Don't go spending that $100M yet

 The chair of House Ways and Means weighed in yesterday: 

House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz has “some serious concerns” about the governor’s election-year proposal to spend $100 million on public schools before they’ve even collected the revenue to support it. 

“The ink hasn’t dried yet on the actual fiscal year 2027 budget, so I think we’d like to see that be implemented first,” the House budget chief said. “There’s a lot of concerns related to raising that Chapter 70 number further, may further complicate things for future budgets.”

It has been rightly noted that Healey's proposal doesn't actually raise Chapter 70 aid--while it's general aid for K-12 schools, it is not being distributed via MGL Ch. 70, sec. 1--and it explicitly does not raise the chapter 70-designated aid received by schools this year, which sets the floor for next year.

I will observe again, though, that concerns about "future budgets" are very much appropriate given that this is the final year of the Student Opportunity Act implementation.  

Things I am reading this week

•  Not specific to education, but this lengthy piece on "AI mania" in the workplace is a very "the Emperor has no clothes" description, where no one can say the Emperor has no clothes because no one else in business leadership will.
  

  The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

  I again reiterate: for education to put any eggs in this basket is badly thought-out.
  
  
• My main takeaway from Chad Aldeman's look at K-12 education spending hitting a trillion dollars is what a huge difference single payer health care would make: 
  

   In 2023-24, schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. As another way to look at it, for every $1,000 that a school spent on salaries, it also paid $438 in benefit costs. These trends may help explain why districts with rising personnel costs are not boosting take-home pay for their workers. 

  Imagine if we had all that money to spend on any aspect of education, because employees all already had health care. 
  
  
• It's worth reading Matt Barnum's interview with Ary Amerikaner, who co-founded Brown's Promise (and I say that not only because it echoes some of what I question about the lawsuit). 
  
  
• Not sure if it's because the seniors involved have graduated or just coincidences of timing, but there are good pieces covering two separate episodes of attempted throttling of student reporting that came out this week. Wired covers Redwood High in California, where a student journalist turned up a connection to the Epstein files to his local community. In that case, the decision making was in the hands of the students, though this quote from their advisor deserves mention: 
  

  “With all due respect,” Schneider remembers Bishop replying, “under California’s student press law, being afraid of a lawsuit or backlash is not a valid reason to call for the takedown of content.”

  Colorado Newsline covers Grand Junction High, where the advisor was reassigned apparently due to a single complaint by another staff member over a student editorial on the Gaza conflict most recently; the student paper itself published a piece about student press freedom being under threat from their administration in June. 
  
  
• One would really like to think something like the national civics competition would be outside of meddling from this federal administration. It appears that is not the case.

It is July and so my daisies are in bloom.

keeping an eye on that $100M

 Regarding the $100M of Fair Share Governor Healey filled a supplemental budget to spend, a smidge of insight yesterday from Colin Young at State House News Service (here being interviewed by NEPM): 

Relatedly, yesterday, both the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education¹ and the Department of Revenue sent out this letter from Healey addressed to "municipal leaders," praising what the letter terms "a total of $200 million" coming to them in Fair Share, of which the $100M which she has requested is half; in other words, there isn't $200M yet. And there is a LOT of credit being taken for how much the executive branch is "partnering" with local communities. 

Does this strike anyone else as an untoward use of departmental communication to municipalities and school districts? While there is not an overt "call your legislator" included in the letter, it's strongly implied. 

We look forward to continuing to work with the Legislature to secure this important investment for schools and to building on our partnership with cities and towns as we continue working together to strengthen communities across the state. 

This, about $100M in non-formula funding requested in the summer of an election year, is all feeling pretty icky. 
And again, this is not funding being distributed in a way that meets the highest needs, nor is it funding we have, nor is it a thoughtful consideration of the needs of districts in the current context.

¹which, despite it continually escaping at least this and the last governor, does not work for them. The Governor appoints the Board, which has, save one member, non-conterminous terms with her, and THEY oversee the Commissioner who runs the Department. She cannot fire them. She does not oversee them. I wish we saw more evidence than anyone knew that legally, this is how this is outlined to work.

Skunk at the garden party time

They're kind of cute, though, aren't they.

Though it is, of course, not the done thing to express anything but enthusiasm for additional funding…It is time again for one of my periodic skunk at the garden party posts.

Things I am reading this week

•  Please add me to those not at all shocked that little kids are finding their way around various kinds of restrictions on school laptops to get up to all sorts of nefariousness. 
  

  Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.
  This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.

  
  
• The storied Financial Times of London is out this week with an article on employers pulling back on their encouragement or even insistence on employee use of AI. In an excellent example of Goodhart's Law, when employers made massive uses of AI something that mattered, employees made maximizing use, rather than doing actual good work, their focus.
  I really hope that educators are watching how quickly things are changing in the workforce on such usage, as that keeps being the argument for why we MUST have students using it in schools. We are very much watching a tech bubble in real time. It's unwise to train kids for the bubble. 
  
  
• And speaking of educators and AI use, please do yourself a favor and review this piece of "meta-meta-analysis" from Patrick E. O’Neil, looking at the major flaws in significant parts of the research propping up AI use in schools. From his introduction: 
  

  The audit found that none of the examined meta-analyses provided a valid basis for the claims they advanced: none had a coherent construct, none sufficiently assessed publication bias, and all had severe heterogeneity. Statistics were misapplied, miscalculated, and misinterpreted. A majority (61%) of the randomly vetted primary studies were problematic, most commonly because the outcome measured didn’t match the meta-analysis.

  I await any of the educational publications I read, all of which have ongoingly significantly boosted this breathless urgency of such use in education, to put this one of their front page. 
  
  
• And speaking of research, I took a look at this research into (essentially) what districts did with their ESSER funding, specifically looking at if such grants were used to offset local property taxes. The piece found it did, which might be what you end up seeing circulating.
  What matters a lot though, is what districts they looked at: in order to have groups to compare, the researchers used the 5% poverty rate used for Title I as their cutoff, looking at districts just to either side of the line.
  What that means is they looked at what wealthy districts did with ESSER that got it.; 5% is a very low rate of poverty in a district; as best as I can find, the national average is closer to 13%, and that would leave out all of the very largest districts in the country.
  That's not really the same thing as saying "here's what happened with ESSER funding" at all. 

and we have official FY27 numbers

 And with the Governor's signature, we have a budget. As a result, DESE has released final Chapter 70 and Net School Spending numbers (including, yes, a new complete spreadsheet: download away!). 

Also, because Governor Healey did not make any changes to the budget, the conference committee numbers on the cherry sheets--for municipal and for regional schools--are now final. 

Happy fiscal new year (ten days in)! 

How you frame the tale

 I posted about this over on Bluesky earlier this week, but I thought it also warranted attention here: 

The Cambridge Public Schools moved to a model where all eighth graders take algebra, and The Hechinger Report wrote an article on it. Here is the headline they used: 

Because Hechinger does good work, the resulting article is both worth reading and isn't the default "no" that Betteridge's Law has taught us to expect. This is a work in progress, and the jury is still out on implementation.

The Boston Globe sometimes picks up articles from Hechinger, and they did with this one. Here is how they chose to headline it: 

I'm not at all the first to observe that the Globe doesn't really write the coverage--particularly of issues like education--for people who live in Boston; they're looking just over the city line to the wealthier and whiter suburbs. The message, as so often for such audiences, is "be very afraid; your children are being failed and will fail as a result." 

Rarely does one see it so well illustrated.