April 2026 Board of Ed: opening comments

 The Board of Ed has their regular April meeting today beginning at 9 AM. The agenda is here; the livestream will come up on their channel over here. 

Today is the first meeting at which the new Secretary, Steve Zrike, will be present in that capacity. As a reminder, Zrike was Salem superintendent, though most of his appearances at the Board of Ed previously were in his prior-to-that position as Holyoke receiver. As an offhand observation, today is the eleventh anniversary of the Board voting the Holyoke Public Schools into receivership; I don't know if there's a balance to that or not. 

Also as a reminder, the Secretary is a single member and a single vote on the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (as well as the two other education boards, Early Ed and Care, and Higher Ed), serving at the pleasure of the Governor, who appoints him*

I will update this post as we go

*so far, I think. Please correct me if I am wrong, but we have not had a female Secretary within my memory, in any case, and not during the current makeup of the Executive Office of Education. 

The debate on technology on schools is ongoing

...and that means that we are due for the backlash. 

Some of us would say: overdue. As the Boston Globe wrote last week: 

Across the state people are rallying to address it — from Fall River to Winchester, Northampton to Cambridge. And pressure is coming from every direction: parents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington.

The list of concerns is long. Young children, glued to screens, miss out on needed play and socialization; older students, glued to screens, use them to bully each other. High schoolers rely on AI to cheat. School-issued laptops, taken home, keep sleep-deprived youngsters up past their bedtimes.

Above all, critics worry that the hypnotic flicker of screens is coming between students and learning.

The 74 wrote of this as a parental backlash, but I think that's probably oversimplified. The New York Times article from last month looked specifically at a middle school in Kansas that had deliberately gone limited tech, an effort that came from educators. 

One issue not mentioned above in the Globe's list is that of student privacy; Curriculum Associates, which owns iReady, is currently being sued (for one):

In the original complaint the plaintiffs allege the company “creates and extracts reams of personal information from K–12 students.”

“Using that data, Curriculum Associates creates detailed data profiles of students that are used to predict and influence their behavior and guide decision-making about them. It further uses that information for commercial purposes, including developing, marketing, and delivering its own products,” the complaint said. “Curriculum Associates also allows numerous third parties to access the information it obtains from K–12 students for the commercial benefit of both Curriculum Associates and those parties.”

One of the issues at hand, according to the complaint, is that students in schools that use i-Ready are required to be in school, where they are required to use the software during the school day with no alternative, and without giving their consent about the use of their data.

And: 

 According to the complaint, the data in question may include basic information like a student’s first and last name, birthday and gender, as well as things like their race, first language, grade level, school of enrollment, their teacher, data from their responses to questions in i-Ready assessments and lessons, and data collected about the student when the i-Ready profile is set up. The complaint alleges it could also include data about the specific device students used to complete the lesson on i-Ready.

“The data Curriculum Associates generates and extracts from students who use its Products, including Plaintiffs, far exceeds what could be legally or traditionally characterized as “education Records,” said the complaint. “Even if certain data could be characterized as education records, Plaintiffs — like all students — retain significant rights over the personal information contained in such records, which are protected by state and federal law.”

Makes one long for the days of filing cabinets and manila folders.

All of that, of course, is without the looming insistence that AI be part of all of this. I cannot recommend highly enough this piece by Massachusetts writer and parent Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, "What will it take to get AI out of schools." She starts with her own family's experience: 

I don’t like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I’ve been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I. image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn’t going anywhere—in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town—so just try your best not to engage.

Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids’ schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school. In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack that read “Certificate of Completion,” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student “designs” a cartoon dancer and “remixes” a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.

Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.

So many times, so many times, I warned her about the creepy neighbor. Now he reads her poems and knows her passwords. He’s always watching through the screen.

We cannot be passive. Our kids deserve better than this. 

kids.
Get it?

Bailing twine and bubble gum: school funding in the House Ways and Means proposal

 The House Committee on Ways & Means released their FY27 budget last Wednesday, and they're currently taking amendments before the House debate on the budget starts next week. 

I've been considering what to say about it since then (sorry if you've been waiting for me to post on it), and the refrain I kept coming back to is what state law says is the intent of the Legislature when it comes to school funding: 

The full section reads: 

It is the intention of the general court, subject to appropriation, to assure fair and adequate minimum per student funding for public schools in the commonwealth by defining a foundation budget and a standard of local funding effort applicable to every city and town in the commonwealth.

Ludlow case leaves in place First Circuit ruling for the district

Screenshot of Monday's orders, highlighting the relevant line
Yes, that is all that they send out!

Unless you were watching for it, you may have missed it, but on Monday, the Supreme Court denied the writ of certiorari (or "denied cert") in the Foote v. Ludlow case. That means the First Circuit decision from last February, which found in favor of the district, which I noted here, stays in place.

To quote again what I quoted from that then: 

As  this  opinion  has endeavored to illuminate,  we acknowledge the fundamental importance of the rights asserted by the Parents to be informed of, and to direct, significant aspects of their child's life--including their socialization, education, and health.  Be that as it may--as this opinion has also made effort to explicate --parental rights are not unlimited.  Parents may  not  invoke  the  Due  Process  Clause  to  create  a  preferred educational experience for their child in public school.  As per our  understanding  of  Supreme  Court  precedent,  our  pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children. And the Protocol of nondisclosure as to a student's at-school  gender expression without  the  student's consent does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized  as  a  violation  of  the  guarantees  of  substantive  due process. All told, the Parents have failed to state a claim that Ludlow's  Protocol  as  applied  to  their  family  violated  their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child.

GLAD Law, which filed a friend-of-court brief, noted the decision here. Note that among the other briefs filed was one from the Massachusetts Attorney General, along with 15 others.

No, I don't know how this aligns with the recent shadow docket decision from California, save maybe it wasn't a state law, but I don't know that we should be looking for consistency among the majority. 
UPDATE: Looks like I'm not alone in being confused.

 

good Globe follow-up on the House social media bill

I'm impressed by the follow-up article from the Boston Globe on the House's disaster of a bill passed last week.*

Civil liberties groups and organizations in favor of tech privacy — including some that are backing the bills — warn the proposals could backfire and make online activity even less private by requiring users to submit personal information to verify their ages or parental status.

Some restrictions, experts argue, would also face First Amendment challenges by limiting young people’s speech and vulnerable groups’ abilities to find community online. 

They also note that this means we're not fulfilling our responsibility to students:

 “Children need to learn how to use social media so they aren’t using it irresponsibly, and we need to learn how to use our phones,” said Max Nash, a junior at Mashpee High School who formed the Coalition for Student Mental Health to lobby for alternative tech policies. “But that requires education and not a ban.”

I appreciate Rep. Gordon in general, but this is such an odd thing to own up to: 

Representative Kenneth Gordon, who chairs the education committee, said lawmakers shaped the bill to closely follow a similar law in Florida, whose under-14 social media ban has faced court challenges for two years. 

Florida + court challenges seemed like a good path to follow?

And all of this here:

 Both the Healey and House proposals would require age verification measures that civil liberties groups and privacy experts say are excessive. All users — not just minors — could be required to give tech companies more personal information, such as photos of government IDs, to prove their age, they warned.

Healey’s proposal, for instance, would require social media companies to provide a host of age-specific data that could require checking users’ ages.

People who don’t have such IDs, or might be hesitant to provide them, could then be unable to access a wide range of online content. The bill includes a broad definition of social media sites, including nearly any platform with personal accounts and user-generated content, which opponents argue could encompass sites such as the popular information forum Wikipedia.

That ID hurdle has formed the basis of First Amendment challenges in many states, according to Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, a tech industry-funded group that has successfully sued to have the law set aside in several cases.

“Ultimately, the laws suffer from the same core constitutional infirmity: They block or restrict access for users, particularly minors, but also adults when it comes to speech that is lawful for everyone,” Taske said.

Cybersecurity experts warn that children could bypass the checks, and hackers could seek to steal data collected. Parental consent requirements could present further security issues, with little way for parents to reliably prove their relation to a user, opening the door for nefarious actors who abuse online reporting systems.

More than 400 cybersecurity experts, including from MIT, Tufts University, and Boston University, issued a public letter last month calling for a moratorium on online age verification laws they said “might cause more harm than good.”

“This policy will inevitably massively reduce privacy online by forcing users to reveal more information to service providers than they do nowadays,” the group wrote.

The age verification measures could also run counter to the goals of a separate date privacy bill the state Senate passed last fall and is backed by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other groups. That legislation would allow companies to collect only “reasonably necessary” personal data and permit consumers to opt out of data collection. Companies would also be barred from selling children’s data.

Plus, of course, there are those who have positive uses for social media that would be barred by this bill: 

Advocacy organizations also raised concerns about other First Amendment violations, including for users who might face the most repercussions from verification measures and social media restrictions.

Such a law, some argue, could limit teenagers’ abilities to organize political activity, hear the latest news, express themselves creatively, or find community online.

Teddy Walker, a 21-year-old Bostonian who is trans and a leader of a group organized to protect trans rights, said he was isolated and depressed as a teenager until he found solace in Instagram and YouTube trans communities.

“It really helped give me the language and understanding for who I am,” Walker said. The proposed parental restrictions could “lead to trans youth and trans kids being less safe, being less able to access that content online that was so life-saving and life-affirming for me.”

Sing it with Noah Kahan, all: 

you're a mess, you're a mess, good God, you're a mess!

__________________________________________________________________

*And how often do I say that? 

Here comes the MA voucher push

 Because OB3, Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" has a provision for vouchers by state in the language, you knew that others would join the Boston Globe's editorial board in pushing for them in Massachusetts. Thanks to Yawu Miller's coverage of a recent panel at the JFK Presidential Library*, we now know not only that this is happening, but who the players are and what their talking points are going to be:

“Covid relief money is gone, inflation is bad, buses are expensive, special education is expensive,” former Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeff Riley told an audience of about 200 that filled an auditorium at the museum last Wednesday. “We have an opportunity for this new pot of money to help us with things like expanded learning time, high dosage tutoring, special education services. This seems like a time when people should get together.”

Yes, taking time away from his fulltime job of trying to get schools on the AI bandwagon, our former Commissioner is all in our vouchers, but we're going to frame it as public school assistance. Also involved: 

The National Parents Union is spearheading the local coalition which aims to pressure Gov. Maura Healey to adopt the tax credit program. So far, the group counts 124 organizations in support, including The Pioneer Institute, The Boston Foundation, the Lynch Foundation, 45 individual Catholic Schools, 18 Montessori Schools, 13 Jewish day schools, the umbrella organizations supporting those types of schools and dozens of YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs.

NPU will surprise no one, nor will the private schools, but the outside of school organizations no doubt have this sold to them as after school dollars that could be coming their way.

Miller does---as always--an excellent job of framing the issues with the push, very much including that they don't actually work. But he also notes that Governor Healey, whose decision this is, so far has been silent on this issue. That is very concerning. There will be an effort to frame this as a "ed reform" issue, and she has some close to her that are in on that.

Oh, and incidentally: the list of things that Riley includes largely are not things on which the vouchers could be used: 

Despite promises that the scholarships could cover special education services, among other school-related expenses, Fliter said that wouldn’t be true for public schools. The way qualified education expenses are defined by the federal government only includes things for which schools bill parents.

“Unfortunately, when you dig into the text of the statute and what the regulations are from the IRS and from others, it becomes very clear that a qualified education expense, as it’s referenced in the Internal Revenue Code and by the Coverdell Education Savings Account, does not include anything like special education expenses,” Fliter said.

Read Miller's coverage, and then keep an eye out on this one.  

*who maybe don't exercise a say over this, but one does question the venue choice

A collection of things to read and review

•  The back-and-forth in last month's House hearing on undocumented students' right to a public education revealed their using stats on English learners, which is not the same group at all
  
  
• The Wall Street Journal takes up the topic facing many Massachusetts towns this spring with a look at South Hadley's tax override (that's a gift link).
  
  
• I thought Jacobin's angle on the LA teachers strike (that didn't happen) being connected directly to the resistance to AI was interesting. This would of course be very much in line with the actual Luddites.
  
  
• I recommend subscribing to Benjamin Riley, but if you don't, please have handy his Illustrated Guide Resisting to "AI Is Inevitable in Education"
  Also, he was kind enough of share his family's really disturbing experience with his late father's resisting treatment because of what he received from AI; here's a gift link to The New York Times piece. 
  
  
• Speaking of AI, analysis finds that Google's AI overview is providing misinformation "on a scale unprecedented in human civilization"

daffodils, even