice EXCEPT to pay attention. (Indeed, look at those pictures. It’s been a while since I was the parent of 10-year-olds, but those faces look less like kids paying attention as kids not NOT paying attention…for whatever reason.) They also didn’t seem to have much choice about wearing those shirts or reciting that “mantra” or, it seems, committing to seven or eight years more of this same stuff. There are other flags for me in here, but I’ll stop now just in case I’m reading too much into it. But I will conclude by saying that I hope if/when I see this program referenced again, the adults running it choose to allow some quotes from kids and, more importantly, from their parents. And that these quotes are more about why they chose to be involved and what they are working to get out of it. Rather than a roster of adults talking about why these adult-selected young Black and brown boys (“It was gender and culturally specific,” said the “youth development practitioner” responsible for starting this effort. “These kids came together for a ‘we thing’,” he added, “not a ‘me thing’.”) are going to love the club and benefit from it nearly a decade in the future. (Canton Repository, 7/2/24)
   
   

2. On Monday, I’m sure my dedicated subscribers will recall (hello to all 8 of you!), I was a little rough on Bowling Green’s PR and Marketing department for making their teacher prep program’s tutoring work all about BG, rather than about the kiddos they were serving. Today, we have a far better example of higher ed PR, courtesy of Ashland University’s College of Education. From their electronic pen, we learn that AU’s teacher prep program has quickly and happily purged ineffective literacy instruction methods from its curriculum. The new curriculum “does not address any content that is contrary to research-based practices… [They] focus on multi-tiered instruction, structured literacy, data for effective instruction, language comprehension and rigorous texts for all. We focus on building our teacher candidates’ knowledge and skills in teaching phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.” They did it quickly and they did it thoroughly. Why? Because “[i]t’s our responsibility to ensure that every P-12 learner has access to highly effective teachers and a well-sequenced curriculum that meets their learning needs,” the dean of the department explained. And their old program didn’t do that. “(We’ve been) making sure that our students, the future teachers of these P-12 learners, are prepared and ready to teach on the first day of their teaching profession.” Sounds just right to me. Go Eagles! (Ashland University, 7/2/24)
   
   

3. Finally today, this story is just ridiculously overblown—particularly the headline, which could just as easily have read “Despite growing pains, parents call Afterschool Child Enrichment program “a huge blessing”. There were delays in some families receiving reimbursements from the contractor in charge of Ohio’s Afterschool Child Enrichment (ACE) program. No question. These are, the contractor says, largely the result of trying to lessen the possibility of fraudulent claims (imagine those headlines, eh?) and are lessening as the quickly-launched effort to help students recovery from learning loss induced by pandemic school closures matures. (Indeed, everyone who is quoted here who experienced some issues has already or will very shortly receive their funds, we are told.) And since the state has just extended the deadline for using the remaining funds for a whole additional year, the complaints of “it takes too long” and “we haven’t even used all the money” ring even more hollow. Additional bellyaching—on the part of the reportage, not from any parent quoted—comes from the fact that only a handful of on-site providers are listed in certain geographic areas. Seeing as how buying curriculum, science kits, and workbooks that can be delivered to your house is a thing (“a huge blessing,” as one parent calls it), and that there’s this neat new invention called the internet, feels like the haters need to retire that talking point here. Or, you know, probably all the negative talking points. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 7/2/24)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.