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While there are obviously some very big things--bombing countries! kidnapping people! removing rights and harassing people! returning epidemics of diseases for which we have vaccines! defunding large portions of the government! lying, ongoingly, about nearly everything!--there are also some very 'education universe' things that I'd* love for us to jettison over the summer:
- AI being viewed as a 'must have' rather than antithetical to everything we should be about in education: Do I have to say more on this? Don't I say enough already?
So ready for this fad to be over before it destroys more than it already has. - Focus on attendance in isolation: Frankly, if I never seen another perfect attendance celebration, it will be too soon, anyway, as celebrations of people who are lucky enough not to have health issues (or came to school sick?) and have structural supports are already inequitable. But in a time when families are facing very real concerns about ICE swooping in on families, about families losing access to basic services, it is beyond callous to hold up attendance as if it exists in isolation.
Stop it, already. By all means, let's work to get students to school as much as is healthy, but let's also work with families to figure out why that isn't happening when it isn't! - Assigned books for summer reading: I thought we'd managed to largely escape this, but it appears to be making a resurgence. There is, of course, a built in inequity if the books aren't supplied (and all, if you think online access to a book substitutes for the one you can toss in your bag and take with you without your parents yelling at you for being on your phone again, you haven't been paying attention), but even if they are, it removes the "reading is good on its own" component from reading over the summer, making it both a strict assignment and removing the ability of students to go find something they love. If what you want at the end of the day is adults who enjoy reading, this is the opposite of the way.
- thinking every thing needs a law: We do not need laws about everything. We have many things in education for which legislation is very unsuited, in fact!
There is no way at all that legislatures, for example, should be setting parameters for literacy curriculum; these are not criteria on which legislators are experts, and, at least in our state, it's not even a power that's entrusted to the legislature. The Board sets standards. Local districts select curriculum under those standards.
Another: Cell phones! Just because half the country has lost its mind and think that some central authority should be making a single decision for the entire state on cell phones in schools does not mean our state (or any state that has so far eluded this madness) needs to do the same. The use of technology--and yes, friends, it is technology--in and around the classroom is not a state law thing. There are far too many reasons why we should be responding to students as students who we are supporting into growing into adults (who are probably going to have a phone in their pocket) for this draconian and poorly informed sweeping decision**. And none of anyone's business that a child needs to monitor their insulin, use a speech to text interpreter, or any of the other myriad adaptations they might use tech for.
There are things we need legislatures for***. Those aren't things for which we have other bodies who are already doing that job. Disagreeing with the choices being made doesn't mean the authority should be usurped. - saying "equal" when we mean "not advantaging me or mine anymore": more to come on this one, we need to stop and think about what we really are on about
*Yes, me personally, just like always here.
**also, shame on any press that runs a "gathers momentum" or anything such on the Massachusetts Legislature on this. Have you paid any attention to our legislative process at all?
***like passing budgets.
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