The Board of Ed meets Tuesday

 You can find the agenda here. The Board is meeting at the Department's new location in Everett. 

The meeting is opening with introductions of (and possibly presentations by?) the Teacher of the Year and the Milken Award winners. 

There is then a presentation (I guess?) on school safety

Then, yes, Commissioner Riley is pushing ahead with his insistence that the Board change the state accountability system to increase the weight of chronic absenteeism. You can find his memo on it here. In it, he says:

At the January meeting of the Board, I will discuss changing the system to include three years of data in the 2024 accountability results, with more recent years weighing more: 15 percent for 2022 data, 25 percent for 2023 data, and 60 percent for 2024 data. 

The big change, though, has been whisked away to the summary of the accountability system, In it, the proposal is to increase the weight of chronic absenteeism from 10% to 25% for elementary and from 5% to 20% for high school.

I just want to note that not putting the proposed change in weight in the memo is terrible. It looks like an attempt to slide this by. 

The Commissioner no doubt will tout their "support" for school districts, which has been $10,000 per district...which isn't enough to do much with. And then there are of course Secretary Tutwiler's ads.

Note that a change of this type at this point, 55% or so through the year, counts for more than double, essentially; less than half the year remains. This is simply irresponsible. 

And that's, of course, setting aside that there has been no attempt by the Department to find out let alone work on the reasons why students aren't attending school. 

Assuming we get through that, there will also be a budget update, the day before Governor Healey proposes her budget. 

I'll be blogging. 

As ongoingly true, and as it says on the blog itself, the above is my own opinion. Me. Personally.