Some days are like that

 We had a one-two punch of "who's in charge of this, anyway?" around public education late yesterday:

• The Trump administration announced that they are moving special education and civil rights enforcement out of the Department of Education; special education is going to Health and Human Services and civil rights to the Department of Justice. This has of course something that this administration been warning of/planning for some time, but it appears they now are rolling forward. 

  The change will move some of the most essential and integrated functions provided by the federal Education Department to two separate agencies and further accelerates the dismantling of the department without congressional approval. Senior department officials said the changes would not reduce or affect students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families. But many details are still being worked out.

  I think it's fair to say, given what we have seen of this administration, that this is not going to work out well for students and families.

• The conference committee working on the literacy bill for Massachusetts came out with their joint work, which can be found here. DESE is now going to have a list of what curricula a district may use, and districts have to choose from the list unless they can get a waiver to use curricula that they can prove works (no room, note for new curricula there). No curricula included may include:
  

  implicit or incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words or guessing from context and picture cues, also known as MSV or three-cueing, as a substitute for identifying a word.

  
  Words mean things and barring "implicit or incidental instruction in word meaning" from reading instruction may be the silliest inclusion I have read recently.
  Already, it has been asked if barring "guessing from context and picture cues," which is a large reason we actually use picture books with children, would bar the use of picture books:
  

  "Does it mean you can't show a student a picture? Of course you can. Children's books are always illustrated."

  That isn't a ridiculous question, and that it isn't well understood how VARIED are the methods by which children gain access to the quite complex skill of reading underlines that this is not a decision that should have been made by the Legislature. 
  Oh, and they stripped out the $25M fund for implementation. 

SCOTUS reject second student free speech case in two weeks

 As we're winding down this session of the Supreme Court, there have been two decisions recently that centered on student speech in schools, and in both cases, the Supreme Court declined, backing up earlier decisions that have sided with school districts. 

The first centered on a 3rd grader wearing a baseball cap with a AK-47 and the words "come and take it" on it. The Appeals Court found: 

...school officials made a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption to the school’s educational environment

...in part due to both the age of the students involved and that it was not far from Oxford High School in Michigan. 

The case most recently decided centered on the perception of the school expressing a view: 

A freshman identified as E.D. sought to hang flyers for a local chapter of the national organization Students for Life of America at Noblesville High School in the fall of 2021. But a dispute over a political photo included in the advertisement led the clubs to be shut down.

The lower courts sided with Noblesville, using a four-decade-old precedent on student speech known as Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier. The 1988 ruling concerned the regulation of school-sponsoned publications, allowing administrators some control over content that might be perceived as the opinion of the school.

While the student could use the school bulletin board to advertise for the club, the school objecting to the political statements used as the illustration was backed by the courts.

good Globe follow-up on the House social media bill

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.”

Sing it with Noah Kahan, all: 

you're a mess, you're a mess, good God, you're a mess!

__________________________________________________________________

*And how often do I say that? 

What we're losing in the Office of Civil Rights

 Good read from The Hechinger Report: 

Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities...

The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

We at least temporarily have an Office of Civil Rights back

 Well, well, well, what do you know? If you lay off hundreds of people who deal with civil rights complaints in the U.S. Department of Education, what do you end up with?

...a growth in its massive backlog of those complaints. 

Thus on Friday, U.S. Ed called back hundreds of those employees, though not without the trademark unprofessional snark that is a current hallmark of the agency: 

In the email to employees, the department said “it is important to refocus OCR’s work and utilize all OCR staff to prioritize OCR’s existing complaint caseload.” 

“In order for OCR to pursue its mission with all available resources, all those individuals currently being compensated by the Department need to meet their employee performance expectations and contribute to the enforcement of existing civil rights complaints,” the email notes.

Remember, Secretary McMahon has repeatedly said that the mandates Congress has for the Department can and are being carried out, but as USA Today notes: 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon's decision to tap into her own laid-off workforce provides further evidence her agency is struggling more than she has publicly indicated to meet its legally mandated responsibilities.

Since cutting the department in half earlier this year, many families waiting on resolutions to their civil rights complaints have been stuck in limbo. Colleges have also reported significant issues with the federal financial aid system.

 I should note that the first report I saw of this was in FedScoop.

AI and violating student civil rights

 Remember how one of the last things done by the Office of Civil Rights under the Biden administration was to send out guidance on the dangers of AI use around protecting student civil rights?

And remember how I noted that we seemed to be barreling right along in that direction back at the beginning of the school year?

A recently-released brief reports at 61% of special education teachers report using AI to write IEPs or 504s last year. You'll note that this was specifically warned against in the OCR guidance above. Among the issues this can create, in addition to massive student privacy rights issues:

IDEA requires each IEP to be unique and tailored to each students’ disabilities, goals and process for achieving their goals. An AI tool that develops IEPs based on little student-specific information and that is not significantly reviewed and edited by a teacher likely would not meet these IDEA requirements, said the CDT paper.

What should districts do? 

I'm going to argue with the article here and say MAKE THIS SOMETHING THAT IS BARRED.  

the new SCOTUS term opens today

 ...which is pretty depressing. A few things to read: 

• Chris Geidner over at Law Dork, who observes that it hasn't really been a summer that is SCOTUS-free, given the shadow docket land we live in
  
  
  
• Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, who gives us five of the worst cases before the court. Observe how many of them directly impact our students and their futures.
  
  
  
• And K-12 Dive looks specifically at K-12 education impacts of the cases before the court

"Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever 

onward and upward are dead damned wrong."

Molly Ivins

How AI violates civil rights: Biden-era OCR guidance

Happy back to school!
WOW, we are seeing some terrible, no good, very bad AI professional development and recommendations for educators out there!

"it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it."

 On Monday, the Supreme Court on a 6-3 vote allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the massive Department of Education layoffs while the cases challenging those layoffs proceed. Because it was taken on the "shadow docket," emergency orders that are issued unsigned and without the decision having an argument in support. Chris Geidner notes the hypocrisy of the Roberts court in making this call. 

As Quinta Jurecic writes in The Atlantic:

This silence is damaging, both to the legitimacy of the Court and to the rule of law. The judiciary is a branch of government that is meant to provide reasons for its actions—to explain, both to litigants and to the public, why judges have done what they have done. This is part of what distinguishes law from the raw exercise of power, and what anchors the courts as a component of a democratic system rather than setting them apart as unaccountable sages. With a written opinion, people can evaluate the justices’ reasoning for themselves. Without it, they are left to puzzle over the Court’s thinking like ancients struggling to decipher the wrath of gods in the scattering of entrails.

What we were not left in any doubt of was the opinion of the minority, written by Justice Sotomayor, a quote from which is the title of this blog post. Sotormayor reviews the history of the federal government's involvement in public education; the important role the Department of Education plays in education; in addition to reviewing the case. She summarizes the argument before them as: 

Before this Court, the Government does not defend the lawfulness of its actions.  Rather, in a now-familiar move, it presents a grab bag of jurisdictional and remedial arguments to support its bid for emergency relief.  None justifies this Court’s intervention. 

She closes by: 

The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers.  Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.  Because I cannot condone such abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent. 

 It is worth noting that this is a stay to an injunction that stopped the layoffs (again) while the cases proceed. The point of the injunction, of course, was layoffs were in fact destroying the Department even as it wasn't being destroyed by an official process. 

As I've said from the beginning (of the prior Trump administration!), the concern here is not only for money, though that tends to capture the headlines. It is also about the services that are provided by the federal department, of which I would highlight the protection of civil rights. We may well be about to find out what happens when every state is left to determine for itself what it is willing to do if not required to.

Reading the Mahmoud decision

First, your periodic reminder both that I'm not a lawyer and that nothing I post here is from anyone other than me.  

Among the cases the Supreme Court handed down on Friday, closing this year's session, is Mahmoud et al. v. Taylor et al. The case was decided 6-3 on ideological lines.

This has largely been covered as "religious parents¹ can opt-out of LGBTQ lessons" decision in the press, 'though I should note that The Hechinger Report did better at what this more realistically means.

I have read through the decision, which was written by Justice Alito; the concurrence, written by Justice Thomas; and the dissent, written by Justice Sotomayor. Sotomayor was joined in the dissent by Justices Kagan and Jackson. What follows are my notes and thoughts on the decision. 

Fair warning: this is bad. 

Public bodies and public meetings and public speech

A few true if possibly unpopular points which I am putting here because I have no interest in arguing in threads¹ of comments:

Public bodies meet to conduct public business. There are things that are under the purview of specific public bodies, and they are required to meet in posted meetings of a quorum of that body to make decisions in public (with ten exceptions).

By Massachusetts state law, those public meetings are not required to have public comment, which is always, under MGL Ch. 30A, sec. 20 (g), at the discretion of the chair ²

Middleboro wins case on tee shirt

SCOTUS denies a writ of certiorari (Thomas and Alito dissenting; they start on page 23 here), so the First Circuit Court decision for the school district of last June stands. 

SCOTUSblog has it here. Local-ish coverage from The Enterprise out of Brockton is here. 

Attorney General Campbell does not have time for this nonsense

Please note that the above post title is very much my paraphrase.

Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who is busy suing the Trump administration more than a dozen times* in the first 100 days of this administration, weighed in on the regulations regarding vocational admission in a letter to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The letter, dated April 18, was released today via State House News Service, which covers it here (which is paywalled and so far no one seems to have picked it up).

She opens right up with her own reason to be at this table: "As Attorney General, I am committed to upholding equal educational opportunity for all students in Massachusetts." This is, of course, literally part of her job.

We have to hold some things in common to have a public system

 ...and that is what this lawsuit before SCOTUS is designed to break. 

At issue is some Maryland parents who want to be able to opt their children out, not of health classes, but any lesson involving LGBTQ+ themes. Note that this means things as innocuous as the mention of a an uncle married to a man in a picture book.

As always, I highly recommend reading Chris Geidner on this over at Law Dork.

Erasing human beings who exist from elementary education is a deeply, deeply disturbing argument to make, and families arguing that they have a "right" for their children not to know that LGBTQ+ people ARE, and being (it appears) agreed with by a preponderance of the Supreme Court is horrific. 

And that is bad enough, and I very much am not putting this as "canaries in coal mines" because we don't sacrifice anyone, but we're fools if we think it stops there. 

There are those who have religious principles that women shouldn't work, that there shouldn't be interracial marriage, that children shouldn't develop any independence of thought, and on and on. As a former high school English teacher, I do not know how you put together a curricula in these circumstances. As someone who writes policy now, I do not know how you write policy for this.

And someone who believes deeply that we have public education so that we have a democracy in which we all participate, I recognize this as undermining its very foundations. 

Special meeting of the Board of Ed: March 10 CTE regulations

 Just saying up front: I'm not planning on liveblogging public comments. The news tonight is the question of acting Commissioner. Agenda is here. Note that the regulations proposed have been updated since the last meeting; they can be found here. 

Updating as we go

Damn right, Maine will see you in court

 The FAQ released last Friday by the United States Department of Education on race in schools earned a 'softened tone' headline from the Washington Post (that's a gift link), which is fair, but I also want to note what they do NOT say.

Here's the response to question 14, which is about consequences of not following their guidance and decisions: 

If OCR determines that a school failed to comply with the civil rights laws that it enforces, OCR will contact the school and will attempt to secure its willingness to negotiate a voluntary resolution agreement. If the school agrees to resolve the complaint, OCR and the school will negotiate a written resolution agreement to be signed by the school that describes the specific remedial actions it will take to address the area(s) of noncompliance identified by OCR. OCR will monitor implementation of the resolution agreement’s terms. If a school is unwilling to negotiate a resolution agreement, OCR will inform the school of the consequences, which may result in OCR initiating enforcement through administrative proceedings or referring the case to the Department of Justice for judicial proceedings.  

Do you notice what that does not say?
We will take away your Title I funding. We will take away your IDEA funding.  

I'm not sure who they've hired or not--they also have this "be a snitch and report your district"* portal still up--but it looks like maybe a lawyer looked at this one. 

__________________
*obligatory: gosh wouldn't it be a shame if it were flooded with silly nonsense from faked email addresses?

MA Statement on equal access to education

 As announced by Secretary Tutwiler today: 

Note this in particular:

This joint guidance reaffirms that these recent federal actions do not prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in admissions and access to higher education or other educational settings. It also includes steps that K-12 schools can take to set their students up for success. Schools and higher education institutions should continue to take affirmative steps, within the law, to create and maintain a positive school climate where all students feel safe, supported, respected and ready to learn. This includes reviewing current practices to ensure they comply with all applicable anti-discrimination, anti-bullying and civil rights laws. 

You can find the full statement online here. 

Note that this confirms what I said earlier this week: no district or classroom is going this alone. This is a shared responsibility. 

celebrate the wins

 And there was one this week in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, where the decision went for the Ludlow School Committee in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee:

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.

Coverage from EdWeek is here. 

On schools and immigration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler

 posted Friday on Twitter, with this note:

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