Gadfly Bites 8/26/24—School choice reportage

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1. It’s all school choice in today’s news. Like we’re living in their heads rent-free. First up, vouchers. Cleveland.com seems to me to be working very hard to discredit the test performance of voucher-receiving students attending private schools. But I have to say that all of this detail ends up sounding pretty positive to me. The bougie districts whose students appear to perform better than their voucher-using peers should publicize that information—rather than spending state money to sue the state to end vouchers on behalf of other districts—to diminish the impact of EdChoice on their own bottom lines. (And they should probably start working on blocking universal interdistrict open enrollment instead.) By the same token, the districts whose resident students are doing very well on tests in their chosen private schools (you know who I mean), should hope this piece doesn’t get too much attention. Because the conclusion to be drawn from these data is obvious…and obviously not in those districts’ favor. (Cleveland.com, 8/25/24)
   
   

2. Columbus and Seattle school districts are namechecked in this story about school closures, blaming school choice and the baby bust for the enrollment decline driving closure discussions…but mostly school choice. The main subject, however, is Rochester school district in New York…the only one of these three districts that has actually gone through with closing anything. And you know what? It really doesn’t sound like that big a deal beyond the emotional adjustment angle. Which could be tackled—directly, proactively, and supportively—by district leaders if they ever decided they actually wanted to do the right thing from start to finish. (ProPublica, 8/26/24)
   
   

3. Speaking of Columbus City Schools, here’s more fallout from the district’s decision to declare hundreds of charter and private school students “impractical to transport” in the weeks before the start of the new school year. By the end of the first week of school, charter school leaders say, many families had dis-enrolled due to the lack of transportation. No word for sure if they ended up in Columbus City Schools, but surely that’s the simplest—and most likely—move they could make. Almost like their other choices were "practically" foreclosed upon. (ABC 6 News, 8/23/24)
   
   

4. School doesn’t start at The Ginn-Thompson School, a brand-new all-girls charter school in Cleveland, until September 4. So this piece, which is all positive and super supportive (“I wanted something on the level of the private schools that we have for girls here in Northeast Ohio,” says the founding principal), can stand on its own for right now. When transportation comes into the picture next week, I assume some of that sunny hopefulness will end up falling by the wayside. (Signal Cleveland, 8/23/24)

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