Friday, June 23, 2017

The Board of Education has their June meeting on Tuesday: UPDATED

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meets for June on Tuesday at their offices in Malden. You can find the agenda here. 
A couple of things that are not on the agenda, but are coming in as reports:
  • The annual survey of superintendents and principals is back. You can find a lot more breakdown of the results here
  • An update on the revision of the social studies and history standards is included. The short version is we're done with the initial stakeholder engagement and moving on to the drafting of draft standards.
  • The annual non-operating school districts (that tuition out all of their students) report is included. Note that a number of these are small towns that run K-6 and then tuition out their high school students (choosing not to belong to a regional school district).
On the agenda:
  • proposed Early College Program Designation process and criteria for discussion and vote. This is essentially formalizing and creating new versions of the linking of high schools and colleges for high school students to gain college credit and experiences in high school. I continue to feel as though this misses the major point, which is that no one seems to know what to do with high school anymore. Shoving them all into college early misses some growth that ought, I think, to be happening in high school.
  • a presentation on the Safe Schools for LGBTQ students program
  • a discussion and vote on proposed revisions to teacher licensure. The only bit that's particularly new here from earlier discussion is the removal of what was proposed as broadening language around removal of licensure; if you skim down the link, you can see the discussion of what was the section most objected to by the state teachers' unions. Note in particular this comment: " The removal of some of the proposed amendments to 603 CMR 7.15(8) does not affect, change, or narrow the Commissioner's legal authority."
  • There will be an update on the four Level 5 schools, of which two are in Boston, one in New Bedford, and one in Holyoke. With the return of the Dever to operation under Boston Superintendent Chang, three of these schools will be operating under the authority of their superintendents as receiver, though in those cases not reporting to their school committees (with the exception of Holyoke, where the entire district is under state receivership).
  • The Commissioner has his annual performance review, done by subcommittee. You can read the full report here. He is being given a 4.95 rating out of 5. More than anything, this reflects to me just how far removed the Board is from most of education in the state.
  • The Board is being asked to waive the week's notice of charter school lotteries in the case of three schools that had to reschedule due to a snowstorm in March. 
  • The Board is being asked to do their usual summer delegation of authority to the Commissioner. 
  • And the Board is being asked to vote their schedule for next year.
Liveblog/tweet coming Tuesday. 

UPDATE: Today (Friday) they added:
Executive Session to Discuss Litigation Strategy

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