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

Keeping an eye on federal grants

 DESE sent this update out late last week:

DESE has received some additional projected figures from the federal government that have allowed us to refine the Title I projections we shared last month; we’re also able to anticipate statewide totals from other major ESSA programs (Title II-A, Title III-A, and Title IV-A), as well as from Perkins. Again, these numbers are still preliminary. DESE receives final awards from the federal government on July 1st. 

Title I – Updated figures from the federal government show that MA will experience about a 7% reduction overall, not a 10% reduction overall as we projected last month. DESE has revised the FY27 Title I Warning Chart accordingly. These district-level projections are likely more accurate than last month’s projections, but it bears repeating that they are subject to change. Districts will receive final numbers in July. 

Title II-A – Similar to Title I, preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely experience about a 7% overall reduction from last year. We do not have district-level projections for Title II-A, which could vary greatly, so we encourage districts to budget conservatively. 

Title III-A – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely be level-funded for Title III-A. DESE will provide district-level projections for Title III-A in several weeks when we issue the Title III-A Intent to Participate application in GEM$. Until then, we encourage districts to budget conservatively. 

Title IV – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely see about a 6% increase in Title IV-A. We do not have district-level projections for Title IV-A, which could vary greatly, so we encourage districts to budget conservatively. 

Perkins – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely be level-funded for Perkins. 

can we stop considering Sal Khan an expert now?

 I very much appreciate Matt Barnum's piece this week on how it turns out---color me shocked--that Sal Khan's whole forecast on how AI in education was going to work out is not. 

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

And in a particularly "we could have told you that" bit: 

 Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

Right, because asking good questions is part of learning which is a thing that has to be taught.

I really can't do better than Audrey Watters on this: 

 It's a change from the sweeping rhetoric of Khan's 2023 TED Talk in which he proclaimed that, "We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen." Invoking the highly questionable (that is to say utterly un-replicated) findings from the classic "2 Sigma Problem" paper by Benjamin Bloom – a paper first published in 1984 and invoked now by decades of ed-tech evangelists – Khan claimed that “the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

Amazing. Or ... not.

She observes that inevitably, the response of the rejection is to then given students (and teachers, often) no choice but to use whatever the new hip tech thing is that is around, which is, of course, just what Khan Academy has done; from Chalkbeat:

Now Khanmigo is incorporated directly as a way students can get advice as they’re working through specific problems. A spokesperson said the organization made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”

Four things I would have preferred the House do this week

1.  Move forward the bar on religious exemptions for vaccinations. Just this week, the West Virginia bar withstood a federal appeals challenge. Just today, the AP is noting that babies too young for the MMR vaccine become "sitting ducks" in an outbreak. Given the anti-vaccine push by the federal government (as much as the courts are doing what they can), we cannot afford cracks in our community immunity. 
   
   
2. Do literally anything at all about Massachusetts being the only state in the country that has Democrats in charge of both chambers and the Governor's office and has a 287(g) contract with ICE. 
   Seriously. Anything at all. You could even pass a bill to make it illegal, like Maryland or Virginia, as that's the whole reason we have a legislature: making laws. 
   
   
3. Pass legislation protecting our immigrant neighbors from being preyed upon by the federal government, like the PROTECT Act, which passed out of committee two weeks ago, yet somehow was not seen as being as urgent as that bill on cell phones. I have been told they passed this? That missed my radar. One hopes it receives half the urgency from the rest of the process that this appears to have
    
4. Move forward the legislation that updates how inflation is calculated in the foundation budget, and make it effective for FY27, better aligning the foundation budget with district costs (and perhaps keeping us from the mistake of digging even bigger hold harmless aid holes).
   
   

please enjoy these pansies from my walk to work in Boston

The House passed the most draconian social media ban in the country

From State House News Service this evening:  

The House on Wednesday put Massachusetts on track to join a handful of other states in placing restrictions on children’s social media use – an issue that is playing out in courts across the country. The House passed legislation on a 129-25 vote, largely along party lines, prohibiting social media use for children under 14 and requiring that social media platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. Representatives said the legislation closely follows a similar law in Florida, which is still being challenged in court two years after it was passed. The legislation leaves many of the regulatory decisions surrounding how to enforce the policy amid an ever-evolving online landscape up to Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Reps added language to the bill that limits some parental monitoring of social media usage "to protect certain vulnerable populations," Rep. Peisch said on the floor, and adds further protections for 14- and 15-year-olds related to the "addictive nature" of some platforms. The bill also bans students from using their cellphones throughout the school day. The House dispensed with almost all of the 29 amendments filed on the legislation through two consolidated amendments.

"on party lines" means it was Democrats who voted to violate young people's privacy, Democrats who voted to make them less safe in school, Democrats who voted to require that we all turn our information over to social media companies.  

I cannot even.

Update: here’s the vote: