As Massachusetts now has the lottery online...

 ...it might be good to remember that more teens are getting hooked on gambling:

A recent national survey from Common Sense Media found that 36% of boys age 11 to 17 in the U.S. have gambled in the past year.

"It's a lot of kids," says Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that promotes digital safety for kids. "A third of kids is a lot of kids."

A recent check of GoGuardian, a company that blocks websites in schools: 

...shows that the rate of sites blocked in its gambling, betting and fantasy sports category has increased nearly 30% since the company started tracking in 2022, from a low of 13.48 blocks per 1,000 students to 17.4 this year.

The company blocks roughly 140,000 attempts to access such sites on average every month....

(I am certain that there are "safeguards" to ensure there is no online access for those who are underage. And safeguards work so well!) 

As it is, in Massachusetts, per the Boston Globe article covering the expansion of the lottery, we spend more per capita on the lottery than any other state.

per the Motley Fool, which recommends other strategics for "financial growth"

And that was BEFORE it landed on our phones! 

Oh, and because this inevitably comes up: yes, that $1B in FY25 that the Lottery generated was, as you've no doubt seen widely advertised, budgeted for towns in local aid. However--and this is part of why the push for online lottery sales has been a thing for many years!:

Lottery proceeds continue to grow, but at a slower pace compared with other sources of state revenues, and the legalization of online sports betting plus the introduction of phone apps that enable online purchases of lottery tickets may influence lottery revenue trends going forward.

That, incidentally, is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which notes in its introduction that New England states are more reliant on gambling revenue than other parts of the country. 

That is in addition to it being a REGRESSIVE TAX: it is most likely to hit those who can least afford it--

A 2011 paper in the Journal of Gambling Studies conducts a thorough review of the available research on lotteries and concludes that the “poor are still the leading patron of the lottery and even the people who were made to feel poor buy lotteries. The legalization of gambling has seen a significant increase of young people gambling, particularly in lotteries, and the best predictor of their lottery gambling is their parents’ lottery participation.” 

..in marked contrast, of course, to the other very specific way Massachusetts brought in almost TWO billion dollars last year to allocate, the Fair Share amendment, which of course is a 4% surtax on annual income above $1 million.

AI slop: coming to a classroom near you?

Is there bad news on AI in education?
There is ALWAYS bad news on AI in education!

Chalkbeat earlier this month had a look at the AI slop on the Teachers Pay Teachers website: 

The poster depicting famous inventions by Black figures throughout history should show the invention George Crum is widely credited with: the potato chip.

Instead, the picture labeled with Crum’s name shows a firefighter in an ominous gas mask next to a stop light. There are no potato chips to be found.

But there is a typo-ridden description of Crum that reads: “Created the popular crispy snack when a customer is polated thinner fried potatees.”

For $1.99, they could also download an alphabet coloring worksheet missing the letter F. And for just $1.50, they could get a poster of U.S. presidents that uses an asteroid hurtling toward anti-slavery demonstrators to illustrate the idea that Martin Van Buren was resilient.

Setting aside the issues I have with TPT in the first place--which are many!--this is absolutely going to find its way to the classroom, because the reason teachers are on there are presumably because they don't feel they have time for whatever it is they feel they need and the site--of course!--isn't really managing it: 

In an emailed statement, Paul Mishkin, CEO of IXL Learning, TPT’s parent company, wrote that the company uses “algorithmic tools to identify and demote stores associated with low-quality, AI-generated content.”

Right. Sure. 
By the way, someone please tell Chalkbeat that one cannot "interview" ChatGPT. 

This of course is only one of the many ways in which any use of this mess is harming to children. For those who didn't catch Ben Riley looking at Anthropic's "skin" of Claude for teachers, please take a look. 

...individual teachers need to bear the responsibility for ensuring compliance with FERPA, even though the law itself applies to school districts and other legal entities (not individual educators). Or as Claude puts it:

Right, so Claude for Teachers is FERPA compliant if and only if teachers take on the work of anonymizing their student data each and every time they enter it into Claude.

The same teachers who don't have time to develop classroom resources, per TPT, and that are using Claude to 'save time' are going to anonymize their students every time they use it?

Could we both not break federal privacy laws and provide students with accurate curricula, please? 

We're losing kids on free lunch

 Hey, remember how we've noted that as we lose SNAP enrollment, we're going to lose free lunch enrollment?

That has now started to be seen happening, per EdWeek

In addition to Miami-Dade, some schools in nearby Palm Beach County, Fla., Houston, the San Antonio area, and Hardin County, Ky., have also announced the end of universal free meals in recent months because they no longer qualify for CEP.

Hysom anticipates more districts will follow suit.

Schools use data about students’ food assistance enrollment as of April 1 to determine if they are is eligible for CEP for the next school year, if they are not already participating, Hysom said. If the school is eligible, leaders decide whether to adopt CEP for the next four years. At the end of the four-year cycle, the school uses the most recent April 1 data to determine if it still qualifies, and school leaders decide if they want to commit for another four years.

The schools dropping CEP now, Hysom said, are among the first to come up for recertification since SNAP cuts took effect.

This matters for two additional reasons in Massachusetts:

1. The state has now mandated universal free meals for all students in all public schools in Massachusetts. As districts lose Community Eligibility for free meals, the amount of reimbursement being carried by the federal government is going to drop.
    I don't know to what degree the state can run numbers on this, if they can estimate how many kids and where are going to drop off and what hit that will make on district eligibility, but I am very concerned as to if this is on the radar of anyone.
   If it isn't, by the way, districts are required to provide the meals, anyway. State reimbursement is subject to appropriation.
   
   
2. As I noted last May, SNAP is part of how Massachusetts determines how many students are low income, which in turn becomes part of the calculation of the foundation budget, and thus state aid for education.
   I would argue, by the way, that we cannot wait for the report of the new Foundation Budget Review Commission (due October 2028) for this. 

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.