While your attention may have been on the election, the Supreme Court held arguments yesterday in St. Mary's v Roy, a case out of Colorado in which the central question is if a Catholic preschool which receives public funds may discriminate against LGBTQ families.
While I always await Chris Geidner over at Law Dork, both Chalkbeat and K-12 Dive have coverage worth reviewing, Frankly, it looks pretty bleak.
My hearty congratulations to those across the country who brought in national, state, and local leadership that will better support public education!
(including Texas, where a former school board member will serve as the next Governor!)
If you're rejoicing this morning in the blue tsunami that swept the nation last night, I do not wish to take away from your joy, but I do want to point to some election results on ballot initiatives that are not good for kids.
I will update this when or if I find more.
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| the Tenniel illustration via Project Gutenberg** |
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| we're thinking of getting tee shirts... |
Just today, AFT announced that they are suing McMahon over the mismanagement of public service loan forgiveness. This makes something like seven lawsuits that AFT has filed against the federal government.
Despite allegedly being aware of abuse to minors and not preventing it, Linda McMahon serves as Secretary of Education in Donald Trump’s administration.
And while we're doing McMahon news, be sure to read Matt Barnum McMahon's "make American education great again" and its relationship with reality. Our revolution on education has always been the access provided to public education, and even that quite unevenly. The bit that I found most telling: regarding that federal "intrusion" in education:
There is good evidence students have benefited from these efforts, and the laws have become foundational to American education.
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| The mill village of Haydenville is where Williamsburg keeps their Dunkin' |
There is this memo which isn't particularly revelatory, but then there is a large PowerPoint that is not online. As the memo says:
The agency is currently developing guidance and tools to support districts towards full implementation of the proposed graduation framework.
I am again going to point out that "fully implementing" a "proposed framework" that has yet to go through a legislative process makes no sense.
"the agency setting conditions to change practices in the field" is the theme of this year, says Commissioner Martinez
introducing MyCap and MassCore
And then hearing from researchers
regulations that the Department will bring forward for discussion next month on what?
The backup provided is here, though it doesn't tell us anything
Sara Khan speaking to this from slides that are hard to see
SSAC Summer Leadership retreat
analyzed a lot of data, data gathering and analyzing
The Board of Ed is here today:
(the above is an adaptation of a line from Lil' Abner that I cannot now find anywhere online)
As a blogger who started writing out of sheer frustration with local school district governance coverage, I have a certain amount of weary understanding of the misses that happen. This is particularly true given the undercutting of the Fourth Estate and the seemingly endless churn of local reporters (when we have them at all!) for local news coverage.
I nonetheless was puzzled by coverage of the October 8 Worcester School Committee meeting, which appeared to take as given that the graduation report from last year was moving forward into implementation.
As we have discussed here before, more than once, this is not the case. The Department does not have the authority to create new required graduation standards. The authority to determine what a student needs to graduate remains with local school committees. The competency determination, as bound by the amended law under Question 2, is within the Department's authority, and districts now all have policies that align to that. That is, though, the full extend of the authority of the Department.
Now, I'm pretty sure--I think?--that those running things here in Worcester know that, but I remain concerned that some writing for the Department might not. Recently, every superintendent received a communication from DESE that gave a deadline of late November for a report on where individual high schools were on their graduation requirements relating to the graduation report. It referred to this Companion Guide for information.
And nowhere in any of this was there any mention of the fact that the Department cannot simply implement the graduation report, lacking utterly the authority to do so. It takes the graduation report as something that is being implemented, and this, despite the report itself--though only v-e-r-y subtly!--noting that the Legislature would need to act for implementation.
And if you think the Legislature is simply going to pass the graduation report as issued into legislation, well, I wouldn't advise putting money on that.
While I have come to expect this sort of confusion of local reporters who often just got there, I am troubled to see it from the regulatory agency.
UPDATE: The backup for Tuesday's Board of Ed meeting now has this memo, which continues the "the report is a recommendation which we are working to implement" without mention of the Department not having the authority to do so.
You may already have heard of Nikki Anderson, the mom in South Carolina whose six-year-old daughter came home from school with an AI-generated photo of the little girl as what she wanted to be when she grew up; it's now been covered in both USA Today and People, though I recommend reading Anderson's own posts over in Instagram.
In an update today, she notes that the district, in responding to USA Today, speaks of no longer having such assignments and adopting policies and procedures, including one that has an "parental release" for AI (whatever that is), but she can find no such release within the district handbooks.
What is feeling rather deja vu to me about this is the district being able to share student information without the permission of parents is something that was being raised by many of us 13 years ago in connection to InBloom*. Changes to FERPA during the Obama administration allowed school districts to share information about students to third parties in ways that previously had not been allowed. In 2016, this--along with more straightforward concerns about actual data breaches--were flagged in a petition to then-U.S. Secretary of Education John King:
The petition, sent to U.S. Education Secretary John King, says changes made to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as FERPA, over the past several years have allowed education agencies and organizations to share student data with third parties without permission from students or their parents.
Now, of course, districts are signing agreements with all sorts of tech companies all of the time, and, by their very nature, those companies have access to all sorts of data about the students in the district.
I think it's time to bring back up those concerns about the FERPA changes.**
_______________________________
*alas for links that have since died...
**You know you're getting old when you've been through the whole pendulum swing on something in education...
And you can find the agenda here.
The out-of-the-ordinary part of the piece of this is that they are meeting in Williamsburg at the Anne T. Dunphy School. For those not familiar, Williamsburg is northwest of Northampton, and it is quite lovely! I recommend visiting sometime, 'though perhaps not for a Board of Ed meeting; don't miss the general store.
The meeting will start at 9:30, presumably so those making their way west can find it (I will observe here that the heavy traffic actually goes east, and yet, somehow, those are the meetings that start at 9).
In any case...the State Student Advisory Council is sharing their goals for the year, one assumes via student member Sara Khan, who is president of the group. Also on the agenda is the Commissioner's evaluation, and the proposed regulations on literacy.
There is also "K–12 Statewide Graduation Standards: Foundational Coursework and Postsecondary Planning" as an item. I will be interested to see if that notes that the graduation report is a proposal that requires legislative action to move forward--more on that this weekend--and not a done deal, as it has been framed by the Commissioner to date.
None of the above has any backups (which is unusual at least for the regulations, such that I wonder if that is an oversight) as of Friday evening at 6 PM.
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| These are Worcester trees, but I imagine we'll get to enjoy some pretty trees on the drive to Williamsburg. |
...don't miss the NBC News look at what videos students are watching on their school-issued devices.
And don't miss Matt Barnum's coverage of the Trump administration official who likened ed tech to tobacco. The problem there is that its being used as an argument against continuing Erate (pendulum again...).
5 'good' AI use cases that are bad for students
...and frankly, this is still too positive about possible uses. We need students to develop these skills, which they manifestly are not doing if they're outsourcing it!
Some recent useful reporting on this coming year--and in some cases, even this year, and in all cases, beyond next year's--school budgets:
I've added "geopolitical forces" to my "impacts on future budgets" slide for school district presentations. While this was always true, oil prices show up multiple places in school budgets (not just the buses!), and I'm glad the Boston Globe captured that.“The bottom line is there’s no wiggle room on municipal budgets almost across the board,” he added. “Any time there is a cost driver that exceeds the rate of revenue growth, yeah, it’s very concerning.”
This lengthy piece by Sam Drysdale at State House News (sharing there via WWLP 22) takes a hard look at declining enrollment and what the means for the state.
On paper, declining enrollment should mean less state aid. In practice, Massachusetts’ funding formula cushions districts from those losses.
Overall Chapter 70 aid increased to $7.66 billion in fiscal 2027, up 4.03%, even as enrollment fell.
No district receives less Chapter 70 aid than it received the previous year, and every district is guaranteed at least its prior-year aid plus $160 per pupil in fiscal 2027. As a result, only 62 districts are receiving aid driven directly by the formula’s enrollment and need calculations; most are receiving hold-harmless funding plus minimum aid.
Lewis said that is itself evidence the formula needs attention.
“The high number of communities in held harmless is actually one of the clear signs that we need to be reviewing our funding formula again,” he said. “The formula is basically broken for many communities.”
Yet there is a fundamental question about what the formula can realistically accomplish.
Howgate said the state cannot simply create a funding formula that pays districts for having fewer students.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to come up with a formula to give districts money for fewer kids,” he said.
(and cheers to Sam for correctly capturing hold harmless there!)
I'd missed this from Springfield last week:
Springfield Empowerment Zone Co-Executive Director Matthew Brunell clarified that the pilot was paused due to the cyberattack on Springfield Public Schools that occurred in the beginning of September. He said the pilot will likely not be in use this school year.
I hope that you've been keeping up with Ben Riley's reporting on Alpha Schools and specifically the experience of students there; you can find his sixth report from last week here. The way that students have been treated should concern us all.
Largely, though, I am posting to urge you to read the Texas Tribune's report on Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, who oversees the public schools of Texas, working to get Alpha Schools into the public school system there. It's a collaborative report with ProPublica, which draws on months of public records' requests.
Over the last year, Morath and his staff at the Texas Education Agency exchanged a flurry of emails with leaders of companies connected to Alpha about possible partnerships, visited their campuses several times, helped with a one-page explainer about the program to share with school districts and connected them with district leaders, according to communications obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through public information requests.
One email revealed that Morath offered to personally introduce an Alpha leader to the superintendent he appointed to lead the yearslong state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the largest in the state.
“I’d also like to set up another site visit to visit both your Austin secondary and primary with my team,” wrote Morath. “The Superintendent of H.I.S.D. would also like to do a site visit, so l’ll connect y’all separately. And hopefully we can schedule them to happen on the same day.”
The emails show that state education officials and Alpha affiliates approached at least 10 school districts about the AI program. After the coordination, at least three of those districts — Houston; Fort Davis, in West Texas; and Aldine, near Houston — launched pilot programs incorporating the AI tool.
The full extent of Morath and his agency’s involvement, as well as the number of public school districts using the AI program, remains unclear. The TEA has not responded to questions about its efforts for months, initially failed to provide some of Morath’s emails in response to public information requests and continues fighting the release of additional communications.
It's bad enough that this is out there and sucking in families at all. That the influence of a state leadership is being wielded in its favor--and this in a state where the state board refused to allow Alpha Schools to open as a charter!--is worse.
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| It's a lovely time of year in Massachusetts. Do get out and enjoy it. My photo of a former schoolhouse in Belchertown yesterday. |
The tabs I have open:
Not sure about you, but I often feel that there is so much that is an ongoing catastrophe here in the U.S. that what's happening elsewhere---even within education--can be overwhelmed by just our stuff. So I hadn't caught that students in France have been protesting in what began in Paris but has now swept across the country. The reason?
Demonstrators have voiced a range of grievances, often centering on a lack of resources and opportunities for students in disadvantaged schools, despite the promise of France's national motto: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."
Students have drawn attention to rundown classrooms that lack basics such as desks and chairs, become sweltering in summer without air conditioning and, in some cases, are infested with rats. Other common complaints include staff shortages and exhausting workloads. French high school students' compulsory classroom hours are among the highest in Europe.
Significant numbers of schools have been closed this week; it's estimated that a quarter of a million people were protesting in Paris.
The way that the protests are being met by the national leadership is increasing support for students:
Nearly 500 people were detained Tuesday, the ministry said. The widespread use of arrests, tear gas and riot-control weapons against teenagers is fueling defiance and angering some parents and teachers. Some student groups called for new protests Thursday....in the latest case, a 15-year-old boy lost a hand Monday in an incident involving a police stun grenade.
There is video circulating online of Saint-Denis Mayor Bally Bagayoko shielding student protestors from riot police, as well as being treated for having been tear-gassed.
At 4 PM last Friday, October 2, State House News Service sent an article entitled as follows:
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| Headline reads "Ads critical of Boston Public Schools removed from T" |
NBC 10 picked up the article, which you can read here.
Saturday's edition of the Boston Globe included this column from Adrian Walker, headlined "Dark Money comes for the Boston Public Schools," in which he attempted to chase down who it was that was funding the new "Next Chapter Boston" and their $1.5M ad buy.
This then spun over the weekend into accusations of who could possibly have made the call to pull the ads, cries of censorship, and no movement towards any discovery of who was funding the ads that would have followed Boston secondary school students on their way to school each morning.
Should we ever get to the bottom of who funded the ads, it is, as Walker notes:
People who suddenly pour big money into something like that aren’t just trying to “raise awareness” — whatever that really means. They are trying to influence public policy. And the public has a right to know who they are, and what they really want.
The website, for what it's worth, offers a sign-up and a letter calling for "measurable, public goals" in clear language alongside an explanation of how the budget is being used for "evidence-based instructional practices and curriculum in all subjects."
And maybe that's it. But I think that's a lot of advertising for that.
My guess as to what they want is this: I don't think it is a coincidence that these ads went up the same week that the U.S. Treasury released the rules on the federal voucher program. Massachusetts, as has been noted this week, is neither in nor out; Governor Healey had said she was awaiting the rules to decide. Her response last week was:
“Well, you know, what I understand is that Treasury has released temporary regulations. I don’t know what that means. So, you know, what I’ve said from the beginning is this, and I’ll continue to say, we need to make sure that nothing harms public education.”
Having the local public transit scream that the largest public school system in the state was failing its students would give an extra push to any riding who might have influence on Beacon Hill as Healey is continuing to decide.
As others, including Marketplace, have noted, it is private education that is most likely to benefit from these programs. And when we talk about private education (especially in a place like Massachusetts), we tend to think of college prep schools with brick buildings on leafy campuses. For states that already have vouchers, though, that isn't what you should think about. You should think about a few reporters at the local brew pub coming one fire inspection away from approval as a private school, as ProPublica reported this week, in a piece in which they applied to create of a private school in North Carolina, Arkansas, and West Virginia.
And even as it isn't that easy in Massachusetts, where private schools have to be approved by their local school committee, within a limited purview, the chance to use federal funds (the dollars here would have been federal tax dollars) for non-public, non-publicly-allocated and -accountable uses is deeply concerning.
And possibly was worth $1.5M in advertising.
I'd like to be able to give you some sort of meaningful summary of last night's Board of Ed meeting on the DESE strategic plan (liveblog here), but it wasn't that sort of meeting.
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| Polaris? This is as close as we're getting around here... |
Let's walk through some main points:
From today's Globe:
“It feels a little bittersweet,” said Anthony Clough, a policy analyst at the left-leaning Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. “How are we supposed to celebrate the culmination of this really progressive law when it hasn’t really panned out for anybody in the way we thought it would.”
There is, of course, too much "but why aren't the test scores higher" here, but, as so often, Andrew O'Leary nails it:
“It was a long overdue I-O-U,” said New Bedford Superintendent Andrew O’Leary. “Those of us who worked in urban districts for a long time had seen the result of the fiscal inequities. It was constant budget crises and constant compromises.”
The agenda (which doesn't tell us much) is here.
The livestream is here.
Martinez: setting new benchmarks for proficiency, lower to zero doesn't meet (I think)
he is just saying this aloud; it isn't shown or written out as to what he's saying...this is really hard to follow
I am intentionally posting a stub here, as I am working on this on the train outbound, and my posts go out at 3 PM. Come back for more, between today and tomorrow.
On tomorrow night's Worcester City Council agenda, we have the following:
First a process note: This is coming from the Department of Public Facilities, not from the Worcester Public Schools. That's because school buildings, in a municipal school district, are built not by the school department (which does have its own section on the City Council agenda) but by the city itself. The school department does not run its own building projects, and the School Committee has very, very little to do with building projects.*
Now I want to remind you of where we are with Worcester's school building projects: since 2011, Worcester has rebuilt North High, South High, and Doherty, three of the four comprehensive high schools in the city. Add in Worcester Tech, which opened in 2006, that's all of the largest high schools in Worcester, in the past twenty years.
Let's give credit where due: considering that Worcester also opened a new elementary school in there (Nelson Place, which was literally falling down, opened 2017), that is a stunning pace of building new schools. Genuinely, and I say this as someone who watches this, this is a tremendous pace.
While it has had its highs and lows of effectiveness, I recommend attending. Per the invite:
Interpretation services will be provided in Spanish and Portuguese, childcare is available, and pizza will be served! If you need interpretation services in languages other than Spanish and Portuguese, please let us know by Friday, October 2nd, 2026.
There is a special meeting of the Board of Ed tonight at 6 PM. The agenda is here. It is fully remote.
This is the meeting that they scheduled on the fly during last Tuesday's meeting, when some members argued that they did not have sufficient time to discuss the strategic plan needs of the Department in light of the state accountability results. There was a request that materials be updated in light of that, though nothing has appeared online (that doesn't, of course, mean that members don't have new material; they might).
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| from "It Is Right--EDUCATIONALLY," the Report of the Advisory Committee on Racial Imbalance in Education, 1965 |
If you're in online education or parenting spaces, you probably saw that the talk of the weekend was "In fighting for every Black child, did I betray my own?" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who you might remember writing "Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city" in 2016. That daughter is now 16, and, as you'd expect of a child raised in a household in which such things are discussed, she has opinions.
This, in turn, foster a lot of online conversation (and argument and worse) over the weekend about the decision.
I will share only two thoughts:
UPDATE: This American Life has more this week. (That links to the transcript, because give me print, please, but you can also listen from there.)
They're now adding a meeting to Monday night at 6 PM
there's a report here but there's also a PowerPoint which I wonder if we will get
anticipate bringing regulations in October as law "is quite prescriptive"
we're doing some retrospective stuff
Martinez: start from an asset-based perspective
there's a memo here but it doesn't have a lot
I'm under the weather, so this one is coming to you remotely...
The agenda is here; the livestream is here.
DESE has extended the embargo of assessment and accountability results until 11 AM today.
I have noted it several times on here already, but there is an opinion piece in The 74 discussing the loss of access to free meals due to SNAP cuts:
Last summer, Congress made devastating cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing nearly 5 million Americans — including an estimated 1.5 million children — to lose their benefits. In doing so, those children lost their automatic eligibility for free school meals. Access to free meals is also now threatened for entire school districts in high poverty areas. This is a crisis hiding in plain sight, and as kids return to the classroom, it is hitting families and schools hard.
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| I went to the most recent meeting |
And it is MCAS and Accountability release week.
The agenda for the Board of Ed can be found here. The MCAS data will go up on the school and district profiles at 10 AM Tuesday. As a reminder, always check the accountability data, as it's much more complex than just the testing, which will inevitably grab the headlines.
(Yes, that's why that whole section of the website will be offline starting at 3 tomorrow.)
In addition to the release of MCAS data and accountability status, the Board has some start-of-the-year housekeeping--election of the vice chair, introduction of the new student member, the appointment of subcommittees--plus something on the literacy law implementation, which expanded the Department's authorities on determining what curricula is used, a power that had belonged to school committees in Massachusetts until now.
There's also an update on DESE's strategic plan. In one of the ongoingly places I find the relationship between the Commissioner and Board confusing, it appears the Commissioner is simply announcing it, not presenting it for approval, despite (I'd assume?) the Board being in charge of setting of goals and overall direction.
While some of the Commission is set by the legislation, some are appointed. Governor Healey today announced her picks:
Governor Maura Healey has appointed Kristen Smidy and Amy O’Leary to the Foundation Budget Review Commission.
Smidy is the former superintendent of the Gateway Regional School District and currently serves on the Board of Ed; O'Leary is the Executive Director of Strategies for Children. Both are from western Mass, which the Governor notes in her press release.
Things I have been reading:
Modern practitioners defend the intervention, saying ABA no longer subjects children to physical punishment. Yet documentation of its harms is mounting, as researchers — including autistic adults who underwent ABA as youngsters — gather evidence that the therapy has caused widespread PTSD. Autistic children may no longer be subjected to electric shocks or slaps to the face — and the word “aversive” may sound kinder than “punishment” — but they are routinely denied food, toys and comfort items, as well as adult attention, a strategy practitioners industrywide call “planned ignoring.” ABA providers still frequently restrain children or confine them in isolation — practices recognized as so dangerous and traumatic as to be illegal in most circumstances in Colorado schools.
I learned from this that the person who created ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, also created conversion therapy, which is of course banned many places.
The Boston Globe looks at parents who are organizing for more recess in schools. From this I learned that there is a national "Say Yes to Recess" group.
I will say, though, that I'm a little tired of the Globe doing this "in a bill pending before the state legislature" coverage when the Legislature is done with formal sessions.
In the state ballot questions campaigns here in Massachusetts, it's Smith and Wesson bankrolling the "no" vote on question 9 (which would repeal some gun control measures), with the largest funding for "yes," which keeps the legal language, seeing its biggest funding from the teachers' union. You can find that reporting here.
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| not hard, eh? Vote yes on 9. |
As the current administration daily posts another round of nonsense about "returning education to the states"--the place education has been overseen since we have had a constitution*--the framing of an alternative has been kind of weak. "Let's not destroy the U.S. Department of Education" is a good start, but reaffirming the mission of the Department has been rather lacking.
I was intrigued, then, to read Kevin Carey's piece in Democracy entitled "A Department of Education--and then some" which outlines a bigger vision:
The Department of Children and Learning (DCL) would do everything ED is charged with by statute while incorporating children’s programs currently located in other federal agencies, including the school lunch benefits located at the Department of Agriculture and the Head Start and child-care programs housed at the Department of Health and Human Services. As any parent can tell you, health, nutrition, and learning all go together.
The DCL would be organized around three main purposes: funding, research, and civil rights. Its mission would be ensuring that foundational education services and the latest scientific findings and technological advances are available to all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Existing programs that don’t contribute to this core mission would be replaced.
What is particularly interesting to me is that Carey actually talks about what very, very seldom is: school districts:
But as it is practiced in U.S. education, “local control” is a false promise. It means that local school districts—and in the privatization era, individual families—are left alone to search and struggle for enough resources to purchase what an indifferent and unforgiving market chooses to provide. It means that students destined to compete in a global economy are tied down by how much money their neighbors happen to pay in property taxes. It condemns teachers to crumbling buildings and outdated curricula. It means that the various institutions charged with the care and education of children don’t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. “Local control” is a long con. It exploits parental anxiety by pretending to give people power, then leaves them feeling individually responsible for our collective failure.
Local communities have the right and responsibility to decide who will teach their children and lead their public schools. Those accountable for school performance should be as close to parents and voters as possible. Critical organizational decisions shouldn’t be routed through a central bureaucracy in Washington. State governments ultimately determine academic standards for their children. At the same time, all local school districts should have enough money to hire great teachers who are versed in the latest research findings and empowered by the newest education technologies. And all children should have equal rights to a free, high-quality education tailored to their specific strengths and needs, regardless of their race, family income, native language, immigration status, or disability.
As I've just again had the class I teach explore the New America map of segregation and income inequality among school districts, the vivid extremes in inequity and segregation are fresh in my mind.
And we do not talk about it, let alone do anything to actually change it.
*and happy Constitution Day!
I have put off writing anything regarding about this until we had, really, anything to talk about. As a result of this past week's Governance and Operations meeting, we now have a report from Dillinger Research and Applied Data, with preliminary recommendations. I thought that MassLive did a decent job outlining the big points of what is in it (that link is via Yahoo! so is not paywalled); the T&G also did five takeaways.
The rezoning work is being updated on this WPS page, and this map (which I urge you not to try to examine on a teeny phone screen!) is what they're looking at right now. That also allows you to give feedback.
And while I am sharing useful information up front here, the rest of what they're planning this fall for meetings is this:
Here are some initial thoughts from me (as usual, speaking solely as myself).
The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
When Gaggle quarantines a draft, when Securly assigns a kid a rolling “wellness level,” when a detection system decides the shape in a student’s hand is a gun, the software is filing a report about a young person’s intentions. And it arrives first. It shows up carrying the authority of a system that cost the district millions and speaks in the grammar of objectivity, and it lands in front of an administrator or a school cop before the kid has said a word. The student’s account comes second, when it’s generally too late.
Hard to "believe kids" when they're always the ones responding to something that has already been invested, literally, which such authority.
Florida's voucher program and so-called parents' rights push has just run headlong into 2000 years of hierarchy, with the Florida Attorney General receiving, upon his push to force Catholic schools that are receiving vouchers to allow students to attend even if they are not vaccinated, a tour de force letter from the Roman Catholic bishops of Florida, which I really recommend you read.
Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.
I'll note that the letter does a nice job of laying out why one might required universal vaccination, by the way, something which I'd appreciate more of our Massachusetts politicians reading.
Steve Revilak has been posting highlights from the Arlington, MA archives via his Bluesky account, and I very much appreciated, as a child of the 70's, this one from 1971 about the latest menace on the street of Arlington: BIG WHEELS!
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You might remember that Springfield's Empowerment Zone schools came back under Springfield School Committee control last spring, now as innovation schools, which you may or may not remember were a part of the 2011 Act Relative to the Achievement Gap. They allow for schools, under a school committee approved plan, to have individual modifications of some things, which can include schedule, staffing, curriculum.1
Well, one of the schools in Springfield has a particular "innovation" in mind, WBUR reported this week:
Springfield's Kiley Prep plans to use a model developed by Alpha School, a controversial national network that uses AI to teach academics like math and reading.
Oddly--and I'd be really interested in what's going on with this--this piece continues to talk about the school being in the Empowerment Zone, the Zone having authorities, and quotes the Empowerment Zone co-director as the authority, which seems rather in conflict with the spring decision to bring these schools back into the district.
Back to the Alpha schools part:
Springfield Empowerment Zone leaders had discussed bringing the Alpha model into several classrooms during the 2026-2027 school year, according to emails obtained through a public records request filed by the president of the Springfield Education Association and shared with WBUR.
The pilot would begin with about 25 students. Kiley Prep has roughly 300 sixth through eighth graders, and students score well below state averages on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the standardized test known as the MCAS.
Matt Brunell, SEZP's co-executive director, said he hopes Alpha's model will boost academic performance.
“We're in need of doing something pretty dramatic in the wake of post-COVID learning losses,” he said. “We can at least see if this strategy could yield some success.”
Brunell posted a message on the SEZP website Thursday outlining the plan. He said parents will be notified Friday. School starts Monday, and the pilot is expected to begin in September.
Innovation schools have a very specific process through which their plans, having been supported by two-thirds of the educators in the building, goes to the school committee. If those plans, which would be required for the schools to become innovation schools, actually went forward in Springfield, I have not seen any reporting on it, and, as this change is now being challenged by the Springfield teachers' union, it would appear there's some question on that aspect of the innovation.
1If you type "innovation" into the handy search bar on the left of this blog when you have it open on a laptop, you get these results, which will give you some of the extensive history Worcester has had with these. In other words, yes, I know whereof I speak.
At the School Committee meeting at the beginning of August, the Brockton School Committee was told that they should anticipate cuts for next year's--FY28--budget:
School district leaders in Brockton anticipate cuts in the coming years as they stare down two budget time bombs: the end of the Student Opportunity Act and rapidly escalating pension costs.
"The way I see it, this does mean cuts moving into next year, and we are going to start talking about the budget early," Superintendent Priya Tahiliani said about the impact of pension payments during an Aug. 4 school committee meeting.
On top of pension costs that are increasing by over $1 million every year through 2032, Tahiliani has warned committee members about the end of the Student Opportunity Act following the 2026-27 school year. The act has poured millions in state aid into districts like Brockton that serve more high-needs students than average.
While the increases in pension obligations is specific, the end of the implementation of the Student Opportunity Act--and thus the end of those increases in state aid, which were, for districts getting the big bumps on this, covering the actual cost increases, because the inflation in the formula does not--is not only a Brockton thing. It is a Worcester, Springfield, Holyoke, New Bedford, Fall River, Lowell, Lawrence--are you sensing a theme here?--thing.
This is not being talked about enough. It is not making enough noise locally in those cities, let alone at the state level.
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| I happened to be behind a log truck on 202 last week, and while I have not seen that movie, I have seen the clips. Think of this post as a warning of much more certain danger. |
With ongoing thanks to Mark Lieberman for keeping his eyes on this:
Congress in February approved more than $12.5 billion for K-12 schools to flow to states on Oct. 1, including $10.8 billion through the Title I formula grant for schools serving low-income students and $1.7 billion through Title II for teacher professional development.
In a statement to Education Week, the department confirmed that those funds will go through the department’s existing G5 grants system, rather than through a portal run by the Department of Labor, where the Trump administration has moved most K-12 programs.
This was true of the round of funding that went out July 1; today's statement confirms the same will be true of the funding going out on October 1.
...without herd immunity in more than 70 percent of classrooms:
...it might be good to remember that more teens are getting hooked on gambling:
A recent national survey from Common Sense Media found that 36% of boys age 11 to 17 in the U.S. have gambled in the past year.
"It's a lot of kids," says Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that promotes digital safety for kids. "A third of kids is a lot of kids."
Is there bad news on AI in education?
There is ALWAYS bad news on AI in education!
Chalkbeat earlier this month had a look at the AI slop on the Teachers Pay Teachers website:
The poster depicting famous inventions by Black figures throughout history should show the invention George Crum is widely credited with: the potato chip.
Instead, the picture labeled with Crum’s name shows a firefighter in an ominous gas mask next to a stop light. There are no potato chips to be found.
But there is a typo-ridden description of Crum that reads: “Created the popular crispy snack when a customer is polated thinner fried potatees.”
For $1.99, they could also download an alphabet coloring worksheet missing the letter F. And for just $1.50, they could get a poster of U.S. presidents that uses an asteroid hurtling toward anti-slavery demonstrators to illustrate the idea that Martin Van Buren was resilient.
Hey, remember how we've noted that as we lose SNAP enrollment, we're going to lose free lunch enrollment?
That has now started to be seen happening, per EdWeek
In addition to Miami-Dade, some schools in nearby Palm Beach County, Fla., Houston, the San Antonio area, and Hardin County, Ky., have also announced the end of universal free meals in recent months because they no longer qualify for CEP.
Hysom anticipates more districts will follow suit.
The chair of House Ways and Means weighed in yesterday:
House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz has “some serious concerns” about the governor’s election-year proposal to spend $100 million on public schools before they’ve even collected the revenue to support it.
“The ink hasn’t dried yet on the actual fiscal year 2027 budget, so I think we’d like to see that be implemented first,” the House budget chief said. “There’s a lot of concerns related to raising that Chapter 70 number further, may further complicate things for future budgets.”
It has been rightly noted that Healey's proposal doesn't actually raise Chapter 70 aid--while it's general aid for K-12 schools, it is not being distributed via MGL Ch. 70, sec. 1--and it explicitly does not raise the chapter 70-designated aid received by schools this year, which sets the floor for next year.
I will observe again, though, that concerns about "future budgets" are very much appropriate given that this is the final year of the Student Opportunity Act implementation.
The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.I again reiterate: for education to put any eggs in this basket is badly thought-out.
In 2023-24, schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. As another way to look at it, for every $1,000 that a school spent on salaries, it also paid $438 in benefit costs. These trends may help explain why districts with rising personnel costs are not boosting take-home pay for their workers.Imagine if we had all that money to spend on any aspect of education, because employees all already had health care.
“With all due respect,” Schneider remembers Bishop replying, “under California’s student press law, being afraid of a lawsuit or backlash is not a valid reason to call for the takedown of content.”Colorado Newsline covers Grand Junction High, where the advisor was reassigned apparently due to a single complaint by another staff member over a student editorial on the Gaza conflict most recently; the student paper itself published a piece about student press freedom being under threat from their administration in June.
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| It is July and so my daisies are in bloom. |
Regarding the $100M of Fair Share Governor Healey filled a supplemental budget to spend, a smidge of insight yesterday from Colin Young at State House News Service (here being interviewed by NEPM):
Relatedly, yesterday, both the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education1 and the Department of Revenue sent out this letter from Healey addressed to "municipal leaders," praising what the letter terms "a total of $200 million" coming to them in Fair Share, of which the $100M which she has requested is half; in other words, there isn't $200M yet. And there is a LOT of credit being taken for how much the executive branch is "partnering" with local communities.
Does this strike anyone else as an untoward use of departmental communication to municipalities and school districts? While there is not an overt "call your legislator" included in the letter, it's strongly implied.
We look forward to continuing to work with the Legislature to secure this important investment for schools and to building on our partnership with cities and towns as we continue working together to strengthen communities across the state.
This, about $100M in non-formula funding requested in the summer of an election year, is all feeling pretty icky.
And again, this is not funding being distributed in a way that meets the highest needs, nor is it funding we have, nor is it a thoughtful consideration of the needs of districts in the current context.
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| They're kind of cute, though, aren't they. |
