As Massachusetts now has the lottery online...

 ...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."

AI slop: coming to a classroom near you?

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.

We're losing kids on free lunch

 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.

Don't go spending that $100M yet

 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.  

Things I am reading this week

•  Not specific to education, but this lengthy piece on "AI mania" in the workplace is a very "the Emperor has no clothes" description, where no one can say the Emperor has no clothes because no one else in business leadership will.
  

  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.
  
  
• My main takeaway from Chad Aldeman's look at K-12 education spending hitting a trillion dollars is what a huge difference single payer health care would make: 
  

   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. 
  
  
• It's worth reading Matt Barnum's interview with Ary Amerikaner, who co-founded Brown's Promise (and I say that not only because it echoes some of what I question about the lawsuit). 
  
  
• Not sure if it's because the seniors involved have graduated or just coincidences of timing, but there are good pieces covering two separate episodes of attempted throttling of student reporting that came out this week. Wired covers Redwood High in California, where a student journalist turned up a connection to the Epstein files to his local community. In that case, the decision making was in the hands of the students, though this quote from their advisor deserves mention: 
  

  “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. 
  
  
• One would really like to think something like the national civics competition would be outside of meddling from this federal administration. It appears that is not the case.

It is July and so my daisies are in bloom.

keeping an eye on that $100M

 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.

¹which, despite it continually escaping at least this and the last governor, does not work for them. The Governor appoints the Board, which has, save one member, non-conterminous terms with her, and THEY oversee the Commissioner who runs the Department. She cannot fire them. She does not oversee them. I wish we saw more evidence than anyone knew that legally, this is how this is outlined to work.

Skunk at the garden party time

They're kind of cute, though, aren't they.

Though it is, of course, not the done thing to express anything but enthusiasm for additional funding…It is time again for one of my periodic skunk at the garden party posts.

Things I am reading this week

•  Please add me to those not at all shocked that little kids are finding their way around various kinds of restrictions on school laptops to get up to all sorts of nefariousness. 
  

  Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.
  This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.

  
  
• The storied Financial Times of London is out this week with an article on employers pulling back on their encouragement or even insistence on employee use of AI. In an excellent example of Goodhart's Law, when employers made massive uses of AI something that mattered, employees made maximizing use, rather than doing actual good work, their focus.
  I really hope that educators are watching how quickly things are changing in the workforce on such usage, as that keeps being the argument for why we MUST have students using it in schools. We are very much watching a tech bubble in real time. It's unwise to train kids for the bubble. 
  
  
• And speaking of educators and AI use, please do yourself a favor and review this piece of "meta-meta-analysis" from Patrick E. O’Neil, looking at the major flaws in significant parts of the research propping up AI use in schools. From his introduction: 
  

  The audit found that none of the examined meta-analyses provided a valid basis for the claims they advanced: none had a coherent construct, none sufficiently assessed publication bias, and all had severe heterogeneity. Statistics were misapplied, miscalculated, and misinterpreted. A majority (61%) of the randomly vetted primary studies were problematic, most commonly because the outcome measured didn’t match the meta-analysis.

  I await any of the educational publications I read, all of which have ongoingly significantly boosted this breathless urgency of such use in education, to put this one of their front page. 
  
  
• And speaking of research, I took a look at this research into (essentially) what districts did with their ESSER funding, specifically looking at if such grants were used to offset local property taxes. The piece found it did, which might be what you end up seeing circulating.
  What matters a lot though, is what districts they looked at: in order to have groups to compare, the researchers used the 5% poverty rate used for Title I as their cutoff, looking at districts just to either side of the line.
  What that means is they looked at what wealthy districts did with ESSER that got it.; 5% is a very low rate of poverty in a district; as best as I can find, the national average is closer to 13%, and that would leave out all of the very largest districts in the country.
  That's not really the same thing as saying "here's what happened with ESSER funding" at all. 

and we have official FY27 numbers

 And with the Governor's signature, we have a budget. As a result, DESE has released final Chapter 70 and Net School Spending numbers (including, yes, a new complete spreadsheet: download away!). 

Also, because Governor Healey did not make any changes to the budget, the conference committee numbers on the cherry sheets--for municipal and for regional schools--are now final. 

Happy fiscal new year (ten days in)! 

How you frame the tale

 I posted about this over on Bluesky earlier this week, but I thought it also warranted attention here: 

The Cambridge Public Schools moved to a model where all eighth graders take algebra, and The Hechinger Report wrote an article on it. Here is the headline they used: 

Because Hechinger does good work, the resulting article is both worth reading and isn't the default "no" that Betteridge's Law has taught us to expect. This is a work in progress, and the jury is still out on implementation.

The Boston Globe sometimes picks up articles from Hechinger, and they did with this one. Here is how they chose to headline it: 

I'm not at all the first to observe that the Globe doesn't really write the coverage--particularly of issues like education--for people who live in Boston; they're looking just over the city line to the wealthier and whiter suburbs. The message, as so often for such audiences, is "be very afraid; your children are being failed and will fail as a result." 

Rarely does one see it so well illustrated. 

There is a foundation budget review commission in the conference committee budget

 Yes, I am still playing catch-up from being away!

the headline I saw from vacation

The conference committee budget agreed to by both chambers does have a foundation budget review commission in it. As the guide to the outside sections notes, it is compromise language, which here means that they didn't just take the Senate's language, as, as you might remember, the House didn't have such language in the budget. 

I'm going to include the text from the budget in full below; it's in two sections (64 and 111), covering the committee's charge as well as the deadline for the report of the next commission. I say next report, as the language appears to be (again, as this was also in the Student Opportunity Act) to be establishing this as a commission that is to meet periodically. The language establishes it "every ten years" but that's "[u]pon action of the general court."

There are two things that are interesting to me: 

I read the state graduation council report

 ...I am not going to say "so you don't have to," because I think if you have an interest in education, you probably should at least skim the report, which is online here.
As always, this is me writing as me on behalf of me only. 

This image deserves more space than it gets in the report, as it isn't bad thinking and it's a solid try at an outline. 
How is it, though, that they managed parallel structure for all but ONE of the items?
The upper left one is crying out for a noun!

June 2026 Board of Ed; Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School

 the report is here

completed the tasks described in the three conditions, around governance of their board
different than demonstrating sustained improvement
will have additional governance requirement; expected that they will apply for renewal next year
now having some conversation around the transportation item
condition was for them to develop a plan; they haven't fully implemented a plan

June 2026 Board of Ed: translation and interpretation regulation

backup is here; public comment summary is here; redline is here 

Martinez notes there's no money attached to this
strategic about what is in regs; "want to be nimble"
"not intended to create a significant financial burden to any of our districts"
balancing making sure that our children's needs are being met

June 2025 Board of Ed: special education regulations

 You can find the backup here, summary of public comment here, and the redline version here. 

Martinez, in introducing the topic, notes the intended move of special education from DoE to HHS at the federal level, stressing that it makes it that much more important that Massachusetts have strong laws and regulations to protect students.

1. amend definition of individualized education program to reference state law, which aligns with federal law
2. add new section on discipline procedures for eligible students; incorporating provisions in federal law

changes made in response to public comment:

• ESL staff specifically listed as required to be trained (already required for all staff, anyway)
• consideration of English learners' needs in IEP dvelopment
• "change in placement" definition streamlined
• definitions for "controlled substance," "illegal drug," "serious bodily injury," and "weapon" all directly from IDEA
• notices comply with state discipline law requirements
• language on appeal of a placement as a result of a disciplinary decision
• reference to state law regarding transmission of student records to law enforcement 

June 2026 Board of Ed: Civics

 Super weird to me that the update includes this "look this curriculum is everywhere"

civics law passed in 2018

student-led civics projects

Oddly, this presentation is from iCivics, not from DESE staff or school district people, or...this is kind of weird; 

"goal of schooling is produced informed engaged citizens"
"health of our constitutional democracy requires sustained commitment"
now speaking about the We Declare! challenge

Here's the Boston Green Academy winning video

June 2026 Board of Ed: State Student Advisory Council

 State Student Advisory Council 
for some reason, they never link to the presentation from the SSAC on these...I wish they would

used extensive amounts of data in their work
host successful regional and statewide stakeholder engagement events

June 2026 Board of Ed: opening comments

 As I noted earlier this week, this agenda has the end-of-year group of reports today: one on civics, because 250th anniversary of the Declaration; the end of year Student Advisory Report; probably some talk about the statewide graduation report, which had its own meeting last night; the Mitchell Chester award; plus they have regulations to update.

There's a pre-meeting rally happening in the courtyard outside about immigration, 'though there has not been a lot directed to the Board on that (and the Governor issued guidance on this topic last month)

The livestreaming video is here.

from my walk to the meeting

News of interest

 Some things I have been reading: 

• The Wall Street Journal covers the parent rebellion on about screentime at schools, particularly looking at Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania, where the school board recently removed an opt-out provision on tech that they'd previously passed. (Cue "that's a bold strategy, Cotton" gif here). 
  It isn't going away, and the level of resistance in some local administrations to even having the discussion is really...odd? I guarantee every district that has an administrator dismissing parent concerns has, somewhere, something about family engagement somewhere in goals (and in Massachusetts, "two-way" communication is part of the state standards for evaluation!).
  
  
• The good news on education policy and such from New Hampshire is sometimes few and far between, so we'll take that Governor Ayotte (a Republican) has vetoed a trans bathroom bill for the fourth time, each of those times by a Republican governor. 
  Republicans in N.H. are also joining with their Democratic colleagues in considering a tightening oversight of the so-called "education freedom" accounts, the thing where families can just take the money allocated for public schools.
  
  
• Continuing our looking north, Vermont signed into law language restricting ICE access to schools, modeled on the policy of Winooski, which has of course received national attention for standing up for its immigrant students.
  
  
• In case you wondered if the Pioneer Institute has changed, the answer from today's Boston Globe editorial page is a resounding 'no.' "Boston charter schools went DEI" is not going to fly, folks.
  
  
• Special education oversight moving to HHS got lots of press, but it appears that Senator Cassidy, who chairs the Senate education committee, is not on board, considering a vote next month to bar it. You might remember that the Senate is what saved the federal education budget last year (implementing this year) from draconian cuts; this actually doing oversight appears to be continuing. 

It's a two meeting week for the Board of Ed

 As a reminder: the Board has a special meeting tonight (Monday) at 5 PM virtually, specifically on the recently released graduation report. 

They have their regular June meeting tomorrow at 9 AM (yes, both agendas are a single page) in Everett. That agenda includes the end of the school year things--the Mitchell Chester award, the end of year report from the student rep from the State Student Advisory Council--along with some end of year informational reports (off agenda) including both the chronically underperforming schools report, and the non-operating school districts report (my personal favorite Massachusetts education trivia question!). 

There is also a report on civics education (you might remember this was a request of the chair at the last meeting) and a report on the operating conditions of Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School, who the Commissioner is recommending being released from their current conditions but:

 While I recommend that the Board remove the current conditions, concerns remain about the board’s governance practices, such as an Open Meeting Law violation and other deficiencies in complying with the Open Meeting Law; inconsistent implementation of the board’s review and approval processes; and, based on review of board and committee meeting minutes and observations of board meetings, indications that board trainings have not led to improved governance practices or a clearer understanding of the role and responsibilities of the governing body. 

This is pretty interesting, as (as you would see if you searched their history on this blog), PVCICS has had what I'd call a storied history when it comes to their relationship with the state that charters them. Among other interchanges, they're the only example I remember of Paul Sagan, when he was chair, being utterly exasperated by something publicly, when they applied over the head of the Commissioner for an expansion that had been refused by the Commissioner. I would say that they have a culture of going their own way, so to speak. Speaking so directly to their governance is interesting. 

There are also two rounds of regulations up for vote: special education (which is aligning regulations with state and federal law) and interpretation and translation. I did a brief thread on my own comment on the proposed regs yesterday on Bluesky, but I do recommend reading the public comment summary overall. 

I won't be on for tonight's meeting, but I'll be posting tomorrow from Everett. 

Do they read all the comments? Yes! There's mine.