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Probably not good news
In their annual “school year readiness” report, Columbus City Schools’ administrators this week noted that their bus driver corps is only 75 percent staffed and warned that students who rely on yellow bus transportation will experience late buses and other problems for at least the first few weeks of the upcoming school year…and maybe longer. Charter, private, and STEM school students in Columbus can rest assured that they will experience their fair share of those problems…and maybe more.
To stabilize or not to stabilize
The superintendent of Dayton City Schools says that transportation in his district went so well last year that there will be no changes to the plan this year. “Any moves to do something else might destabilize the work we’ve already put in,” he says. There’s no discussion of how well transportation went for charter, private, and STEM school families last year, so we’ll have to take his word for it for now. But it is interesting to learn that the district has quietly settled with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce for all the past infractions for failing to properly transport those students in previous years and did not have to pay any of the millions of dollars in fines it had incurred. Stabilization indeed!
Leadership
Lee Strang, co-founder and board president of the Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, was recently hired as the executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University. The Chase Center is one of the five intellectual diversity centers, to be launched at state universities—intended to bridge political and ideological gaps between Ohioans—after being created via the state budget bill last year. Strang told the Ohio Capital Journal that the centers are “part of the solution to how Americans of all backgrounds and viewpoints, together, will renew our common civic life.” If all goes well, the Chase Center should be fully up and running by fall of 2025.
One family’s important story
The Advocate, a newspaper serving all of southern Louisiana, recently featured the story of the Bethley family of Baton Rouge. Mom Katherine struggled to find support for her first grade daughter, who struggled with reading and other aspects of school. She eventually enrolled the youngster in Louisiana Key Academy where a long-delayed dyslexia diagnosis was immediately followed up with strong instruction and intensive supports that made all the difference. “She has soared. She learned how to read within the first two months of being there,” Katherine Bethley said. “She enjoys reading now. She has gone from coming home depressed and crying to wanting to read and being very animated when she does so. It was a true transformation for us. She is going into the sixth grade, and her teacher told me that she is reading almost on a ninth-grade level.” Fantastic!
Good research findings, with some lingering questions…
A recent research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that charter school students in Massachusetts are significantly more likely to enroll in a four-year college after graduation and to obtain a degree than their non-charter peers. This held true in both urban and suburban charter schools. However, urban students earned higher state test scores than their non-charter peers while suburban students actually earned lower scores than their non-charter peers. What could possibly account for such a discrepancy? “The whole premise of test-based accountability is that test-scores predict longer-term outcomes. And that is likely still the case, writ large,” lead researcher Sarah Cohodes told The 74. “But this situation shows it is not always the case, and other things are going on in schools.” Interesting stuff. The full report can be found here.
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