From an article in Futurism, Microsoft's (to give the latest example) sales pitch isn't panning out:
Regardless, the dustup suggests that enterprise customers are far from convinced that large AI agents are ready to autonomously complete complex multistep tasks. It’s yet another indication that companies are struggling to convert the enormous hype surrounding generative AI into actual revenue, a concerning trend considering the billions of dollars AI companies are burning through right now with no end — or return on investment — in sight.
This is, of course, because it continues to absolutely not live up to the hype:
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent, which was Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time
What I find incredibly alarming is how many people who are in positions of power and authority refuse to look critical at all on this matter. We're continuing to see it pushed across the education sphere, including (particularly of concern to me) in matters of school finance.
Consider what a 70% failure rate looks like for school budgeting.
I am just seeing this, but for those who read or follow such things: the Office of the Inspector General has issued a report on Brockton in FY23. You can find it here. Coverage in MassLive, Boston Globe, and The Enterprise
In 2024, 59 countries experienced large or disruptive outbreaks – almost three times as many as in 2021 – and a quarter of them had previously eliminated measles.
Somerville, Easthampton, and all the rest have indeed updated their lawsuit in light of the moving of powers of the U.S. Department of Education out of that office. From the New York Times coverage:
The education coalition argues in its lawsuit that the annual appropriations law approved by Congress requires the Education Department to carry out its programs and that Ms. McMahon lacks the authority to shift these functions to other federal agencies.
“The information and actions coming out of the Department have been unpredictable, chaotic, and unprofessional,” the education coalition said in the lawsuit. “This experience is unprecedented in administration changes.”
Something I want to flag, arising from this article in last week's Boston Globe flagging--rightly!--the drop in immigrant students enrolling in our schools1is a persistent miscommunication in the piece (from those quoted) about what happens to state aid to a school district if enrollment drops:
STATE AID IS NOT LOST.
Massachusetts has a "hold harmless" provision in the calculation of chapter 70 funding. That provides that every district gets at least as much aid as they got the year before.
If, once the full chapter 70 aid calculation is completed, a districts would get less aid than they would have received the year before, the hold harmless provision kicks in, and the district gets the same amount of aid they got the year before. To this then is added a minimum per pupil increase in aid, which by state law is $30/student but last year was $150/student.
While many of the districts discussed in the article are not districts that are usually in hold harmless--they're districts that not only are growing, but they have growing levels of need, both of which are provided for through the state calculation of school funding--they would nonetheless NOT LOSE state aid if their enrollment fell.
Their aid may well not grow by the levels to which they are accustomed, nor grow at a level to keep up with expenses, but it would not be "lost."
Let's not mess this one up.
____________________________________________________ 1And huzzah again to new Boston Globe reporter Marcela Rodrigues who is keeping focused on this. It matters! And she gets the stories across well!
It was another of those news rounds where if, like me, you were offline for an hour, you missed a major thing and had to play catch-up.
On Tuesday of this week, the U.S. Department of Education signed a series of agreements with other federal departments. Those agreements move functions of U.S. Ed to those other Departments, as EdWeek charts out here. Most of it is going to the Department of Labor—demonstrating truncated view of the function of the public education system—though several go to the Interior, and one to HHS. As yet, there is no move of IDEA which covers special education to HHS, as has been floated a number of times.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first of such moves: career and technical education grants were moved to the Department of Labor earlier this year. Those who have been paying attention say it has not gone well.
Secretary McMahon was quick to say that funding would continue to flow to states and from there to schools. As Matt Barnum wrote in Chalkbeat, it's quite possible that schools will see little change, so long as those other departments actually pick up the ball. The AP, though, captured the concern that I've had all week:
Instead of being housed in a single agency, much of the Education Department’s work now will be spread across four other federal departments...The plan increases bureaucracy fivefold, Washington state’s education chief said, “undoubtedly creating confusion and duplicity” for educators and families. His counterpart in California said the plan is “clearly less efficient” and invites disruption. Maryland’s superintendent raised concerns about “the challenges of coordinating efforts with multiple federal agencies.”
It is state education agencies that coordinate with the federal level, and it is those state agencies that now have to chase funding down across multiple federal departments--departments not set up to interface on those programs--in order to get the funding to states and then to districts. Those state agencies, if they're anything like our own (and I'll bet they are) are understaffed already.
It's also worth noting that objections have not all fallen along party lines, as covered in the same article:
Yet some conservatives pushed back against the dismantling. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said on social media that moving programs to agencies without policy expertise could hurt young people. And Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary to Republican President George W. Bush, called it a distraction to a national education crisis.
“Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate the federal bureaucracy, and it may make the system harder for students, teachers and families to navigate and get the support they need,” Spellings said in a statement.
Those who work in the Department have also noted that this makes no sense. This is doing it for the sake of doing it. As I noted elsewhere earlier in the week, this feels a lot like the phase some kids go through where they have to push every rule and will come back with "TECHNICALLY..." when they are called on it.
TECHNICALLY, they haven't closed the Department of Education. I suspect that isn't going to be good enough for the judges that have already told them to knock it off.
Some of us have often referred to Worcester's election year as "everybody wants to be a school committee member" season, as very frequently in past years, city councilors show a sudden interest in creating policy1 for the Worcester Public Schools in a fashion that is WAY out of their purview.
Schools: There are a few items, both from the Public Works Committee and Councilor Ojeda, having to do with school cafeterias, food waste, and students providing meals to poll workers, possibly all of which are outside the purview of the City Council. I note these here because a few years back the Council frequently had items on the agenda that only the School Committee had authority over, but it’s been awhile since that’s happened.
City Manager request Chief Sustainability Officer work with
the School Department to facilitate a food waste study in the
schools cafeterias. Said study should quantify the
percentage of food waste created compared to the amount
of food distributed from the cafeterias.
14b. Request City Manager provide City Council with an outline
of a two (2) year plan to appropriate funding to work with
the Worcester Public Schools (WPS), supermarkets, and
local organizations to utilize food waste to help combat food
insecurity. (Ojeda)
14c. Request City Clerk work with the Superintendent of Public
Schools to determine the feasibility of Worcester Public
Schools students providing poll workers with meals during
each Election Day. (Ojeda)
While the inquiry--and let's be clear that it is no more than that--of the last item is under Council purview, as elections are (to a certain extent), now that the schools are closed for students on election days in Worcester, this seems a rather expensive (to put it mildly) undertaking. As most polling places are not in schools, I don't know why this would be the schools' problem to solve.
But food waste studies of the Worcester Public Schools cafeterias and a two year plan on food waste in school cafeterias? Those are both totally not under the Council purview (nor on their committee on Public Works).
Further, the school nutrition program of the Worcester Public Schools is entirely funded through federal USDA funding. There isn't even any budgetary interest possible here.
I'd suggest the City Council interest itself in things that are actually under its purview, and leave the oversight of the public schools' nutrition programs to the district.
________________________________ 1Somehow this never seems to extend to the very much under their purview matter of funding the schools below the legal requirement. That would require their requiring something of their actual employee, the city manager, as opposed to making speeches about children on matters over which they have no control. Yet here we are.
2And cheers to whomever started posting it as a PDF that actually just OPENS on the city site, so we don't have to DOWNLOAD it to open it!
The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation...Art must not shy away from the mystery of frailty; it must engage with it and know how to remain before it. Without being didactic, authentically artistic forms of cinema possess the capacity to educate the audience’s gaze.
I've been in a couple of sessions recently on federal grants (most recently DESE did one this morning), so providing a few highlights:
Always remember that federal education grants are almost all what's called 'forward funded' meaning that we have the current fiscal year's funding already.
Thus discussions of the FY26 federal budget--which is what the shutdown happened around--are funding that are/will largely impact our NEXT fiscal year at the state and district level, FY27, and thus NEXT school year.
There are BIG differences among White House/House/Senate's bills, with the Senate being the one that essentially level funds and has the least changes. As the Senate can only act on a bipartisan basis, there's some thinking that the Senate's option is the one that will win out.
The Senate bill also included language that required that funding to states go out as soon as it was available--none of this wanting to recheck stuff that hung up grants this fall!--but it's anybody's guess as to if that stays in.
The continuing resolution to fund the government expires January 30, 2026, so expect us to get countdown clocks again soon.
The CR passed reverses the reductions in force RIFs initiated just after the shutdown began and prohibits the Administration from initiating any new RIFs through January 30, 2026, when the CR expires.
One piece of good news: Because the CR funds full year appropriations for, among others, USDA, the continuing resolution that passed fully funds school nutrition through September 30, 2026, so that isn't iffy around government shutdowns.
In the last year, school bus driver employment has grown modestly by around 2,300 jobs.1 This small increase (1.1%) is a step in the right direction, but the trend of the last few years remains mostly flat.
Don't miss that that piece also includes charts that matter:
We're entering THE CONFERENCE ZONE at work, so I haven't had time to take a breath, but I don't want to miss some amazing things that happened Tuesday. This HuffPost post on victories you haven't heard of is also a good start. Several of these are of the "you might remember this headline" type; I'll add more as I find them!
You might remember West Ada School District in Idaho, where a teacher was ordered to remove an "Everyone is welcome here" poster which had multiracial hands from the walls of her classroom. Of the two seats that were up for election on Tuesday, challenger Meghan Brown beat incumbent Angie Redford with more than 61% of the vote; Brown is a teacher. The board chair Lori Frasure did win re-election over challenger Dara Ezzell-Pebworth, a social worker, but with only 54% of those voting. The challengers ran on an explicitly inclusive platform that also opposed private school tax credits.
As Peter Greene covers well in Forbes, Central Bucks County School Board, which got all sorts of national attention several years ago and had flipped majorities in 2023, further moved to a 9-0 Democratically-held majority on Tuesday. This was part of a larger blue wave across suburban Philadelphia.
Denver, which had been a hotbed of charter expansion and other things called 'ed reform' saw a pushback on that in the past six years, with this election a test of if that majority pushing back would hold on. They did, with those candidates taking the four of the seats open.
In Cy-Fair Independent School District outside of Houston, Tuesday saw a backlash to the conservative policies that district's board had implemented, as three members lost their seats to non-partisan newcomers, including the board chair and vice-chair. Cy-Fair is the third largest school district in Texas, educating over 100,000 students.
A recently-released brief reports at 61% of special education teachers report using AI to write IEPs or 504s last year. You'll note that this was specifically warned against in the OCR guidance above. Among the issues this can create, in addition to massive student privacy rights issues:
IDEA requires each IEP to be unique and tailored to each students’ disabilities, goals and process for achieving their goals. An AI tool that develops IEPs based on little student-specific information and that is not significantly reviewed and edited by a teacher likely would not meet these IDEA requirements, said the CDT paper.
What should districts do?
I'm going to argue with the article here and say MAKE THIS SOMETHING THAT IS BARRED.
On this eve of Worcester's municipal election, I offer the following thoughts, while looking back to what I wrote almost two years ago about the Worcester School Committee, though this is as much about Worcester City Council as it is about the Committee.
Please enjoy this fun "winter is coming" view of Cannon Mountain last weekend.
As tonight, the municipal contribution study group is taking public testimony here in Worcester, perhaps we can offer this from a Worcester school teacher:
The Whole People must take upon themselvs the Education of the Whole People and must be willing to bear the expences of it. There should not be a district of one Mile Square without a school in it, not founded by a Charitable individual but maintained at the expence of the People themselvs they must be taught to reverence themselvs instead of adoreing their servants their Generals Admirals Bishops and Statesmen.
asking for the Board to waive the requirement that charter schools submit single audit by November 1 prior to the government shutdown those single audit requirements were not updated only for those that spend more than $750,000 of federal funding other districts are not governed by a state statutory date; other districts are due nine months after the close of the fiscal year (so March) November 1 is in regulation; January 1 is in state law Curtin: Board doesn't have the authority to waive the statute regulatory deadline of November 1 can be waived by Board
Both of these are taking "competency determination" out of the language: in the Seal of Biliteracy and in student records. The request today is to send the proposed regulation changes out for public comment through December 5, with this back before the Board at their January meeting.
Seal of Biliteracy remove CD; clarify and streamline procedures for notification; transcripts, and terminology; pathways to demonstrate English proficiency; support equitable access
seeing numbers of students completing Seal of Biliteracy growing
Here are some tabs I have open that I'd recommend reading:
When we do facilities in the college class I teach, one thing my students most often remark on is the disparities among play space outdoors: who has a playground? who has access to grass? UC Davis is doing some interesting work measuring heat in school playyards, which particularly an issue for urban schools, where often the only play space is a patch of asphalt, and in a warming world.
You may have caught headlines about Alpha Schools, the chain that claims kids can spend just two hours a day with their generative AI "tutoring" overseen by adults who are not teachers. I urge you to read Wired's extensive piece on the actual experience of families, who are now pulling their kids out due to how their children were treated. This particularly matters as the chain is expanding across the country, funded in many places by vouchers.
With the school year now fully underway, I’ve been dismayed to see how the default position on generative AI throughout the educational landscape has been to ask how we might use it ethically, without considering that the answer to the question might be: “We can’t.”
I’m seeing this at my kid’s high school and at the University of Minnesota (where I work), from my professional organization and from the Minnesota Department of Education. It seems to be the norm pretty much everywhere. But what if we just didn’t accept that these programs must infiltrate every part of our lives? Or at least not the products currently being sold to us, literally sold to us so megacorporations can make more money, but also metaphorically sold to us as inevitable.
We can stop. We can pause. We can demand something better. And we must. Because there is a body count.
More than a decade ago, Springfield and state entered into an agreement to place some of the city’s most troubled schools under the control of the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, a collaborative effort of the Springfield Public Schools, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Springfield Education Association, with assistance from some business partners.
In November, officials agreed that Duggan Academy, Van Sickle Academy, Chestnut Accelerated Middle School, Discovery Poly Tech and four schools within High School of Commerce have reached achievement goals and are ready to return to the control of the Springfield district.
The state initially set the transition to take place this summer, but school officials successfully put off that move for a year to give educators enough time to plan for a smooth transition, said Superintendent Sonia Dinnall. The plan was discussed this past week at a School Committee meeting.
I'd missed that there had been a discussion already last year--did that get any coverage at all?--but this is in keeping with Massachusetts moving away from not having democratically-elected local control of its schools, with Holyoke now out of receivership and Southbridge moving there.
Here in Worcester, I'd urge you to send MONEY (money is always better than food donations to food banks; they can get more with it than you can!) to the Worcester County Food Bank. I am also a donor to the Worcester free fridges, where you can bring food or you can donate money; see their website for more information on both. For information on more local resources, as well as how to give, please see FoodHelpWorcester.
Also, this makes the school nutrition efforts that much more important. Here in Massachusetts, remember that we have universal free lunch; if you know of hungry families, please ensure their families are taking advantage of that.
After a two-hour proceeding, Judge Jason Braun ruled the boy can stay in the United States for now, but he must remain at the juvenile detention center in Winchester, Virginia until his case is heard again Nov. 5.
Lattarulo said the teen, who he said appeared very sad throughout the hearing, told the court he misses his mother in Everett.
“He’s probably maturing at a pace I wouldn’t like because it’s such a wake-up call to a child to be in that facility,” Lattarulo said. “I don’t think he’s good. He’s as good as he can be. When I talked to him, I could tell he’s trying to find strength in his voice, but you still hear the 13-year-old child.”
“ICE’s targeting of not only adults without criminal convictions, but also children and families, negates the administration’s stated policy of going after the ‘worst of the worst’ for deportation proceedings,” they note in an Oct. 3 letter signed by eight other New York Democratic U.S. representatives, including Ritchie Torres and Jerrold Nadler.
They demanded to know the total number of students — from kindergarten to college-age — arrested by the Department of Homeland Security since President Donald Trump took office in January. They want to learn how many remain in ICE custody, their average length of stay and what percentage were or are being held alongside their families.
They further asked how the U.S. government is meeting its legal obligation to educate these children and, more specifically, about the quality and language proficiency of the teaching staff.
“The Department of Education has the responsibility under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution to ensure that all students have equal access to education,” they wrote. “Please provide copies of curricula, sample lesson plans, and rubrics currently in use at ICE detention facilities, processing sites, and Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters.”
Sorry, I know the first of these public sessions already happened this week. This fall is somehow feeling particularly slammed for me...remember, they also will take electronic submission of testimony at C70PublicComment@mass.gov. Also, yes, again, this is me posting as me and not in any other capacity.
When I last wrote on this for you, I shared what isn't going to come up in the study commission because it isn't things with which they are charged.
Note that those are all things about which we should be talking, too! We really cannot ignore how harsh not having SOA increases is going to be on the districts that have been using them to ensure they can maintain services, because inflation isn't keeping up with costs, much as so many other districts have been pushing local increases for the same reason.
In other words:
INFLATION INFLATION INFLATION
However, again, this study is specifically to study the "municipality's target local contribution and required local contribution" so it's looking at what I think of as the SECOND part of the question: once we have decided what a "minimum adequate per pupil budget" is, where does the money come from?
Here are some things that I expect to come up, some of which are written right into the study language itself:
I'm at the ASBO conference this week in Fort Worth--ASBO is the Association of School Business Officials--and one of the "must attends" for me is always the federal policy update jointly done by ASBO and AASA (that would be the superintendents). This stems from that presentation yesterday.1
Setting aside for a moment:
that we do not currently have an operating federal government
because we do not have a federal budget or continuing resolution
and that some of the proposals for the federal budget have been alarming
I want to talk here about something that is actually going to happen because it is actually law and appears to not be in what is being planned for, at least from what I have seen in Massachusetts.
...and so here we are, with an announcement last week that the required hearings for this study are starting on the 23rd. This seems rather last minute as an announcement, even as one understands that they need to get going in order to have the report back, as required, by June 20 of next year.
Note that is this is very specifically a study "to improve the adequacy and equitability of the formula to determine a municipality's target local contribution and required local contribution." Thus much in the way the Foundation Budget Review Commission was only about the foundation budget--the "how much does it cost to educate a child" question--this is very much only about local contribution.
Because this started to get long, I'm going to break this into two parts: first what they won't talk about, then what they will or should, given the scope of the committee. You can find part two here.
As we were warned, the Trump administration is using the federal shutdown as an excuse to issue layoff notices--including a little 'oops' moment at the CDC, which they're now blaming on a coding issue--leading many of us to wonder just how much of the U.S. Department of Education will exist as of Tuesday after the holiday weekend.
Amid the smoke bombs and screams that ricocheted throughout a South Shore building last month during a massive military-style immigration raid, one man heard a knock on his door.
On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.
“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.
“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.
“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
Leominster family says ICE agents held their daughter outside their home so they would turn themselves over
Agents ask the parents to come out of their house multiple times as their 5-year-old sits in the driveway surrounded by federal immigration officers, video shows
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.
The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.
I could go on and on and on...the horror of what our federal government is continuing to do to families, to do to CHILDREN has no end of monstrousness. This is terror being done in our name as Americans.
The longer I have been a parent, the more I have come to realize that one of the starkest dividing lines among us is if we can see ourselves in another person's position. I shudder at the position we put parents in, at the horrific way we are treating families and children.
We know that one of the ways that genocide are successfully (which is a terrible adverb to use) executed is through making it common not to see those against whom it is being perpetrated as not human, as other, as less than. One recounting of the Chicago raid includes:
One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘fuck them kids.’
How great is the clever title? A building foundation...the foundation budget?
The upshot is that if Shrewsbury has nine schools, and Worcester has fifty schools, and each can build one new school at a time, when we get to the end of any set of time, Shrewsbury can rebuild all of its schools before Worcester has rebuilt a fifth of theirs.
Many of you are no doubt under the impression that this money goes, as is intended by state law, to the school districts themselves. This is, however, is the case only for regional school districts. For municipal school districts, because charter school tuition reimbursement isn't designated as going to schools "without additional appropriation," the money goes to the city or town general fund.
Cities and towns have long since passed their budgets. Unless someone takes additional action, these funds you intend for schools will not go to schools.
Were it possible for you to pass these funds with language so designating them, that would be most useful.
If not, perhaps you could ensure that the Department of Revenue generates updated cherry sheets, and you could ensure the cities and towns in your districts are aware of where the money should go?
With very sincere thanks,
Someone who wants to ensure the Worcester Public Schools gets their $2M
1As a reminder, here are all the amounts over $1M:
...which is pretty depressing. A few things to read:
Chris Geidner over at Law Dork, who observes that it hasn't really been a summer that is SCOTUS-free, given the shadow docket land we live in
Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, who gives us five of the worst cases before the court. Observe how many of them directly impact our students and their futures.
I did want to call to your attention this recently released report from the Center on Poverty and Inequality from Georgetown Law which analyzes the impact on state budgets of federal legislation:
OBBBA introduced a new state matching requirement for benefits and increased the state share of administrative costs. Under OBBBA, states must cover part of the benefit costs for the first time, and their share of administrative costs will rise from 50 percent to 75 percent.
Click through to see the map on which you can hover; I share this because this is the result for Massachusetts:
The text reads:
MASSACHUSETTS
State Cost Share Pre-OBBBA:$91,939,795
State Cost Share Post-OBBBA:$530,559,697
Increase in SNAP Share of State Budget477%
I am fairly certain that no one in Massachusetts is budgeting for that, or even is able to.
Martinez: has not yet opened but has made progress on these conditions ask to approve conditions for opening Fall of 2026; extension of dates is under discretion of Commissioner, including additional training for the board members conditions will be overseen by DESE staff Martinez: "won't let something open under my name that isn't ready to serve students"
Martinez: results are mixed no student group across the Commonwealth that is above pre-pandemic levels "we always meet children where they're at" foundational goal: regardless of what people's opinions are of where we were in 2019 "here in our Commonwealth, I seem advantages, I see alignment, I haven't seen in other parts of the country" At the end it's about us coming together "I'm fine having critical friends...there are no shortcuts in this work" "the data will speak for itself"
this sheep has nothing to do with it, but I thought we might need a sheep to get through this
Craven is talking to members about this so they can express their interest I don't understand why the Board would have most of these subcommittees as these aren't things under Board purview
The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meets today for its regular September meeting. This is the first meeting with the new commissioner, Pedro Martinez.
And while we've been over this a few times, here's Politicoon what this means for education. The two big PreK-12 hits are Head Start (in some cases) and federal funding in areas with non-taxed federal land. Again, remember, most of our federal grants are forward funded.
Politico also shared the official "here's what happens in a shutdown" document filed by Secretary McMahon. Page 1 has the number of employees expected to have to continue to work should the federal government shutdown at midnight tonight.
I recommend reading The New Yorker on what is becoming our federalized--as opposed to national--vaccine policy.
Given Kennedy’s pedigree of vaccine skepticism, one might have expected him to take a sledgehammer to the bedrock of public health: the injections that have protected us against numerous infectious diseases for generations. In reality, the impact of his policies has been more like that of a freeze-thaw cycle. Rocks have tiny fissures into which water can seep; when the temperature drops, the water expands into ice, exerting pressure and widening the cracks. The cycle repeats and, eventually, the rock begins to fall apart. For the nation’s public-health infrastructure, Kennedy’s tenure has been one freeze-thaw cycle after another. The cracks are getting bigger.
Our requirements that children be vaccinated to attend school has been an incredible public health success:
The C.D.C. estimates that routine childhood vaccination in the U.S. has saved more than a million lives, averted hundreds of millions of illnesses, and led to trillions of dollars in societal savings.
Something to remember? We aren't actually all that divided on this one:
According to a new KFF-Washington Post survey, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that public schools should require students to get immunized against diseases such as polio and measles.
Don't forget to get your fall flu and COVID shots!
...makes me think that we're probably getting some sort of a press event around noontime today.
Let me give you my annual reminder here that Massachusetts state accountability is based on MANY THINGS beyond the MCAS, and anyone who makes MCAS the sole report they make--I'm looking here at you, Boston Globe, but I see school districts do this, too!--is not only not telling the whole story; they're misrepresenting what the state actually uses in measuring districts.
If someone has told you that the only thing we're focusing on is MCAS, that isn't DESE telling you that.
This will of course be new DESE Commissioner Martinez's first meeting, so it should be interesting to see how he interacts with the Board and with the DESE staff. Too often, in recent years, the permanent commissioner has left DESE staff out there on their own when facing the Board, which has both, in my view, been lousy leadership and not fair.
And speaking of leadership, the Board elects a Vice-Chair, and it will be interesting to see if they finally decide to start to move in the direction of the newer appointees.
It appears from the posted topics of the chair and the commissioner that we're going to get two rounds on the 'are we teaching 9/11' thing, with--yes!--the Commissioner making reference to the actual state standards (someone is doing their job!). Both the Secretary and the Commissioner are updating on the recent state graduation council release of their Vision of a Graduate. I presume that this goes now to DESE and the Board, as they're the ones who have actual power to do anything with it.
There is also a vote proposed on the "let's clean this up" regulation changes on regional schools (which, no, do not have a single thing to do with admission to regional vokes).
The Atlantic, not an organization known for having its eye actually on the ball when it comes to threats to childen's health, as we learned in COVID, turns its (brief) attention to the collision of teens, mental health, and AI. The piece rightly notes that leaving it to big tech to protect teens is not a complete answer, though it does not suggest another.
A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return.
The piece also gives us this rather cheering chart from the perspective of trust in people over the crap we're getting from AI:
It appears that 30 Massachusetts school districts have taken up the "curriculum pilot" on AI put together by Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative with Project Lead the Way. ...and I have to wonder if any school committees publicly reviewed and approved that substantial curricular change before anyone moved forward. Hm.
Governor Healey has appointed former Gateway Regional1 superintendent Kristen Smidy to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Before she was superintendent in Gateway, a position she just left at the end of this past school year, she was the principal of Hampshire Regional. She now works for NEASC.
Think: rural, regional, western Mass
She's also been leader and outsized voice for the needs of small rural districts.
She's a good egg, and this is a good pick! And I suspect she isn't going to be quiet, either!
She replaces Michael Moriarty (of Holyoke). Thus, while the Board is still wildly overbalanced in terms of inside 128 to outside 128 (with two from Worcester plus Smidy), at least we haven't actually lost ground on that!
1Gateway Regional is Huntington, Blandford, Chester, Middlefield, Montgomery and Russell. Think just west of Westfield.
...and while I cannot go to the release, some of you may wish to!
Worcester Regional Research Bureau and MassInc are coming out with a joint report entitled "Fixing the Foundation: Uneven Access to Modern Schools and a Blueprint for a More Equitable Future." It's being released in an event October 7 from 10 AM to 12 at the State House.
Act 72 goes a step further than other state laws, and includes a provision barring schools from using social media platforms to communicate with students, and from otherwise requiring students to have social media accounts to engage in academic and extracurricular activities.
NEPC's newsletter outlined some reasons why this was done, and I want to call your attention to the first two:
Student pictures on social media can end up in the hands of pedophiles.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other government agencies use social media for the purposes of surveillance
...as the federal fiscal year ends October 1 (like me, you may be surprised to learn that is next Wednesday), and Congress is not showing signs it's moving towards a continuing resolution to keep it funded (never mind an actual budget).
Most K-12 federal funding is “forward-funded”—funds are provided the following July for the upcoming school year—which means the majority of K-12 federal education funding is not immediately impacted by a government shutdown.
Proposition 2 ½ is considered a “bedrock” of budget cycles throughout Massachusetts cities and towns, due to the limit it places on how much property tax revenue they can collect, as one research group put it earlier this year.
But Boston Mayor Michelle Wu yesterday took a few digs at the law, which was implemented in 1982 after voter approval. The law limits cities and towns to raising no more than 2.5 percent of the assessed value of all taxable property taxes, plus new growth, but they can request an override from voters.
Boston, which has a larger commercial sector than most, has never put an override question on the ballot. But in the pandemic’s aftermath, more communities in other parts of the state are seeking property tax votes, after ballot overrides hit a 30-year low in 2018. Proponents of Prop 2 ½, as it’s often called, say it offers taxpayers predictability, and pleases voters sick of high property taxes.
In Boston's most recent budget, longtime vacant jobs were slashed, and salary savings arose out of delaying a police academy class, Wu said in a sit-down with Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce President Jim Rooney. “We are going to continue keeping that belt cinched as tight as we possibly can,” she said. “Prop 2 ½ is the tightest belt of all.”
"Of the 43 years that that law has been in place, inflation has been, on average, 25% higher every year, above two and a half percent growth,” as health care costs have quickly risen, she added.
When MASSterList later asked whether she believed the state should take a look at Prop 2 ½, and whether it no longer works, Wu said, “Yes.” Asked to elaborate, Wu said it’s part of a larger conversation. “Prop 2 ½ was put in place through significant pressure and advocacy from the business community against municipal governments’ advocacy several decades ago,” she said.
Adam Chapdelaine, the executive director of the Mass. Municipal Association, echoed some of Wu’s comments. “Frankly, the mayor’s comments lined up with some research we’ve been doing recently,” he said. (Stay tuned for more on that, he added.)
“I think Prop 2 ½ is in some ways an ingenious law in that it shifted budgets from being expense-driven to being revenue-driven,” he said, before adding, “I wouldn’t put the thumb up or down. I would say, ‘Look at how it’s working and let’s have a conversation on whether it can work in a different way.’”
In Boston, the city budget, which heavily relies on property taxes, remains “very stable,” Wu said, but the conversation about revenue diversification, in order to maintain the expected level of city services, is needed. Diversification measures have been repeatedly blocked at the State House, but “whether or not anyone wants to have the conversation, we are going to have to have it, because this is a strain on municipal budgets all around the Commonwealth, especially now,” she said.
That Prop 2 1/2 puts communities into a hamster wheel where they cannot keep up with inflationary costs is becoming more and more of a common conversation. I have heard it across the state these past two budget seasons. Wu, of course, commands a much larger platform, so this voice will matter as this continues, I suspect, to snowball.
It's past time to fess up, all. This emperor has no clothes. If you don't have someone like Andrew Lipsett of Woburn saying this in public:
Urging his colleagues to develop policies now to discourage the integration of such technology into classroom environments, the outgoing School Committee member, who is not seeking re-election in November, volunteered to jump-start that process by meeting with central office administrators to review how AI might be integrated into the curriculum.
“I tend to be a technology-positive person. I’m an early adopter of a lot things. But AI to me is a very dangerous road [to travel down] when it comes to education and I’m concerned about [sending] a message that there is a way for students to use it safely,” said the School Committee member, who is employed as a high school history teacher in Billerica.
“What I tend to see in my classroom is that AI has been used as a short-cut, a method of cheating,” he continued. “AI is something that may be useful for people who have advanced training, who are very comfortable writing, and who have done a lot of work in this area before. [But for school use], I think we’re opening pandora’s box and it’s very concerning for me as an educator to watch.”
You'll remember that last week, I told you not to panic on the budget just yet. New America this week released an analysis of both the Trump proposed budget and the House Appropriation proposed budget; you might remember that the Senate doesn't cut. Specifically, it looks at it by Congressional district.
As it happens, the House proposal is actually worse than Trump's proposal: the President's proposal would cut an estimated $35.34 million per district, where the House proposal would cut $41.2 million from schools in each congressional district, on average.
Now, what gets cut changes, too. For the Trump proposal:
This figure is fairly similar between Republican- and Democrat-represented congressional districts. But there is a difference in the specific funding streams most impacted: Democrat-represented districts stand to lose the most in Title I funding for students in poverty and Title III funding for English learners, while Republican-represented districts would lose far more in Title V funding for rural schools. Both would see a major cut in funding for teacher professional development and after-school programs.
And for the House:
Without even hiding behind the smokescreen of “consolidating” funds into block grants, the House proposal would eliminate funding for a number of programs, including Title II funding for educator development and Title III funding for English Learners. It would reduce Title I funding for students in poverty by an astonishing and unprecedented $4.7 billion, slashing a program that is vital for students in every state.
Because the House's cut is worse, I'm including below that estimation for the Massachusetts Congressional districts; if you follow the link above, you can page through all of them to find yours if it isn't here, as well as see the projected Trump budget impacts.
Most LGBTQ+ young people agreed that they go online to connect with people because it is difficult finding others to relate to and connect with in their daily lives.
In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk last week--and no, you won't be getting a hot take from me on that--I've seen frequently circulating an appeal to "shared values." This has particularly come in reference to what educators should or have posted online.
Sometimes these "shared values" have been listed, either in what is released or as part of larger mission or vision statements.
We don't, in Massachusetts, actually get to pick and choose our foundational shared values, though, because the very creation of public education in Massachusetts in the state constitution also creates the values:
to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people
Does that sound like what you've been hearing?
The real kicker, though, is the opening of the passage, the reason it's in the state constitution at all:
We have public education at all for preservation of our rights and liberties. That is the whole reason right there.
It would behoove us to examine if the "shared values" being appealed to or referenced are in fact the values we are required to share in public education in Massachusetts.
If you've been among those who've fought, these past years, for state funding reform for schools, you may have been concerned by headlines last week like these:
“We were interested in finding out whether we can actually trust the models when we try to simulate any specific types of students. What we are showing is that the answer is in many cases, no,” said Ekaterina Kochmar, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of natural-language processing at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates, the first university dedicated entirely to AI research.
NO! Somewhat darkly amusingly, it's because of how they work:
The LLMs that underlie AI tools do not think but generate the most likely next word in a given context based on massive pools of training data, which might include real test items, state standards, and transcripts of lessons. By and large, Kochmar said, the models are trained to favor correct answers.
“In any context, for any task, [LLMs] are actually much more strongly primed to answer it correctly,” Kochmar said. “That’s why it’s very difficult to force them to answer anything incorrectly. And we’re asking them to not only answer incorrectly but fall in a particular pattern—and then it becomes even harder.”
You may have missed it in--gestures to universe--but we had a bit of a thing last week with headlines saying that Governor Healey was ORDERING Massachusetts schools to teach about 9/11, which seems to have been in response to this Boston Globe article about families of those who died during the 9/11 organizing for it to be mandatory, which includes these sentences:
There are 14 states where teaching students about what happened on and after 9/11 is required. But Massachusetts, where the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center took off, where so many families were affected by the wars that followed, is not one of them.
A whole generation of Massachusetts kids has grown up without the 9/11 story being a required part of their education.
The thing is? That's false. What Massachusetts public school students are required to learn in history and social studies is included in the History and Social Science Frameworks, last updated in 2018. That link is to all 217 pages of it. And right there in the History II section on page 138 under Topic 5: The United States and globalization is this:
Evaluate the effectiveness of the federal government’s response to international terrorism in the 21st century, including the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., the Homeland Security Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
“All students should be taught about 9/11 and its aftermath, which is a tragic and important piece of both our state and our nation's history. I've directed the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to work together to ensure that it is fully incorporated into school curriculum frameworks. I’m grateful to the families of 9/11 victims who have advocated for this and are making sure that we never forget this horrific tragedy, the incredible displays of heroism on that day, or the thousands of lives that were lost.”
So it would appear that this direction--which, I'll add, is overstepping, because the only person the Governor has the actual legal authority to "direct" there is actually the Secretary of Education, who has a single seat on the Board--is going to make for a pretty brief conversation.
I suspect the misunderstanding is that many states like to make BIG BOLD MOVES by REQUIRING BY LAW that particular things be taught, which is a lousy and piecemeal way of creating a public education system. Massachusetts has the radical notion that the first place the conversation about what students need to learn should be had is with educators, with that process then going to a public body that exists purely for educational purposes.
We should refuse to be sucked into this worse processes for the purposes of making headlines. And the next time someone writes about what does and doesn't get taught in Massachusetts schools, it might be nice if they looked in the actual place we keep that.
