Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup.

Push for Indiana Schools to Share Buses and Buildings Ramps Up (The 74)

The 74 reported this week that,

“A push from Indiana’s legislature for the Indianapolis school district and charter schools to share buses and school building is raising temper, as opponents jockey over scarce resources and control over how to divide them.”

No surprise here. When I was a region superintendent, we asked a high-performing charter school to share space with a low-performing high school. Initially, we saw a lot of shared learning between the two entities, resulting in cost-savings for the high-performing charter school and better systems for the low-performing high school.

But then adult agendas took over.

The high-performing charter school leaders didn’t feel like they were receiving proper consideration from the low-performing high school leaders when it came to sharing building resources – like access, security, and other services, to name a few.

At the same time, the low-performing high school leaders didn’t feel like the charter school was helping them improve classroom practice. Instead, the charter school was focused more on getting their students to perform at high levels.

Shared space continues to be a challenge for anyone wanting to work with our current traditional K-12 system.

We Urgently Need Grading Reform. These 3 Things Stand in the Way (EducationWeek)

According to grading expert Joe Feldman, there are three reasons our K-12 system has not been able to achieve desperately needed grading reforms:

1. Educators and noneducators can tend to oversimplify and misunderstand changes to grading.
2. District leaders often try to fix grading too quickly through top-down policy.
3. Defenders of traditional grading allow students and teachers to avoid accountability for real learning.

Unreliable grading practices in schools are like unreliable accounting practices in business – if you can’t depend on the numbers, then what good is the assessment.

You can read more about Feldman’s grading idea in his EducationWeek post from November 5, 2025.

Central Vermont Towns Strike Down Bond for New Tech Center (Vermont Public)

Times are tough in Vermont, as in other states. Housing prices are soaring, the government shutdown is impacting the needy, and, in Vermont’s case, the Green Mountain State is still trying to recover from two major flooding events in 2023 and 2024.

But voting to strike down a bond to expand what might be the best example of workforce training in the state – the Central Vermont Career Center – shows too many people don’t vote for what matters. The $149 million bond was turned down this week by a vote of 5,751 to 3,873. Most voters told exit poll interviewers that the price tag was just too much money right now.

But, to keep a young workforce inside Vermont, and other states like it, state of the art training centers are a necessity, not a nicety. Sometimes you have to invest in something in order to reap its rewards.

Bylaws Proposed for New University of Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom (The Cedar Rapids Gazette)

Governor Kim Reynolds signed House File 437 earlier this year creating the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa.

The center’s mission, according to newly approved bylaws, will be to:

Educate students “by means of free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth”,

Equip students with the “skills, habits, and dispositions of mind they need to reach their own informed conclusions on matters of social and political importance”,

Affirm the value of intellectual diversity in higher education and “enhance the intellectual diversity of the university”,

And “create a community dedicated to an ethic of civil and free inquiry, which respects the intellectual freedom of each member, supports individual capacities for growth, and welcomes the differences of opinion that naturally exist in a public university community.”

Am I missing something here, or isn’t the mission of this Republican-backed center similar to the mission of a university at large?

So what is the real reason for this Center of Intellectual Freedom? What is its real purpose?

That’s the News Roundup for Friday, November 7^th. Til Monday. SVB