Talking at cross purposes on state aid

Among the recent articles covering school budgets in the past week, three caught my eye for how they nicely encapsulate how much talking at cross-purposes there are in Massachusetts education funding discussions right now.

Be cautious about buying the headlines

 You've quite possibly seen headlines touting particular states' "miracles" or otherwise having all the answers, suddenly, in student achievement. 

In addition to the caution that Bruce Baker (as so often) offers around how we support schools, I want to also point you to Linda Darling-Hammond's recent piece in Forbes, which cautions about hyping up only fourth grade NAEP, particularly in light of another affirmation of the long-term bad impacts of retaining students in early grades. As Darling-Hammond writes: 

In this article, I look primarily at 8th-grade NAEP scores, because there are two substantial sources of potential distortion in the comparability of 4th-grade NAEP scores across states: the outcomes of grade retention policies and the size of English learner (EL) populations.

About 20 states now have policies that require holding students back in 3rd grade if they score low on a reading test. The rigor of the tests and cut points varies across states. Some states allow for exemptions; others do not, so the results also vary. Some states (like Mississippi) provide extensive interventions to students that prevent many from ultimately being retained; others do not. These differences make the impacts of such policies difficult to generalize. In some cases, states with mandatory 3rd-grade retention policies will appear stronger on 4th-grade NAEP scores because large numbers of their lowest-performing students are excluded from the tested cohort in 4th grade.

What happens to those students after this point as they move through school is an important question. Most studies have found that students retained based on test scores do score higher when they get to the following grade, but their achievement is not always maintained thereafter. Many studies find that these students have higher dropout rates in secondary school. (This can also increase scores when low-performers leave the school population.)

States with fewer English learners also appear more advantaged on 4th-grade tests than those with many ELs, because it takes 5 to 7 years to acquire a new language. Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have fast-growing populations of ELs, but they are still far lower than states like California and Texas, which serve about four times as many ELs as a share of their populations. For example, half of California’s kindergartners speak a language other than English at home, and most are not fluent in English when they first start school. However, the large majority become fluent within 7 years and, on average, outscore their monolingual English counterparts thereafter in both English language arts and math.

At 8th grade, where the impact of schools over time on a student’s learning is clearer, five of the top 10 states in 8th-grade reading on NAEP in 2024 appear on both the unadjusted and demographically adjusted state rankings: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. That means that these demographically diverse states (all blue) are doing relatively better than other states for their population as a whole and for their students from low-income backgrounds and English learners. The other states on the list that are high achieving overall (Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Utah) are not as demographically diverse and do not score at the top of the adjusted rankings. Those that are more racially and economically diverse and thus given bigger statistical adjustments—including Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—are not yet high achieving overall, even though progress is being made.

So what works? School funding reform (no escaping money!), and investment in educational quality (note the Massachusetts state standards get mentioned here),  

Read beyond the headlines and the grabber columns. 

On Title I for next year

 

Slide from Friday presentation from MASC

This week, DESE updated superintendents (slides 10-18) and then those who manage grants that Title I for the upcoming year is expected to be less for the state and for districts in Massachusetts.

As I noted back at the beginning of February, the federal budget that was passed by Congress and signed into law pretty much level funded the federal entitlement grants. As both the White House and the House of Representatives had proposed budgets that cut grants in various ways and in some cases quite severely, that level funding was a victory.

However (and again as I noted), allocations to states and then in turn to districts are recalculated each year based on the demographics that determine funding. So, while the national number is the same, the way it is divided up changes each year. 

This year--this coming fiscal year for school districts--the state has learned that the Massachusetts share of the federal poverty total has dropped by 10%. That will in turn decrease the Massachusetts share of Title I funding, and, because the Massachusetts share is made up off Massachusetts districts, the district by district allocations will also be less.

The state has recommended that districts plan for a Title I allocation that is 85% of this year's allocation. They have also shared this spreadsheet, which both gives in the final column that 85% and also alerts districts that may be on the cusp of losing particular eligibilities within Title I (thus making their losses more severe).

if putting crucial student documents into a chatbot for translation

 ....and then potentially, after review, using them concerns you, you may wish to offer public comment on proposed new state regulations 603 CMR 57. The new regulations set standards, as required by state and federal law, for translators and interpreters. 

As proposed, however, 57.05(3) reads: 

(3) Machine translation may be used to translate a document so long as the translation is reviewed and edited as needed by a School Translator before the document is provided to a parent or legal guardian with limited English proficiency.

Remember, what we're talking about here are things like IEPs, 504s, documents having to do with students' education, rights, access, and more. They often contain private information. They always contain vocabulary that is very specific to education (something recognized elsewhere by the creation of levels in translation certification).  

This would allow for such documents to be dumped into generative AI bots, with no privacy protections, to become part of the universe on which such things draw. Such programs have been created from the theft of others' work--it thus conflicts with the many mentions of "ethics" elsewhere in the regulations. And the levels of accuracy, even if checked by a human, both makes more work for the humans involved while lessening the humanity of the translation. 

You can submit comment by filling out their form or sending an email to BESERegulationComments@Mass.gov by April 24 at 5 PM. 

Two things on Massachusetts school budgets

•  The United for Our Future coalition, which includes (among others) MASC, MASS, and the MTA, sent a letter calling for increased education state education funding to cover an array of issues. The Eagle-Tribune covers that here.
  
  The letter reads in part: 
  

  The “perfect storm” of factors behind the fiscal crisis remains in place. Rising special education and transportation costs, funding lost to charter schools, the constraints of Proposition 2 ½, and technical issues with the formula that determines how our schools are funded all continue to strain local budgets, as they have for years. In addition to those challenges, many districts also face looming threats of federal funding cuts along with unanticipated declines in enrollment spurred by federal attacks on our immigrant students and families. These enrollment declines are heartbreaking for our students and school communities and directly impact funding in a school finance system such as ours that is based on per-student allotments.
   When our districts are under-resourced, our attention is forced away from developing creative and innovative ways to enhance student learning and more effectively support their social and emotional wellbeing. Instead, we are left to fight to minimize devastating cuts to programs and staff so that we can try to maintain the basic, daily services on which our students depend. We cannot accept this situation as an unavoidable reality. As champions of public education, we know what work must be done to build public schools that prepare all students for success in the classroom and beyond, but local communities cannot do it alone.

The Supreme Court endangers trans students through the shadow docket

 On Monday night, through their so-called shadow docket, in which a case isn't argued before them and they weigh in, anyway, the Supreme Court further endangered trans kids. The case is  Mirabelli v. Bonta out of California, in which parents are challenging the California law that bars school districts from outing trans kids to their parents. 

Was the school struck accidentally?

 Both Al Jazeera and NPR have looked more closely at the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Mina in Iran.