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).