Wednesday, February 12, 2025

If you're getting discouraged

 A fourteen year old middle schooler who attends a U.S. Department of Defense school on the U.S. base in Stuttgart, Germany organized a student walkout during Secretary of Defense Hegseth's visit earlier this week. 

Monday, February 10, 2025

For those wondering about the Title IX executive order

 I thought this, in Ohio Capital Journal, was quite good: 

But lawyers and Title IX experts told States Newsroom it remains to be seen how exactly schools across the country will enforce the executive order and how the administration would rescind federal funds for any schools failing to adhere.

Shiwali Patel, a Title IX expert and senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, said the “blatantly discriminatory” order is “extremely broad” and raises “a lot of questions.”

“It touches educational institutions, it touches international competitions, it touches immigration of trans women athletes, it calls for these convenings, it calls for state attorneys general to identify some enforcement mechanisms,” Patel said.

The order asks the assistant to the president for domestic policy to bring together state attorneys general to “identify best practices” in enforcing the ban.

The assistant is also responsible for bringing together “representatives of major athletic organizations and governing bodies” to promote such policies regarding trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports. 

Elana Redfield, a lawyer and federal policy director at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, which focuses on laws and policies affecting LGBTQ+ people, pointed out that the executive order “contains kind of broad language, including addressing locker rooms.”

“So, it suggests that any kind of space … for example, PE classes or locker rooms for use in elementary and high school, middle schools as well — those kinds of spaces would be affected,” she said. 

Kelli Rodriguez, assistant dean for academic affairs at Seattle University School of Law, said it’s going to be “really confusing for a while” and “a lot of waiting and seeing.”

Rodriguez, who is also the director of sports law at Seattle University School of Law, said “the one thing that’s different is that the executive order calls for, potentially, ramifications or punitive actions if institutions don’t comply.”

“I don’t know what that means yet, I think that’s one of the things that’s kind of outstanding — we’ll see what that means from an enforcement standpoint,” she said, noting that she thinks many schools right now are “very anxious” for what exactly those punitive actions would look like when it comes to federal funding.

Rodriguez also said she expects to see state attorneys general, individual athletes, parents of athletes and institutions challenge the executive order.


On schools and immigration

January prayer intentions of Pope Francis
From the Sunday, January 26, 2025 bulletin of the Cathedral of St. Paul, Worcester

 This past April, an early morning trip to Logan put me headed back home in time to stop by Lexington for the re-enactment of the Patriots Day battle on Lexington Green. I'd been as a child once, where my main memories (sorry, Mom!) were of it being cold and very early.

As an adult who now works in public policy, this time, the thing that struck me was that those who stood on Lexington Green were just the local small town local people. The names you know--both John Hancock and Samuel Adams had been in the town overnight, and of course Paul Revere had gone back and forth--were gone by the time the British regulars marched onto the town common, and most of us probably can't name anyone from those who stood there*.

And when the men in fancy uniforms, representing the might of the British Empire, marched onto the Green and ordered those there to disperse, the local people didn't do it. Just because someone in a uniform who had an official position told them to do something, they knew that wasn't enough to make it the right, or even legally required, thing to do.

I was thinking a lot about this over the week, in reading comments from many of my fellow citizens who appear to be under the impression that just because people in uniforms show up and start ordering people to do things, that we are required to do them.

Deferring to those in uniform simply because of their uniform or their position not only isn't legally required; it's fundamentally unAmerican. 

_______________________________
*noted exception: the people of Lexington, who named an elementary school after one: Jonathan Harrington, Jr.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

This is why you have a bureaucracy

 I hope that you didn't miss this weekend the news that Elon Musk and those working for/with him have gained access to the U.S. Treasury payment system

From CNN

Before Trump’s inauguration, members of his transition landing team wanted to know granular details about the bureau’s proprietary computer systems, including “each step in the disbursement process.” They also wanted to visit field offices where government workers, in Philadelphia or Kansas, work on computers that disburse payments.

The requests puzzled many career officials initially. The transition operation hadn’t requested substantive briefings on any of Treasury’s other critical areas of operation, multiple people familiar with the matter said. Veterans of past transition efforts, representing presidents of both parties, couldn’t recall precedent for the Trump team’s entreaty.

That group wanted to know how to stop particular payments, and were told, by then-Acting Secretary of the Treasury David Lebryk "we don't do that." 

And let's stop for a moment and acknowledge that THIS is what is needed here. Thanks to Mr. Lebryk, as well as the officials described below at USAID, for doing so. 

With Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sworn in this week, he granted Musk and his crew such access. Lebryk was placed on leave and then retired; he had been with the Treasury for three decades. 

The NY Intelligencer gathers a lot of reporting here, wins on the grabber headline: 

and sums this up as: 

So now Musk and DOGE have access to and potentially power over what is basically America’s checkbook, weeks before another debt ceiling crisis looms, at a time when Musk is vowing to somehow cut a hysterically large amount of federal spending, and during a chaotic period in which he and other officials in the Trump administration are running roughshod across the federal government like they have unchecked power.

And here's a gift link to the Wall Street Journal, which also covers a standoff at USAID

The thing that I am struggling to wrap my head around is this: so-called "DOGE" is only a federal entity by executive order. These are not federal employees, it appears with paychecks who have filled out requisite tax forms; they do not have background checks or clearances for such access. Musk, for sure, has a massive conflict of interest in doing anything anywhere near the federal government.

If what, per Wired, was happening this week at the Technology Transformation Services (part of the General Services Administration) is anything to go by, they may not have government worker I.D.s  or email addresses. 

I would have thought that it would have taken a number of steps--not just the yes or no of the top official--for anyone to be cleared to have access to the actual payment system of the United States government. 

Your average Massachusetts public school employee goes through more than this, by a lot. Having lots of steps to go through with more than one person involved is how we do things like keep public spending ethically.

Concerned about tariffs and schools?

 This K-12 Dive piece from December tackles that topic. Construction gets hit both by a tariff on goods from Canada and by a crackdown on immigration. 

If your vegetable drawer looks like mine, you may have wondered about school nutrition; note: 

When it comes to the food served in cafeterias, K-12 food services are required by law to buy “to the maximum extent practicable, domestic commodities or products,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Not mentioned? Fuel.  

Not mentioned, of course, is that if budgets OVERALL tighten, money for schools ALSO will get tighter (and, for example, I'd suspect overrides get a little more tricky).  

Note, also: the tariffs aren't popular.

Sharing a good resource on the education-related executive orders

 As I noted last week, something that is really important about this administration in general, but specifically the executive orders, is not to assume that just because something is said on a piece of paper above Donald Trump's signature, it's so.*

I get updates from Education Counsel in D.C., and they sent out an update late last week on the three education related executive orders, which I have posted in full here (as it isn't yet on their website). 

I wanted particularly call attention to these two things, which are in the "racial ideology in schools" section, but matters across many things in education:

The use of the phrases “applicable law,” “illegal,” “unlawful,” “discriminatory” and other qualifiers throughout the EO is key since it is a reminder that EOs do not supersede existing laws and that calling something “illegal or “unlawful” via an EO does not in fact make it illegal or unlawful. Depending on how the Administration approaches implementation, these other federal laws may stand in their way

And:

Multiple applicable federal statutes prohibit the federal government from interfering with state and local authority to make decisions about K-12 curriculum and instructional materials.

That starts, of course, with the tenth amendment to the Constitution, but lives other places, too. As Education Counsel says in a linked blog post on this subject: 

Congress has clearly and repeatedly outlawed federal intrusion into state and local curricular decisions. Although it only takes a single law to make something illegal, the collective weight of this list highlights just how clear a line the President must toe to remain “consistent with applicable law” when implementing his new order. Indeed, the multiple instances of this four-word phrase throughout the order suggest the Administration may also recognize the significant legal obstacles to exerting federal control over state and local decisions about teaching and learning. By remembering these legal limitations, we all — especially our education leaders — can also avoid overreacting to the order’s rhetoric.

For education, that last line is about our, collectively, holding the federal government only to what it actually is able to do. Education authorities largely do not belong to the federal government.  

_________________
*And if you're one of those going around snarking 'who's going to stop him?' you're not helping. Particularly where it comes to education, the answer is WE ALL WILL. Stop. 

and incidentally

 ...this Boston Globe piece on inflation is surprisingly good. 

From Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler


 posted Friday on Twitter, with this note:

The Healey-Driscoll Administration issued the following statement today in response to the U.S. Department of Education's announcement that they will be enforcing the Trump Administration’s 2020 Title IX Rule.