There is a document here; you can find their things here
it feels not great that this got bumped to the end
Rachelle Engler Bennett, Associate Commissioner of Student and Family Commissioner
joint effort of Department and MA Commission of LGBTQ Youth
part of DESE's Student and Family Support office
advance educational vision for all students
Proposed final regulations are here
Martinez: recommends adoption of alternative pathway; three year implementation and evaluation
"BOLD five year plan" for diversification of pipeline
Abbott, Associate Commissioner of Educator Effectiveness
maintaining teacher quality: diverse, culturally responsive, well-prepared, and committed to continuous improvement
working to expand the pipeline; effectively prepare and license; and sustain and retain
alternative licensure pathway waiving communication and literacy skills test
available for three years as Department studies impact and student outcome
four options to fulfill requirement:
new 9/11 education resources in partnership with the Mass 9/11 Fund; speaker is from WGBH
WGBH works with PBS Learning Media
videos produced as part of the U.S. history collection
series of three videos: actions on the day, short and long term impacts, memorials and remembrances, along with an interactive lesson
Look, there is a document on this! There is also a PowerPoint, which NEVER happens
This is also being taken out of order on the agenda
Martinez notes the literacy grant wasn't in the House Ways & Means budget, nor were the literacy institutes, nor reimagining high school grant (pay for AP exams) and support early college and MyCap
The Board of Ed has their regular April meeting today beginning at 9 AM. The agenda is here; the livestream will come up on their channel over here.
 |
| flowers in downtown Boston yesterday |
Today is the first meeting at which the new Secretary, Steve Zrike, will be present in that capacity. As a reminder, Zrike was Salem superintendent, though most of his appearances at the Board of Ed previously were in his prior-to-that position as Holyoke receiver. As an offhand observation, today is the eleventh anniversary of the Board voting the Holyoke Public Schools into receivership; I don't know if there's a balance to that or not.
Also as a reminder, the Secretary is a single member and a single vote on the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (as well as the two other education boards, Early Ed and Care, and Higher Ed), serving at the pleasure of the Governor, who appoints him*
I will update this post as we go
...and that means that we are due for the backlash.
Some of us would say: overdue. As the Boston Globe wrote last week:
Across the state people are rallying to address it — from Fall River to Winchester, Northampton to Cambridge. And pressure is coming from every direction: parents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington.
The list of concerns is long. Young children, glued to screens, miss out on needed play and socialization; older students, glued to screens, use them to bully each other. High schoolers rely on AI to cheat. School-issued laptops, taken home, keep sleep-deprived youngsters up past their bedtimes.
Above all, critics worry that the hypnotic flicker of screens is coming between students and learning.
The 74 wrote of this as a parental backlash, but I think that's probably oversimplified. The New York Times article from last month looked specifically at a middle school in Kansas that had deliberately gone limited tech, an effort that came from educators.
One issue not mentioned above in the Globe's list is that of student privacy; Curriculum Associates, which owns iReady, is currently being sued (for one):
In the original complaint the plaintiffs allege the company “creates and extracts reams of personal information from K–12 students.”
“Using that data, Curriculum Associates creates detailed data profiles of students that are used to predict and influence their behavior and guide decision-making about them. It further uses that information for commercial purposes, including developing, marketing, and delivering its own products,” the complaint said. “Curriculum Associates also allows numerous third parties to access the information it obtains from K–12 students for the commercial benefit of both Curriculum Associates and those parties.”
One of the issues at hand, according to the complaint, is that students in schools that use i-Ready are required to be in school, where they are required to use the software during the school day with no alternative, and without giving their consent about the use of their data.
And:
According to the complaint, the data in question may include basic information like a student’s first and last name, birthday and gender, as well as things like their race, first language, grade level, school of enrollment, their teacher, data from their responses to questions in i-Ready assessments and lessons, and data collected about the student when the i-Ready profile is set up. The complaint alleges it could also include data about the specific device students used to complete the lesson on i-Ready.
“The data Curriculum Associates generates and extracts from students who use its Products, including Plaintiffs, far exceeds what could be legally or traditionally characterized as “education Records,” said the complaint. “Even if certain data could be characterized as education records, Plaintiffs — like all students — retain significant rights over the personal information contained in such records, which are protected by state and federal law.”
Makes one long for the days of filing cabinets and manila folders.
All of that, of course, is without the looming insistence that AI be part of all of this. I cannot recommend highly enough this piece by Massachusetts writer and parent Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, "What will it take to get AI out of schools." She starts with her own family's experience:
I don’t like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I’ve been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I. image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn’t going anywhere—in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town—so just try your best not to engage.
Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids’ schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school. In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack that read “Certificate of Completion,” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student “designs” a cartoon dancer and “remixes” a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.
Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
So many times, so many times, I warned her about the creepy neighbor. Now he reads her poems and knows her passwords. He’s always watching through the screen.
We cannot be passive. Our kids deserve better than this.
 |
| kids. Get it? |
The House Committee on Ways & Means released their FY27 budget last Wednesday, and they're currently taking amendments before the House debate on the budget starts next week.
I've been considering what to say about it since then (sorry if you've been waiting for me to post on it), and the refrain I kept coming back to is what state law says is the intent of the Legislature when it comes to school funding:
It is the intention of the general court, subject to appropriation, to assure fair and adequate minimum per student funding for public schools in the commonwealth by defining a foundation budget and a standard of local funding effort applicable to every city and town in the commonwealth.
 |
| Screenshot of Monday's orders, highlighting the relevant line Yes, that is all that they send out! |
Unless you were watching for it, you may have missed it, but on Monday, the Supreme Court denied the writ of certiorari (or "denied cert") in the Foote v. Ludlow case. That means the First Circuit decision from last February, which found in favor of the district, which I noted here, stays in place.
To quote again what I quoted from that then:
As this opinion has endeavored to illuminate, we acknowledge the fundamental importance of the rights asserted by the Parents to be informed of, and to direct, significant aspects of their child's life--including their socialization, education, and health. Be that as it may--as this opinion has also made effort to explicate --parental rights are not unlimited. Parents may not invoke the Due Process Clause to create a preferred educational experience for their child in public school. As per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children. And the Protocol of nondisclosure as to a student's at-school gender expression without the student's consent does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized as a violation of the guarantees of substantive due process. All told, the Parents have failed to state a claim that Ludlow's Protocol as applied to their family violated their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child.
GLAD Law, which filed a friend-of-court brief, noted the decision here. Note that among the other briefs filed was one from the Massachusetts Attorney General, along with 15 others.
No, I don't know how this aligns with the recent shadow docket decision from California, save maybe it wasn't a state law, but I don't know that we should be looking for consistency among the majority.
UPDATE: Looks like I'm not alone in being confused.
I'm impressed by the follow-up article from the Boston Globe on the House's disaster of a bill passed last week.*
Civil liberties groups and organizations in favor of tech privacy — including some that are backing the bills — warn the proposals could backfire and make online activity even less private by requiring users to submit personal information to verify their ages or parental status.
Some restrictions, experts argue, would also face First Amendment challenges by limiting young people’s speech and vulnerable groups’ abilities to find community online.
They also note that this means we're not fulfilling our responsibility to students:
“Children need to learn how to use social media so they aren’t using it irresponsibly, and we need to learn how to use our phones,” said Max Nash, a junior at Mashpee High School who formed the Coalition for Student Mental Health to lobby for alternative tech policies. “But that requires education and not a ban.”
I appreciate Rep. Gordon in general, but this is such an odd thing to own up to:
Representative Kenneth Gordon, who chairs the education committee, said lawmakers shaped the bill to closely follow a similar law in Florida, whose under-14 social media ban has faced court challenges for two years.
Florida + court challenges seemed like a good path to follow?
And all of this here:
Both the Healey and House proposals would require age verification measures that civil liberties groups and privacy experts say are excessive. All users — not just minors — could be required to give tech companies more personal information, such as photos of government IDs, to prove their age, they warned.
Healey’s proposal, for instance, would require social media companies to provide a host of age-specific data that could require checking users’ ages.
People who don’t have such IDs, or might be hesitant to provide them, could then be unable to access a wide range of online content. The bill includes a broad definition of social media sites, including nearly any platform with personal accounts and user-generated content, which opponents argue could encompass sites such as the popular information forum Wikipedia.
That ID hurdle has formed the basis of First Amendment challenges in many states, according to Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, a tech industry-funded group that has successfully sued to have the law set aside in several cases.
“Ultimately, the laws suffer from the same core constitutional infirmity: They block or restrict access for users, particularly minors, but also adults when it comes to speech that is lawful for everyone,” Taske said.
Cybersecurity experts warn that children could bypass the checks, and hackers could seek to steal data collected. Parental consent requirements could present further security issues, with little way for parents to reliably prove their relation to a user, opening the door for nefarious actors who abuse online reporting systems.
More than 400 cybersecurity experts, including from MIT, Tufts University, and Boston University, issued a public letter last month calling for a moratorium on online age verification laws they said “might cause more harm than good.”
“This policy will inevitably massively reduce privacy online by forcing users to reveal more information to service providers than they do nowadays,” the group wrote.
The age verification measures could also run counter to the goals of a separate date privacy bill the state Senate passed last fall and is backed by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other groups. That legislation would allow companies to collect only “reasonably necessary” personal data and permit consumers to opt out of data collection. Companies would also be barred from selling children’s data.
Plus, of course, there are those who have positive uses for social media that would be barred by this bill:
Advocacy organizations also raised concerns about other First Amendment violations, including for users who might face the most repercussions from verification measures and social media restrictions.
Such a law, some argue, could limit teenagers’ abilities to organize political activity, hear the latest news, express themselves creatively, or find community online.
Teddy Walker, a 21-year-old Bostonian who is trans and a leader of a group organized to protect trans rights, said he was isolated and depressed as a teenager until he found solace in Instagram and YouTube trans communities.
“It really helped give me the language and understanding for who I am,” Walker said. The proposed parental restrictions could “lead to trans youth and trans kids being less safe, being less able to access that content online that was so life-saving and life-affirming for me.”
 |
| you're a mess, you're a mess, good God, you're a mess! |
__________________________________________________________________
*And how often do I say that?
Because OB3, Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" has a provision for vouchers by state in the language, you knew that others would join the Boston Globe's editorial board in pushing for them in Massachusetts. Thanks to Yawu Miller's coverage of a recent panel at the JFK Presidential Library*, we now know not only that this is happening, but who the players are and what their talking points are going to be:
“Covid relief money is gone, inflation is bad, buses are expensive, special education is expensive,” former Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeff Riley told an audience of about 200 that filled an auditorium at the museum last Wednesday. “We have an opportunity for this new pot of money to help us with things like expanded learning time, high dosage tutoring, special education services. This seems like a time when people should get together.”
Yes, taking time away from his fulltime job of trying to get schools on the AI bandwagon, our former Commissioner is all in our vouchers, but we're going to frame it as public school assistance. Also involved:
The National Parents Union is spearheading the local coalition which aims to pressure Gov. Maura Healey to adopt the tax credit program. So far, the group counts 124 organizations in support, including The Pioneer Institute, The Boston Foundation, the Lynch Foundation, 45 individual Catholic Schools, 18 Montessori Schools, 13 Jewish day schools, the umbrella organizations supporting those types of schools and dozens of YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs.
NPU will surprise no one, nor will the private schools, but the outside of school organizations no doubt have this sold to them as after school dollars that could be coming their way.
Miller does---as always--an excellent job of framing the issues with the push, very much including that they don't actually work. But he also notes that Governor Healey, whose decision this is, so far has been silent on this issue. That is very concerning. There will be an effort to frame this as a "ed reform" issue, and she has some close to her that are in on that.
Oh, and incidentally: the list of things that Riley includes largely are not things on which the vouchers could be used:
Despite promises that the scholarships could cover special education services, among other school-related expenses, Fliter said that wouldn’t be true for public schools. The way qualified education expenses are defined by the federal government only includes things for which schools bill parents.
“Unfortunately, when you dig into the text of the statute and what the regulations are from the IRS and from others, it becomes very clear that a qualified education expense, as it’s referenced in the Internal Revenue Code and by the Coverdell Education Savings Account, does not include anything like special education expenses,” Fliter said.
Read Miller's coverage, and then keep an eye out on this one.
*who maybe don't exercise a say over this, but one does question the venue choice
 |
| daffodils, even |
DESE sent this update out late last week:
DESE has received some additional projected figures from the federal government that have allowed us to refine the Title I projections we shared last month; we’re also able to anticipate statewide totals from other major ESSA programs (Title II-A, Title III-A, and Title IV-A), as well as from Perkins. Again, these numbers are still preliminary. DESE receives final awards from the federal government on July 1st.
Title I – Updated figures from the federal government show that MA will experience about a 7% reduction overall, not a 10% reduction overall as we projected last month. DESE has revised the FY27 Title I Warning Chart accordingly. These district-level projections are likely more accurate than last month’s projections, but it bears repeating that they are subject to change. Districts will receive final numbers in July.
Title II-A – Similar to Title I, preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely experience about a 7% overall reduction from last year. We do not have district-level projections for Title II-A, which could vary greatly, so we encourage districts to budget conservatively.
Title III-A – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely be level-funded for Title III-A. DESE will provide district-level projections for Title III-A in several weeks when we issue the Title III-A Intent to Participate application in GEM$. Until then, we encourage districts to budget conservatively.
Title IV – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely see about a 6% increase in Title IV-A. We do not have district-level projections for Title IV-A, which could vary greatly, so we encourage districts to budget conservatively.
Perkins – Preliminary figures from the federal government show that MA overall will likely be level-funded for Perkins.
I very much appreciate Matt Barnum's piece this week on how it turns out---color me shocked--that Sal Khan's whole forecast on how AI in education was going to work out is not.
Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.
So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.
“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”
Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.
And in a particularly "we could have told you that" bit:
Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”
Right, because asking good questions is part of learning which is a thing that has to be taught.
I really can't do better than Audrey Watters on this:
It's a change from the sweeping rhetoric of Khan's 2023 TED Talk in which he proclaimed that, "We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen." Invoking the highly questionable (that is to say utterly un-replicated) findings from the classic "2 Sigma Problem" paper by Benjamin Bloom – a paper first published in 1984 and invoked now by decades of ed-tech evangelists – Khan claimed that “the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
Amazing. Or ... not.
She observes that inevitably, the response of the rejection is to then given students (and teachers, often) no choice but to use whatever the new hip tech thing is that is around, which is, of course, just what Khan Academy has done; from Chalkbeat:
Now Khanmigo is incorporated directly as a way students can get advice as they’re working through specific problems. A spokesperson said the organization made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”
 |
| please enjoy these pansies from my walk to work in Boston |
From State House News Service this evening:
The House on Wednesday put Massachusetts on track to join a handful of other states in placing restrictions on children’s social media use – an issue that is playing out in courts across the country. The House passed legislation on a 129-25 vote, largely along party lines, prohibiting social media use for children under 14 and requiring that social media platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. Representatives said the legislation closely follows a similar law in Florida, which is still being challenged in court two years after it was passed. The legislation leaves many of the regulatory decisions surrounding how to enforce the policy amid an ever-evolving online landscape up to Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Reps added language to the bill that limits some parental monitoring of social media usage "to protect certain vulnerable populations," Rep. Peisch said on the floor, and adds further protections for 14- and 15-year-olds related to the "addictive nature" of some platforms. The bill also bans students from using their cellphones throughout the school day. The House dispensed with almost all of the 29 amendments filed on the legislation through two consolidated amendments."on party lines" means it was Democrats who voted to violate young people's privacy, Democrats who voted to make them less safe in school, Democrats who voted to require that we all turn our information over to social media companies.
I cannot even.
Update: here’s the vote:
Is there bad AI news this week?
Friends, there is ALWAYS bad AI news!
Two things to review:
AI assistance reduces persistence and impairs independent performance: After brief AI-assisted sessions (~10 minutes), participants were significantly more likely to give up on problems and performed significantly worse once the AI was removed, compared to participants who never had AI assistance.
Effects are concentrated among users who seek direct solutions: Persistence costs were concentrated among participants who prompted AI to solve tasks for them directly. Using AI for hints or clarifications did not produce significant impairments.
Effects generalize across domains: Effects replicated across fraction arithmetic and reading comprehension, suggesting it is a general consequence of AI-assisted problem solving, not specific to any particular task.
Their conclusion?
These findings raise urgent questions about the cumulative effects of daily AI use on human persistence and reasoning. We caution that if such effects accumulate with sustained AI use, current AI systems — optimized only for short-term helpfulness — risk eroding the very human capabilities they are meant to support.
I found this page which gives visuals for their findings very accessible; I include one below.
Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, is the subject of an in-depth profile in The New Yorker . It reads almost as a parable of hubris: you can trace the loss over time within the company of values expressed early on.
That he has as much power as he does is horrifying.
 |
| Visual from "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" |
I've only occasionally been paying attention to what's going on with the Worcester Public Schools1, but a sequence over the past week has me paying attention.
 |
| Samuel Adams in the U.S. Capitol Because I am feeling a lot like that about this. |
One of the things that is very close to my heart, both personally and professionally, is Worcester's dual language program. Over my transom last week came the following message that had gone to parents in the dual language program:
Tomorrow, the Mass House is voting on a bill on social media and cell phones for youth that includes, as the post from WBUR puts it:
...prohibiting social media use for children under 14, requiring platforms to obtain parental consent for users ages 14 and 15, and banning students from using cellphones in schools.
The Boston Globe adds that it also would share information posted with the parents of young people between the ages of 14 and 15.
This is terrible in so many ways!
I sent the following email off to my state rep John Mahoney yesterday:
John,
I am writing to urge you to vote against the proposed bill regarding social media and cell phones that will be before you this week.
Young people in marginalized communities very frequently find support on social media platforms, in many cases, support that they cannot find in their own families and communities. Barring them from those platforms, and, at under age 15, pushing anything they submit to their parents is not only an inappropriate violation of their privacy (which, yes, they have); it may well endanger young people. The rates of rejection and abuse of young people who are gay and trans is high, even in Massachusetts.
Doing age checks requires ALL of us to submit OUR data to social media companies; this is not something I wish to do, and it is wildly irresponsible for the legislature to expect that of us.
Young people who are currently endangered by the federal government also should not have their communication devices (which also include cameras) [taken] from them at the schoolhouse door. That is the opposite of supportive.
This is, top to bottom, a bad bill, John. Please oppose it.
Thank you,
Tracy Novick
_______________________________
Do I need to remind you again that my blog posts are just from me as me? Here's that reminder.
You might be concerned or confused by headlines that came through over the weekend like this:
Did we just DO a federal budget?
We did, but that one was overdue (thus the shutdown) and was the current federal fiscal year budget, 'though it funds next school year.
Now we're starting NEXT fiscal year, FY27, which for the federal government starts in October, which will funding school year 2027-28.
With me?
Now to the alarming headlines: you might remember that we also had alarming news from the initial proposal from the Trump administration for the current fiscal year, too. The House proposal was also alarming, and then the Senate put their feet down and we got a largely level funded federal budget.
So pay attention, but don't panic.
Something happened at last Tuesday's Board of Ed which doesn't happen at 99.9% of Massachusetts Board of Education meetings1: someone not only mentioned school committees, but there was even a smidge of a discussion about them.
This came in response to a (properly posted) update from the Commissioner on Fall River. You may have seen that the Fall River School Committee recently moved to fire their superintendent without cause; she resigned. At the request of the Mayor, the Department is completing a targeted review of district governance.
Fall River Public Schools had their last comprehensive district review in 2025, as required by MGL Ch. 15, sec. 55A, under state regulations 603 CMR 2.03. Those regulations, passed by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, require that the review include: Leadership and Governance, alongside Curriculum and Instruction; Assessment; Human Resources and Professional Development; Student Support; and Financial and Asset Management. Those are always the areas reviewed for every district.2
Within that last report for Fall River, released in November 2024, within the Governance analysis, DESE reported the following:
According to focus groups, working relationships between district leaders and school committee members are still in early stages and are sometimes tense. As mentioned above, the superintendent is new to her role and began leading the district in July 2024 and, as such, a formal evaluation has not yet been completed. According to interviews, the superintendent is still working through her formal entry plan into the district and trying to “build a little bit more of a network and relationships with the school committee.” However, district leaders also reported that the current superintendent faced opposition from several members of the school committee upon her promotion to superintendent from her previous role as assistant superintendent and chief academic officer. Currently, there are still reported tensions between the school committee and the district superintendent, and both agreed that there was occasionally “strain” in the relationship regarding the best way to collaboratively fulfill their responsibilities and benefit the district. Despite this, in interviews and focus groups, both parties reiterated their commitment to Fall River and their desire to collaborate effectively to improve the district and outcomes for all students. Building rapport between both parties is an area for growth in Fall River.
As they were doing a report early on in a new superintendent administration, this is a measured, but early warning, view of what the Department saw then. Then the Fall River School Committee underwent an election last fall in which three of the six seats changed (the seventh member, the mayor, stayed the same), with the above being the outfall.
What I found most odd about the above bit of discussion in the meeting, beyond it happening at all, was the common concern of Chair Katherine Craven and Vice-chair Matt Hills: they were very concerned about the Department's relationship with the "democratically-elected school committee."
While I agree that the lines of authority are always3worth keeping an eye on, it's very odd to hear this from the Board leadership, which in its tenure, has not expressed all that much concern about the very removal of school committee authority that state receivership is. The school committees in receivership districts are also democratically-elected, and yet it has been from the successor of Commissioners after Jeff Riley that the impetus has come to return them to local authority. That could have come from this chair and vice chair at any time in their tenure. Instead, it took Russell Johnston as acting receiver to finally move. That, mercifully, has continued forward.
The Commissioner is appointed by and evaluated by the Board. If "democratically-elected" school committees having authority was this much of a concern, Craven and Hills had ample opportunity and reason to speak earlier. They did not.
Interesting time to speak up.
from this WBUR coverage of the Boston Public Schools before their City Council:
Boston Public Schools could have fined its school bus vendor $1.5 million for missed rides, but chose not to do so. The admission outraged parents and Boston City Councilors at a Tuesday hearing.
WBUR first reported that the district had not exercised its contractual right to fine vendor Transdev $500 for each instance of a “blown trip.” That's when a bus is more than an hour late for pickup or "uncovered" — as in, no driver or vehicle is available for the ride.
