- A little bit of report card hangover to start with today. After the blunt assessment of Cincinnati City School’s performance, the Enquirer decided to turn their full regional report card roundup into a post-Oscar style best/worst package…including, for some reason, the average teacher salary in each district. And while some districts who did well on the report card and all who did poorly repeated the usual line of “report cards don’t show everything our district is doing”, it comes across a little differently when said by a five-stars-across-the-board suburban district. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/16/22) And speaking of different tunes, Akron City Schools are sounding quite a bit less positive about their report card performance than they did in the data preview shared with the media before we all saw the numbers ourselves. While everyone seems super proud that they managed to recover nearly 70 percent of their pre-pandemic academic performance so far, superintendent Christine Fowler Mack now says that getting back the last 30+ percent may be harder to do. “It’s a challenging time to really make up ground and to get back on that path to thriving,” she told the ABJ. And her rhetoric turned to talk of “hope” and “possibility” after that. Have sympathy if you are so moved, but do realize that we’re talking about being unable to reach already-subpar pre-pandemic performance levels despite the full-court press, millions of dollars, and years of time already invested and still theoretically available. (I will try to ignore the fact that that low pre-pandemic performance was described as “thriving”, but it gets harder and harder, you know.) If this counts as a silver lining, there must have one heck of a black cloud inside it. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/19/22)
- Feeling their oats after a successful day on the picket lines, the Columbus Education Association is ready to continue its work for the benefit of their students. No no no. Not like that, silly. By forming a new coalition of the parents and community members who supported them during the strike to “advocate” on “issues”. Although, their little Zoom echo chamber is supposedly open to everyone… Personally, I just hope the CEA “strike band” gets to continue honing its chops. With some steady practice, I could see them headlining one or more pre-K cookouts by next fall. (ABC6 News, Columbus, 9/18/22)
- Finally today, a new series is set to launch on Cleveland.com, following two reporters who were embedded in CMSD schools for a year. This is hailed in a preview piece as something “unprecedented”, although I remember the series covering the family whose kids all went to charter schools in the city. That was about them as a family, though, and not about education specifically. So this will probably be a little different, likely focusing more on the system than the families. Buckle up, folks! (Cleveland.com, 9/17/22)
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