"on the uncoordinated actions of thousands of parents"

 from "It Is Right--EDUCATIONALLY,"
the Report of the Advisory Committee on  Racial Imbalance in Education, 1965

If you're in online education or parenting spaces, you probably saw that the talk of the weekend was "In fighting for every Black child, did I betray my own?" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who you might remember writing "Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city" in 2016. That daughter is now 16, and, as you'd expect of a child raised in a household in which such things are discussed, she has opinions. 

This, in turn, foster a lot of online conversation (and argument and worse) over the weekend about the decision. 

I will share only two thoughts: 

1. Someone who is 16 isn't done yet. What her daughter thinks of her own education, and of the choices her parents made regarding that, is not a settled thing as yet. Already, her daughter has seen the value of her having had time in majority-Black spaces; the relative value of that alongside all else in her schooling in the scope of where she ends up is something yet to be seen. 
   This is not to dismiss her daughter's current perspective--far from it. But what conclusion gets drawn over time may well change.
   
   
2. It reminded me, vividly, of the above passage from the closest thing Massachusetts ever saw to a report on desegregation, in 1965. 
   We can do the best we can as parents; real change comes as a society. 

UPDATE: This American Life has more this week. (That links to the transcript, because give me print, please, but you can also listen from there.)

What could one do with the Department of Education?

 As the current administration daily posts another round of  nonsense about "returning education to the states"--the place education has been overseen since we have had a constitution*--the framing of an alternative has been kind of weak. "Let's not destroy the U.S. Department of Education" is a good start, but reaffirming the mission of the Department has been rather lacking.

I was intrigued, then, to read Kevin Carey's piece in Democracy entitled "A Department of Education--and then some" which outlines a bigger vision:

The Department of Children and Learning (DCL) would do everything ED is charged with by statute while incorporating children’s programs currently located in other federal agencies, including the school lunch benefits located at the Department of Agriculture and the Head Start and child-care programs housed at the Department of Health and Human Services. As any parent can tell you, health, nutrition, and learning all go together.

The DCL would be organized around three main purposes: funding, research, and civil rights. Its mission would be ensuring that foundational education services and the latest scientific findings and technological advances are available to all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Existing programs that don’t contribute to this core mission would be replaced.

What is particularly interesting to me is that Carey actually talks about what very, very seldom is: school districts:

But as it is practiced in U.S. education, “local control” is a false promise. It means that local school districts—and in the privatization era, individual families—are left alone to search and struggle for enough resources to purchase what an indifferent and unforgiving market chooses to provide. It means that students destined to compete in a global economy are tied down by how much money their neighbors happen to pay in property taxes. It condemns teachers to crumbling buildings and outdated curricula. It means that the various institutions charged with the care and education of children don’t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. “Local control” is a long con. It exploits parental anxiety by pretending to give people power, then leaves them feeling individually responsible for our collective failure.

Local communities have the right and responsibility to decide who will teach their children and lead their public schools. Those accountable for school performance should be as close to parents and voters as possible. Critical organizational decisions shouldn’t be routed through a central bureaucracy in Washington. State governments ultimately determine academic standards for their children. At the same time, all local school districts should have enough money to hire great teachers who are versed in the latest research findings and empowered by the newest education technologies. And all children should have equal rights to a free, high-quality education tailored to their specific strengths and needs, regardless of their race, family income, native language, immigration status, or disability.

As I've just again had the class I teach explore the New America map of segregation and income inequality among school districts, the vivid extremes in inequity and segregation are fresh in my mind.

And we do not talk about it, let alone do anything to actually change it. 

*and happy Constitution Day! 

Things I am reading this week

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

  The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

  I again reiterate: for education to put any eggs in this basket is badly thought-out.
  
  
• My main takeaway from Chad Aldeman's look at K-12 education spending hitting a trillion dollars is what a huge difference single payer health care would make: 
  

   In 2023-24, schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. As another way to look at it, for every $1,000 that a school spent on salaries, it also paid $438 in benefit costs. These trends may help explain why districts with rising personnel costs are not boosting take-home pay for their workers. 

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

  “With all due respect,” Schneider remembers Bishop replying, “under California’s student press law, being afraid of a lawsuit or backlash is not a valid reason to call for the takedown of content.”

  Colorado Newsline covers Grand Junction High, where the advisor was reassigned apparently due to a single complaint by another staff member over a student editorial on the Gaza conflict most recently; the student paper itself published a piece about student press freedom being under threat from their administration in June. 
  
  
• One would really like to think something like the national civics competition would be outside of meddling from this federal administration. It appears that is not the case.

It is July and so my daisies are in bloom.

Weaponizing what's left of the Department of Education

 

trans colored heart on a sidewalk at Smith College
photo by Kate Hobbs

If you follow me on any social media platform other than this one, you've probably caught my ire that the U.S. Department of Education has now started a (well-publicized) investigation into my alma mater, Smith College for, they say, admitting men. Smith is the largest historically women's college in the country; the college started admitting women who are trans in 2015 (after an uproar over not doing so). The admission policy specifically says Smith:

considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women are eligible to apply to Smith.

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.

Open tabs tonight

 Tabs I have open tonight:

• I urge you to read "A Letter from a Minneapolis Mom" by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl:
  

  This is the story of trying to be a good and moral mom in the city of Minneapolis over the last decade, just like Renee Good and Melissa Hortman were, and how you do it full of uncertainty, in between loads of laundry and grocery runs and kids rolling their eyes at you and generally thinking you’re reckless or a coward, between the Mother’s Day cards that tell you you’re the greatest mom ever

  
  
• Dana Wormald offers commentary on the New Hampshire House Education chair supporting schools segregation, tracing how this gets us (them?) further on support for vouchers.
  
  
• Mark Lieberman went back and did the math to come up with at least $12B that the Trump administration has interfered with in his first year in office.
  
  
• I do recommend reading Matt Barnum's take on the interview last week with Lindsay Burke, 'though I think he's being too generous in finding some explanation in why the federal education policy is incoherent. 
  
  
• I really cannot believe that Massachusetts has two chambers of the Legislature that have decided in all of the things we actually need them to do, they need to weigh in on how we teach kids to read. This straight-up swings the pendulum all one way on reading instruction, which is just not actually how it works¹. And they're going to make it state law, and then we'll be stuck. Such a disservice to us all.

__________________________________

¹stop calling it "evidence-based" and "high quality" in the coverage, by the way; those are not descriptors, but arguments

Not that anyone asked me but: on state education priorities

In their past two meetings, the Board of Ed has established priorities; in November, for the FY27 budget request, and in December, for the Commissioner, which he proposed as being the foundation of a strategic plan. 

I'd first note--and I do realize that the Board here is constrained by state deadlines on budget--that the above is really backwards; you always want to establish your priorities before you do your budgeting. You set your values before you spend your money. 

With that in mind, then, let's consider first the priorities, with a connection to what one would then need for budgetary priorities. 

Let's first note that he started with this slide: 

...which I just find super disheartening as framing. Someday, someone is going to note? remember? that public education is guaranteed by the state "for the preservation of their rights and liberties" and that it is for the good not only of individual children, but for all of us. THAT is what we should be leading with, anytime we are asking how we are doing.

A few thoughts on Tuesday's Board meeting

 This is my ongoing reminder that the only thing you see here is me thinking about things; no one else's policy or position is here.

• While getting to Methuen was a bit of a pain, it's nice for the Board to meet somewhere other than DESE's office. The degree to which the Board is very removed from schools is not helpful.
  
  
• We now have regulations that adhere to the mess of a law the November ballot question left us with, pending further action--eventually?--by legislators, which I guess are going to be informed by the Statewide Graduation Council. I've already noted that I am dubious about this group and its makeup, and I'm even more dubious about the work of any group this large writing a report. Plus, I don't think the Legislature should be the body deciding what it takes to graduate from high school. 
  But obviously, no one asked me.

May Board of Ed: opening comments

Today's meeting is being hosted by Methuen High (which has a stunning auditorium, and I'd quite like to have a box seat for Board of Ed meetings always, thank you). The agenda, which is regulation central, can be found here. 

If this box seat had an electrical outlet, it would be close to perfect.

updating as we go once they start...this will not start on time. 

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

October Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting: opening comments

 The agenda is here; livestream is here

My notes from last night are here

and the meeting has started, but there is no sound on the broadcast...

Things to read this week

 As always, a lot of this has come through on the microblogger sites, but for those who prefer somewhere else: 

Read the report from the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council

 Don't read the Globe, which follows its usual "CITY SCHOOLS FAILING AND NO ONE CARES BUT US" storyline; read the report itself.

Even the report itself still underplays what is the main story--MASSACHUSETTS AMONG MOST SEGREGATED DISTRICTS IN COUNTRY AND NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE AT ALL--but at least its in there, and the fact that the segregation is among DISTRICTS primarily, matters.

School districts were not handed done on a stone tablet from some higher power, folks. We could change them.

If what we fund is what we value, what does it say when the inequities are this stark?

Released Friday from New America is a new report using 2021 funding data, "Crossing the line: Segregation and resource inequality between America's school districts." It looks specifically at "next door neighbor" districts, so to speak, where the gulfs between neighboring districts are the largest.

This is, let's be clear, generally accompanied by gulfs in enrollment by race and ethnicity, too. It doesn't happen accidentally. As they note in the report:

Nationwide, 53 percent of public-school district enrollees are students of color, including 14 percent Black students, 28 percent Latino students, and 5 percent Asian students, among others. However, these students are highly concentrated in a relatively small number of districts, and 26 percent of school systems serve student populations that are more than 90 percent white. The average district border separates districts that are 14 percentage points apart in their proportions of students of color. But along the 100 most racially segregating school district borders in the country, the average separation is between a district that is 92.4 percent white and a district that is 86 percent students of color. 

You can read the full report here (that's a PDF).

From a Massachusetts perspective, I want to call your attention to he multimedia story of 100 most economically segregated lines, because guess what? We're in there.

Four times:

We should of course note that this is 2021 data, so not full implementation of the SOA, but that doesn't mean a) that will be closed or b) more importantly, that the reasons for this shouldn't be examined and combated. A flag of four being in the national top 100 doesn't mean this isn't a statewide issue.

Among the 100 most racially segregated borders: 

I have ongoingly said that the conversation Massachusetts never wants to have is how segregated its school districts are. Even in all the ongoing "number one for some" and descriptions of achievement gaps, we are allergic as a state to discussing why it is that some districts don't even have statistically significant enrollment of students of color or whose first language isn't English.

I don't think that serves any of us well. 

 

PS, because you know I'd never leave off Worcester; you can do these comparisons with any school district borders here. 
Here's Worcester Public Schools compared to surrounding on low income enrollment:

And on students of color:

October Board of Ed: opening comments

 The Board of Ed meets today at 9 am. The agenda is here. The livestream will be here.

I don't like their new room arrangement. 

Equity in funding school buildings

 taking off a bit here from a morning Twitter thread

The Boston Globe's piece this weekend on the Massachusetts School Building Authority features this grabber quote:

Districts with a majority white student population got about $10,000 per student for school projects, the Globe found, while districts made up mostly of students of color got about $6,400 per student.

That's terrible, right? The Globe, though, only quickly glances at why ("students of color, who tend to be clustered in urban districts with deteriorating buildings") in the previous sentence, and it's really a major part of the story.

A district can only put forward one major renovation/rebuild project to the Massachusetts School Building Authority at at time. This is in the spirit of fairness, but it also is out of a concern for any municipality or district's ability to both fund and manage more than one such thing at a time. There have been exceptions made: most notably perhaps, Worcester has had buildings under construction when a new project entered, as the MSBA was assured that the city could fund and manage more than one. 

Most students of color in Massachusetts are concentrated in 20 or so of the largest urban districts in the state. As those are large districts, they have more school buildings. They still can only apply for one project at a time on it. 

There are also many, many more school districts that are not the cities: there are about 314 school districts in Massachusetts.

As the practice is every district can have one at a time, the "one at a time" necessarily is going to hit many more white kids than kids of color, by virtue of where each tend to go to school.

Noting that, though, would mean we'd have to talk about how most kids of color are concentrated in a limited number of districts--districts that also have been historically underfunded--which also have more buildings.

The demographics on this are stark, with wild swings in demography when crossing city lines. I always recommend people pull open DESE's district profile page and compare any city to the surrounding suburbs.

That segregation--and that's exactly what it is!--doesn't happen accidentally. It also doesn't change unless and until we choose to do something about it. 

Most Americans now live in mixed-race neighborhoods

 I've had this piece, this analysis, really from the Washington Post open in a tab for a week now, waiting to be able to do something with it, because I think it's really important to a lot of things about how we live as Americans, education among them.

(Note, incidentally, that I've used a gift link for that; you don't need a subscription to the Washington Post to read it.)

The evaluation the Post did is based on this: 

When we say neighborhoods, we mean census tracts, which typically hold about 3,800 people. We created our tract data by rolling up even smaller block-level estimates to fit 2020 census tract boundaries, so that we could compare individual neighborhoods over time — something that’s not usually possible given the constantly shifting outlines of official census tracts.

 And they found this: 

Back in 1990, 78 percent of White people lived in predominantly White neighborhoods, where at least 4 of every 5 people were also White. In the 2020 Census, that’s plunged to 44 percent.

The piece has some great visuals on this--charts, maps, other things to play with--so I really urge you to take a look. 

I keep hoping to see someone take this up with the election results from Tuesday--if you see something, let me know?--because I'd be really interested if this had an impact both on attitude and access. It would seem to me that this make differences in both counts.

From an education perspective, of course, most children attend schools based on where they live. If where they live is more integrated, that makes a difference in the make-up of their schools. That's pretty huge.

From a Massachusetts perspective, we're tracking with the trend as a state: 

And a new 2020 majority in mixed neighborhoods is true both of what's nationally seen as metro Boston and the metro Worcester/Hartford thing. 
HOWEVER, if you zoom in on the map showing in which decade each county passed "most residents living in mixed race neighborhoods," and note that "never" is grey:

...it really depends where in Massachusetts you are. 
Anyway, neat stuff! Go look! 

What I want from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

 At Monday's Joint Committee on Public Health hearing, Rep. Mindy Domb asked the school committee panelists what they could use from DESE this year. I asked on Twitter if she'd take that input from others, and she said yes. Here, slightly edited from Monday, is what I sent in. 

train platform at Union Station, Worcester

In my capacity as a member of the Worcester School Committee and a parent of a high school sophomore, I am leaping at Rep. Domb’s request to send in what we could use from DESE this year. As I write this on my train homebound to Worcester, fully masked and looking at a smoky Massachusetts from western fires, I am wondering, I have to say, about what sort of world we’re arranging for our children.

I do want to start, however, by thanking you with all my heart for today’s hearing. It was the very first—and I am not exaggerating—time I have felt that any organized state level public body or group of officials in Massachusetts has acknowledged just how local districts have been profoundly misserved the past eighteen months. In all the reading I have done of the various types of challenges schools have faced for centuries, never did I imagine that when the challenge came for Massachusetts public education that the state leadership would abandon its responsibilities. And yet they did, and they have continued to do right up through their non-appearance today. Thank you for hearing and acknowledging that; thank you even more for working to change that.

Rep. Domb asked what we would want of the Department in our capacities at the local level, month by month. Let me start by saying that I want the Department to center my kids—and those of Boston, and Chelsea, and Lynn, and Fall River, and Springfield, and Pittsfield—in their decisions. It has been exhaustingly clear that the Governor lives in Swampscott and the Secretary in Milton and (more to the point) they never leave. We cannot and will not have equity in this state unless and until we first acknowledge the profound segregation of school districts and what impact that then in turn has on absolutely everything we do. The community health leadership who testified today are entirely correct: we have had our response to this pandemic backwards from nearly the beginning. The question should never be “is it okay for the kids in Swampscott?”; it should always be “is it okay for the kids in Springfield?”

Those children—my kids in Worcester—have parents who have been working front line jobs throughout the pandemic. Those are literally the people that Worcester has depended on to keep our hospitals open, crucially, as they are the custodians, the food service, the CNAs and more of our hospitals on which the central Mass health system depends. They have worked long hours and have been worried about COVID throughout. Some of our families ran small businesses, and some of them have closed. The hunger, the concerns about homelessness, and all of the cascading impacts of the pandemic have hit our families.

This hasn’t been a “shift to take out and Amazon” pandemic for most Worcester Public Schools kids.

So first, yes, as soon as the shots were widely available to school staff (and what a mess that was!), the state should have mandated for them. If it meant quite that much to them to have our kids in schools, then they should make it as safe as absolutely possible. 

Likewise, as soon as the vaccines were available for our students, we should have seen a profound push first for city kids to get them vaccinated, with the expectation that all would be required, down to age 12 for fall.

And then the state should have spent the entire summer at every single possible space at which people have gathered in cities—farmers markets, outdoor church services, festivals of every kind—having vaccinations there. They should have rolled out PSAs with any and everyone who has any kind of following—sports, music, and more—having them use their social media to magnify that anyone who was anyone was getting vaccines. They should have worked with the Statewide Student Advisory Council, first, to make sure they’re vaccinated, and then to have them use their social media reach, and those of their student government peers, to reach out further to their peers. Make teen vaccination a constantly trending topic on Instagram.

As you note, Rep. Decker, we’re now five weeks out. How much of this can be done now? I don’t know. But we shouldn’t give up the weeks we have. DESE should absolutely be using its reach and messaging to push as many as possible to be vaccinated as soon as possible.

And then, yes, it should be mandated at the state level in partnership with DPH. I don’t want to be the test case for a district mandating vaccinations of students, but if I have to (and if I can get the votes), I absolutely will. This is not my job as a school committee member. It wasn’t my superintendent’s job to cancel school in a pandemic, either, though, and she had to do that. 

It also, as it long since should have been, should be mandated for all school employees. We’ve been told that this is something we’ll need to negotiate with our collective bargaining units. If DESE wanted to be useful, they could make it embarrassing for the unions to fight this; as a former member of the MTA, I will find it horrifying if my former union argues that this isn’t in their members’ interest. 

The state should also absolutely mandate masks for all in school buildings for the coming year. This is, I agree, a no brainer. And there should be no exceptions for wealthier white communities that don’t have front line workers and have managed early high rates of vaccinations, either. Lines between communities are invisible; so is the virus. 

I would like the state to give solid research on just want kinds of realistic improvements we can make to ventilation in the buildings we actually have with the time and money we actually have. Stop sending us pie in the sky idealized and expensive options when our floor plans and our building ages are available to the state. What should we spend time and money on and what is a waste? This, again, would have been more useful months ago, but I’ll take it now. Give it to us in phases: what can we do now, what could we do if there are two weeks off in December, what can we plan for next summer?

I would like the state to do what they should have done this summer (but again, here we are): create a statewide mobilization of after school programs. Yes, let’s run some in schools, but we also have plenty of community resources. How do we make sure that any student who needs a place to be after school has a safe place to be? Cross reference those with the school districts to ensure those students also have what schoolwork support those students specifically need as part of their after school hours. That should, though, only be part of that. 

(This isn’t what you asked, but I’d further extend that to making sure every student of a particular age—fourth grade?—also got swimming lessons.)

The state should create and staff statewide affinity groups for anyone who will be dealing with students emotional and social impacts of this year. I am very worried of how much we’re pushing onto our adjustment and guidance counselors this year, and I’m certain that some of that is going to end up on teachers, too. Yes, we at the district level should be supporting them, too, but the state has capacity to create common support groups. They often can better point to resources.

There also should be common catalogues of resources: online, easy to access, well organized, for any school staff to access as they have need to for their students. 

Heading into teachers going back to school, the Department should use every channel they have to emphasize that the first job of schools is not reading scores or math scores; it’s supporting students. There should be no question in anyone’s mind who walks into a school building this fall as to what we’re about. That will need repeating over the course of the year, particularly once we get into spring and what traditionally is test prep season. In general, the messaging on academics has been less than stellar. Students are in very very different places right now, and that is to be expected. That should be the first message from the state.

As we head further into fall, the danger of students showing up sick to school will grow. First, we certainly need a flu vaccine mandate this winter (and one that sticks this time). We also, though, need a clear message that showing up for school sick (whether you’re staff or student!) is a bad idea. We need flexibility with DESE on outreach to students who stay home (as there’s no easy switch to remote this year), and we need a hard discussion on accountability accordingly. We can, if we are smart about it, emphasize the importance of school without encouraging “presenteeism” as your speaker today had it. 

We also need the state for the holidays—first the long weekend in October, then Thanksgiving and forward—to create real mandates on testing after traveling, even discouraging traveling as needed depending on what things look like around the country. We have to be consistent that we are endangering unvaccinated children when we aren’t strong on these standards. 

Should we have under 12 year old students eligible for vaccinations by the turn of the calendar year, then, yes, we must be more than ready to go. It must be mandated but in concert with vaccinations being in schools. This should be, as you noted (and as we already should have) Rep. Domb, multi-lingual resources for families that respond to frequent questions and misinformation about vaccines in children. Again, that should be anywhere there are families, should be culturally responsive, should be easy to find, should be above all accessible. We will know this is a success if the rates in Chelsea exceed those of Brookline. 

I am certain that as soon as I send this, I will think of much more. This is the first time that someone has asked, though, and I want to send this right in so you understand how much it means to be asked. Contrary to what the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education said in their evaluation of the Commissioner, this was not, has not, been well handled for any of us at the local level. 

I would be more than glad to speak with any of you regarding this at any time.

Thank you again for asking the question. 

How school district boundaries enable segregation

Not about New England but could be:

In the suburbs today, there appears to be little concern over the racial segregation that was exacerbated by the new district lines. Residents note that Collierville, where 60 percent of students are white, is more diverse than the district serving Memphis, where students are overwhelmingly African American. Even in neighboring Germantown, 1 in 4 students are black, Asian or Hispanic.
“Longtime residents of Memphis and Shelby County have grown weary in many ways of the spotlight on desegregation,” said Jeff Jones, chief of staff for Collierville schools. “People feel, ‘We tried that. We went there, and it didn’t work.’ That’s the resignation a lot of people have arrived at.” Instead, he said, the goal is for each district to do the best job possible with the children it has.
Collierville allows students from other districts in the county to transfer in, but charges about $400 each, with 466 transfer students this year. Germantown has considered charging tuition as well, but so far has not.
Jones added that longtime residents of Collierville are invested in Memphis’s success, but he said newer arrivals hardly relate to the central city, living their lives in the suburbs. “They eat here, shop here, worship here.

On desegregation

I've had a running list of articles and such to share around desegregation, which after that late June exchange at the Democratic presidential debates has suddenly become a hot topic. I've just finished reading Professor Ansley Erickson's Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (see tweet thread here) about the desegregation of the Nashville schools and that interaction with the larger city of Nashville and surrounding county. I'd highly recommend it; I found a lot to be learned in overlaps with larger national policies or in reflection on more local ones. Next, as I mentioned in my last post on this topic, I'm reading Professor Rucker Johnson's Children of the Dream: Why Integration Works.
As the experience of Senator Kamala Harris was in Berkeley, this piece on Berkeley's history and current status on desegregation is worth considering. Unlike many other places, Berkeley has shifted, but not given up on desegregating its school system, even as both the city and the system of laws has changed.
The 45th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley was two weeks ago, and there was quite a bit on how this decision, which found that, in essence, the districts surrounding Detroit could not be made to be part of its desegregation, shaped the landscape of schools today. I recommend this piece from Professor Jon Hale and this lengthy piece that aired on NPR stations.
Earlier last month, the Washington Post published this piece on how desegregation became the third rail of Democratic politics. The question of de jure versus de facto segregation is likewise taken up in Erickson's book.
And to tie this back around to the still looming issue here in Massachusetts, which of course is not only in Massachusetts, Ed Build published a tool that walks through district lines and funding which I highly recommend. You can read some of what one discovers from it here.