Some things to read from across the country

 It's a whole big country out there, and, even though it is summer, there is stuff happening around schools:

• People in Worcester may or may not remember this--I believe it was in the fogginess of everything being remote, meetings happening seemingly multiple times a week, and state guidance changing nearly as fast--but there was an effort at one point to implement a surveillance of students' online activity under the guise of mental health. This was (appropriately!) brought to the School Committee, that weighed in against it.
  If you're wondering what that then would have looked like, please read this piece from May McCoy in the Kansas Reflector about what it's like to be a student at Lawrence High School in Kansas:
  

  It would be easy to describe what’s happening to students at Lawrence High School as Orwellian, but that would be an easy and not exactly fitting metaphor. It does resemble in general the dystopian novels we used to be assigned to read in high school — “1984” and “Brave New World” — but a more accurate comparison is to a science fiction novella you may have never heard of.

  In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” published in 1956 and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002, a predictive policing system is used to arrest people before they have the chance to commit the crime they are expected to. Dick’s story — like the use of Gaggle — pits authoritarianism and conformity against creativity and individual liberty.

  Read it, because the sales pitch here to school officials is how "safe" it will make their students, while, of course, doing no such thing. Watch for this one.  

• Even though Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a "mandate" that every public school in Oklahoma would teach the Bible, a growing number of them are saying that they aren't going to do that, leading to this great column by Clay Horning, asking what Walters really wants, and what he's actually getting: 
  

  ...making Walters looks even smaller, dumber, simpler and more ridiculous than he previously appeared, which is hard to do.

   Go, Oklahoma districts! 
  

• The New York Times Sunday Magazine covered the push to deny undocumented students or even the children of undocumented immigrants an education. 
  This is of course not only dumb--it poorly serves the country not to educate children who are here--but would reverse current regulation and policy.
  That's a gift link. Please read it and share it. 

So what's the deal with the low income measurement?

Why is there discussion/controversy/activism about the low income implementation in school funding in the House 2 budget?

As I mentioned when I ran through the Governor's proposed budget back in January, most of the sections of the Foundation Budget Review Commission's recommendations and the Student Opportunity Law that had to do with funding were implemented at 1/7th of the goal, under the general understanding that this will be phased in over seven years.
Not low income.
What did happen with low income was this: the law provided for a one year "best option" count on students: for each district, the state looked at the direct certification count--the one we've been using, through the matching of students via the databases--and also ran the FY16 percentage of students that were low income then (the last year that everyone was being credited on free/reduced lunch, 'though some districts had already switched), and each district got the higher of those two counts.
Note that if you download the FY16 spreadsheet, you can double-check your number by calculating your percentage of low income students that year. I assume that there were business offices that did this ahead of time. And each of the FY21 preliminary foundation budget sheets has, in the bottom right corner, a comparison of the FY16 percentage applied to this year's enrollment and this year's direct certification:

Here's Worcester's. See the blue box? 

That "best of," as has been widely noted, added about 46,000 students statewide to the count of low income. Those students, of course, were not all in one district, and, as with any such count, there were districts that benefited more than others. Worcester picked by 2000 more students for this year; as Mike noted, Northbridge actually lost kids even with the FY16 count being used (it would have gone lower if it were only direct cert) and so on.
However, as a result of the the increased count of students, the state of course had to increase the amount of funding going to that line. In order to keep to the overall $300M or so planned--the overall 1/7th--the rate change was only implemented by 4/100ths, not the 1/7th of the other sections.

This was part of the Mass Taxpayers' Foundation presentation yesterday
to the Connecticut Valley Superintendents' Roundtable.
We were told it is a slide that DESE doesn't like.

This isn't a thing that I or anyone else cooked up; you can find it right on DESE's page on FY21 under "Foundation Budget Rates."
As noted in the above slide that you probably can't read, this means the rates for low income will then have to pick up the difference over the next six years in order to meet the seven year generally understood goal.
It also, as a side note, means that some of the money gets postponed having inflation applied by a year.
The slide also notes, however, that the final section of the law says that the changes are to be implemented in "an equitable and consistent manner."
Thus the question is: is this equitable? is this consistent? does it line up with the intent of the law? is in line with what was fought so hard for?

A number of us are arguing that it doesn't.

Two additional notes after the jump:

On loving kids

From this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer: 

The children of God are trapped in a cave outside of Mae Sai, Thailand — some 8,000 miles away — but they are also hopping atop moving trains and wading across dangerous rivers to flee the gangs in San Pedro Sula, or they are trapped in neighborhoods in Philadelphia or Chicago where the murder rates are too damn high. God’s children are our children, too, but we grown-ups can have funny ways of showing our love and mercy.

One Oklahoma representative wants to round up ELL kids

Yes, it's as awful as it sounds:

Republican Rep. Mike Ritze told CBS affiliate KWTV that he has another proposal in mind: Rounding up the state’s 82,000 non-English-speaking students and handing them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Identify them and then turn them over to ICE to see if they truly are citizens — and do we really have to educate noncitizens?” Ritze asked.

As the article points out, the Supreme Court weighed in on this issue in Plyer v. Doe in 1981, finding that those who are undocumented are people "in any ordinary sense of the term," and thus were protected (and afforded equal access to education) under the Fourteenth Amendment.
And this did not escape the ACLU:

All children living in the United States have a guaranteed right to a public education, & Oklahoma cannot strip them of that right. https://t.co/Nwhy73gqzV

— ACLU National (@ACLU) May 12, 2017

Today in things that are wrong

From around the web:

• States that already were funding their schools at the lowest levels are those that cut the most during the recent recession. Also, while Massachusetts is way down on that list, check out the actual numbers: 70.7% of our districts cut per pupil funding, and we're down 6.3% 2009-12 in actual dollars. Worrisome.
• New York City was going to go with universal lunch, then discovered what we had--that you're going to throw off your Title I funding if you do so. Two things wrong here: 1. this seems fixable. 2. the end of this article has a school nutrition director commenting that her enrollment is down 14% but her reimbursements are up. That has nothing to do with Title I, however: school nutrition reimbursements may well be up, but if her enrollment is down 14%, then the Title I funding for the district is down, as well. 
• The National Council on Teacher Quality is coming out with another report on teacher preparation and it's probably going to be a mess again. 
• The Gates Foundation is now calling for...a two year moratorium on consequences of Common Core testing? Really? 
• There are thousands of kids entering the US unaccompanied by parents or guardians due to growing violence in parts of Central America.