Things you won't read about this week's Board of Ed

 While there's been no lack of coverage of this week's Board of Ed meeting--of which you can read MASC's full coverage here--there's a number of things that happened that certainly didn't make headlines and in some cases didn't make the coverage at all.

The Board of Ed is back

 ...and they meet both Monday night (entirely remotely) and Tuesday morning.

Monday evening is an accountability system review. We're into MCAS and accountability release, it appears from the agenda. 

Tuesday, in addition to that, the Board will elect a vice chair for the year; update on the Commissioner search; have an update on pandemic recovery and literacy, as well as literacy launch; and receive back the charter (voluntarily surrendered) of the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy Charter Public School.

The agenda for all of that is here. 

Liveblog from me is going to be remote and possibly a little choppy, as I have a meeting Monday and an appointment Tuesday morning.

On Southbridge

 The T&G  has a lengthy piece on Southbridge today; Southbridge is the district most recently put into receivership, a vote taken in 2016, meaning 'recent' here is quite relative. I think it's fair to say that the major hole in the section of the law on receivership--that there's no path OUT--is as true there as anywhere. Acting Commissioner Russell Johnston is quoted here, as he has been on Holyoke, talking about governance: 

"The extent of which a school committee is ready to resume its authority, its responsibilities for the governance it can provide for a district, that is a key thing we are looking for," Johnston said.

I think it is also fair to say that this wasn't how prior leadership framed the question.  

Moms for Liberty lawsuit and MA schools

 It's possible you've caught that the Kansas case filed by Moms for Liberty and others reached beyond the district of federal court in which it was filed. The New Bedford Light looks at what this means for the Massachusetts schools named: 

...in Massachusetts, state law already offers the same protections for transgender students that Moms for Liberty is challenging at the federal level. So Massachusetts schools will still be able to uphold their current policies, legal experts say. 

If you've been following Brockton

 ...Mayor Sullivan released the report created by Nystrom, Beckman & Paris, a law firm, today at noon in advance of tonight's Brockton School Committee meeting, which did not discuss it. The report is dated August 15.

RSM, auditors hired by the school department, completed this report, which was released this evening during the Brockton School Committee meeting, at which it was discussed.

As it was the earlier, most reporting so far is on just the first: The Enterprise; MassLive; Boston Globe (which missed half the points)...updating as they come in. The Enterprise reporting on the School Committee meeting is here.

If I could make every school committee member, superintendent, mayor, school finance officer worker (of any level), city finance worker (of any level) read the report from NBP, I would.

Two to read on the MCAS ballot question

 Without commenting further at this time--though I have many thoughts!--I did want to share two things that I think are below the radar to read on the ballot question ending the use of the high school MCAS as a graduation requirement: 

• The Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University is doing a series on the Massachusetts state ballot questions; this is the one on the MCAS question. It's really well done, and it had me finding their other ones.
  
  
• I ongoingly lament the lack of attention to the actual work being done on and around the MCAS, and the actual research (using decades of data) of John Papay at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University is something that periodically gets reported out at the Board of Ed, and otherwise doesn't seem to capture much attention (I think in part because many of those who spend a lot of time talking about the MCAS don't like the information being arrived at). He and others published this back in July.

Round up for the end of the week

 Some things to read or consider this week:

• Some Aquinnah Wampanoag elders gathered last week to talk about the closing in 1968 of Gay Head School, which served Aquinnah Wampanoag children in Martha's Vineyard.
  
  
• The Boston Globe ran an "epic fail" headline on an article that only followed the experience of two students; no systemwide data on transportation on the first day of school was yet available. This is how the educating reporting earns our cynicism.
  
  
• Useful paper out this week on public comment and public policy found four things: 
  

  First, commenters at public meetings are unrepresentative of the public along racial, gender, age, and homeownership lines; second, distance to the proposed development predicts commenting behavior, but only among those in opposition; third, commission votes are correlated with commenters’ preferences; finally, the alignment of White commenters (vs. other racial groups) and neighborhood group representatives and the general public (vs. other interest groups) better predict project approvals.

• In light of the shootings in Georgia, note that in Oswego County, NY, in response to threats by a 10 year old boy, law enforcement visited the home to remove guns if there were any (there were not), because NY has a law that "allows law enforcement to search a home and remove guns if someone is thought to have access to weapons and be a danger to themselves or others.”
  
  

• And because this always brings up discussion of mental health, a reminder that mental health is more of a predictor of victim than assailant.

• May J.D. Vance's characterization of school shootings as "a fact of life" be the real life "crime, boy, I don't know" *

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*and if you snark about The West Wing references, you are free to read elsewhere.

Book recommendation: Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequality

swiped from a footnote of "Dividing the Public" is this quote
from Fletcher Swift skewering Massachusetts

 Summer is generally when I try to catch up on the rest of the year's "oh I should read that!" pile, particularly as it pertains to education. Among my reads that I want to recommend to anyone else for whom school finance equity is either a vocation or an avocation is Matthew Gardner Kelly's Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequality.

Gardner Kelly, who now teaches at University of Washington College of Education (he'd been at Penn State), takes as his topic K-12 public education funding in California, but really it is a way of examining what we may think of as foundational to education in this country: the tie between local funding and local enrollment. California starts from a completely different direction than, say, Massachusetts on this, and at various points in its history had advocates who argued that it wasn't really a state public education system if it depended on local funding. 

I could quote at length from passages of his book, which also includes midnight property raids, racial violence, and footnotes well worth examining (the above has already been added to my standard presentation on Chapter 70!). I really appreciated, though, a book that drove me to question why it is that we think the taxation of local property ought to determine the revenue available to local schools at all, and how it is that a state can require a statewide education system--check the quote at the bottom of the page here, Massachusetts!--without state revenue paying for it.

Two more to read on AI

 Two from this weekend:

• "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning."
  Coverage is in The Hechinger Report, and the study itself is here.
  
  
• The New Yorker, if you can get past the paywall, has a piece from Ted Chiang entitled "Why AI isn't going to make art" which includes the following: 
  

  The task that generative AI has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.