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. 

 

Batchelor et. al v. DESE et. al

You've no doubt seen that students in Boston, Brockton, Lawrence, Springfield, and Worcester along with four community organizations have filed suit against the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Board, Chair Craven, the Commissioner, and the Secretary on the segregation of our school districts. This is filed in state court under the state's Constitutional guarantee of a public education in particular. 

I've read the coverage and just read the complaint filed in state superior court, and I guess I have three thoughts:

1. Yes, Massachusetts absolutely has among the most segregated school systems in the country by district. This is a direct result of our having--unusually for the U.S.--school districts that not only are originally formed by our cities and in towns, but largely have not changed. Those lines are heavily segregated for the same reasons our housing is: historic redlining, discrimination in lending for housing, and the resulting disparities in capital by race. You know this if you've read The Color of Law, or so many other things. It's also extensively covered by Matthew DiCarlo and Bruce Baker in their recent book Segregation and School Funding.
   Regionalization efforts since the 1950's still put the authority and responsibility on the towns to ensure there are public schools; it is towns and cities that are parties to the regional agreements that form regional districts. It is up to municipalities to provide public schools.
   As sort of a side note, but which matters in this context: while most regional districts are groups of towns, but not cities, this is not true of the regional vocational districts, in which Boston, Springfield, and Worcester are outliers in having vocational schools internally rather than being part of a "Greater [city]" vocational district, as Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, Brockton, and others are. Thus there are regional districts that include cities. They do operate under the "students by community" entrance system, though, and you may remember this coming up in the arguments around moving to a lottery admission for the regional vocational schools, as seats by town, rather than by total population, won’t give a group reflective of the entire student demographic. 
   
   
2. I was confused on reading initially about the lawsuit as to why DESE would be sued, as DESE has authority over none of this at all. 
   I am even more confused after reading the lawsuit, because both the complaint--the lines of school districts and the impact that then has on students--and the parts that suggest remedies-more on that below--are not within the authority of the Department to provide. The lawsuit is against state laws, which are executed by, but cannot be changed by the Department. The Governor is not named here, ‘though the Secretary is. And the argument within the filing is a series of assertions of…things DESE just cannot actually do. 
   
   
3. I'm told there's more coming, but the remedies led towards are so far doing more of the same, only more so.
   METCO covers something like 2000 statewide students; expanding it to other districts (that still can choose to participate or not) does not desegregate the state (not to mention the buses still only go one way).
   More regional vocation districts? schools? does not change that those are either internal to our heavily segregated districts, or are agreements among towns that are heavily segregated and would have seats allotted within the parties. Anything else would require a change in state law.
   Increasing magnet programs within districts doesn't desegregate districts; if you want to do inter-district magnets, you need to change state law.
   Even supporting more transportation between districts is a budgetary authority of the Legislature, not something that is at all done by the Department. 

Look, this is absolutely the right point: We have a very segregated system of school districts.

I cannot understand why one would sue DESE on things DESE can't do, arguing for things that wouldn't fix the underlying issue. 

I'll be watching with interest.

The debate on technology on schools is ongoing

...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?

Ludlow case leaves in place First Circuit ruling for the district

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.

 

Minnesota educators sue to keep ICE away from their schools and bus stops

 Yesterday, two Minnesota school districts (Twin Cities suburbs) and Education Minnesota, the teachers' union, filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security¹ to keep ICE agents away from their schools and bus stops. From K-12 Dive:

“DHS’s presence in and near school property has created an atmosphere of fear, for native-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and legally present immigrants alike,” the lawsuit, filed by Fridley Public School District and Duluth Public School District, said. “Parents across the state are afraid to send their children to school, and schools have had to adjust their programs.” 

The grounds for the suit, per The New York Times:

The lawsuit argues that the policy change usurped decades of federal precedent. Since the 1990s, the lawsuit says, the federal government had instructed immigration agents to minimize impact in places with children present and to get special permission and operate discreetly if necessary.
The suit asserts that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that requires certain notice and procedures when making a policy change.

Never rule administrative procedure out. 

____________
¹ The name always feels ironic, but particularly here.

Knew we could count on them

Somerville, Easthampton, and all the rest have indeed updated their lawsuit in light of the moving of powers of the U.S. Department of Education out of that office. From the New York Times coverage:

The education coalition argues in its lawsuit that the annual appropriations law approved by Congress requires the Education Department to carry out its programs and that Ms. McMahon lacks the authority to shift these functions to other federal agencies.

“The information and actions coming out of the Department have been unpredictable, chaotic, and unprofessional,” the education coalition said in the lawsuit. “This experience is unprecedented in administration changes.”

The press release from Democracy Forward can be found here.

Not so fast on nuking the Department of Education

It was rather a day for education news last Thursday: by now you will have seen that U.S. District Judge Myong Joun¹ issued an injunction in the two cases filed in U.S. District Court that were before him:

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is among the plaintiffs in the first case; Somerville and Easthampton Public Schools², alongside AFT, AFT-MA, AFSCME Council 93, American Association of University Professors, and SEIU are the second. They're being taken together.
Not only does the injunction block the Trump administration from dismantling the Department of Education while the case goes forward; it also orders the reinstatement of 1400 laid-off federal workers.

While what ensues at this point of course remains to be seen, I would recommend reading the injunction should this case or even topic be of interest. How judges frame discussions matter, and in Judge Joun, we have some good thinking on why U.S. DoE matters. 

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. 

Good news from the courts yesterday on ESSER funding

 New York federal Judge Edgardo Ramos issued a preliminary injunction in the case that 18 states and the District of Columbia filed to get the extension on ESSER funding back:

...Education Department is prohibited from enforcing the cancellation of funding under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program during the litigation or until a further court order. The reprieve only applies to the states that sued for access to the funds.

For Massachusetts, this should mean that the state can go back to drawing down those funds against the federal government; you might remember that DESE has continued to allow districts to draw down their funds against the state. 

Chalkbeat has more coverage here. 

Yes, that's in Massachusetts

 On Friday, arguments in the U.S. District of Massachusetts were heard in two cases against the federal government regarding the gutting of the U.S. Department of Education: 21 states suing, and the AFT case in which Somerville and Easthampton are plaintiffs before Judge Myong J. Joun. EdWeek has a good piece on it which also capture two exchanges I thought entertaining: 

Judge Myong J. Joun from the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts pressed Trump administration lawyers on what the president has meant when he’s spoken in recent months about “returning education to the states”; putting Education Secretary Linda McMahon “out of a job”; and closing the Education Department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law” without congressional action, as written in an executive order Trump signed in March.

“It’s kind of like when my kids were teenagers, they would throw a party at the house,” Joun said. “They might say, ‘To the extent that my parents give me permission to, I’m throwing this party.’ It doesn’t excuse having thrown the party.”

And also: 

Joun didn’t preview his ruling or indicate whether he believes the fired employees ought to be able to return to work.

He did, however, contest the administration’s position that the plaintiffs leading the lawsuits don’t have standing in the case because they’re trying to intervene in personnel matters outside their jurisdiction. To illustrate the point, he described his morning routine of ordering coffee from two workers at his local Dunkin’.

“I don’t think that these plaintiffs are saying, if one morning there’s no one there, that Dunkin’ Donuts should hire these two employees back,” Joun said. “I think what they’re saying is they want the cup of coffee.”

Judge Joun, who was also the judge who temporarily froze the ending of the teacher grants (the case that was 5-4 at the Supreme Court), has an intriguing personal story. 

Courts tell Trump "not so fast" on taking federal funding

Not one (in New Hampshire)...

Not two (in Maryland)...

but THREE (in D.C.) federal judges today issued separate injunctions barring the Trump administration from taking federal funds from schools that don't meet the administration's interpretation of not having diversity and equity initiatives. 

The injunctions are issued because the judges have found that there is some potential for success in the cases filed. 

Worcester did what?

Plenty of press last week on the announcement* of the Worcester School Committee voting to become part of the lawsuit against President Trump, Secretary of Education McMahon, and the U.S. Department of Education, which argues that the elimination of the Department would be harmful, and in fact, the cuts of employees that have already occurred are harmful, mostly due to federal funding. 

If, like me, you learned the word "declarant" from this, welcome. This means that Worcester is not itself actually suing--that's Somerville Public Schools, Easthampton** Public Schools, AFT-MA, AFSCME, and AAPU--but is supporting the position of the plaintiffs officially. 

Note, by the way, that's the School Committee taking action here, as they're essentially the legal entity of the district (for all that they mostly weren't the "face" of the press).

______________________

*I think? This appears to have only been done in executive session?
** for those surprised by Maureen Binienda's vote in favor: she's currently the interim superintendent of Easthampton

Screaming into the void on IA

 

Headline in "The Hill": AI read to hit its stride in schools in 2025
No, I am not linking to the article.

Sometimes it is a consolation rather than a problem that education tends to operate as a pendulum. Anyone around schools for any length of time knows that much that comes into schools being trumpeted as the next big thing goes away. 

Something that you may have missed is the judge in the Hingham High AI-cheating case denied the plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction in a decision you can read here or can read Benjamin Riley having some fun with here. A preliminary injunction--my I am not a lawyer explanation!--is based on the likelihood of the judge deciding the case in that side's favor, and in this case, the judge's answer was "not at all likely." As the decision says:

Despite Plaintiffs’ strenuous efforts to frame this case as one of “first impression in the Commonwealth” about how to deal with an emerging technology, Court need not parse the terms of the Handbook as if it were a criminal statute27 to decide whether Grammarly can reasonably be considered an “author” as the term is used in the Handbook. The Supreme Court has expressly eschewed such an approach. See Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403, 478 U.S. at 686 (“Given the school’s need to be able to impose disciplinary sanctions for a wide range of unanticipated conduct disruptive of the educational process, the school disciplinary rules need not be as detailed as a criminal code which imposes criminal sanctions.”).  

In any event, the Handbook defines plagiarism as “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own work.” Docket No. 24-1, at 25. Even if I were to credit RNH’s testimony that he was “confused” about what uses of AI were permitted, it strains credulity to suppose that RNH actually believed that copying and pasting, without attribution, text that had been generated by Grammarly was consistent with any standard of academic honesty.  

I'll only add: no appropriate attribution is possible, as the actual sources of such generated text are unknowable.  

It's a useful decision to read.

_______________________________________________
While I'd known of the courts' general reluctance to look over the shoulders of school officials (within bounds), I'd not previously read either of the closing citations:

As the Supreme Court has noted:  

    It is not the role of the federal courts to set aside decisions of school administrators which the court may view as lacking a basis in wisdom or compassion. Public high school students do have substantive and procedural rights while at school. But § 1983 does not extend the right to relitigate in federal court evidentiary questions arising in school disciplinary proceedings or the proper construction of school regulations. The system of public education that has evolved in this Nation relies necessarily upon the discretion and judgment of school administrators and school board members and § 1983 was not intended to be a vehicle for federal court correction of errors in the exercise of that discretion which do not rise to the level of violations of specific constitutional guarantees. 

Wood v. Strickland, 420 U.S. 308, 326 (1975) (citations omitted). 

In sum, “the Nation’s youth is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges.” Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 273 (1988). This case well illustrates the good sense in that division of labor.

Recommended reading

• You may have recognized how damaging the right-wing assault on school districts has been, but now there's a first attempt to calculate how expensive it has been. The answer: $3.2 billion. The report, posted through UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, is here. You can also find coverage in The Guardian, K-12 Dive, Chalkbeat, EdWeek
  
  
• Coming in this week's New York Times Magazine is this long read on cheer: how it became a dominant sport, how dangerous it is for girls, and how it's probably violating anti-trust laws. That's a gift link, so read and share. 
  
  
• In both Oklahoma and Louisiana, educators and parents are suing their respective states to stop mandates for Bibles (Oklahoma) and the Ten Commandments (LA) in the classroom. 
  
  
• I really appreciated this opinion piece from New Bedford superintendent Andrew O'Leary on vocational school funding.
  
  
• I appreciated the paragraphs in this piece regarding San Francisco on position control.

Moms for Liberty lawsuit and MA schools

 It's possible you've caught that the Kansas case filed by Moms for Liberty and others reached beyond the district of federal court in which it was filed. The New Bedford Light looks at what this means for the Massachusetts schools named: 

...in Massachusetts, state law already offers the same protections for transgender students that Moms for Liberty is challenging at the federal level. So Massachusetts schools will still be able to uphold their current policies, legal experts say. 

One can't talk about a lawsuit when one is a party

But I do want to observe that this is happening. 
There are parallels being made with Lowell, which was sued on Council and Committee grounds. 

Why a Chicopee parent joined the funding lawsuit

Good one coming in from NEPR this morning:

“My son needs education in order to make his way in the world,” Fleming said. “If... he's already experiencing differences from his wealthier — and oftentimes white — counterparts, then I have no choice, really, but to fight for him. Or, I guess, the other option is to lay down and do nothing. But that's not what you do as a parent.”

Mussotte et al v. Peyser et al press conference liveblog

Learn those names, because here comes the lawsuit.
Live feed coming from the conference on this page.

The front row: the plantiffs
Taking this photo kind of broke my heart. 

Juan Cofield, NAACP
“We felt it necessary given the harm that continues to be done to our children”

There's a third branch of state government and the Gateway Cities are prepared to go there if they need to

Yesterday, the mayors and superintendents of Brockton, New Bedford, and Worcester held a press briefing in Boston, outlining the possible lawsuit they feel they may need to file and responding to press questions about the decision to procede. It was my Boston day, so I walked up to listen in.

Walked up the hill to the briefing by Gateway Cities mayors on a possible lawsuit #FBRC #MAEdu pic.twitter.com/qOfqrWP1uP

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) May 8, 2019

(if you click through to that tweet, it is the first in the thread of my livetweeting)
There was A LOT of press there:

• State House News
• WBUR
• The Boston Globe
• Commonwealth Magazine
• MassLive
• Boston Herald
• The (Brockton) Enterprise

The presentation they handed out entitled "Gross Inequities" can be found here. The three mayors spoke, they ran quickly through the presentation, one of the lawyers spoke, and then they took questions.

Mayor Jon Mitchell of New Bedford said, “We need more money, more resources to do what we are expected to do by the state and by those who send us into office to educate our children...Our school districts, our cities, have not been able to do enough to establish fully functional school districts.” And he noted who is most impacted:“This is a statewide issue which is felt most acutely outside of the Boston orbit.” Mayor Bill Carpenter of Brockton noted his own city's role in school funding--they brought both the McDuffy and the Hancock cases--said that they viewed working with the Legislature as the "best possible outcome" but were prepared to go to the courts if necessary. Mayor Joe Petty of Worcester boiled it down: "This is about equity...Equity for our children in the public school system." He said that the success of the cities in the future depends on the success of the children in the school system.

The presentation opened with reviewing some of the demographic changes that have happened since 1993:

As was rightly pointed out to me yesterday: the demographic categories in which students can choose to identify have changed substantially since 1993, so the above comparison isn't entirely valid (it kind of can't be made). 

The statewide enrollment of students learning English or whose first language is something other than English also has substantially changed: 

Worcester's students' first languages is now up over 100:

Worcester’s count on languages spoken by students is over 100 (they just passed it out; it runs for four pages) pic.twitter.com/ebwVpzpENW

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) May 8, 2019

And that English learner population is VERY concentrated:

(something which wasn't done but should be? A dissaggregation of race and ethnicity and then poverty along similar lines. Those are also very concentrated enrollments.)

 And what else to know about the Gateways?

The presentation then ran through the reason for the funding issues, and the gaps districts currently are facing (hello, 770 teachers Worcester is short!). This, to me, is the story that isn't told enough or told vividly enough; too often, I hear a counter "but other districts have a hard time, too." Yes, but are they missing close to 20% of their teaching staff?

Attorney Patrick Moore of Hemenway and Barnes, among the attorneys who are working on this pro bono, ran through an outline of the argument: the Constitutional guarantee of education, the state's duty not only to provide it, but to provide it as changing with the times, and the state's lack of concerted action. He noted that a student entering high school when the Foundation Budget Review Commission came out would be graduating next month (parental note: in some cases, this month).He said, “We know more now and are learning ever more by the day of what it takes to meet the needs of those from disadvantaged backgrounds" but “the state plan has neither been maintained nor adequately funded, as the courts say is necessary...and the consequences are perhaps more than ever.”

When asked if there was a hard deadline, the general answer was "progress by the school year," which would, added to Mayor Mitchell's comment that his understanding was the Legislature intends to take this up after the budget, give them July and August to act. Asked what needed to be included, the mayors referenced the Foundation Budget Review Commission report, with Mayor Carpenter noting, "from Gateway Cities’ perspectives, we want to see what they’ll do for English language learners and low income students” (which many will remember was what was being left behind in last year's House proposal, with low income remaining the weakest portion of two of the bills proposed now). Asked about specific remedies, Attorney Moore said that the lawsuit will seek a declaration that the current state of affairs is not good enough; it then is to the Legislature to resolve the issue.
So: watch this.

Worcester School Committee meets Thursday, February 28

And the agenda is here. Much of it, the--finally!--report of the superintendent on FY20 included, is items held from last meeting due to the three hours of public testimony on sex ed.

Relatedly, if for some reason you didn't read Bill Shaner's comprehensive cover story in last week's Worcester Magazine on Worcester's long and winding road to not getting anywhere on sex ed, you really should.

That FY20 report appears also to be the only place as yet that anyone has compared actual impacts of the three (as yet) bills proposed in the Legislature on reforming the foundation budget, 'though of course it only does so for Worcester. Scott O'Connell asked Secretary Peyser about the lesser funding in the Governor's bill in his interview covered in yesterday's T&G, to which Peyser gave the meaningless response that he thinks "people should wait to see how these proposals unfold,” before responding. Not when we have actual analysis in front of us, thank you.


A number of the other items that have been held from the prior meeting are related to transportation, responded to here.  Also of note: going to subcommittee is this:

To review bid specifications for student transportation services and award contract to lowest responsive and responsible bidder for a contract term to begin in June 2020.

That's the bid for school buses! If you haven't been happy with the WPS bus service, now is the time to speak up (and keep an eye out for that Finance and Operations subcommittee meeting)! Goodness knows I plan to.

There are an array of recognitions, thanks, appointments, and such.

There's also still a prior year payment (of $48 to Learnwell Education) and I am curious if anyone at any point is going to bring up that this is not good practice.

There is...I wouldn't really even call this a response...an acknowledgement of the request for information on how the district plans to implement civics education ("we're going to pilot some things" is not an answer). The bill is much longer than quoted, has many more pieces than referenced, and this should reassure those asking not at all.

There is a muli-part response to an item on a specific dyslexia program (the link goes to the part that actually responding about the program; there is a summary of district sped literacy initiatives here, a summary of the dyslexia screening law here, a dyslexia evaluation checklist here, and what appears to be a copy of an individual's discussion of types of dyslexia here), of which the upshot appears to be no, we're not going to do anything with this.

I am going to interrupt myself for a moment here to call attention to how little sense the amount of time and attention being given to those items. Should there be a response to the second? Maybe, although evaluation of the appropriate models of learning ability is precisely why one has professionals; responding to a multi-grade requirement imposed by the state that may well require additional funding should take more than a sentence, on the other hand.

Mr. O'Connell and several other members propose to comment on the state health education standards (which won't be set out for public comment for a bit as yet).

Several members wish to support HR 141, which would make those who get a government pension, currently not eligible for Social Security eligible; you can read the argument from those in favor here. 

There's a request for an update on bringing down school suspensions.
There's a request to administration to change policy in the handbook regarding headwear (as that's under policy, the committee can just do it).
There's a request from Mr. Comparetto and others to use some of the taxes from marijuana for schools, and also to increase school funding "in light of new revenues coming into the city."
Five members have co-sponsored an item to support the PROMISE act (Note that this will go nicely after a presentation that shows that easily being the best of the bills for WPS of those thus far proposed.)
Mr. Comparetto also wants to reduce state spending on prisons and spend money on schools.
Miss Biancheria wants an update on the use of the Shannon Grant.
She also wants an update on lawsuits.
Mr. Monfredo, who is under the impression the school districts bans cell phone use in school (it does not) wants to consult with "secondary school principals" about their use. Perhaps we're missing several groups of people there?
Miss McCullough is asking for an update on graduation rates by ethnic categories.
Mr. O'Connell wants an update on a court case.
The Committee is being asked to approve:

• a STARS Residency grant for $5000 for Neighborhood Strings to be at Clark Street School 
• an Amplify grant for $1000 for Burncoat UNITES
• donations to Woodland Academy of $172.00 from various donors from a school fundraiser and $700.00 from Target for field trip 

There is also a posting for an non-specific executive session, which is not something that one can do legally under the Open Meeting Law.