The Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act, which is still bad

 I wouldn't read the mainstream press which is all "groundbreaking blah blah blah" but maybe look at The Verge. It's good to read the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stop KOSA.
And as a reminder, here's my post on this from January. While the bill has changed a bit, the main issues with it remain.

..we can only hope that it tanks in the House.

If you're planning on contacting your rep (please do), you might find some of what is in this The 74 piece (in addition to the EFF and Stop KOSA links above) useful. 

Massachusetts, we have a budget, mostly.

On Monday, Governor Maura Healey signed the FY25 conference committee budget. You can find the Governor's signing statement here along with the record of vetoes. 

As the most of the larger K-12 education accounts of the budget were signed as passed by the conference committee, which I covered here, I'm going to skip those and go right to the vetoes, of which there are quite a number that impact K-12 districts. 

(I know, right? You'd never know this from the coverage.)

Do note, though, that DESE has posted the final FY25 Chapter 70 and net school spending requirements. This means we can play "exactly how far back did making the minimum per pupil increase $104 set us from SOA gains?" which I'll get to in a future post.

The following is taken directly from the line item account veto document.

A word about superintendent evaluation

To the extent that we have a superintendent evaluation season in Massachusetts, it is superintendent evaluation season in Massachusetts¹, and so a few words on it, with a note or two for my fellow Worcester residents, as our school committee has to turn in their individual evaluations to Mayor Petty by the end of this week; those then are put together into a single composite evaluation.

Some things to read from across the country

 It's a whole big country out there, and, even though it is summer, there is stuff happening around schools:

• People in Worcester may or may not remember this--I believe it was in the fogginess of everything being remote, meetings happening seemingly multiple times a week, and state guidance changing nearly as fast--but there was an effort at one point to implement a surveillance of students' online activity under the guise of mental health. This was (appropriately!) brought to the School Committee, that weighed in against it.
  If you're wondering what that then would have looked like, please read this piece from May McCoy in the Kansas Reflector about what it's like to be a student at Lawrence High School in Kansas:
  

  It would be easy to describe what’s happening to students at Lawrence High School as Orwellian, but that would be an easy and not exactly fitting metaphor. It does resemble in general the dystopian novels we used to be assigned to read in high school — “1984” and “Brave New World” — but a more accurate comparison is to a science fiction novella you may have never heard of.

  In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” published in 1956 and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002, a predictive policing system is used to arrest people before they have the chance to commit the crime they are expected to. Dick’s story — like the use of Gaggle — pits authoritarianism and conformity against creativity and individual liberty.

  Read it, because the sales pitch here to school officials is how "safe" it will make their students, while, of course, doing no such thing. Watch for this one.  

• Even though Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a "mandate" that every public school in Oklahoma would teach the Bible, a growing number of them are saying that they aren't going to do that, leading to this great column by Clay Horning, asking what Walters really wants, and what he's actually getting: 
  

  ...making Walters looks even smaller, dumber, simpler and more ridiculous than he previously appeared, which is hard to do.

   Go, Oklahoma districts! 
  

• The New York Times Sunday Magazine covered the push to deny undocumented students or even the children of undocumented immigrants an education. 
  This is of course not only dumb--it poorly serves the country not to educate children who are here--but would reverse current regulation and policy.
  That's a gift link. Please read it and share it. 

Moving right along: Board of Ed membership

Periodically, I am asked about the length of terms of the current Board of Ed members, particularly given that we have a largely Baker-appointed Board and an ostensibly more education-friendly Governor now. While the state does have this chart, it's not fully updated, has weirdly set everything to June expiration dates (which isn't in state law), and has more than one ending date just plain wrong.

I did the first version of this post in 2017, with an update in January of last year.

Two more on Project 2025 and education

•  Time has a piece this week on how it isn't waiting for a second Trump administration: it's already started. 
  
  
• USA Today talks about the impact on people's lives.
  
  
• The Hechinger Report looks at how Project 2025 could change education.

...okay, that's three. They keep coming!

Odd one on WPS FY24 funding

I haven't posted on this because monetary decisions have to be done in public session, and so I expected, naturally, that we would see something in an agenda, and so I was waiting for that.

Fiscal year 2024 has ended; fiscal year 2025 has started.
There was no meeting called before the end of June after budget.
There is nothing on the July agenda.

There has been no vote by the Worcester School Committee to change the bottom line of the FY24 budget; there has been no vote of the Worcester School Committee to allocate funds received (it would be a prior year allocation, one assumes, now).

And yet at the City Council meeting on June 16, it seems, the City Manager said that additional funding would be forwarded to the Worcester Public Schools in response to a question from a councilor regarding minimum net school spending.
That then was raised as a question by Member Mailman at the June 20 meeting, with the response being at that point it hadn't been received yet, and that there would be a memo sent to the Committee.

It appears that was only done to the Committee², not publicly, and there still hasn't been any action taken by the Committee.

Last Thursday night, in response to a question by Member Biancheria (noting that the district has laid off literacy tutors, and questioning both why and how it is that the superintendent spoke of hiring an 'outside contractor' for literacy tutoring), the response was that this from "extra money from the city."

The response was that this was being done from the additional $1.8M received from the city--it's homeless transportation¹ reimbursement money, which the schools only get if the city actively moves it to schools--as the School Committee, it seems, received a memo about. 
And that funding went to fill FY24 holes, so it freed up federal grant funds, that then can be carried over into FY25, some of which can be used for literacy tutoring. 

Can the district do the above? Yes. 

And the Committee votes each year--and they did this year--to authorize the superintendent to move money among cost centers to close the fiscal year. 

It should be clear, though: this is not what this is.
This is new money for the district, which as not been recognized by the Committee in any way in their own action, which then is being used to provide for spending that the Committee also hasn't overseen. 

The City Auditor, it seems, has said that further action by the Committee isn't needed. The auditor, though, isn't who sets state law, regulation, or guidance for districts, all of which is unified that school committees in Massachusetts both set the bottom line spending and allocate funding by cost center. 

What's really, really odd to me about all of this is that the Worcester Public Schools are not--and I dare say I'm unusually well informed about this--a district where the budgetary authority of the Committee is usually in question. 
____________________________________________________________

¹As an utter side note, this means that, if this funding is being used to meet net school spending, it isn't being used for transportation, as that doesn't count. And that, again, is fine, and will no doubt show up in the end of the year close report.

²Let me head off the obvious here and say this: my concern isn't "I'm not on the Committee, so I don't know." My concern is that it's budgetary, so we are all supposed to know, regardless of our relationship with the district.

State conference committee budget on Governor Healey's desk

I'm working through updating my running spreadsheet on the FY25 budget, but the conference committee budget released last Thursday, passed Friday, and sitting on Governor Healey's desk has a few interesting wrinkles in the education accounts. 

• In the ongoing "this is actually a terrible way to add aid to schools, but it's easy to understand" race, you might remember that the Senate had upped the House's $104 minimum per pupil increase to $110. It's usually a good bet on those that the higher number will prevail, but in this case, it did not, as the conference committee budget adopted the $104 minimum per pupil. The additional $74 per pupil that this is--remember, the Student Opportunity Act sets this at $30 per pupil--is coming from Fair Share funds. 
  And this is a really terrible and inequitable way to add school funding which is completely undercutting the entire fight over the foundation budget and passage of the Student Opportunity Act, which I will continue to scream into the void over here.
  
  
• Free lunch for all kids is in there, but the conference committee budget took the smaller (in this case Senate) number of $170M for reimbursement on this one. We should be alarmed by this, as this doesn't fully fund the account. 
  Remember, this is now a state MANDATE; if the state doesn't fully fund it, districts are on the hook for the difference. There's been far too much dependence on supplemental budgets and "finding the money somewhere" on something as grounding as feeding kids for me on this one, so consider raising this with your legislators. You can be sure that most of them are running for re-election on it. 
  This, too, is funded from Fair Share, by the way.
  
  
• Interestingly, the conference committee passed a higher number than either chamber for circuit breaker, by close to a million dollars; the passed account is $493,177,484. This suggests to me that they're using as up-to-date reimbursement projections as possible, which is good. 
  
  
• Charter reimbursement was identical all the way through, at $198M, which is $33.7M. We've been assured that this fully funded; let's keep an eye on it.
  
  
• Similarly, homeless transportation reimbursement is funded at $26.6M, which has been consistent through the process. Given how costs on this have exploded across the state, I cannot believe that this comes close to reaching need (setting aside that frequently these reimbursements don't ever get to non-regional school districts, anyway, getting stuck in municipal general funds). 
  As Salem Superintendent Zrike said before the Board of Ed in June: these are OUR kids. We need to be sure they're covered, but we also can't pretend that is magically happening somehow without funding.
  
  
• Rural school aid came through at $16M, which is down from the Senate's $17.5M but up from the House's $7.5M. While I know this isn't the hoped-for $60M, I think it's worth noting that this is now an accepted, included account, that isn't having to be stuck in over the course of the process via amendment.
  

This is obviously not everything, but it's the ones I thought to flag. I will update this post when I have the spreadsheet updated, which I hope to do later today.

UPDATE: The account by account spreadsheet is still lacking a bit in commentary, but the numbers are updated.

Also, the preliminary cherry sheets are now also updated for both municipal and for regionals.

Harris on education

"And that little girl was me." 

EdWeek quickly turned around this piece on Vice President Kamala Harris on K-12 education after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and the Democratic party quickly swung behind her. 

For me, the salient point on Vice President Harris on education, as the personal is political, is that she was herself part of the voluntary desegregation of the Berkeley (CA) public schools, which started in 1968; you might remember "that little girl was me" from the 2020 campaign, which caused me to pull together this blog post on federal desegregation (and Joe Biden, whose record on this frankly is awful); I'd also point to this post from that August on desegregation.

Obviously, at this point, she's running on the current administration's record. I'll note, though, this NEA post from 2019 on six points on why they supported her running with Biden--giving her maiden speech on the Senate floor to oppose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education may well be enough to seal the deal for some!--as well as this 2019 The Atlantic piece's intriguing look at something near to our heart here: school funding equity: 

“It is bananas,” Senator Kamala Harris told the audience—members of the American Federation of Teachers’ Michigan chapter—gathered at Marcus Garvey Academy, in Detroit, on Monday.

“It is completely upside down that we currently have a system where the funding of a school district is based on the tax base of that community,” the Democratic hopeful vying to run against President Donald Trump in 2020 said. The line met with approving head nods and a chorus of agreement. “It’s just basic math,” she continued, on a roll. “The community that has the lowest tax base is going to receive the fewest resources, and by the way probably [has] the highest need.”

More as I turn it up!  

Things to read this week

 As always, a lot of this has come through on the microblogger sites, but for those who prefer somewhere else: 

Another great resource on the 2024 election

 ...is this policy brief from New America: 10 education and work issues at stake in the 2024 election

When cops are in schools, more kids get arrested

 File under "asking over and over doesn't change the answer"...the United States Government Accountability Office crunched the numbers of the public schools in the United States and found: 

Arrest rates more than doubled in schools with police present compared to similar schools without police, according to GAO's analysis. Among the 51 percent of schools with police present at least once a week, GAO found that arrests were more common when the police were involved in student discipline.

Also not new news, but found again: 

Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native students were arrested at rates that were two to three times higher than White students. For boys who had a disability, the differences in arrest rates widened further.

You can read K-12 Dive, District Administration, and The 74 on this, too.  

A thought: maybe we should act accordingly! 

PS: Be glad the GAO reports to Congress

You need to know about Project 2025

 I am hoping that by now you've heard of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's "Presidential Transition Project," which not only involves a whole lot of familiar faces from the previous administration, but also has significant overlap with the now-adopted Republican party platform, which, as Kevin Kruse notes, isn't itself much of a platform. 

This includes in education as Chalkbeat outlines, where the periodic calls for elimination of the federal Department of Education--Trump, for example, promised it in 2016--are renewed.

Long time, no post

 ...and not for lack of possible content, huh?

I don't have much clear time or mental space for writing right now, so no promises. I'll see if I can at least get a few "you should read this" posts up this week.