Worth a read this week

 Things I have been reading: 

• This story from The 74 on how Boulder, Colorado parents worked with their district to change (very much in process) how students with autism are worked with in the district.:
  

  Modern practitioners defend the intervention, saying ABA no longer subjects children to physical punishment. Yet documentation of its harms is mounting, as researchers — including autistic adults who underwent ABA as youngsters — gather evidence that the therapy has caused widespread PTSD. Autistic children may no longer be subjected to electric shocks or slaps to the face — and the word “aversive” may sound kinder than “punishment” — but they are routinely denied food, toys and comfort items, as well as adult attention, a strategy practitioners industrywide call “planned ignoring.” ABA providers still frequently restrain children or confine them in isolation — practices recognized as so dangerous and traumatic as to be illegal in most circumstances in Colorado schools.

   I learned from this that the person who created ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, also created conversion therapy, which is of course banned many places. 
  
  

• The Boston Globe looks at parents who are organizing for more recess in schools. From this I learned that there is a national "Say Yes to Recess" group. 
  I will say, though, that I'm a little tired of the Globe doing this "in a bill pending before the state legislature" coverage when the Legislature is done with formal sessions. 
  
  

• In the state ballot questions campaigns here in Massachusetts, it's Smith and Wesson bankrolling the "no" vote on question 9 (which would repeal some gun control measures), with the largest funding for "yes," which keeps the legal language, seeing its biggest funding from the teachers' union. You can find that reporting here.
  
  

  

  not hard, eh? Vote yes on 9.

  
  
• Connecticut, which is among the states that allows no religious exemption to school vaccine requirements, just had that requirement upheld in the courts.

What could one do with the Department of Education?

 As the current administration daily posts another round of  nonsense about "returning education to the states"--the place education has been overseen since we have had a constitution*--the framing of an alternative has been kind of weak. "Let's not destroy the U.S. Department of Education" is a good start, but reaffirming the mission of the Department has been rather lacking.

I was intrigued, then, to read Kevin Carey's piece in Democracy entitled "A Department of Education--and then some" which outlines a bigger vision:

The Department of Children and Learning (DCL) would do everything ED is charged with by statute while incorporating children’s programs currently located in other federal agencies, including the school lunch benefits located at the Department of Agriculture and the Head Start and child-care programs housed at the Department of Health and Human Services. As any parent can tell you, health, nutrition, and learning all go together.

The DCL would be organized around three main purposes: funding, research, and civil rights. Its mission would be ensuring that foundational education services and the latest scientific findings and technological advances are available to all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Existing programs that don’t contribute to this core mission would be replaced.

What is particularly interesting to me is that Carey actually talks about what very, very seldom is: school districts:

But as it is practiced in U.S. education, “local control” is a false promise. It means that local school districts—and in the privatization era, individual families—are left alone to search and struggle for enough resources to purchase what an indifferent and unforgiving market chooses to provide. It means that students destined to compete in a global economy are tied down by how much money their neighbors happen to pay in property taxes. It condemns teachers to crumbling buildings and outdated curricula. It means that the various institutions charged with the care and education of children don’t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. “Local control” is a long con. It exploits parental anxiety by pretending to give people power, then leaves them feeling individually responsible for our collective failure.

Local communities have the right and responsibility to decide who will teach their children and lead their public schools. Those accountable for school performance should be as close to parents and voters as possible. Critical organizational decisions shouldn’t be routed through a central bureaucracy in Washington. State governments ultimately determine academic standards for their children. At the same time, all local school districts should have enough money to hire great teachers who are versed in the latest research findings and empowered by the newest education technologies. And all children should have equal rights to a free, high-quality education tailored to their specific strengths and needs, regardless of their race, family income, native language, immigration status, or disability.

As I've just again had the class I teach explore the New America map of segregation and income inequality among school districts, the vivid extremes in inequity and segregation are fresh in my mind.

And we do not talk about it, let alone do anything to actually change it. 

*and happy Constitution Day! 

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.