Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
What’s that mushroom cloud over Dayton?
The best line of the day at the Hechinger Institute’s seminar for education reporters on covering teacher contract negotiations today came from Sue Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.
When the issue of urban enrollment declines came up, Taylor cautioned the group that Ohio’s numbers reflect more than just out-migration from people moving out of the Midwest. City school districts are also getting smaller becuase charter schools have grabbed a chunk of their students.
In Taylor’s view, this is not a good thing.
“You have to remember that Ohio is the Chernobyl of charter schools,” she said, referencing the Russian nuclear power plant explosion and its destructive fallout in 1986.
Taylor said she describes Ohio charters that way because “the vast majority are miserable failures” when it comes to academic performance.
Of course, Dayton is not just the biggest charter school city in Ohio, it’s tops in the nation after New Orleans (which has largely been remade as primarily a charter school district following Hurricane Katrina.)
So I guess, following Taylor’s analogy, we’ve been educationally vaporized. Something tells me there are a few people in Dayton that would disagree.
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