Sunday, March 22, 2015

Mass Board of Ed meets this week

The Massachusetts Board of Ed has their March meeting this week. Their Monday night is on the Foundation Budget (so I'm trying to figure out if I can go...), the FY16 budget, and Educator Licensure. That's, as usual, in Malden at 5 pm.
Their Tuesday morning meeting is, unusually, not in Malden! They're meeting at Monty Tech in Fitchburg this month, at 8:30 am. On the agenda is another update on PARCC, an update and vote on the ESEA waiver, a vote on the LGBTQ student environment regs, another update on Holyoke and on Level 5 schools (my understanding is that Holyoke plans to turn out in force for this), and this:
Over the past two years, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and other entities have commissioned research projects to better understand implementation progress and stakeholder perceptions of several key state education initiatives, including the new curriculum frameworks, educator evaluation, and PARCC. Taken together, the studies show that implementation of these initiatives continues on a positive trajectory. The studies also provide useful feedback to the Department on opportunities to further refine our initiatives and to strengthen our supports to the field. At the meeting of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on March 24, Associate Commissioner Carrie Conaway will share a summary and highlights of the findings from these various reports.
There's no other backup: no mention of who has done this research, in conjunction with whom...really anything. One assumes this will all be available at the meeting, but tough to do any real evaluation of the research if it all just gets launched at the meeting.

In any case, I'm definitely planning to be there Tuesday, and I hope to make Monday night as well: notes to follow!

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