Tuesday, February 27, 2024

February Board of Ed: commissioner transition

 Riley calls out health standards as most important work, noting recent things that have happened across the country
recommends Johnston as acting "with all my heart"
Craven opens discussion on that recommendation

Moriarty praises literacy effort coming from Department rather than from Legislature

Gardiner thanks "on behalf of almost million students across the Commonwealth"

Hills "one set of images that's always going to stick in my mind" seeing "Jeff possessed with getting kids back into schools" in the fall of 2021
asked by his wife how the Commissioner was doing, Hills said "I don't know...he's just swearing a lot"

unanimous vote in favor of appointing Johnston acting

Johnston: "student-centered has been the theme of the day; we're going to keep that theme moving forward"

Motion to go into executive session due to "pending litigation"
which it is not
roll call is unanimous 

end of public session
Next meeting March 26

February Board of Ed: budget!

 and about damn time!

back up for Bill Bell is here

Gov. has released budget; Legislature now up
Joint Committee on Ways and Means hearing on education aid in Greenfield this Friday
"have hit the eight billion mark in the Commonwealth" for aid
fourth year of six years of Student Opportunity Act
total increase $260M for Ch. 70; about 4%
other programs "meet statutory requirements for" programs
working with Legislature to ensure they understand reimbursement
Secretary's budget: $30M for early literacy
"actively working with staff at Executive Office" and staff of W&M so they understand what is behind those numbers
a multi-year initiative
new funding for social emotional 
additional early college funding
continued support for universal free school meals
expect House W&M budget just before April break
Senate W&M mid-May
"then we'd be looking to month of June to reconcile two bills"

Through January 
ESSER I and II have been obligated and expended
$1.2M of ESSER II in late liquidation being spent out
ESSER III: 52% of all funds claimed ($860M)
about 48% left 
would expect that a number of districts will want late liquidation authority
have to have obligated funds by end of September, but would have 18 months to spend out
"would expect late liquidation to be a little bit higher than on ESSER II"

Hills: does ch. 70 have "look back or make whole"? and how far back does it go?
Bell: it goes back to prior year
yes, Newton has been a hold harmless district

West: some new research on recovery from pandemic from Tom Kane
guidance and resources for districts in how they spend their money
"how we're serving districts that are serving low income students"



February Board of Ed: charter school matters

City on a Hill Charter: returning charter and request to change grades served
moves straight to vote: approved

amendment requests to Boston charter schools for removing grade 6 at one and consolidating UP Academies
then amendments to enrollment patterns of charters
full list



West: can I confirm that we have an accurate understanding of region request: students already can attend, but they'd be granted priority in attendance
Yes
Tutwiler: don't want to make a habit of bringing up things in public comment
earlier denied request for Prospect Hill
DESE: was not possible to grant earlier request due to spending requirements and such
Fisher: two schools for charter region; are both needing to do this to meet legal requirements
DESE: yes, in order to address requirements in charter school law

Being voted together: 
Rocha: no
All others: yes
9-1 approved

February Board of Ed: awards and recognitions

 Colin Moge of West Springfield High School is being recognized as School Counselor of the Year
introduced by noting need for counselors in schools: mental health, bullying, college admission and financial aid

February Board of Ed: opening remarks by Board

 Chair Craven: "just want to take some time to go over the past six years" of Riley
hey, this is not when this is on the agenda! And I'm not going to take extensive notes on this part

Secretary Tutwiler: Massachusetts "long been celebrated for first in the nation outcomes"
"largely from the efforts of really talented educators"
lists lifetime award recipients: Kontos, Scott, Warwick
"I personally have learned so much from each of you"

Riley: AG, MASS, MIAA, free regional trainings for districts and athletic inititives on addressing hate in school sports
more to follow
FAFSA: "to the families struggling with FAFSA: it's not just you"
upcoming workshops
"as soon as the student data begins to flow--and there is a meeting tomorrow...--we'll get the data out to you as soon as possible"
notes it is worth it, especially in Massachusetts
"please don't give up"
Brockton: deficit
mayor appointed (?) acting superintendent
outside fiscal review
DESE last month requested safety and operations audit which it is funding
will support findings going forward

minutes approved

February Board of Ed: opening comments from public

 Coming to you live from Everett...the agenda is here.

Please enjoy this lovely view of the Malden River willows
from under the Revere Beach Parkway

Muhammed and Rouhanifard participating remotely

Friday, February 23, 2024

The second February Worcester School Committee

 Yes, it's taking me about a week to get to these. It's budget season...
Hey, do note that due to this being a Leap Year and February having five Thursdays, there is NOT a Worcester School Committee meeting Thursday; you can have this week off. There is, however, a Teaching, Learning, and Student Success meeting on Monday at 5 pm.

The February 15th agenda can be found here; the video is here.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

The new literacy crusade

And I mean that with all the negative baggage that carries, yes. And a periodic reminder that the only person I speak for here is me  

xkcd 1167, acknowledging that the world may not need more written on this

I had a friend ask me earlier this month what I knew about what Governor Healey announced in the State of the State as her administration's "Literacy Launch" and more largely about what Massachusetts is doing on literacy and public education.

If you read the linked article, you'll see that Secretary Tutwiler outlines a $30M effort from the state that seems reasonable. They're planning to fund professional development and grants for districts to purchase curriculum that more strongly supports kids learning to read. That seems fine, and it's the role of the state to support districts in this way.

Let me be clear: while teaching kids to read is not my professional background, it's demonstrable that:

  • kids need different things in order to learn to read; not every kind of instruction works with every child (kind of like everything else)

As a local side note: this is where Worcester was. It wasn't until we got a new superintendent, and the leadership that resisted getting teachers the curriculum they needed was gone, that we made a change. $7M or so in ESSER funds went to a new elementary reading curriculum; Worcester's elementary schools now have Core Knowledge for Language Arts or CKLA.

Where this becomes something else, as too often in education, is when it becomes a crusade. 

And all, we are there in spades. 

I have been struggling for weeks on how to tackle this issue on here, because it is so big, so heated, and, at ground, so breathtakingly missing the mark. Yesterday, though, I had shared with me the third of Maren Aukerman's of the University of Calgary's three part series on the Literary Research Association site "The Science of Reading and the Media" which hits the mark; you can find the first part here, and the second here.

I particularly found useful how she frames the state of coverage, which will sound familiar to any readers of the Boston Globe:

From how much of the media tells it, a war rages in the field of early literacy instruction. The story is frequently some version of a conflict narrative relying on the following problematic suppositions:

a) science has proved that there is just one way of teaching reading effectively to all kids – using a systematic, highly structured approach to teaching phonics;

b) most teachers rely instead on an approach called balanced literacy, spurred on by shoddy teacher education programs;

c) therefore, teachers incorporate very little phonics and encourage kids to guess at words;

d) balanced literacy and teacher education are thus at fault for large numbers of children not learning to read well.

The upshot? "Unfortunately, these suppositions turn out to be highly misleading."

In the first part, Professor Aukerman starts by asking if reporting is biased, using as an exemplar Dana Goldstein's piece from 2022 on Lucy Calkins. Aukerman walks us through the lack of balance, use of straw man arguments, myopic lens fetishizing phonics instruction, and logical fallacies. One could--and I would argue, we need to!-- do the same here in Massachusetts with the Globe's three part much-touted series on literacy. 

In the second part, Aukerman looks at if media is using high quality research. The lack of deep understanding and use of research across education (and I dare say, in other fields) is an ongoing issue of the current state of media, and we certainly see it here in Massachusetts. Even something so basic as the basis of the argument in their literacy series, which the Globe has based on ELA MCAS scores reveals this sloppiness, as MCAS scores do not tell us much about literacy; ELA MCAS tests much more than literacy and is not, on its own, a test of literacy. 
But more broadly, you can see this in the coverage:

By drawing mostly on vociferous advocates of one approach and bolstering their claims primarily with other journalism, journalists create an echo chamber which itself is disconnected from reading research. 

And would you guess this from reading the popular coverage?

 ...there is insufficient evidence to conclude that any single approach, including the particular systematic phonics approach often elided with “the science of reading,” is most effective.

Nearly all coverage also lacks both historical context:

 The idea that phonics can fix children’s reading ills is at least 70 years old, yet results from other large-scale phonics reforms have also yielded disappointing results, including during the Reading First era in the U.S. and as England’s recent national curriculum mandates have played out

And, I would argue, a disturbing ignorance about how curriculum works in the classroom. The Globe, for example, waved their hand and deemed "outdated" curricula that they found in their survey that districts are using. But that both a) leans on the above poor understanding of what is quality curricula and b) understands "curricula" as if it is taken from a box and inserted into children's heads without going through educators who always use a variety of resources to best meet the needs of children.

The third part of Aukerman's series brings us to where I am concerned we are in Massachusetts: the consequences. The latest Massachusetts iteration of this is the push to pass H579/S263, frighteningly favorably reported out of the Joint Committee on Education on the last available day*. This would not only add another report to the pile of reports that districts have to submit to DESE--let me know when that fixes something, eh?--but would give the Department the authority to select curriculum, with districts selecting from a list generated. As the bill reads:

each local school committee shall use programs and curricula from the lists developed by the department or an approved alternative program

This honestly makes me both so angry and so frightened about the state of education in Massachusetts that words fail me. There are much more articulate words in the actual practitioners of the letter I shared earlier this month, of the position statement of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, and the four fallacies of the reading wars.

One cannot, of course, separate this out from context: this is the same "my local elected officials are not doing exactly what I want, so I am taking it to the manager" that brought us mandates over everything from COVID to other nonsense. And someone, somewhere, is going to write a great book about the economic anxiety of the white middle class and its impact on public education and lines of governance.

But in the meantime, here we are. 

So, please go read all of Aukerman's series. Share it. Email it to your legislators.  

____________________________________________________________________

*and if you think the Globe "just happened" to choose the hometown of the Senate chair of that committee for one of their articles, I have a bridge to sell you.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

how do we make sure it can't happen here: on Nex Benedict

Content warning: death of a trans student 

MTA button and sticker read "Protect Trans Kids" on a trans flag

I've been profoundly disturbed by the death of Nex Benedict since I heard of it. 

Sounding the alarm on the low income count

 



If you'd prefer to review this with funny Muppets gifs, you can do that on my Twitter thread here

As I mentioned in my Q&A on the FY25 state budget (as well as elsewhere), the state funding formula for schools is enrollment-driven. In other words, it's at ground based on the kids that are enrolled in your school district. Setting aside the changes within the Student Opportunity Act, the two ways that a district's foundation budget can change is through changes in enrollment and changes in the inflation rate.

Reminder: you should be concerned about this year's inflation rate of 1.35%!

On enrollment, in addition to a student being in a grade (or, for high school, vocational or not program), students are also designated as English learners, which has an additional funding increment, and low income, which has an additional funding increment. And the low income increments going up are the biggest drivers of change in the Student Opportunity Act.

Those following budgets may remember that in the first years of SOA we not only had the dollar amounts going up from that; we also had the count of students who were considered low income going up. This was due to the state being tasked with coming up with another means of counting students. Since FY17, the state has counted as low income students who are participating in state public assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), MassHealth, and foster care, or who are homeless. Part of what has been going on since SOA, and what has been driving the count upward, is that the state's system of matching kids has improved. They literally take the two databases, one of students enrolled in the above, the other of students enrolled in schools, and they match them. And they've really been getting much better at it.

To that, the state has added a supplemental program, where the district can, through paperwork, say "hey, you missed one" to be sure that student is added.

Note that none of the above has anything to do with free and reduced lunch enrollment. If your district isn't funded for universal free lunch by the federal government, the state's supplemental program fills in for nutrition funding on top of the students whose forms you have, but those forms in no way impact your low income student count.

Still with me?

The above matching to count low income is called "direct certification," as students are directly certified by the state as being low income. The place where an issue arises is if anything impacts enrollment in those other programs. And something has, in a big way.

During the pandemic, the federal government froze enrollment in Medicaid programs for the period of the public health emergency. When that public health emergency was declared over, states had to go back to reviewing the enrollments. This "redetermination" started last March, and there have been ongoing concerns about how many people are going to lose coverage, many due to speaking a first language other than English, mobility, homelessness, and so forth

And some of them are kids.

Between the FY24 and the FY25 counts, there are 6715 fewer kids counted as low income across Massachusetts (in an overall enrollment that went up). We haven't seen that count drop in years.

Because this count runs on a four year basis, that is only going to get worse.

And again, it isn't that those kids necessarily are no longer poor. In fact, it's good guess that they still are. They just aren't being counted.

That's bad in a number of ways, but from a school budget perspective, it undermines the major driver of increased funding for schools that serve predominately low income kids, and it will do so in the final two years of Student Opportunity Act implementation.

We need to be sounding alarms on this. 

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Big news from DESE this evening: Commissioner Riley is resigning

Commissioner Riley is ending his tenure with the Department, submitting his resigning effective March 15 of this year:

I am writing to let you know that after six years of service, I am stepping down from my position as Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, effective March 15, 2024.

The full letter, as shared by MASS, is here. He says it is due to needing to care for elderly parents, as well as the Department needing someone who can devote the next five years to service.
I will reserve comment. 

So what happens now? 
For this, we look to MGL Ch. 15, sec. 1F:

Whenever a vacancy occurs in the position of commissioner, the board shall by a two-thirds vote of all its members submit to the secretary, for the secretary's approval, a recommended candidate to fill that vacancy. The secretary may appoint the recommended candidate as commissioner. If the secretary declines to appoint the candidate, the board shall submit a new candidate for consideration. The secretary may appoint the commissioner only from candidates submitted to the secretary by the board.

Riley is recommending Russell Johnston as the interim (like a superintendent, we have to have a Commissioner); that very much does not preclude further action. I would suspect, as last time, that they would do a full national search, with a confidential round of interviews with a search committee. But that is only my hunch. 

The rest of that section, incidentally, reads as follows:

The board may in its discretion by majority vote of all its members remove the commissioner. The commissioner shall be the secretary to the board, its chief executive officer and the chief state school officer for elementary and secondary education. The commissioner shall receive a salary to be determined by the board.

The board may delegate its authority or any portion thereof to the commissioner whenever in its judgment such delegation may be necessary or desirable. The commissioner shall exercise such delegated powers and duties with the full authority of the board.

As Riley noted at his last meeting was then approaching his six year anniversary; he was appointed in January of 2018 after Commissioner Chester died the prior June, with Jeff Wulfson serving as interim (after being appointed at genuinely the weirdest and saddest Board meeting ever).

Also, I had some thoughts about how I'd do if if I were in charge (which I very much am not) the last time we did this. I may give some more thought to that now, in, as always, my personal capacity.

Images of full letter:




More as there is anything! 

Sunday, February 11, 2024

No, DESE didn't make the numbers up: a bit of a Q&A on FY25

While it's not uncommon this time of year for me to get questions about the state budget, never have I found myself standing in front of quite so many groups, answering so many phone calls, typing so many emails that involve some version of "no, DESE doesn't make these numbers up."

To that end, a bit of a Q&A on FY25. 

And there's a Worcester School Committee meeting this week

 And while I again will not offer commentary, this week is going to be the week if we see if the Committee caves to being ombudsmen. As a reminder, items filed by members per rule 26 of the Committee:

...shall be under the purview of the Committee, focus on the business of the Committee, and should be concise and specific. Members shall not file items that can be disposed of via contact per rule 9. Items not following this rule shall not be placed on the agenda.

The agenda is here.
The report of the superintendent is on the implementation of the Family and Community Engagement framework. 

The second Worcester School Committee meeting of the term

 ...and if I let these get too far away from me, we'll never catch up!

The agenda is here; the video is here.

Please note the important takeaways from the FY25 budget presentation here. I managed to catch just the second half of WEC's FY25 forum this past week, in which Mr. Allen replicated his presentation, and I was concerned that the questions didn't seem to be those stemming from a $22M budget gap. Let's start to get ourselves into that mode, folks. 

And as a reminder, here's the advocacy at the state level: 


Sunday, February 4, 2024

Two further FAFSA issues

 You may or may not have been following the ongoing issues with the new FAFSA (some of us have to live in this world alas), but the new form, which is finally out, but which is going to delay when colleges get information and thus can get back to families had two other issues highlighted recent I thought of interest:

  • If you have or will have two kids in college, what had been the rule that the colleges split what the calculation thinks you can afford in half is no longer the case. (Gift link to the NY Times there) It's not yet clear how colleges are going to handle this--there's some hope that they'll make up the difference rather than have families decide that they simply cannot afford it--and only time will tell. 

  • What all the changes didn't fix was the requirement that the parents have Social Security numbers to fill out the form. Children whose parents are immigrants thus cannot fill it out.
If this isn't you this year, cross your fingers they work it out! 

If you're interested in the Worcester Public Schools budget and facilities

 Do note that there is a meeting of Finance, Operations, and Governance tomorrow at 5:45 pm, which is taking up the second quarter budget report and the quarterly facilities report. 

Unfortunately, those are still being done via "view only" Google Drive links, rather than posted as part of the agenda. 

I won't comment, but I will offer that the second quarter is really when the district gets a clear picture of how the budget is rolling out; it also can offer some insight into the following year. 

And of course, the facilities report has photos! 

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Four takeaways and three footnotes from the preliminary FY25 Worcester Public Schools budget presentation


with thanks to Roosevelt K-1 student Arlo Frutaan for the rueful budget fish
and to Mr. Allen for selecting it for this year's budget


The presentation shared is here, and you can watch the video of that section here:


We can go into this in greater depth as the year goes along, but here's a big four plus three footnotes:

Friday, February 2, 2024

Because no, the state shouldn't be selecting curriculum

I'm passing (in my personal capacity) along this opportunity for advocacy from Sara Cuthbertson, chair of the Lexington School Committee, who shares the following letter from Lexington superintendent, Dr. Julie Hackett: 

Thursday, February 1, 2024

The Worcester School Committee takes a preliminary look at FY25 tonight

 And you can find the presentation that they're getting here.

It looks like we're also getting an early look at the budget book cover, and as per usual, WPS Visual Arts has collaborated to provide student artwork. This fish represents how I feel about the inflation rate:


They've got an executive session this week, so thinking sometime after 6?