Cannot be aesthetically integrated: updates on Secretary Linda McMahon

we're thinking of getting tee shirts...

• You may have caught that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon spent $43,000 on furniture for the office she purports to be vacating, as the current furniture "cannot be configurationally or aesthetically integrated” into new space.
  If you're supposed to be making your job go away entirely, surely you can put up with the old desk in the meantime? 
  

• 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.
  

• Also on the Secretary McMahon lawsuit front, something that didn't get a lot of mainstream press, so full marks to the wrestling world here, but the effort of she and her (still though separated) husband Vince McMahon to get the lawsuit against them for the sexual abuse of minors that happened while they were running WWE has failed. As quite appropriately noted by the article here linked: 
  

  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. 

 

How subcommittees work

 In which John Adams recounts talking Thomas Jefferson into writing the draft of the Declaration of Independence: 

Yesterday was the anniversary of this historic subcommittee meeting. This is, of course, the account Adams gave, which is why you should also take good minutes, lest only one person's version of the meeting persist! 

April 2026 Board of Ed: 9/11 resources

 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

Eisenhower

 Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.  

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.  

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. 

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.  

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.  

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.  

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.  

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. 

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.  

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that comes with this spring of 1953. 

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.  

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.  

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live? 

From "The Chance for Peace" 
Address Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16th, 1953 

for any who might be interested: the three F-15 bombers shot down by "friendly fire" by Kuwait over the weekend--which did not result in U.S. deaths--cost about $90M each.

on the attractiveness of school buildings

 The days on which I agree with the American Enterprise Institute are few, but this opinion piece by Robert Pondiscio, entitled "Why are school buildings so ugly?" struck a chord: 

A century ago, we built schools that looked like cathedrals: soaring, columned, sunlit. Even in modest communities and small towns—especially there—they were grand civic statements, rooted in the idea that public education was a serious and noble undertaking. Just as courthouses and libraries once signaled dignity and permanence, so too did public schools. You were meant to feel small walking in, but in the best way: awed, inspired, aware that something larger than yourself was happening here. And once you were old enough to set foot inside, you were part of it.

I will gladly concede that my opinion might be Philistinism; I don’t know enough about architecture to fill a thimble. Perhaps my tastes are outdated and anachronistic. But to my untrained eye, too many schools built from the post-war decades to today resemble garages, warehouses, even prisons. Instead of announcing themselves with architectural pride, they disappear into the landscape. At worst, they actively depress it. That transformation isn’t just aesthetic. It’s moral, cultural, and political; I cannot shake the nagging sense that uninspiring school buildings reflect our shrinking vision of education itself—from temples of intellectual and moral formation to utilitarian spaces built for the drab instrumentalism of “college and career readiness.”

Some tabs I have open

•  If you're a history buff, you might be interested in the events going on across the state in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the "Noble Train of Artillery," led by Henry Knox that brought the cannons of Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights. They crossed from New York into Massachusetts Saturday (Hillsdale, NY to Alford, MA, to be exact).
  As you may know, the cannons arriving at Dorchester Heights are what caused the British to leave Boston, which those who grew up in Suffolk County know well happened on March 17. 
  It'll be in Worcester January 31:
  

  Prior to the program at AAS, reenactors with horses and sleds, accompanied by fife and drum musicians, will walk from Worcester City Hall along Main Street to Institute Park.  The procession from City Hall will begin at 1:00 p.m.  At approximately 3:30 p.m., following the program at AAS, reenactors will fire a canon at Institute Park.

  
  
  
• Great work by Mississippi Today on student absence in Simpson County which actually looks at some of why students aren't in school: 
  

  Aaron Thompson drives his two elementary-aged children to school each day, but only when they aren’t sick or the road isn’t flooded. The family of four lives off a ragged stretch of concrete bounded on one side by a hunting trail and, on the other, by a worn bridge dotted with orange traffic cones....The reasons vary by family, with explanations oftentimes exposing a fraying social safety net now relying on younger helpers around the house to take care of elderly relatives and toddlers and teenage laborers in town, who work to contribute to their household income. 

   

• Intriguingly, Matt Barnum (now back at Chalkbeat) is having ​​Lindsey Burke, the current U.S. Department of Education’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, on a webinar on Wednesday at noon to discuss "why the administration wants to eliminate the agency, how officials are already working to do so, and what all this means for students, educators, and parents." I have RSVP'd, though I'm going to see how my blood pressure is doing by Wednesday before deciding to tune in or not. 

Who directed what? On 9/11 in Massachusetts schools

 You may have missed it in--gestures to universe--but we had a bit of a thing last week with headlines saying that Governor Healey was ORDERING Massachusetts schools to teach about 9/11, which seems to have been in response to this Boston Globe article about families of those who died during the 9/11 organizing for it to be mandatory, which includes these sentences:

There are 14 states where teaching students about what happened on and after 9/11 is required. But Massachusetts, where the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center took off, where so many families were affected by the wars that followed, is not one of them.

A whole generation of Massachusetts kids has grown up without the 9/11 story being a required part of their education.

The thing is? That's false.
What Massachusetts public school students are required to learn in history and social studies is included in the History and Social Science Frameworks, last updated in 2018. That link is to all 217 pages of it. And right there in the History II section on page 138 under Topic 5: The United States and globalization is this: 

Evaluate the effectiveness of the federal government’s response to international terrorism in the 21st century, including the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., the Homeland Security Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. 

...which is explicitly, yes, teaching about 9/11. 

Here's the statement Healey's office actually issued:

“All students should be taught about 9/11 and its aftermath, which is a tragic and important piece of both our state and our nation's history. I've directed the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to work together to ensure that it is fully incorporated into school curriculum frameworks. I’m grateful to the families of 9/11 victims who have advocated for this and are making sure that we never forget this horrific tragedy, the incredible displays of heroism on that day, or the thousands of lives that were lost.” 

So it would appear that this direction--which, I'll add, is overstepping, because the only person the Governor has the actual legal authority to "direct" there is actually the Secretary of Education, who has a single seat on the Board--is going to make for a pretty brief conversation.

I suspect the misunderstanding is that many states like to make BIG BOLD MOVES by REQUIRING BY LAW that particular things be taught, which is a lousy and piecemeal way of creating a public education system. Massachusetts has the radical notion that the first place the conversation about what students need to learn should be had is with educators, with that process then going to a public body that exists purely for educational purposes. 

We should refuse to be sucked into this worse processes for the purposes of making headlines.  
And the next time someone writes about what does and doesn't get taught in Massachusetts schools, it might be nice if they looked in the actual place we keep that.

Isn't this a nice sunset? 

Book recommendation: Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequality

swiped from a footnote of "Dividing the Public" is this quote
from Fletcher Swift skewering Massachusetts

 Summer is generally when I try to catch up on the rest of the year's "oh I should read that!" pile, particularly as it pertains to education. Among my reads that I want to recommend to anyone else for whom school finance equity is either a vocation or an avocation is Matthew Gardner Kelly's Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequality.

Gardner Kelly, who now teaches at University of Washington College of Education (he'd been at Penn State), takes as his topic K-12 public education funding in California, but really it is a way of examining what we may think of as foundational to education in this country: the tie between local funding and local enrollment. California starts from a completely different direction than, say, Massachusetts on this, and at various points in its history had advocates who argued that it wasn't really a state public education system if it depended on local funding. 

I could quote at length from passages of his book, which also includes midnight property raids, racial violence, and footnotes well worth examining (the above has already been added to my standard presentation on Chapter 70!). I really appreciated, though, a book that drove me to question why it is that we think the taxation of local property ought to determine the revenue available to local schools at all, and how it is that a state can require a statewide education system--check the quote at the bottom of the page here, Massachusetts!--without state revenue paying for it.

Recommended reading

My week went a bit sideways at the end here, so I haven't gotten around to a few things I'd intended to write on. In the meantime, here is some of what I have been reading:

• There are many, many things out there about the wave of organizing that is happening on college campuses on Gaza and divestment. I'd recommend this New Yorker piece, this New York Times opinion piece, and this scorcher from Columbia University's student newspaper, The Spectator, which also covered protests in solidary on other campuses; Teen Vogue covered that at the beginning of the week.

• An aspect not being discussed in the AI in education discourse is the absolutely atrocious environmental impact; read about that here in the New Republic.
  Also there's an excellent column in Education Next on artificial intelligence not being a great teacher: “This isn’t just unhelpful; it’s counterproductive to learning.”
  

• MassInc posted this piece "Musing on the House budget, SOA, families, and the state's long term fiscal health" last week. The one thing I would add here:
  

  The House budget increases Chapter 70 aid above levels required by the SOA. However, fully factoring inflation, the funding levels fall below what the SOA called for based on the estimated costs of educating students back in the 2010s.

  ...is that the increase "above levels required by SOA" is done in a way that has nothing to do with SOA, or student need, at all, as it's the $104 per pupil.  

• Today's NPR piece on historical markers, what they are for and not and what they say and don't is well worth the time.
  

  How the U.S. tells its own story is a debate raging in schools, statehouses and public squares nationwide. It has led to social movements and angry protests. But for more than a century, historical markers have largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.
  With more than 180,000 of them scattered across the U.S., it's easy to see why

Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for March: opening comments

 The agenda is here. The livestream is here. 

This is of course the first meeting at which Jeff Riley is not Commissioner; Acting Commissioner Russell Johnston is here.

please enjoy these cold pigeons over the Malden River

Craven opens the meeting; Matt Hills is participating remotely

Yes, Dr. King wrote this but he wrote a lot of other stuff on education, too

 Just a quick observation today that the most oft-used quotes of Dr. King today on education:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew the power of education to break down prejudices & create opportunities for all. Today, we remember his commitment to a more equal & educated society. #MLKDay pic.twitter.com/oHT6xVyA2K

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) January 15, 2024

...is from a piece he wrote while he was a student at Morehouse. 

It is a fine piece that makes a relevant point, but he did make many, many other points about education along his life, and it's interesting to me that this is the one we hear repeated, not those on distribution of resources, or desegregation, or any of the perhaps more challenging ones.

Reminder from a friend: 

Putting some national context on local fervor

 I had already posted to this piece by NBC News about the wave of national emotion over claims around critical race theory in schools; I now want to point you towards this Time cover story around what effectively is more of a debate over how we teach history--though not solely history--in schools. 

What happened in Loudon County, VA earlier this week is not a thing that is isolated. This protest (I guess it's a protest?) that took place in Medway this weekend is similarly motivated; I assume that the questions being raised in Dudley-Charlton may be as well. This was also on the floor of Congress this week, when Secretary Cardoza spoke. 

As we talk about this, I want to emphasize this from the Time piece: 

It’s a debate between people who think children shouldn’t be burdened with the past, and those who want kids to learn how the legacy of that past shapes American society today. Is our national history merely a tool to inspire patriotism, or is it, as historians argue, a valuable lesson in the good, the bad and the ugly? As this new front in the culture wars shows, our understanding of the past is a key factor in how we envision our future. This is a story about the story—and the myths—America tells about itself.

If you never talk about what really came before, and if we are not honest about what is broken, we cannot do better. To not tell the truth to our students is to disempower them as the next generation that will run our democracy. It is, in short, to not do our job as public educators, which is to equip children to grow up to participate in democratic governance. 

And I also want to say that we cannot and should not run from this as policy makers. We have a responsibility to continue to assert calmly that we teach to state standards in history, that we uphold equity in our work, and that we continue to work to ensure children are able to take up the work of making a more--yes, emphasis mine--perfect union. 

Sunday reading

Here's some things I've been reading that I'd recommend:

• I struggle to choose what passage to quote in this interview with Paul Gorski, which I really just want you all to read all of:
  

  All these practices are alluring because they avoid the harder work of equity—because they don’t require that we identify inequities, how they are operating in schools, and how we’re complicit in them. I want to clarify: I do think that—in the context of a robust systemic approach to equity—some of these practices can play an important role. I wish my own teachers had access to trauma-informed classroom practices, for example, because I grew up with a lot of trauma and generally felt like I was repeatedly punished for the impact of that trauma. But what none of these approaches help us do is identify and eliminate inequities that are deeply embedded in our educational systems. When we’re not eliminating inequities, we’re instead trying to help students adjust to inequity-laden institutions—we’re feeding that classic deficit ideology.
  We challenge deficit ideologies by learning how to spot them in all their forms. Educational leaders have a big role to play here: they simply cannot allow deficit narratives and assumptions to live in their school or district cultures. On a more interpersonal level, when I hear somebody make a deficit-oriented statement, I like to ask a question that invites that person to look through a more structural lens. Somebody might say, “These low-income families just don’t value education. They never show up for anything.” In this case, I might ask, “I wonder if there are any other possible explanations for why those families are less likely than wealthier families to attend family-engagement events? Could there be an explanation other than they don’t care or they’re irresponsible?” In this way, I’m inviting somebody to try on a different lens.
  Ultimately, we challenge deficit narratives by making an intentional choice: equity efforts should never be about fixing anything about students who are marginalized in schools. They should always—always—be about fixing whatever is marginalizing students in schools. 

• Similarly, this piece on the trap of hiring a woman of color as a diversity officer without ensuring she has full leadership support to change the culture of the organization is a challenging but necessary read:

I asked how that was going.
“Not great,” she said. “The trouble is that they don’t actually want me to do my job.”
This is a complaint I heard time and again from the six women of color CDOs I spoke to for this essay, and it is a complaint I have made myself.



• If you have some time, try out this tool that tracks school by school demographics back over the past several decades. Worcester, try out the high schools!
  
• I learned a lot from this New Yorker piece on historic preservation and Black history, including of the existence of the Rosenwald schools, which says a lot, really, that someone who reads about education history as much as I have still hadn't come across them.

Here's one for the school committee members

I've been attempting over on Twitter to share my education-related reading (#amreading is the hashtag, if you search for that and my handle), and right now, I'm reading High Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability by Professor Kathryn McDermott of UMass Amherst. I'm in Chapter 3, which traces the evolution of educational accountability, and this passage (p. 37) made me laugh:

Administrative reformers also disliked small, local districts because they forced school administrators to engage with a broad, cross section of the public on school boards. According to the views embodied in Ellwood Patterson Cubberley's textbooks, school board members should be drawn from the elite of society relative few people had the appropriate outlook and skills for board service. If a state contained hundreds of small school districts, it would certainly run out of elites well before it ran out of school board seats to fill. 

Worcester School Committee meets Thursday

The agenda is here.
The report of the superintendent is on the Barr Foundation grant on "reimagining high school." The grant is a second round of a grant received last year--this one for $300K, last year's for $150K--of which little has been said until now. In fact, the first round of the grant, when it was listed in an article on disciplinary disparities, was billed as:

A $150,000 grant – and possibly more – from the Barr Foundation to implement a ninth-grade transition program aimed at reducing suspensions.

The School Committee did not receive a report on the work of that grant, nor did it receive a grant report that specified how the funding had been (or even was planned to be) expended. A ninth grade transition program for reducing suspensions is not the same as work on what Worcester imagines its graduates from high school to be, as this second grant reportedly is being used for, even if, as this report says, this one focus on "9th grade success," along with "rigor and relevance, college planning, and equity."
I say "reportedly" because the request that the Committee vote acceptance on the grant has not a shred of information on how the grant is being expended. This is problematic for two reasons:

•  it means the Committee can't fulfill its function of keeping spending aligned with the goals of the district (rather than chasing what is shiny)
•  it means the Committee (and thus the district) isn't fulfilling its fiduciary responsibility in allocating funds. No one is voting where the money is going. 

As the presentation itself also lacks specificity--the strategic plan is mentioned, but not how this aligns with it, with nothing on how this lines up with other work the district is doing--it's impossible to tell from this what exactly is being done, by whom, where, what it is going to cost, and how. The section on work so far and work ahead is the same: stakeholders that are being met with can mean a lot or a little; a "representative sample" of site councils, given how much work there is to be done on site councils in Worcester, is, frankly, not representative. One of course likewise wonders which students have been met with. If it's the usual suspects (as I call them; the kids who get picked for everything), the "portrait of a graduate" is only going to mean a very particular thing.
Also, that diagram on community is from Battelle for Kids out of Ohio and...why are their diagrams being used?
None of this, incidentally, is to find fault with the idea of looking at what Worcester thinks a high school graduate should be. It isn't clear to me that this is necessarily going to do it, nor how the grant funding is being spent to get there.

Teaching, Learning, and Student Supports subcommittee met largely to file things, it seems, as the term comes to a close. Looking through the minutes, it appears that there are a number of requests for information coming back.

There are some resignations and appointments.

The enrollment by course report that is coming back to Miss Biancheria's request isn't the full list of courses; I believe it's the new courses that had been approved.

There are donations and recognitions and congratulations.

The ongoing rash (pun intended) of prior fiscal year payments continue, with $1284,86 to a certified nursing assistant, and with $1721.02 (!) going to Struck Catering. I would think they are probably more prompt in their billing than this, which would mean the district not only is not following proper procedures on this, but it's also holding up paying a local business.

Mr. Monfredo has an item to "increase math scores as delineated in the strategic plan." That's not...how this works.
Miss Biancheria is asking again this year for a list of snow-clearing equipment by school "including the process for clearing snow at each site and the evaluation of equipment." Setting aside for the moment just how far into management this is (the answer is WAY into management!), it's hard to think of responses for "the process for clearing snow" that aren't, er, sarcastic.

Mr. Comparetto closes the agenda with a series of items in response, I believe, to an email from a Worcester principal that was pinballing across social media, which asked students to dress as Pilgrims and Wampanoag on the day school got out for Thanksgiving.

They read:

• Request that the Administration provide an update on the alleged culturally inappropriate programming at Goddard School of Science and Technology. 
• Request that the Administration consider incorporating a day of mourning at Thanksgiving time into school programming. 
• Request that the Administration consider incorporating real American history into the curriculum. 
• Request that the Administration review recommendations made by the organization Teaching Tolerance for culturally appropriate Thanksgiving programming

The implementation of the history and social studies standards still has, it seems, work to be done. The state standards did extensive work on historically disenfranchised voices, and the standards created and the resources used lead towards a richer understanding, one hopes. If you're struggling to see the issue here, start "A Culture, not a Costume" from the Washington Post; Googling that will give further resources.

There is an executive session, with one item arbitration with the EAW, one item on litigation, and two on collective bargaining.
And yes, I am planning to attend. 

Joint Committee on Education hearing: charter schools, genocide and other matters

The agenda is here.
The room is packed.

Lewis: Peisch is finishing up a meeting on transportation
will allow elected officials to testify out of turn, then will take testimony in order on the docket

The 1619 project

To quote the opening of the project:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. 

No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

Nikole Hannah-Jones opens the collection with an essay that reviews American history from 1619 onward. As she says:

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it.

There are essays, photography, poetry, and more.
Educators, please note that not only is the entire issue available for free online, lesson plans are also part of the Pulitzer Center's contribution.

More resources on desegregation of schools

In addition to this post (late and somewhat in haste from Omaha), some more resources on this:

• Note the use of the word "bussing" itself is problematic, as children are and have been bussed in and around districts for decades, and it was only when black children were being bussed to white schools that it became an issue: 

Pro tip: being against "forced busing" was the preferred northern way to oppose desegregation (while distinguishing themselves from the south). Most students were bused before "busing" without objection from white parents. As Julian Bond observed, "It's not the bus, it's us."

— Jeanne Theoharis (@JeanneTheoharis) June 30, 2019



• What we might learn from Berkeley (which was a voluntary effort) is covered here. Both this and the page above are from Matt Delmont, professor of history at Dartmouth who also wrote Why Busing Failed.

• It is particularly important for those of us from Massachusetts to step away from Common Ground, the Pultizer Prize winning account of the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in the 1970's. 

Black Bostonians disputed Lukas’s favorable presentation of white resistance to school desegregation, his emphasis on black family dysfunction, and his selection of a black family with no ties to the decades-long campaign to secure educational equality for black children (he found the black family he profiled through a social worker). Longtime Boston civil rights activist Ruth Batson described Common Ground as "one of the most devastating and distorted views" of Boston's school history.

(note: add this to my "still learning" list)


• There is some lousy dismissal of desegregation of fairy dust; please don't buy this.

• If you're interested in what the research in fact says about desegregation and its impact on students, Matt Barum has a good round-up of it. We shouldn't dismiss the loss of Black educators as part of desegregation efforts, for one. Do also read the work of Rucker Johnson, professor of economics and public policy at Berkeley, who wrote Children of the Dream: Why Integration Works. 

• Also, Nikole Hannah Jones has been tweeting up a storm, so go check her timeline.

Role playing in history class

This pops up in my timeline every few weeks it seems: a role playing scenerio from a teacher either is framed in a problematic way or goes badly askew. This piece from Slate discusses just that and why.

A teacher may wish to teach students about the history of American slavery and may think that “feeling” their way through that history is the best way to do it. But historical empathy is much more complex than this idea assumes. In a critique of the common idea that students’ historical empathy might prompt them to adopt democratic habits and acquire an affinity for social justice, professor of education Megan Boler writes, “Passive empathy is not a sufficient educational practice. At stake is not only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront.” 

This recognition of personal implication is an extremely significant intellectual and emotional leap, and one that many white adults—including teachers—have not, themselves, made. King pointed out that the teacher’s position in relationship to this history was important. Someone teaching a lesson about the Confederacy, for example, might have family members still sympathetic to the Confederacy—or she herself might be. Before teaching these lessons, he said, “Teachers need to really get in there, to understand themselves as a racialized human being.”

May Board of Ed from the Malden Public Library: history, social studies, and civics update

back up is here
Peske: one year since approval of new standards
Michelle Ryan (herself a former Randolph history and social studies teacher):

They have the three pillars of the framework as the following image pic.twitter.com/7ztO5Evmr3

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) May 21, 2019