Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Worcester, do read this

 Hey, I'm not going to talk about this, as my turn to talk about it comes next week, but do check out the draft WPS strategic plan. It was discussed at yesterday's Governance meeting (video embedded below) and is before the full committee for discussion next Thursday, with scheduled final vote for our final meeting of the year and term on December 21.

As noted during the meeting, there are some edits already in train, so note that the above is very much not the final document. 

If you have comments, get in touch with the Committee! 

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

I regret to inform you that we are going to need to talk about FY25

 And we're off! 


The Swifty Swine Racing Pigs from the Eastern States Exposition (photo mine)

While I usually consider the "official" start of the next fiscal year discussion to be the Consensus Revenue Hearing (this year scheduled for December 4 at 1 pm; mark your calendar!) when the Joint Committees on Ways and Means together with the Secretary of Administration and Finance from the Governor's Cabinet hold a hearing to discuss how much money the state will have next year, I'm going to kick off the blogging  on this a little early this year, because, all, we need to have a discussion about what we know so far. 
Note, incidentally--check where you are!--that this is offered not in my professional capacity at all.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

November Board of Ed: public adult education

 and there is a memo here "Live to Learn
Wyvonne Stevens-Carter: puts no-cost quality instruction, advising, job training, and career pathways within reach of all adult students in Massachusetts
students are all different, they're reslient and indomitable
public education for adults is the bridge between living and learning
need for services and commitment from state; added 284 seats for basic adult education; 3087 English learner seats
and now a video from some of the students
putting opportunity within reach of everyone


Board of Ed: early literacy

 memo is here

update on early curricular materials Katherine Tarca
with guest stars Worcester Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Marie Morse and Manager of Curriculum and Learning Magdalena Ganias

November Board of Ed: chronic absenteeism and accountability

 the memo for this is here 'though that doesn't give any details
Curtin: adjusting the weighing of chronic absenteeism
students missing at least 10% of their days in the school year, so 18 days in 180 days
'19 was just under 13%
have come down from high water of 29.9% in '21 to 22% in '23
rate in elementary has doubled from before 2019
high school, percent increase isn't as great, but almost 30% of high school students are chronically absent in the '23
"impact is startling" MCAS for students who were chronically absent versus those who were not
close to half an achievement level of difference 
all grade spans, all school types
Students who are not chronically absent achieve more highly
DESE is interested in increasing weighting in accountability system FOR THIS YEAR
"coupling this with...grant or seed funding to districts to work on the problem" plus a public service campaign
"But one of the levers that the Department has is the accountability system"

November Board of Ed: measures of progress and goals

 memo on this is here but I am just going to plunk them all here: 

1.     By 2026, the state will return to pre-pandemic levels (or higher) of the percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations on the MCAS:

a.      Increase grades 3-8 ELA by 10 percentage points to 52 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations

b.     Increase grade 10 ELA by 5 percentage points to 63 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations

c.      Increase grades 3-8 Math by 8 percentage points to 49 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations

d.     Increase grade 10 Math by 9 percentage points to 59 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations

2.     By 2026, the state will return to pre-pandemic levels (or lower) of the percentage of students who are chronically absent:

a.      Decrease the non-high school chronic absenteeism rate by at least 9.4 percentage points to 9.0 percent

b.     Decrease the high school chronic absenteeism rate by at least 9.1 percentage points to 17.3 percent

3.     By 2026, at least 85,000 high-school students will be enrolled in a designated high school college-and-career pathway or program (e.g., Career and Technical Education, including Chapter 74 and “After Dark” programs, Innovation Career Pathways, and Early College).

4.     By 2026, the percentage of diverse staff in schools and districts will increase by at least 4 points to 17.9 percent.

5.     By 2027, the state will offer structured professional learning on evidence-based practices for literacy for all teachers and administrators with responsibility for early literacy.

November Board of Ed: FY25 budget recommendation

 Mohammed: budget is just under $8B but vast majority is distributed via formula 
memo is here
three priorities proposed:

  • early literacy
  • mental health
  • teacher diversity

November meeting of the Board of Ed: opening comments

 The agenda is here. The livestream will show up here (and that's the only way to see it, as sadly the Board did not pursue the eagerness to meet in Worcester demonstrated last meeting).

Craven says they're meeting remotely "because there's no other place" (which is of course untrue; the Department is between locations, but that's it).
Interesting, Tom Moreau is on for Secretary Tutwiler; it also appears that Marty West is in a car.

Two important and related school finance decisions in N.H. yesterday

 In New Hampshire, which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau is the state that contributes the smallest percentage of local education revenue to local public schools by the most recent data, there were two related school finance decisions handed down yesterday. 

In one ruling, Ruoff found that the current $4,100 base adequacy rate – the minimum amount of money the state sends to public schools for each student – is not enough to meet the state’s constitutional requirement to provide an adequate education.

The state instead should send no less than $7,356 to each student in order to meet its adequacy requirements, Ruoff ruled.

In a second ruling, Ruoff found that the statewide education property tax (SWEPT) is unconstitutional. That tax is collected by towns – not the state – at a set rate in order to provide funding for each town’s school district. But Ruoff held that the state’s 2011 decision to allow wealthier towns to retain any excess SWEPT they collect is unconstitutional and that the money should be distributed to poorer towns. Ruoff’s order Monday enjoined the state from allowing towns to retain that excess SWEPT in the upcoming tax season this winter and spring.

Per the Boston Globe:  

Ruoff said he intentionally released the two orders together because he wanted the parties to be able to consider how a higher state contribution will impact the taxation scheme used to raise some of that money.

SWEPT is raised locally and kept locally. In most places, those funds don’t cover the full cost of education, so there’s also an additional local tax. But if a town raises more than they need through SWEPT, they get to keep the excess. That happens in about 17 percent of communities, according to Reaching Higher, a nonprofit education think tank based in Concord.

Ruoff said communities that raise more than they need can no longer keep the excess, starting with the next budget cycle. Those funds instead have to go to the state and “must be used for the exclusive purpose of satisfying the State’s adequacy aid obligations,” he said.

 

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Things to read from this week

 Related reminder that if daily education news is of interest, part of my job for MASC is putting together a daily education news collection; it's called The Daily Ed and goes out via email. Today's is here, and there's a link to sign up at the bottom.

  • Content warning for what happens when an AR-15 is used on human bodies: the Washington Post has put together a piece called "Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings". They talk about why here

  • The year that many kids were learning from home resulted in fewer suspensions and fewer arrests, per the latest release from the Office of Civil Rights, flagging what U.S. Education Secretary Cardona says is "a reminder that we have a lot of work to do." Chalkbeat has that story here.

  • The pandemic also caused Massachusetts (among others) to put into place emergency licensure for teachers. WBUR looks at a study from BU on what that has looked like in the classroom. The short version is similar impact on classroom learning as other new teachers, and greater diversity in the profession.

  • History of Education Quarterly has a special edition on the SCOTUS ruling of San Antonio v. Rodriguez; that was the school funding lawsuit which essentially found that it was not a violation of the 14th amendment not to redistribution school funding across school district bounds (that's not necessarily a great summary). Professor Jack Schneider, who co-edited, did an epic twitter thread which gives read-only links to the pieces! I plan to read them all! School funding and finance aficionados, rejoice!

  • There's a good look in the New Republic on how the Christian Right may have miscalculated in their push on religious charter schools.

  • And as Tennessee considers turning down all federal funding, so they don't have to abide by the federal requirements that go along with it, this is my periodic reminder from me that grants are not free money; they're a contract.

Monday, November 13, 2023

Finalists for the position of Worcester School Committee administrative clerk

Tonight, the Worcester School Committee accepted the report of the Governance committee, thus moving forward three finalists for the position of Worcester School Committee Administrative Clerk. The three finalists are:

  • Emanuela Abbascia, who currently is a career counselor at MassHire; she has also worked as a Family and Child Advocate for the District Attorney's Child Abuse Unit.

  • Kate Benoit, who currently is a communications specialist with the Barrington (RI) Public Schools; she has also worked in communications for Clark University.

  • Kristi Turgeon, who currently is executive assistant to the senior vice president at UMass Memorial; she has also worked as executive assistant to the superintendent for the Berlin-Boylston Regional School District.
You can find their applications in tonight's agenda backup here. 

All three will be interviewed at Thursday's Worcester School Committee meeting. 

Jack Foley recognized

Among those recognized with MASC Life Membership last week at the MASC Joint Conference was former Worcester School Committee member Jack Foley. I just wanted to share what was said about Jack there:

Jack Foley’s 22 years of service on the Worcester School Committee were an exemplar of, as the MASC Code of Ethics states, school committee service as “means of unselfish service with no intent to ‘play politics’ in any sense of the word or to benefit personally from their Committee activities.” 
Jack’s service to the larger Worcester Public Schools community began with his co-chairing, with eventual Secretary of Education Paul Reville, the successful city override vote of June 1991. That vote, two years before the McDuffy decision, was a marker of the needs on not only Worcester’s children, but the state’s children, for which Jack would continue his work on Worcester’s school committee. 
His service was always to those most marginalized, his focus always on the otherwise unheard. His leadership in committee work on school finance made him a trusted voice in the decade’s long work to reform the school funding system, 25 years after McDuffy. 
His professional career was as an administrator at Clark University in Worcester. In that capacity he was instrumental in helping to organize the first of MASC’s Poverty and Equity Summits, which Clark hosted. 
He is recognized for his work with other MASC leaders in focusing on equity and services for students and their families and for modeling the best in local elective public service.

Jack will receive this award at a December Worcester School Committee meeting. 

Sunday, November 12, 2023

A word on the position of vice chair on the Worcester School Committee

 With a new school committee will come the election of a vice chair, as the Worcester School Committee (unlike the Worcester City Council, for whom the vice chair is the mayoral candidate who came in second whilst also winning an at-large council seat) elects its own vice chair. 

This past term, of course, our vice chair has been Jermaine Johnson. While Jermaine did come in first in the at-large race in November of 2021, his election was a recognition of the historic nature of his taking the seat, as the first Black man to serve on the Worcester School Committee.

In the 2020-21 term, the vice chair was Jack Foley. Jack had also come in first in the election of 2019 (recall that Brian O'Connell's name was on the ballot, but he died in October), but Jack, we also knew, was retiring after his decades of service to the district, and thus was elected to the position.

In both cases, at least part of the consideration was also the power of the vice chair under most city school committees, and now under Worcester's, to work with the superintendent to set the agenda, and to ensure that the Committee fulfills its legal obligation to meet with the Student Advisory Council every other month. While this rule change only was implemented in this (2022-23) term, the revamping of the rules began in the 2020-21 term, to ensure that the Worcester School Committee was (finally) reforming itself in light of the critique of the Committee's lack of adherence to its business in the Comprehensive District Review of 2017 by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

Prior to these two terms, the tradition--though this was not in the rules--was for the position to rotate among members. As the position of vice chair prior to this term had no authority beyond chairing the meeting in the absence of the mayor, considerations such as the ability of the vice chair to work with all members and with the superintendent, the knowledge the vice chair had of the role, purview and authority of the school committee, and the temperament of the vice chair did not play into the decision.

The recent history of the position is as follows: 

2019: Molly McCullough
2018: Jack Foley (Brian O'Connell was the top vote getter in 2017)
2017: Dianna Biancheria
2016: Brian O'Connell (Brian O'Connell was the top vote getter in 2015)
2015: Dianna Biancheria 
2014: John Monfredo (Brian O'Connell was the top vote getter in 2013)
2013: Jack Foley
2012: me (Brian O'Connell was the top vote getter in 2011 by 11 votes)
2011: Brian O'Connell 
2010: Jack Foley (Brian O'Connell was the top vote getter in 2009)

Friday, November 10, 2023

Even more coverage of the culture warriors losing on Tuesday

 ...because, really, this is something to celebrate!

USA Today headline: "In school board elections across America, voters offer stunning rebuke of culture war politics" and here's the conclusion:

“It’s going to cause school board candidates down the road to seriously question whether affiliating themselves with some of these far-right groups is good for their chances of getting elected,” said Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

“I think a lot of them are going to come to the conclusion that it is not and that there’s too much risk that comes with associating with these groups,” Valant said.

Christian Science Monitor headline: "Parents’ election plea: Could schools get back to teaching?" and notes "a growing disenchantment with the way so-called culture wars have dominated school board discussions"

And Amanda Marcotte in Salon, who had done a report Moms for Liberty in Pennridge last month, followed up yesterday:

The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society. 

Don't rest on your laurels, but it's worth celebrating. 

Thursday, November 9, 2023

The national school board news from Tuesday

While I am not quite in a space to yet post on our local results from Tuesday, I want to be sure that you've caught the big national news on school board elections on Tuesday, which is that the Moms for Liberty, culture war candidates largely lost, and even lost in some pretty amazing places.

Front counter at the
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Malden, MA

The Association Press has an overview here focusing on Pennsylvania: 

In recent years, down-ballot elections have become proxy votes for polarizing national issues. Liberal and moderate candidates took control in high-profile races Tuesday in conservative Iowa, as well as swing states Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The New York Times (that's a gift link) frames it as "conservative activists for parental rights" which is doing that thing the Times does of buying someone else's framing, but closes with AFT President Randi Weingarten observing that this isn't what voters want their school boards focused on: 

But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children.

(As a side note, catch how on brand charter and choice supporter Jeanne Allen is in that piece. She presumably hasn't caught that those issues don't win, either.)

PBS News Hour, which interviewed Julie Marsh, Professor of Education Policy, University of Southern California caught this quite well in this exchange: 

Geoff Bennett:

Well, what effect has all of that had on significant issues that public school boards face, like teacher shortages, pandemic-related learning loss, school safety?

Julie Marsh:

This has been a distraction.

I'll say that I think most of the elections appear to be disagreeing with her conclusion, that it is driving people away from public schools. Instead, they appear to be moving away from those who have put school boards in this position.

HuffPost names Moms for Liberty specifically--Sarah Dohl put together a spreadsheet of how those they endorsed did!--and concludes: 

After a lackluster showing from culture war candidates in 2022 and again last night, it’s becoming clear that casting public school teachers as the bad guys and Moms for Liberty as students’ only hope just isn’t the winning strategy that MFL and other conservatives want it to be.

 And WHYY went to Central Bucks County, where the Democrats completed a clean sweep.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon notes this, on reporting from the Pennridge race: 

The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society. 

Erin Reed summarized well on Twitter:

Monday, November 6, 2023

on good governance

I remember reading that part of what was so exhausting about the Trump administration--besides the ongoing "what fresh horror is this?" of the whole administration--was that so many of us had to be so ongoingly conscious of the presidency. This wasn't the attention of an active denizen in a democracy; this was the hyperawareness of someone who is watching for the next chance of being hit. 

"The Awakening" at National Harbor, Maryland

We don't have direct democracy in this country at any level save town meeting, and even there, a selectboard is put into place to conduct much of the business of the town over the course of the year. We hire, in essence, school committees and city councils and selectboards, as well as board of health and library boards and many other groups to conduct the week to week business of running our democracy and the parts it oversees. 

There is a lot of that work that isn't very dramatic (when done right): ensuring that roads are repaired and plowed, that school buses run on time, that the water you drink is clean and is there when you turn on the tap, that trash gets picked up and disposed of some way we won't later regret, that the next generation is getting what it needs to keep the work running for decades to come. 

And even the work that oversees that--the setting vision and direction, the setting the budget--doesn't, often look very dramatic. It's working to agree to what comes next for all of us as a community and how one gets there. It's knowing what the job of the governance board actually is and doing it.

One thing that I have seen written a bit about on school committees of late is how the very boringness of school boards has changed since the pandemic. Starting with school building status and moving quickly through masking and critical race theory and LGBTQ rights and book banning, the country has had a wave of fearmongering be very loud at our school committee meetings. The budgetary oversight, the policy work, the direction and oversight that is the charge of the school board in the U.S. has often gotten pushed out by this very loud fear of a small group of people.

That move away from the responsibility of the work, though, doesn't always come from either that space or those sentiments. There are other spaces and directions that flatten the attention of governance boards, such that their work of actual governance remains undone. To be consumed entirely by any single matter--to show no inclination or opening towards steps forward if they don't accomplish all wished for--to not come to the table prepared to do anything other than speak--that is to neglect the duty owed. 

I bought myself a pin four years ago when I rejoined the Worcester School Committee, adopting as my own unofficial motto Emmeline Pankhurst's "Deeds not Words" as a reminder to myself as much as anyone that, while making a speech on a Thursday night may be satisfying, it doesn't, alone, change anything.


And change, of course, we have, over the past four years. We have a new superintendent, after a thorough, professional national search. That superintendent is, alongside an administration reconstituted to provide the support denied schools, doing the hard work of shaping our schools to work for all of our students. We brought, over the objections of the prior superintendent, district transportation in house, demonstrating not only that it could be done, but that it could improve performance and our relationship with our drivers and monitors, while saving the district money. We fought for and won increased funding for facilities, gaining reimbursement for Doherty's inflation, seeing reinstatement of the accelerated repair program, and securing increased funding per square foot for new buildings, putting us in good stead for a new Burncoat. We set forward, and will adopt by year's end, an updated strategic plan. We updated our own rules, ensuring we are focused on the work which is our own. We redrafted the dress code; we adopted a new elementary literacy program; we saw the new health curriculum implemented; we added guidance counselors, climate and culture specialists, mental health professionals, nurses, more funding for student supplies, and many teachers. 

And that's just what this weary brain can conjure the night before the election. 

But note that much of the above wasn't glamorous. It wasn't the result of speeches. It was deliberation in open session. Some of it was the result of compromises. 

None of it was the work of any one person. 

Many of us will cast ballots in the next few hours. If I have a hope this evening, not only as a candidate for public office but one who simply lives here, it is that we elect people who are in it to do the actual, non-glamorous, non-rhetorical work of governance.

Deeds. Not words.