Four things I would have preferred the House do this week

1.  Move forward the bar on religious exemptions for vaccinations. Just this week, the West Virginia bar withstood a federal appeals challenge. Just today, the AP is noting that babies too young for the MMR vaccine become "sitting ducks" in an outbreak. Given the anti-vaccine push by the federal government (as much as the courts are doing what they can), we cannot afford cracks in our community immunity. 
   
   
2. Do literally anything at all about Massachusetts being the only state in the country that has Democrats in charge of both chambers and the Governor's office and has a 287(g) contract with ICE. 
   Seriously. Anything at all. You could even pass a bill to make it illegal, like Maryland or Virginia, as that's the whole reason we have a legislature: making laws. 
   
   
3. Pass legislation protecting our immigrant neighbors from being preyed upon by the federal government, like the PROTECT Act, which passed out of committee two weeks ago, yet somehow was not seen as being as urgent as that bill on cell phones. I have been told they passed this? That missed my radar. One hopes it receives half the urgency from the rest of the process that this appears to have
    
4. Move forward the legislation that updates how inflation is calculated in the foundation budget, and make it effective for FY27, better aligning the foundation budget with district costs (and perhaps keeping us from the mistake of digging even bigger hold harmless aid holes).
   
   

please enjoy these pansies from my walk to work in Boston

Applying Mahmoud v. Taylor to vaccines is alarming

 On Monday, the Supreme Court sent a case challenging New York State's ending of religious exemptions for vaccines back to the appeals court " for further consideration in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor."

Mahmoud, of course, was the decision that allows parents to exempt their children from, well, basically anything in a school, on religious grounds. 

Slate covers the issue here well: 

Unfortunately, Mahmoud’s author, Justice Samuel Alito, wrote the opinion so sweepingly that this interpretation is entirely plausible. He evinced no concern for the rights of other students—like, say, the children of LGBTQ+ parents who might feel stigmatized by the removal of books that depict families like theirs. And he contemplated no clear limits to parents’ freedom “to direct the religious upbringing of their children.” Instead, he indicated that when parents’ faith-based demands conflict with democratically enacted education policies, it is the parents who must win out and the contested policies that must yield. So the Amish plaintiffs in Miller v. McDonald are not off base when they say that Mahmoud establishes their right to send their kids to school unvaccinated. Alito’s decision is so recklessly capacious that it arguably allows parents to challenge even the most basic school-safety measures on religious grounds.

Mahmoud did at least acknowledge that infringements upon this newfound First Amendment right may survive if they are “narrowly tailored” to serve a “compelling government interest.” The plaintiffs argue that the existence of New York’s medical exemption proves that there is no compelling interest in overturning its religious exemption, insisting that these opt-outs are analogous. But they are not: As the 2nd Circuit explained, there is “a difference in magnitude” between the frequency of religious and medical exemption, with families claiming the former vastly more often than the latter. Medical exemptions are also easier to police, since states can require licensed doctors to explain why each child has a legitimate need to forgo vaccination. Public health experts have shown that religious exemptions were linked to recent outbreaks—like New York’s measles epidemic—while medical exemptions were not.

In a week in which South Carolina reports what they've termed an "accelerating" measles outbreak  and Connecticut has just reported their first case in four years, it would certainly seem as if there is a compelling interest here. It is alarming that the Supreme Court would wonder otherwise.

Two ways the news isn't good today

 Happy Monday back from Thanksgiving! 
Two pieces of not great news today:

• We are just failing all over the place on vaccinations, and that has consequences. Last week, the United Nations warned that 30 million children around the world have missed measles vaccinations, and "...outbreaks continue to rise sharply." To wit:
  

  In 2024, 59 countries experienced large or disruptive outbreaks – almost three times as many as in 2021 – and a quarter of them had previously eliminated measles.

  At the same time, here in the U.S., whooping cough numbers are outpacing those of last year. A third baby in Kentucky died last week. 
  
  

• I will admit the phrasing here made me laugh, but it turns out an "old fashioned web search" is better for learning than using large language models (generative AI). This is from research published in October through the National Academy of Sciences. 
  And at the same time, the argument schools have been hearing on why students need to be 'taught' AI seems to not be panning out: AI use in businesses has flatlined.
  

  Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.

  That one's from The Economist, by the way, the "we're looking to see if there is money to be made" coverage, so perhaps we can take that to the bank? 

Things to read this week

 Here are some tabs I have open that I'd recommend reading: 

• When we do facilities in the college class I teach, one thing my students most often remark on is the disparities among play space outdoors: who has a playground? who has access to grass?
  UC Davis is doing some interesting work measuring heat in school playyards, which particularly an issue for urban schools, where often the only play space is a patch of asphalt, and in a warming world. 
  
  
• You may have caught headlines about Alpha Schools, the chain that claims kids can spend just two hours a day with their generative AI "tutoring" overseen by adults who are not teachers. I urge you to read Wired's extensive piece on the actual experience of families, who are now pulling their kids out due to how their children were treated. This particularly matters as the chain is expanding across the country, funded in many places by vouchers.
  
  
• Reports this morning that Louisiana officials hid the whooping cough outbreak for months that killed two infants combined with this ProPublica piece reporting from Idaho, which now bans vaccine mandates, and where advocates hope to spread such laws, continues the trend towards what were preventable illnesses that kill, and particularly kill children, coming back full force. 
  It also increases the urgency of Massachusetts following Connecticut, New York, and Maine in barring religious exemptions.

I really like this red shed and tree across from
one of the elementary schools in East Longmeadow

A federalist vaccine policy hurts us all

 I recommend reading The New Yorker on what is becoming our federalized--as opposed to national--vaccine policy. 

Given Kennedy’s pedigree of vaccine skepticism, one might have expected him to take a sledgehammer to the bedrock of public health: the injections that have protected us against numerous infectious diseases for generations. In reality, the impact of his policies has been more like that of a freeze-thaw cycle. Rocks have tiny fissures into which water can seep; when the temperature drops, the water expands into ice, exerting pressure and widening the cracks. The cycle repeats and, eventually, the rock begins to fall apart. For the nation’s public-health infrastructure, Kennedy’s tenure has been one freeze-thaw cycle after another. The cracks are getting bigger.

Our requirements that children be vaccinated to attend school has been an incredible public health success:

 The C.D.C. estimates that routine childhood vaccination in the U.S. has saved more than a million lives, averted hundreds of millions of illnesses, and led to trillions of dollars in societal savings.

Something to remember? We aren't actually all that divided on this one:

 According to a new KFF-Washington Post survey, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that public schools should require students to get immunized against diseases such as polio and measles. 

Don't forget to get your fall flu and COVID shots! 

What I really hope the education universe jettisons over the summer

Early azalea in New Hampshire

While there are obviously some very big things--bombing countries! kidnapping people! removing rights and harassing people! returning epidemics of diseases for which we have vaccines! defunding large portions of the government! lying, ongoingly, about nearly everything!--there are also some very 'education universe' things that I'd* love for us to jettison over the summer: