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Mayoral visit
Mayor Jack Bradley visited Lorain Preparatory Academy this week, to read to young students at the K-8 charter school and to kick their celebration of Right to Read Month into high gear. Awesome!
Secretarial visit
Similarly, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona visited E.L. Haynes High School and Elementary School this week. He was there to visit with staff and students and to kick off Women’s History Month. The school is named for educator Dr. Euphemia Lofton Haynes, and honors her as the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics in the United States.
Yes in My Backyard
Kudos to Liberty High School, a longstanding dropout recovery charter school in Dayton, on receiving two planning and zoning committee wins recently to move forward with building a brand new facility. They were aided in their effort by several future neighbors who were excited to see a new use—and this use particularly—for a long-desolate corner of town. “For 23 years, [the neighborhood] has waited for a project such as this,” said one of the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) speakers. How lovely.
Competitive effects
We talk a lot here about the research on competitive effects. That is, how traditional districts respond to the increase of competition for students from charters and vouchers. It’s rare that we get to look at response to competition in real life, but here it is before us: The new superintendent of Dayton City Schools wants to entice local charter school families to switch to his district and he’s already implementing changes that he thinks will make the district more attractive. So far, these include increased experiential learning opportunities, doubling the number of field trips, and emphasizing customer service. Hold the doors!
The research is clear
Speaking of research, the Fordham Institute’s Daniel Buck dug into a new meta-analysis from MIT and NBER researchers on lottery-based charter studies. It’s interesting stuff with a lot of nuance, but Buck says the bottom line is clear: “Even if they don’t vindicate the charter sector as a whole—[the studies] do demonstrate that quality schools can alter a child’s trajectory, improving their odds of escaping poverty, staying out of prison, going to college, and leading a successful life.” He concludes that “such institutions are perhaps the single most promising, scalable policy to shrink the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students.”
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