Worcester Public Schools take up rezoning

I have put off writing anything regarding about this until we had, really, anything to talk about. As a result of this past week's Governance and Operations meeting, we now have a report from Dillinger Research and Applied Data, with preliminary recommendations. I thought that MassLive did a decent job outlining the big points of what is in it (that link is via Yahoo! so is not paywalled); the T&G also did five takeaways. 

The rezoning work is being updated on this WPS page, and this map (which I urge you not to try to examine on a teeny phone screen!) is what they're looking at right now. That also allows you to give feedback.

And while I am sharing useful information up front here, the rest of what they're planning this fall for meetings is this: 

Here are some initial thoughts from me (as usual, speaking solely as myself).

What I have been reading this weekend

• This is from earlier in the month, but Wired covered how AI slop is now facing a backlash.
  

  The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.

  
  
  
• The one group that is acutely aware of how much public education spends is the industries concentrating on selling schools things, and technology is one of the two big pushes on that front right now. The New York Times has a piece on exactly that sales relationship. It is an excerpt from Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools by Natasha Singer, which is coming out in September.
  
  
• The other industry clamoring for education money is the security industry, and Slate has a bleak look at that, which makes this very good point: 
  

  When Gaggle quarantines a draft, when Securly assigns a kid a rolling “wellness level,” when a detection system decides the shape in a student’s hand is a gun, the software is filing a report about a young person’s intentions. And it arrives first. It shows up carrying the authority of a system that cost the district millions and speaks in the grammar of objectivity, and it lands in front of an administrator or a school cop before the kid has said a word. The student’s account comes second, when it’s generally too late.

  Hard to "believe kids" when they're always the ones responding to something that has already been invested, literally, which such authority.
  
  

•  Florida's voucher program and so-called parents' rights push has just run headlong into 2000 years of hierarchy, with the Florida Attorney General receiving, upon his push to force Catholic schools that are receiving vouchers to allow students to attend even if they are not vaccinated, a tour de force letter from the Roman Catholic bishops of Florida, which I really recommend you read.
  

  Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.   

  I'll note that the letter does a nice job of laying out why one might required universal vaccination, by the way, something which I'd appreciate more of our Massachusetts politicians reading.  

• Steve Revilak has been posting highlights from the Arlington, MA archives via his Bluesky account, and I very much appreciated, as a child of the 70's, this one from 1971 about the latest menace on the street of Arlington: BIG WHEELS!
  

  

  
  
  

I wouldn't call that "innovation"

 You might remember that Springfield's Empowerment Zone schools came back under Springfield School Committee control last spring, now as innovation schools, which you may or may not remember were a part of the 2011 Act Relative to the Achievement Gap. They allow for schools, under a school committee approved plan, to have individual modifications of some things, which can include schedule, staffing, curriculum.¹ 

Well, one of the schools in Springfield has a particular "innovation" in mind, WBUR reported this week: 

Springfield's Kiley Prep plans to use a model developed by Alpha School, a controversial national network that uses AI to teach academics like math and reading.

Oddly--and I'd be really interested in what's going on with this--this piece continues to talk about the school being in the Empowerment Zone, the Zone having authorities, and quotes the Empowerment Zone co-director as the authority, which seems rather in conflict with the spring decision to bring these schools back into the district. 

Back to the Alpha schools part:

 Springfield Empowerment Zone leaders had discussed bringing the Alpha model into several classrooms during the 2026-2027 school year, according to emails obtained through a public records request filed by the president of the Springfield Education Association and shared with WBUR.

The pilot would begin with about 25 students. Kiley Prep has roughly 300 sixth through eighth graders, and students score well below state averages on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the standardized test known as the MCAS.

Matt Brunell, SEZP's co-executive director, said he hopes Alpha's model will boost academic performance.

“We're in need of doing something pretty dramatic in the wake of post-COVID learning losses,” he said. “We can at least see if this strategy could yield some success.”

Brunell posted a message on the SEZP website Thursday outlining the plan. He said parents will be notified Friday. School starts Monday, and the pilot is expected to begin in September.

Innovation schools have a very specific process through which their plans, having been supported by two-thirds of the educators in the building, goes to the school committee. If those plans, which would be required for the schools to become innovation schools, actually went forward in Springfield, I have not seen any reporting on it, and, as this change is now being challenged by the Springfield teachers' union, it would appear there's some question on that aspect of the innovation. 

¹If you type "innovation" into the handy search bar on the left of this blog when you have it open on a laptop, you get these results, which will give you some of the extensive history Worcester has had with these. In other words, yes, I know whereof I speak.

as goes Brockton...

At the School Committee meeting at the beginning of August, the Brockton School Committee was told that they should anticipate cuts for next year's--FY28--budget: 

School district leaders in Brockton anticipate cuts in the coming years as they stare down two budget time bombs: the end of the Student Opportunity Act and rapidly escalating pension costs.

"The way I see it, this does mean cuts moving into next year, and we are going to start talking about the budget early," Superintendent Priya Tahiliani said about the impact of pension payments during an Aug. 4 school committee meeting.

On top of pension costs that are increasing by over $1 million every year through 2032, Tahiliani has warned committee members about the end of the Student Opportunity Act following the 2026-27 school year. The act has poured millions in state aid into districts like Brockton that serve more high-needs students than average.

While the increases in pension obligations is specific, the end of the implementation of the Student Opportunity Act--and thus the end of those increases in state aid, which were, for districts getting the big bumps on this, covering the actual cost increases, because the inflation in the formula does not--is not only a Brockton thing. It is a Worcester, Springfield, Holyoke, New Bedford, Fall River, Lowell, Lawrence--are you sensing a theme here?--thing.

This is not being talked about enough. It is not making enough noise locally in those cities, let alone at the state level. 

I happened to be behind a log truck on 202 last week,
and while I have not seen that movie, I have seen the clips.
Think of this post as a warning of much more certain danger.

yes, most federal grant funding is still coming from the U.S. Department of Education

 With ongoing thanks to Mark Lieberman for keeping his eyes on this: 

Congress in February approved more than $12.5 billion for K-12 schools to flow to states on Oct. 1, including $10.8 billion through the Title I formula grant for schools serving low-income students and $1.7 billion through Title II for teacher professional development.

In a statement to Education Week, the department confirmed that those funds will go through the department’s existing G5 grants system, rather than through a portal run by the Department of Labor, where the Trump administration has moved most K-12 programs.

This was true of the round of funding that went out July 1; today's statement confirms the same will be true of the funding going out on October 1.  

exploding a few myths of the coming Massachusetts school year

•  We do not have new graduation requirements. The council created to submit a report has done so. Those are, as I noted in my post about it, recommendations, most of which will take new legislation to implement.
  I know there are timelines in the report, but what the timelines don't take into account is the authorities necessary to fulfill the requirements. 
  Not only is that not happening for this coming school year, I would suspect that it unlikely to happen for next school year, either, as the Legislature will begin a new term in the spring. New term means new committee assignments, and so things won't get moving until spring at least.
  
  
• We do not have a state-mandated cell phone policy in schools. Yes, both the House and the Senate passed cell phones in schools bills, but they are wildly different. While that did go to conference committee, the Legislature ended formal sessions on July 31. We will only see non-controversial legislation passed in informal session, which is what remains.
  If you're seeing a new cell phone policy in your district, that is something your district is choosing to do; it is not required by state law. 
  
  
• We will not see a major revision of the school funding system ahead of the next budget. The new Foundation Budget Review Commission's report is not due until October 2028. 
  Sorry, but the next budget--the first post-SOA budget--is not going to be assisted in this fashion.  

How we are starting the school year

 ...without herd immunity in more than 70 percent of classrooms:

image from the Washington Post's look-up tool (gift link)