March Board of Ed: midyear report from State Student Advisory Council

 This is from Isabella Chamberlain, Hudson High School, who is the SSAC chair
focusing this year on student wellness, especially emotional wellbeing; bullying and harassment; and nutrition and school nutritional environment

using state data in working through this

Chamberlain: there is a concern that recommendations are made to the Board and nothing is really done with that
midyear is so that it is while there is work being done on it
hope is that this allows a feedback loop on their work
Fisher: more than half of Black or Asian students being treated badly, you're not going to be engaged
Department's push for culturally sustaining curriculum, make sure we actually live that mission
Rocha: how can we engage just beyond the presentation
Fisher suggests members going to regional meetings
Chamberlain: want to ensure students are creating the focus
give the students the data and say the focus area has to come from that; up to them to do it
connection between Board and students but keep freedom there

March Board of Ed: virtual schools

 Memo is here. This is the certificates being up for renewal

Greater Commonwealth materials here

TECCA here 

There is a preference (in response to question from Hills) for students who are medically compromised in admissions

passes

March Board of Ed: teacher licensure and preparation

 Hills: "a really good Board conversation broke out" when it was proposed 
anyone having an issues, we should postpone the vote until April
"and no, individually answering questions is not the same as the Board discussion"
yeah, there is an uncomfortable amount of offline discussion...

Martinez: good intentions within the law
part of a larger initiative
"this by itself will not solve it all"
make sure we're doing research on it, monitoring it

memo is here; summary of public comment is here 

March Board of Ed: school counselor of the year

 Henry Wan, School Counselor of the Year, from Harrington Elementary in Lexington

Wan: incredible honor to be before this Board
would like to include a song
He sings part of "Man in the Mirror"

so students can take charge of their realities

"as an Asian man in the field...that largely does not look like me"
"even I as a son of immigrants have something to contribute"
"every single child has the potential to contribute meaningfully and powerfully to this world"

March Board of Elementary and Secondary Education: opening comments

 The Board of Ed meets today at nine. Their agenda is here; the livestream is here. 

I'm joining this one remotely, as I spent yesterday at the Fordham Education Law Symposium, which was great, and maybe I will write about that here at some point. 

going in the mail: letter to ASBO on AI

 I sent the following handwritten letter to the ASBO International Executive Director today.

March 22, 2026

Dear Mr. Rowan,

I had every intention of responding to your invitation to “join the AI user community” via email, but I have hope that my taking the time and care to write by hand may make you take notice. I realize there is a certain irony to that hope, given the topic.

As an ASBO member who is not a school business official, who works with school boards on school finance issues here in Massachusetts, I have found these past years of increasing hype on AI use in school finance not only deeply distressing, but entirely contrary to the values the profession of school business officials are defined by.

In both my ten years on my local school board and the now eleven years I have served in my current role, it is the unimpeachable integrity of the school business official on which our school board members depend to make their decisions on school finances. I note “integrity” is even the first principle to which the ASBO Board holds itself, a principle which speaks of the “ethical responsibility” with which they “uphold trust.”

How then is it that ASBO has and continues to advocate for members to use a system founded in intellectual property theft? One cannot use generative AI systems without using the uncited works of millions, work they did not assent to the use of.

Where is the integrity in using work that is inaccurate? Every week brings another several stories of generative AI results being no better than guessing (in fact, we might guess better). This has in some cases deadly results. While we can hope this is not the case in school finance, results that are incorrect can, as we both know, be catastrophic.

Notably for school finance, it was recently brought to my attention that Microsoft itself recommends against using its Copilot function in Excel for any task “with legal, regulatory, or compliance implications.” (You can find that on the Copilot support page.) I think you and I would agree that this is everything within a school business office.

I do not know how school boards can trust what they are given by their school finance officers given such warnings within the very systems on which they operate, unless the board members know they are not being used.

I could go on at length about the the many other ways this push violates the core principles of school finance (that vast waste of resources; the horrific impacts on our students, particularly those most vulnerable; its use to kill schoolgirls in Iran; and the list goes on), but the loss of integrity in school finance, the undermining of the trust that is core to the function of the school business official, is the item to which I most wish to draw your attention.

Please end this undermining of this crucial trust.

Thank you for your attention,

Tracy A. Novick

Two from other states that may sound familiar

1.  Alaska: 
   

   My personal experience with the education system has been challenging. When I was attending Tok school, it was blatantly apparent that I would not gain the level of education I wanted. There were constant funding issues, inconsistent hiring of teachers and lowered expectations based on the background of students. This forced me to choose between the best of two bad options,” she said.
   ...
   
   “When the BSA stays frozen while the cost keeps rising, it feels like my generation is being asked to carry the burden. It feels like our future is being cut at the knees before we even had the chance to stand. Mt. Edgecumbe is my home away from home, and my last option for a fruitful education,” she said. “Please consider this when you make the decision whether or not to fund Alaskan futures.”

   
   

2. Wisconsin:  
   

   possibly we wouldn’t even have to go to referendum if they had kept up even with half the amount of inflation,” Donich said. “We wouldn’t be in this situation at all.”
   

Do we want kids to pass reading tests, or do we want them to be able to read?

 ...because, as The Hechinger Report notes (adding to what I shared last week from Linda Darling-Hammond), that "Mississippi miracle" which is getting laws passed and policies changed across the country, does not achieve the latter: 

“Mississippi moved a mountain in fourth grade,” said Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the NAEP assessments. High- and low-achieving students both made gains. But when these fourth graders reached eighth grade, their progress stalled. By 2019, more eighth graders were scoring at the bottom than in 2013. Scores dipped further during the pandemic, and by 2024, only higher achieving eighth graders recovered a bit.

“When should we see the Mississippi miracle reach eighth grade? Why haven’t we seen it yet?” McGrath asked.

The piece makes a number of suggestions, but, as a former high school English teacher, I think this one tracks: 

 Researchers and literacy advocates point to a common answer: Early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient middle school reading, where the words are longer and the sentences are more complicated.

Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction must continue after students learn to read. “It’s not phonics exactly,” he said. Teachers need to break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.

Shanahan thinks schools should teach students how to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide guidance on vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure.

Warding off vaccine rollback

 Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy halted the rollback of federal vaccine schedules and other policy changes. Per NPR: 

The judge ruled that Kennedy and his committee had made arbitrary and capricious decisions, ignoring a long-used, well-regarded scientific process for developing vaccine policies. He wrote in his ruling, "the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions."

The Washington Post: 

 “History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny,” the judge wrote. He added that even though science is not perfect, “nevertheless, science is still ‘the best we have.’”

The U.S. District Court judge from Massachusetts, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Joe Biden, wrote that the government bypassed the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel — which is how vaccine recommendations have been made for decades — to change the immunization schedule. He called it a “technical, procedural failure” and a “strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.”

and:

 The judge wrote that HHS cannot circumvent the long-standing practice of getting advice from the federal panel without offering an explanation “simply because they are following the President’s orders.”

He also wrote the government removed every member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them without undertaking the “rigorous screening” traditionally used to select members. The judge noted that “even under the most generous reading,” only six of the 15 members on the panel “have any meaningful experience in vaccines.”

The advisory panel was scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday, but that meeting has now been postponed, according to an HHS official. The judge temporarily suspended the appointment of 13 of the 15 panel members, finding they were not appointed properly. Therefore, he noted, that this week’s meeting could not take place. “For how can a committee meet without nearly the entirety of its membership?”

The federal government is expected to appeal. But every halt is more vaccines in more people.  

To the BU School of Ed on their upcoming "AI and the Future of Education"

 I sent the following email to the (now) Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, formerly the Boston University School of Education, where I earned my Master's of Arts in Teaching. I did so after receiving at least the fifth invitation over the past month to an event entitled "AI and the Future of Education."

Dear Dean Bishop,

As the College has, by my count, now invited me five times to the "AI and the Future of Education" event coming later this month, I feel I must respond: not only will I not attend, I will not be party to any event that purports to  explore how "AI can be developed and used in ways that improve learning outcomes, support educators, and benefit students." 

I know better because the Boston University School of Education taught me better. SED taught me always to see the humanity of the students before and alongside me. It taught me to beware of thinking that my teaching was in a vacuum, rather than in a larger ethical context of society, culture, the environment, and history. It taught me to be aware of myself as a worker who had both rights and responsibilities. It taught me always to be abundantly aware of anything--any work, any reading, any technology--I put before my students and of what it might and well could do to them. 

And above all, it taught me to do the reading.

It's clear in hosting such an event (and advertising it with such vigor) that those in leadership indeed have not done the reading. Just across campus, you have Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica M. Silbey at the School of Law, who in December released the essay "How AI Destroys Institutions." If in fact you wished to engage your future and current educators in the discourse around AI, you could have invited them, with similar fanfare, to discuss their work and findings. 

As an educational institution educating educators in a state in which the constitution demands we educate children "for the preservation of their rights and liberties," BU's Wheelock College owes not only alums and current students but more importantly the future students we educate that examination.

With great dismay,

Tracy O'Connell Novick (SED '95)

You will shift towards the bias in AI

 From recent research from Cornell: 

In every experiment, the researchers found that participants’ views shifted in the direction of the AI bias. The biggest surprise, Naaman said, was that mitigation measures did not work.

“We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”

The research itself is here.  
It cannot legitimately be used as a "thought partner" or even to "clean up writing" as I've heard people say even in the last day.

Don't use it. 

Talking at cross purposes on state aid

Among the recent articles covering school budgets in the past week, three caught my eye for how they nicely encapsulate how much talking at cross-purposes there are in Massachusetts education funding discussions right now.

Be cautious about buying the headlines

 You've quite possibly seen headlines touting particular states' "miracles" or otherwise having all the answers, suddenly, in student achievement. 

In addition to the caution that Bruce Baker (as so often) offers around how we support schools, I want to also point you to Linda Darling-Hammond's recent piece in Forbes, which cautions about hyping up only fourth grade NAEP, particularly in light of another affirmation of the long-term bad impacts of retaining students in early grades. As Darling-Hammond writes: 

In this article, I look primarily at 8th-grade NAEP scores, because there are two substantial sources of potential distortion in the comparability of 4th-grade NAEP scores across states: the outcomes of grade retention policies and the size of English learner (EL) populations.

On Title I for next year

 

Slide from Friday presentation from MASC
slides here; recording here

This week, DESE updated superintendents (slides 10-18) and then those who manage grants that Title I for the upcoming year is expected to be less for the state and for districts in Massachusetts.

As I noted back at the beginning of February, the federal budget that was passed by Congress and signed into law pretty much level funded the federal entitlement grants. As both the White House and the House of Representatives had proposed budgets that cut grants in various ways and in some cases quite severely, that level funding was a victory.

However (and again as I noted), allocations to states and then in turn to districts are recalculated each year based on the demographics that determine funding. So, while the national number is the same, the way it is divided up changes each year. 

This year--this coming fiscal year for school districts--the state has learned that the Massachusetts share of the federal poverty total has dropped by 10%. That will in turn decrease the Massachusetts share of Title I funding, and, because the Massachusetts share is made up off Massachusetts districts, the district by district allocations will also be less.

The state has recommended that districts plan for a Title I allocation that is 85% of this year's allocation. They have also shared this spreadsheet, which both gives in the final column that 85% and also alerts districts that may be on the cusp of losing particular eligibilities within Title I (thus making their losses more severe).

if putting crucial student documents into a chatbot for translation

 ....and then potentially, after review, using them concerns you, you may wish to offer public comment on proposed new state regulations 603 CMR 57. The new regulations set standards, as required by state and federal law, for translators and interpreters. 

As proposed, however, 57.05(3) reads: 

(3) Machine translation may be used to translate a document so long as the translation is reviewed and edited as needed by a School Translator before the document is provided to a parent or legal guardian with limited English proficiency.

Remember, what we're talking about here are things like IEPs, 504s, documents having to do with students' education, rights, access, and more. They often contain private information. They always contain vocabulary that is very specific to education (something recognized elsewhere by the creation of levels in translation certification).  

This would allow for such documents to be dumped into generative AI bots, with no privacy protections, to become part of the universe on which such things draw. Such programs have been created from the theft of others' work--it thus conflicts with the many mentions of "ethics" elsewhere in the regulations. And the levels of accuracy, even if checked by a human, both makes more work for the humans involved while lessening the humanity of the translation. 

You can submit comment by filling out their form or sending an email to BESERegulationComments@Mass.gov by April 24 at 5 PM. 

Two things on Massachusetts school budgets

•  The United for Our Future coalition, which includes (among others) MASC, MASS, and the MTA, sent a letter calling for increased education state education funding to cover an array of issues. The Eagle-Tribune covers that here.
  
  The letter reads in part: 
  

  The “perfect storm” of factors behind the fiscal crisis remains in place. Rising special education and transportation costs, funding lost to charter schools, the constraints of Proposition 2 ½, and technical issues with the formula that determines how our schools are funded all continue to strain local budgets, as they have for years. In addition to those challenges, many districts also face looming threats of federal funding cuts along with unanticipated declines in enrollment spurred by federal attacks on our immigrant students and families. These enrollment declines are heartbreaking for our students and school communities and directly impact funding in a school finance system such as ours that is based on per-student allotments.
   When our districts are under-resourced, our attention is forced away from developing creative and innovative ways to enhance student learning and more effectively support their social and emotional wellbeing. Instead, we are left to fight to minimize devastating cuts to programs and staff so that we can try to maintain the basic, daily services on which our students depend. We cannot accept this situation as an unavoidable reality. As champions of public education, we know what work must be done to build public schools that prepare all students for success in the classroom and beyond, but local communities cannot do it alone.

The Supreme Court endangers trans students through the shadow docket

 On Monday night, through their so-called shadow docket, in which a case isn't argued before them and they weigh in, anyway, the Supreme Court further endangered trans kids. The case is  Mirabelli v. Bonta out of California, in which parents are challenging the California law that bars school districts from outing trans kids to their parents. 

Was the school struck accidentally?

 Both Al Jazeera and NPR have looked more closely at the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Mina in Iran.

Schools are protected by international law

 Among the first places we heard were bombed in Iran over the weekend was the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, which is in southern Iran, where as of yesterday, the death toll had risen to 165 dead, 96 injured.

The strike on school appears to be the worst mass casualty event of the US-Israeli-led bombing campaign on Iran so far.

The United Nations education agency, UNESCO, on Saturday released a statement: 

UNESCO is deeply alarmed by the impact of the ongoing military escalation in the Middle East on educational institutions, students, and education personnel. 

Initial reports indicate that an attack on a girls' primary school in Minab, southern Iran, has resulted in the deaths of over 100 individuals, including numerous students. The killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law. 

Attacks against educational institutions endanger students and teachers and undermine the right to education. In accordance with its mandate and with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2601 (2021), UNESCO recalls the obligations of all parties to protect schools, students and education personnel.

In response to those who commented that the girls' school was next to a military barracks, one should note that currently there are 161 schools on military bases in the United States. 

Eisenhower

 Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.  

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.  

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. 

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.  

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.  

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.  

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.  

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. 

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.  

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that comes with this spring of 1953. 

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.  

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.  

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live? 

From "The Chance for Peace" 
Address Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16th, 1953 

for any who might be interested: the three F-15 bombers shot down by "friendly fire" by Kuwait over the weekend--which did not result in U.S. deaths--cost about $90M each.

Things to read this week

•  EdSurge has the thing I keep pointing out on early ed: everyone wants to talk about universal pre-K--which is great!--but we don't even have universal free public kindergarten across the country.
  ...including in Massachusetts, where education is not required until age 6. 
  
  
• The 74 did a good look at Google's new AI "partnership" for teachers, 'though I would also urge you to read Benjamin Riley's full rant (I think that's fair, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all!) . Google, of course, has said that they're looking to create a "network of future users" by getting into schools. If you get the teachers, you get the students.
  
  
• Speaking of technology looking out only for themselves, the school shooting last month in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia has Canadian leadership demanding answers from OpenAI, where the shooter had a history of descriptions of violence, which, among other things, the company did not bring to the attention of the police when interviewed following the shooting. While the company is how "vowing safety changes," Canada says they don't go far enough.
  It is a wildly unregulated industry. 
  
  
  
• And speaking of school violence, we in the U.S. are going to know less now, because the Trump administration "gutted the Department of Education office responsible for collecting and analyzing most school-related data," including data on kids bringing guns to school. 

Three takeaways from this week's Board of Ed meeting

 Three things that stuck with me from this meeting: 

1. Both the Commissioner and CFO Bell gave a "yikes*" when it comes to federal grants during the budget update. While the federal entitlement grants were level funded by Congress, they're reallocated by state and then by district each year by demographic information. The state and districts may see less money this year.
   
   
2. Depending on what language the conference committee on the literacy bills comes out with**, the Department may end up in the awkward position of enforcing something that doesn't exist. In the literacy discussion, they were careful to note that their standard for "high-quality instructional materials" isn't "evidence-based" because "very few materials on the market have evidence of efficacy." This is, of course, more evidence (hmph) that the Legislature shouldn't be involved in this, but should be leaving this to the level of authorities who are doing the actual reading on this.
   
   
3. Speaking of not doing the reading, it was alarming to hear, in response to a question posed during the interpretation and translation regulation discussion, that the only guidance or recommendation coming from the Department on the use of AI in translation was that translations be checked by a person. So we're okay with teachers and others just dumping, say, an IEP into a chatbot where it then becomes part of the universe on which everything draws?
   FERPA, people.***
   Let's please do more reading about how this stuff works before turning our core responsibilities over in such ways.

__________________________

*not actually; my interpretation 
**assuming it comes out at all? Is it possible this terrible idea will just die there?
***when it comes out for public comment--it hasn't yet--this would be a very good comment to offer

This is not really related to the above but I thought it was funny.
source

On teaching the humanities

 From Iowa: 

Are we richer if we don’t know who Plato was, or fail to read the poems of the Roman poet Virgil? While we may still listen to Beethoven, can we understand the meaning of the music? Who will chronicle our time like Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Irving enlightened us about theirs? Where is Betsy Ross to sew our flag?

It really is time for the academic community, the humanities side, to sharpen their pencils, freshen their paint brushes, and tighten the strings on their violin. They can even ask their tech colleges to come out of Plato’s cave and join the fray.

And in the Yondr v actual students contest

 ...the students are going to win every time [gift link]

I thought this, from student journalist Joel Nam, was quite relevant (and not only on this): 

Let’s not pretend this outcome wasn’t inevitable. Any policy that hinges on student integrity, mass compliance and daily administrative policing is doomed from the start.

That full piece can be found here.  

Board of Ed for February: budget!

 "real challenge" per Martinez at federal level on funding, related to enrollment decline and other things
pay attention when things like this are said

Bill Bell on the Governor's budget

SOA implemented in full as of FY27

concern of how chapter 70 is working; increasing number of districts receiving minimum aid
Department, Commissioner, Executive Office, A&F "aren't tone deaf to the issue"
commitment to see through implementation of Student Opportunity Act; what leaders want to do after that "remains to be seen"

circuit breaker growing by $100M into next budget year

haven't received word on what the education funding levels would be for federal grants in entitlement grants
baseline is funded nationally, but allocations remain to be seen

Legislators have begun their process of budget hearings: education and local aid is March 23 in Lawrence

Hills asks if they have the resources needed to implement the goals
Martinez, in essence, says it is a start

Smidy: the capacity is very limited in the field
even with allocations and grants, a lot of schools are not going to be in a position to move forward with these initiatives if they don't have the resources to move forward

Craven: need a sense about what costs are being piled onto districts
Martinez: not only the need, but also where districts are in 
"when we use the word 'advocacy' we're using it too loosely"
nah, that's still advocacy; you just want specific advocacy
"how do we become strategic about our resources..."
this is what people say when they aren't going to give you more funding to do more things
report on local contribution coming in June 

Bell: another attempt to meet the needs of local districts and communities that exist within a capped revenue environment 

And adjourned

Board of Ed for February: regulation updates proposed

 These are in response to the Protect Education Equity Act as outlined here 

update regulations consistent with federal law on discipline procedures for students in special education
regulation for interpretation and translation for public schools
proposing to go out to public comment 
anticipating vote in June 

amendments to special education regulations 603 CMR 28
technical amendment (adding "state" to law in definition of IEP)
new section 28.11 of discipline procedures
mirror federal requirements

new regulations for translation and interpretation services 603 CMR 57
requirement is not new
law requires state to established clear statewide standards
qualification of interpreters both general education and advanced (requires specialized knowledge)
similar for translation
experienced-based pathway for those who served for at least two years in a district

non-regulatory actions by DESE 

proposal for a 60 day comment period

aha! "use of AI would need to be checked or verified before being released to a family"

so they aren't barring dumping an IEP into an LLM? Because that's a violation of FERPA

Board of Ed for February: early literacy

 Kershaw opens (which is interesting, because of course she's early ed!)
PRISM grants, Literacy Launch, high dosage tutoring
"struggling to see improvement statewide"
grade 3 "dropped during the pandemic years and has not yet bounced back"
"there's been lots of legislative interest"

Board of Ed for February: opening comments

 The agenda is here. The livestream is here. The meeting is fully remote.

tree in my backyard
why they are fully remote

Today will be (I believe) the sole appearance of  Amy Kershaw, as Acting Secretary of Education, as Steve Zrike will have started before their March meeting. 

Not enough people know that this is a thing: one for the map people

You may or may not already be familiar with the Leventhal Map and Education Center (which resides at but is not part of the the Boston Public Library).

They have this Atlascope where they've uploaded maps of Massachusetts and then--here's the fun part--they LAYER then, so you can find places over time!

They recently updated Worcester with a 1911 one, which joins the 1886 layer they already had, which I had to take a photo of part of Tatnuck Square:

 ...because that's Abby Kelley Foster owning the property after Stephen's death. 

two* Massachusetts school budget charts you might find interesting

 I took some time this past week to update some slides from work, and there are two that I thought might be of general interest.

As you may or may not know, the state school funding system is based on an underlying split of 51% of the foundation budget coming from the local communities and 49% coming from the state. Now, that's foundation budget level state aid and  required local spending, so both of those aren't what actually happens. It continues to be the local part that's really different, though. Here's what FY25 (which the state recently released actual spending data on) was: 

Green is chapter 70; blue is local spending

Now, please keep in mind that this is reported net school spending--it doesn't include grants, and it also doesn't include things like transportation (which regional districts have heavily reimbursed). It is however most of what is spend on schools in Massachusetts, and chapter 70 is 38.5% of the above total.

Now some of that above state aid is, as I've been noting, hold harmless aid. Hold harmless aid is, of course, aid that ensures a district doesn't get less aid than the year before. Because the state also ensures districts get an increase in aid each year, this can accumulate, such that the amount of state aid a district is receiving is increasingly far removed from the needs of the district and the ability to contribute of the municipality.

As I was putting together my annual comparison of two districts with very similar foundation budgets that have very different levels of need and very different abilities to contribute this year: 

Dartmouth, which has much less need in its district, and much strongly ability to contribute than Southbridge, as seen above...

...is, due to minimum per pupil increases adding up over time, now required by the state to spend more than Southbridge through state-supplied funding. In other words, the state gets both Dartmouth and Southbridge schools to foundation, and then adds funding to Dartmouth's state aid, lest Dartmouth's aid be less than before. 

As always, I post this not to pick on Dartmouth, or indeed anyone; we could easily do this with a large number of districts across the state. I am, however, going to continue to note that this isn't equity

*yes, there are three charts, but it's the first and the third I thought you'd find of interest

Board of Ed meets Tuesday

 ...and because it is school vacation week, you might miss it, but the agenda is here.

I suspect they'll be spending much of their time on the update on early literacy (the free space the bingo board for this meeting is for "high quality instructional materials"), and the regulations bear review, but I'm looking forward to the only Board of Elementary and Secondary Education appearance of current Acting Secretary Amy Kershaw, who is the Early Education and Care Commissioner. 

On the antisemitism work around Massachusetts public schools

 Excellent piece from The Hechinger Report, capturing much that I haven't seen covered locally, about the state's antisemitism commission:

Massachusetts is a deep-blue state, and the commission started its work before Donald Trump was elected to a second term. But the report and recommendations are being published in the context of the Trump administration accusing schools and universities of not doing enough to combat antisemitism and pulling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from higher education institutions, notably Harvard. The same week the commission released its report, the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce launched a coordinated investigation into alleged antisemitism in three public school districts, in California, Pennsylvania and Virginia. This is happening even as the administration is pulling back on enforcement of antidiscrimination protections of Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ+ students and those with disabilities, among others.  

This work has proven controversial, starting with the definition of “antisemitism” and continuing with the proposed solutions and broader implications for communities. California’s new law was immediately challenged with a lawsuit brought by teachers and students who say it violates free speech. And in Massachusetts, the commission’s final document was met with a “shadow report,” issued in direct response by Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff, a group of Massachusetts-based experts in fields like education, law and Holocaust and genocide studies. 

Most notably: 

Concerns about the Massachusetts report begin with its definition of antisemitism. It advises educators to embrace the definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a multinational nonprofit focused on Holocaust education. That definition, also used by the Trump and Biden administrations, gives 11 examples of antisemitism, several of which could be interpreted primarily as political criticisms of the state of Israel — like claiming that the existence of Israel is a “racist endeavor” or drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy with that of the Nazis. The shadow report notes that Kenneth Stern, one of IHRA’s lead drafters, himself has warned against the definition being “weaponized” and urged institutional leaders not to adopt it as formal policy.

Not covered here--I suspect because how Massachusetts does this is a Massachusetts thing--is that the report has no authority over schools; it was a special commission, and the report has not gone to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

However, it bears thoughtful watching. 

65% of what?

 Over the weekend, Governor Healey, speaking of the proposed ballot question which would roll the income tax back to 4% from 5%, said that the question, which she opposes, could mean "65%" of all education funding would go away.

Reading that, I scratched my head as to how 65% of specifically "all education funding" would be cut, and apparently, I wasn't alone, as today, State House News Service has the following: 

...uh huh...
I'd add only that cutting education funding that specifically resolved the McDuffy suit would, I suspect, also be unconstitutional. 

Parents opting their kids out of technology at school

 I thought this piece from NBC on parents opting their children out of technology at school, of interest: 

National organizations representing administrators, school technology officers and teachers have urged caution against lumping in classroom screen time with recreational device use at home, saying they need to prepare students for employers who expect students to be fluent with digital tools and artificial intelligence.

But the parents opting out point to research showing that students who used computers at school performed worse academically and that information is better retained when read on paper. And education experts say there’s a significant difference between educating students about technology and completely relying on educational technology.

“It’s a bit of a mirage,” said Faith Boninger, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Education Policy Center who has studied flaws in digital platforms used by schools. “Students don’t need to be consumers of this technology in order to be able to use it in 10 or 15 years, when it’s likely going to be something else entirely.”

I found it particularly interesting that, towards the end of the article, they have quotes from Montgomery County, Maryland: 

The Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations is pressing the district to provide a formal process to request “non-screen alternatives” for families that have “made the conscious effort to limit their children’s exposure to screens.”

Lisa Cline, a Montgomery County mom who chaired a parent advisory committee focused on technology, said she opted her son out when he was in third grade and then requested each school year that his teachers keep him off screens as much as possible until he graduated high school last year. She said she hopes to work with the advocacy group Fairplay for Kids to launch a national campaign urging parents to opt out of school-issued devices.

“I think it’s a win, actually, if we get to that point where the default is you opt in,” Cline said.

 Montgomery County schools were in the news last year as they were the district sued in the Mahmoud case, which I wrote about here, in which the Supreme Court provided for pretty sweeping parental opt-outs on religious grounds for their children in public schools. While the case is not mentioned in the article, I suspect that is only a matter of time. 

Locally, I'm still rather stunned that this was part of the reporting of a local subcommittee meeting: 

Massachusetts state standards in action

While it is school vacation week here in Massachusetts, I came across two things over the weekend that were the Massachusetts state education standards in action.

First, this post from the Governor's thread on the new AI-bot that the state is using:

Bluesky post from Governor Healey's account says "Government should embrace new technology --safely and securely--to make life easier for our families and businesses"

The word "should" is doing a lot of work there. That would be grounds for a solid discussion under one of the four strands of our state technology and computer science standards, Computing and Society, which includes both "ethics and laws" and "interpersonal and societal impact." In high school, this includes the following standard [9-12.CAS.c #5]:

Analyze the beneficial and harmful effects of computing innovations (e.g., social networking, delivery of news and other public media, intercultural communication). 

It would behoove the Governor and her administration to do so before continuing to thrust this unwanted change upon us.

In the second case, high school and middle school students in Massachusetts have been organizing walkouts to protest against ICE. This analysis, research, organization, and action is directly reflective of the state's required civics project in both middle and high school, for which you can find the reference guide below. 

Most notably, the overall requirement is:

 Students complete the real work of engaged, informed participants in a democracy by identifying issues and advocating for change in their communities.

And:

 They move beyond the walls of the classroom and exercise their voice.

The thing about education: it isn't, in the end, supposed to be theoretical. Either we mean it, or we don't.

Let's talk about some things you could donate to today

It's almost Valentine's day, and in that spirit, here are some places that could use your love:

• With my usual caveat that I hate that this exists and we should just USE PUBLIC FUNDS TO FUND PUBLIC EDUCATION: With the code "HEART" today, your donation to Donors Choose is doubled. Here's Worrcester. Note that they're also running a specific (needed) focus on Minnesota. If you'd like to help a Minnesota classroom in a place dear to my heart get baby chicks to raise, you can support this effort.
  
  
• The Stand with Minnesota page continues to be an excellent resource for supporting those living under federally-imposed terror, which has not, despite the headlines, ceased.
  Note that if you scroll down, you can find a "for schools and students" section. 
  
  

• I am a big fan of "just feed people who are hungry" sort of outreach, and locally, the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker does that. So does St. John's Food for the Poor, which is also now running the overnight shelter here in Worcester. In both cases, please note that there are ways to sign up to volunteer on those pages, too.
  
  

• LUCE Massachusetts has a regularly updated "Milkweed" page, which shares mutual aid requests coming in from across the state. If you wonder about the name: 
  

   Just as monarch butterflies use milkweed plants to deter predators and create safe conditions during migration, immigrant families need community support when facing ICE enforcement. Be the milkweed.

   

my photo taken some years ago in western Mass

Some things to look at from across the country

•  In another round of trying to get religious charter schools to happen, Oklahoma has rejected a Jewish charter school, and the proposers plan to sue. This is of course aimed at getting such a case back in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 4-4 decision last year on St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was due to Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself.
  
  
• South Carolina has advanced a bill out of their education committee which would bar districts from having minimum grades rather than the grade actually earned for students. One might expect the conservative support, but I'll observe that support also came from their state teachers' association. 
  
  
• Maine is looking at their school funding formula. I thought this part was especially interesting: 
  

  Maine Educational Policy Research Institute proposes a 90/10 model for calculating how much of their costs districts can afford to cover with local funding. That means 90% of the expectation would be based on property taxes (the current system) and 10% would be based on the economically disadvantaged student rate. Researchers found that rate to be the best proxy for the poverty level in a community.

  Note that Maine's formula does include transportation, which Massachusetts does not include. Also this is an "I know, right?" with a different answer: 
  

   Johnson said special education is the area of the model that is “the most under stress.” Because of a step in the formula that bases state funding on past spending, the current formula disproportionately privileges wealthier districts.

  But before changing the formula, the institute proposes shifting special education to a regional model, wherein districts would collaborate on providing special ed services. Researchers are planning a forthcoming special education-specific report.

Wise words from South Dakota on state oversight and cell phones

 Excellent commentary piece from South Dakota: 

....passage of the bill flies in the face of local control for school boards. While SB 198 leaves it up to local boards to decide on discipline and what constitutes a school day, it takes away their power to decide on the use of cellphones in a one-size-fits-all policy.

The beauty of local school boards is that they reflect the wants and needs of their communities. Some have students squirrel away their phones all day. Others give students access to their phones during lunch. Still others use the freedom for students to have a phone during the school day as a lesson in responsibility.

Banning student cellphone use in schools sounds good on the surface. So did substituting ag classes for science classes and allowing athletes to substitute sports participation for a gym credit. Whenever the Legislature gets into the business of micromanaging school districts, there are pitfalls aplenty.

go check what cameras your district has

 ...and what cameras might have been placed on district property by the police¹, due to what has been uncovered in an article jointly reported by The 74 and The Guardian:

The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network.

Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.

Note that this may well not even be your local police department doing the search for ICE: 

Flock searches are typically broad national queries, and officers do not select individual cameras, he explained. Instead, with each search request, the system automatically checks every camera that Flock customers share with the nationwide database, including those operated by school districts.

The closing is very apt:

 “School districts are in a unique position, they have a unique level of responsibility to protect their students in specific ways”, including their privacy, Wandt said.

 It's worth noting that Flock has partnered with Ring, they of the Super Bowl ad that, while attempting to convince us all that they wanted to find lost puppies, made it newly clear that having a Ring camera is to now be part of a national surveillance network. While the comment from Ring was:

For the record, Ring says Search Party is not designed to process human biometrics, and that Search Party footage is not included in the company’s Community Requests service, which allows law enforcement to request video for voluntary sharing by Ring users. 

...do you want that on your house? Let alone in your school. 

Go ask.  

__________________________________________
¹my recollection is that there are cameras that are on WPS property that are not WPS-controlled. Someone may want to look into that?
UPDATE: The city's contract on their cameras does not allow them to be shared with other agencies. I appreciate knowing that! 

Secretary Tutwiler to step down Friday; Steve Zrike will succeed him in March

 The Secretary announced his departure on Instagram this afternoon: 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Executive Office of Education (@masseoe)

State House News Service reports here. WGBH reports here.

The Secretary, as a reminder, is an appointed position, serving at the pleasure of the Governor. They head the Executive Office of Education, and they have a voting seat on the three Boards that oversee public education in Massachusetts: Early Ed and Care; Elementary and Secondary Education; and Higher Ed.

Zrike has been superintendent of Salem since 2020; Lt. Governor Driscoll was mayor in Salem when he was appointed and was a member of the School Committee. He previously was the receiver of Holyoke.

and speaking of children and ICE

 Don't miss this piece from ProPublica on the children in the detention center in Dilley Texas. 

When I asked the kids to tell me about the things they missed most from their lives outside Dilley, they almost always talked about their teachers and friends at school. Then they’d get to things like missing a beloved dog, McDonald’s Happy Meals, their favorite stuffed animal or a pair of new UGGs that had been waiting for them under the Christmas tree.

They told me they feared what might happen to them if they returned to their home countries and what might happen to them if they remained here. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago said he didn’t want to go back to Tamaulipas, Mexico. “I have friends, school, and family here in the United States,” he said of his home in San Antonio, Texas. “To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained.” He ended with a plea, “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

ProPublica features their letters here.  

Don't miss their art, as well as their words. 

ICE kept kids out of school in Maine

 The Portland Press Herald this weekend took a look at the attendance in Maine due to ICE activities: 

More than half of all multilingual students in South Portland, and nearly half in Portland, were absent on some of the most affected days. Between Jan. 20 and 28, Black and Hispanic students in Portland missed school at a rate 30 percentage points higher than their white peers.

Absence rates varied on a school-by-school basis: In Portland, one elementary school was missing as many as 34% of students some days, while others were missing less than 10%. At Biddeford’s PreK-2 school, 23% of all students — and 58% of multilingual students — missed school one especially stark day during the second week of the operation.

They do a nice job with graphing.  

point five, Worcester

 When I posted about the Worcester School Committee taking up the FY27 budget projections for the first time, we didn't yet have the FY25 net school spending compliance report. The summary file of that is now available, and now we can see what impact the $3.8M the City Council transferred from free cash, as highlighted in yellow in Ms. Consalvo's presentation here: 

Note that part of the reason that the city had as much ground to make up as it did is that in FY25, the city underfunded the schools by $1.9M (99.6% of required). That gets carried over into the next year.

That puts Worcester at a projected point five percent over required net school spending for the current fiscal year (FY26). 

Statewide average (projected) for FY26 is 26.3% over required

of note from San Francisco on AI

 San Francisco Unified signed a contract with OpenAI before putting it before their school board, where it appears on their consent agenda. 

As the San Francisco Public Press notes in their coverage: 

Even if students do not have direct access, data such as school work, academic records, behavioral information and digital interactions can be especially sensitive, since minors have special legal protections. Once shared with vendors, student information can be stored, analyzed or reused beyond public view.

Artificial intelligence chatbots can present privacy problems for schools, said Lee Tien, legislative director at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which scrutinizes how many public institutions, including schools, use technology and collect private data.

The timing and handling of the agreement raised questions about how San Francisco school administrators evaluate and approve technology tools, and whether meaningful oversight occurs, Tien said. When procurement decisions come in advance of review by accountable leadership, public discussions about surveillance and transparency can be shortchanged. “It’s simply rubber-stamping decisions that were being made, and you don’t know why they were being made,” Tien said.

Such a procurement decision, unless it exceeded five years, wouldn't even need to come to the school committee in Massachusetts at all.  

on the attractiveness of school buildings

 The days on which I agree with the American Enterprise Institute are few, but this opinion piece by Robert Pondiscio, entitled "Why are school buildings so ugly?" struck a chord: 

A century ago, we built schools that looked like cathedrals: soaring, columned, sunlit. Even in modest communities and small towns—especially there—they were grand civic statements, rooted in the idea that public education was a serious and noble undertaking. Just as courthouses and libraries once signaled dignity and permanence, so too did public schools. You were meant to feel small walking in, but in the best way: awed, inspired, aware that something larger than yourself was happening here. And once you were old enough to set foot inside, you were part of it.

I will gladly concede that my opinion might be Philistinism; I don’t know enough about architecture to fill a thimble. Perhaps my tastes are outdated and anachronistic. But to my untrained eye, too many schools built from the post-war decades to today resemble garages, warehouses, even prisons. Instead of announcing themselves with architectural pride, they disappear into the landscape. At worst, they actively depress it. That transformation isn’t just aesthetic. It’s moral, cultural, and political; I cannot shake the nagging sense that uninspiring school buildings reflect our shrinking vision of education itself—from temples of intellectual and moral formation to utilitarian spaces built for the drab instrumentalism of “college and career readiness.”

but is there bad AI news this week?

 I'm so glad you asked: there is indeed!

Recent research published by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin at Cornell University has found that "[n]ovice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process." From the coverage in Ed Tech Innovation Hub: 

The findings have implications beyond software development, particularly for education systems and professional learning environments increasingly adopting AI tools. The researchers argue that AI-enhanced productivity should not be assumed to translate into long-term competence, especially in settings where individuals are expected to supervise, verify, or correct AI-generated work.

The study also raises concerns about overreliance on AI in safety-critical or high-stakes domains, where human oversight depends on strong foundational skills. Without intentional learning design, AI use may reduce the very expertise needed to manage automated systems effectively.

The authors emphasize that AI can support learning when used intentionally, but caution that widespread adoption without structured pedagogical approaches could weaken skill development over time. They conclude that organizations and educators should focus not only on what AI enables people to produce, but on how it shapes the process of learning itself.

(emphasis added)

These are conversations that are badly, badly needed in education. They are absolutely not being had, in the mad rush to ensure it is adopted in classrooms. 

since I see tech and AI use is in the news here locally

 I thought this, from The Harvard Crimson's reporting on the Cambridge School Committee, was of interest: 

The School Committee also addressed growing concern over technology usage in schools, an issue raised repeatedly during public comment. The discussion followed a policy order last year asking the district to assess students’ screen time and set a formal policy on AI usage.

Murphy said the district’s responsibility is to ensure the benefits of using technology in the classroom are not “outweighed by the types of risks and potential detriments that are also associated with technology being as ubiquitous as it is.”

He recommended the discussion on AI use be moved to the School Committee’s curriculum subcommittee to “provide a forum” for parents, educators, and students to voice their concerns. The district also announced plans to conduct focus groups to gather feedback from educators across different grade levels.

“Trying to strike that balance and understand that nuance — that we want to capitalize on what's available to us, while not falling into, or falling prey to some of the pitfalls,” he said, “I think that's a really difficult conversation.”

A few things of note here: 

1. The "growing concern" is recognized a valid and one, that warrants real engagement.
2. The superintendent recognizes that there is an actual cost/benefit analysis that needs to be done. 
3. Engagement with both families and with educators across grade levels is formally being planned.

I will of course note again that a single "AI policy" is not a thing that can responsibly be done, due to the significant number of areas that AI impacts.  

"Should so much come too short of your great trespass /As but to banish you, whither would you go?"

If you haven't yet seen Sir Ian McKellan's delivery of the Sir Thomas Moore monologue on Stephen Colbert's show, please do watch and listen:

 

Minnesota educators sue to keep ICE away from their schools and bus stops

 Yesterday, two Minnesota school districts (Twin Cities suburbs) and Education Minnesota, the teachers' union, filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security¹ to keep ICE agents away from their schools and bus stops. From K-12 Dive:

“DHS’s presence in and near school property has created an atmosphere of fear, for native-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and legally present immigrants alike,” the lawsuit, filed by Fridley Public School District and Duluth Public School District, said. “Parents across the state are afraid to send their children to school, and schools have had to adjust their programs.” 

The grounds for the suit, per The New York Times:

The lawsuit argues that the policy change usurped decades of federal precedent. Since the 1990s, the lawsuit says, the federal government had instructed immigration agents to minimize impact in places with children present and to get special permission and operate discreetly if necessary.
The suit asserts that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that requires certain notice and procedures when making a policy change.

Never rule administrative procedure out. 

____________
¹ The name always feels ironic, but particularly here.

Worcester School Committee starts talking about FY27

I'm not able to attend this evening--training another committee!--but I did want to note that the Worcester School Committee is receiving their first look at FY27 (next school year's budget) at tonight's meeting. You can find the presentation here. 

This has now become when we also get the first look at the cover art of the budget book, which I always appreciate: 

enjoying the spooky overtones here; are we foreshadowing FY28?