Some days are like that

 We had a one-two punch of "who's in charge of this, anyway?" around public education late yesterday:

• The Trump administration announced that they are moving special education and civil rights enforcement out of the Department of Education; special education is going to Health and Human Services and civil rights to the Department of Justice. This has of course something that this administration been warning of/planning for some time, but it appears they now are rolling forward. 

  The change will move some of the most essential and integrated functions provided by the federal Education Department to two separate agencies and further accelerates the dismantling of the department without congressional approval. Senior department officials said the changes would not reduce or affect students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families. But many details are still being worked out.

  I think it's fair to say, given what we have seen of this administration, that this is not going to work out well for students and families.

• The conference committee working on the literacy bill for Massachusetts came out with their joint work, which can be found here. DESE is now going to have a list of what curricula a district may use, and districts have to choose from the list unless they can get a waiver to use curricula that they can prove works (no room, note for new curricula there). No curricula included may include:
  

  implicit or incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words or guessing from context and picture cues, also known as MSV or three-cueing, as a substitute for identifying a word.

  
  Words mean things and barring "implicit or incidental instruction in word meaning" from reading instruction may be the silliest inclusion I have read recently.
  Already, it has been asked if barring "guessing from context and picture cues," which is a large reason we actually use picture books with children, would bar the use of picture books:
  

  "Does it mean you can't show a student a picture? Of course you can. Children's books are always illustrated."

  That isn't a ridiculous question, and that it isn't well understood how VARIED are the methods by which children gain access to the quite complex skill of reading underlines that this is not a decision that should have been made by the Legislature. 
  Oh, and they stripped out the $25M fund for implementation.