Some things to read

A few things I recommend reading: 

• Calling out the FY21 budget which does nothing for districts under the Student Opportunity Act, Brian Allen, Colin Jones, Diane Kelley, and Glenn Koocher (you'll recognize some names there) write of the impact and note that solutions exist in today's Commonwealth Magazine:
  

  This year Revere could lose $10 million and Worcester could lose $16 million in state aid if the SOA is not funded. So far, these districts are surviving because they can save money by not transporting kids to school and reducing other costs associated with in-person learning. But should Revere, Worcester, and many other cities move to in-person or hybrid learning, costs will skyrocket. 
  We are a wealthy state and have the capacity to help every school weather this crisis and provide their students with the same level of education as students in the wealthiest districts. All of our organizations believe that the state can raise the tax revenue we need for education (and other key areas such as public health, housing, transit, and child care). Research from MassBudget argues that the best way to do so is by asking profitable corporations and wealthy individuals, who continue to take home an outsized share of income earned in our state, to pay more in taxes. 

  ...to which I will only add: Hear, hear.

• The Hechinger Report had a good piece last week that described not only rundown facilities, but the vast gulfs between districts in the school buildings they have, which related to the decisions they made about whether to bring students back into those buildings (and if families agreed):
  

  States have no reason to be surprised by the sharp divide in children’s access to their schools. More than 40 percent of school districts need to update or replace their ventilation systems in at least half of their schools, according to a report by the Government Accounting Office. Moreover, low-poverty districts spent about $1 billion more on school construction than high-poverty districts in 2016, which comes to 41 percent more per student.

• And just out today, a study from Imperial College, London, looks at the impact the English lockdown (started November 5 and just being raised now) had on rates of coronavirus across the country. Rates were doubling every nine days before the lockdown; during it, they halved approximately every 37 days. Overall, rates fell by 30%. When one looks at subpopulations, as covered in the release from the College itself, most groups trended downward, with a single notable exception: 
  

  While previously all age groups were experiencing a rise in infections, now most are seeing a fall, with the exception of children between the ages of 5 and 17 where positive tests are increasing. This trend could be linked to schools remaining open during the current lockdown, in contrast with the first national lockdown, the researchers suggest. In those aged 13-17, the prevalence is now over 2% or 1 in 50 testing positive.

  Most things closed. Schools did not. Rates fell overall, but not for school-aged children, where they rose while they attended schools.  

November Board of Ed: later blog

 Duty called elsewhere on Tuesday, and thus, you get this much later

The agenda is here; the livestream is here.

What I proposed

 Since the list of what I'd proposed as alternatives to the goals proposed by Superintendent Binienda made today's paper, I thought I'd post in full my list. I didn't put the numbers in for the meeting, as I thought we should really have the discussion as part of that, and it was clear it was going to subcommittee. 

• Professional practice goal: Superintendent Binienda and her cabinet will participate in specifically implicit bias training of an ongoing monthly nature. aligns with indicators IV-B and IV-D
• Student learning goal: The Worcester Public Schools will lower the dropout rate of English Language learners to the average district rate of 2.5%. aligns with indicator I-B and I-F
• District Improvement goal: Using restorative justice as a best practice as supported by the FY21 budget and closely collaborating with families, the Worcester Public Schools will lower the student suspension rate across all subgroups to no more than 2%. aligns with indicator I-E, I-F, III-D
• District Improvement goal: Superintendent Binienda and the Worcester School Committee will collaborate with the City Manager and the Worcester City Council on a comprehensive facilities renovation timeline for municipal buildings by the end of calendar year 2021. aligns with indicator II-A

There was also some discussion at the meeting at putting some numbers behind the hiring directions, which I think makes a lot of sense. 

The dog that didn't bark in Brockton

 blog title from "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" among the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, referring to the dog not barking being a key clue in solving the mystery, as one would have expected it to, given the circumstances of the mystery.

The Old Post Office Building,
now the Crosby Administration Building of the Brockton Public Schools

One of the duties assigned to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (specifically by MGL Ch. 15, Sec. 55A) is district comprehensive reviews as follows:

The office shall perform not less than 40 school district audits annually, not less than 75 per cent of which shall be in districts whose students achieve at low levels either in absolute terms or relative to districts that educate similar student populations. The remainder of the audits shall be divided equally among districts whose students achieve at high levels relative to districts that educate similar student populations and randomly selected districts

You can read a bit more about them here. The most recent ones are posted online here. Each one looks at:

• Leadership and Governance
• Curriculum and Instruction
• Assessment
• Human Resources and Professional Development
• Student Support
• Financial and Asset Management

Now, if you're like me, you're seeing "audit" and reading "DESE" and thinking "YIKES!" I want to encourage you to take a look at them, though, as they are a useful perspective across the whole of a district. Worcester's, being from 2017, is increasingly dated but it is here.

So it was that I was interested to read an article that the Brockton Public Schools District Review Report was out (three weeks ago: I am behind!) from the Department's pre-pandemic visit in early March.
Brockton, of course, is the fourth largest school district in Massachusetts and home of the plaintiffs of both the McDuffy and the Hancock legal decisions. When it comes to gaps in school funding, thus, Brockton is a kind of ground zero. Brockton also was the nationally lauded district for closing the achievement gap without becoming a "drill and kill" sort of school system. What happens when those two things are true of the same system, decades or so on?

From the perspective of the Department per the opening paragraph, this:

Since its previous height nearly a decade ago as a recognized leader in closing the achievement gap, Brockton has experienced a continual decline in academic outcomes according to the most recent state data, with 10 of its 21 schools now ranked in the lowest 10 percent of Massachusetts schools. The district eliminated 212 positions from 2014 to 2019 due to budget cuts. These positions included key curricular and instructional leadership roles that were either eliminated entirely or their responsibilities redistributed elsewhere. The district’s decision to reduce leadership, primarily at the secondary level, in order to protect teaching positions has resulted in unstable systems and practices to create and drive improvement initiatives.

(as an utter side note: I do want to laud the writing on these; they're not full of lingo, they're easy to follow, and they're well constructed.)

There are many things I could say about this report--for one, I think the understanding it brings to "policy" is off-base--but I want to focus on this one, which is the central driving theme, but is also interesting in terms of what is not said. 

The argument is that Brockton has had falling achievement due to a hollowing out of its administrative management through its budgetary prioritization and thus there hasn't been the sort of alignment and oversight that is needed for good teaching that reaches students where they are. 

Let me first note that I don't dispute the premise--which some would--that having some degree of management that ensures things like all of the third graders get to the standards of third grade math, no matter where they are in the district, or that what happens in fourth grade logically follows what happens in third, and that the feedback loop of assessment showing that either of those two things are not happening then shifts what is going on in classrooms is necessary. I agree that it is necessary, particularly in a district where those third graders are in different buildings, where students move in and out, and where there are possibly more elementary school teachers than one can easily fit in a room. 

As much as not funding administration properly is frequently an argument during budget deliberations, having an underfunded administration is also, though, not something that's necessarily going to surprise anyone from Brockton. It has been clear from the district's own numbers that they are short administrators. See, for example, this from October of 2018:

From the October 2018 "Take of Four Cities" presentation

That $3.5M FY17 gap in the top line is real positions that didn't (and one assumes still don't) exist in Brockton. They are legitimately short central administration. This is not uncommon among Gateway Cities, and it was also noted over and again during the fight to get the Foundation Budget Review Commission's recommendations into law.

The Department's report continues:

The decision to reduce the leadership force was not informed by district goals or an analysis of data. It was based on the idea that teachers can be effective without sufficient leadership and ignored the value of having high-level leaders to support and monitor high-quality teaching. This approach also avoided the reality that even with fiscal restrictions, it is possible to provide clarity about strategies and expectations for high-quality teaching practices, along with structures to support teachers and monitor the quality of instruction. Evidence gathered during the review indicated that the district did not fully appreciate the cascading impact of reduced leadership and supervision on the quality of curriculum, instruction, and student support services. Consequently, student achievement continues to deteriorate, even with added support and intervention from DESE’s Statewide System of Support.

This is, of course, just the sort of argument that drives a school committee member in a district that the state has conceded is massively underfunded to fury, and, as we see in the article, it did:

Minichiello, the school committee member, said an ever-tightening budget forced leaders to make a series of lose-lose decisions.
“What are we supposed to do? Hire more administrators?” he said. “Don’t tell that to the mother whose first grader is in a class with 30 kids.”

The argument that it had to be one or the other, that it literally was teachers' jobs on the line, isn't made up. Here's the FY17 comparison of Brockton's actual teaching corps versus what it should, by the state's foundation calculation, be:

From the 2018 "Tale of Four Cities" presentation
You are reading correctly that it is a 414 teacher gap.

In other words, while Brockton undoubtedly did cut central administration staff to save teaching jobs, the district still remained catastrophically--over 400 teachers, per the foundation budget--short of teaching staff by the state's own measures. 

The reaction the School Committee thus had this past spring to the promised first year of the Student Opportunity Act thus perhaps was not surprising: they planned to hire teachers. To this, the Department offers this critique (on page 5 of the Executive Summary under "Financial and Asset Management"):

The district is anticipating an additional $21,093,362 in Chapter 70 state aid following the passage of the Student Opportunity Act (2019). At the time of the onsite review, the district had begun to prioritize how to allocate the funds. However, the school committee had approved restoring 93 teaching positions before the full development of an updated strategic plan or district improvement plan. While this added infusion of funds can go a long way toward remediating some of the serious effects of reduced personnel, programs, and services the district has experienced in recent years, the district and its students would benefit from more thoughtful analysis and decision-making.

Again, I am entirely in favor of both thoughtful planning and of ensuring alignment with overall district goals. It would seem from the above gaping holes in personnel, however, that priority one for the district, spoken or otherwise, may well have be "stop bleeding."

The report offers a number of critiques that, from where I sit, potentially don't cost a dime. There is a discussion of consistent and timely assessment of students, followed by shared timely and actionable data, with a repeated note that this is something the School Committee should be using in their decision making (which, you may be sure, captured my attention in more ways than one; there are a number of things Worcester should be noting from this document). There is a challenge to share evidence of district performance with the community in multiple ways, and there is a critique (which I would echo) that the district could well use more accessible budgetary documentation. 

Fair enough. 

The "challenges and areas for growth" section of the Leadership and Governance section argues:

By focusing on external factors such as budget challenges rather than analyzing data and focusing on improving teaching and learning, district leaders have lowered expectations for themselves and students and have not recognized their power to improve all students’ performance, opportunities, and outcomes.

By failing to recognize that budget challenges are a key factor in student, school, and district performance--something which is not in dispute--the evaluation of the district misses a real opportunity to evaluate what can effectively be done by a district that is catastrophically underfunded and runs a real risk of the recommendations that are less monetary dependent being dismissed wholesale due to the documents non-barking dog.

My sense of this evaluation is this--and please note this is entirely surmise and conjecture on my part:

We have, as I have noted in the past, a tendency at the classroom, school, and even district level to talk about "the state" as if that is a single entity in education in Massachusetts. It is, of course, multiple entities, and that is, I think, what causes this report to be silent. 

What we refer to as “the state” is the Legislature, of course, and at the end of the day, the funding lies there, more than anywhere. The interaction between the Legislature and the Department is, in my limited experience, somewhat odd, as, again, the Department isn’t entirely subject to the Governor. It is the Legislature that has effectively been absent this year in the funding of Student Opportunity Act, due to when the pandemic hit. It was the Legislature, however, that (finally) had recognized the need to first look at the foundation budget and then change the calculation. By passing a bill unanimously in both chambers, they put the Governor in the position of either signing the bill or having his veto overridden. His hand was forced.

Evaluations of districts are, as I noted above, a function of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. As such, they are a function of the Executive branch, if one that is quasi-independent of the Governor. Changing the foundation budget has not been a priority of this Governor, nor has it been a priority of the Secretary of Education he appointed, nor of the Board of Education most of whom he also appointed. This all lends itself to a Commissioner who, while he has upon occasion mentioned the undercalculation of the foundation budget, has not centered his leadership on this issue, for all that his most notable experience in leadership prior to this one was in Lawrence. 

We thus don’t have an activist Department around education funding, for better or worse, and I recognize that there are multiple perspectives possible on that. Do note, that more activist Boards and Commissioners have existed in the past—look, for example, at where much of the energy around desegregation came in the 1960’s and 1970’s, for all that they were not successful. That is not this Commissioner, nor, thus, is it this Department.

This seems, then, to effectively tie the hands of the Department when it comes to noting the real impacts of decades of underfunding on school and district performance. The evaluation does not--cannot?--parse out what is in fact poor governance on the part of the district and what is due to simply not having the money to get the job done.

Both are possible. Both may well be the case in Brockton. 
That dog sure isn't barking, though

offered with all due respect to His Excellency the Bishop

 I offer the following with enormous respect for the Catholic educators, here and elsewhere. 

I am not otherwise going to offer further comment on the letter from Bishop McManus in today's paper, but when we get into school finance, we're on my home turf, so I did want to correct the misapprehension here:

The best example of how the Catholic Church is helping the city is in the area of elementary and high school education. Each year, hundreds of young people are opting to enroll in our schools. Catholic schools located in the Diocese of Worcester have 5,033 students enrolled this year which saves the taxpayers and the communities in Worcester County over $65,000,000 dollars. 

In Worcester this year we have 687 students in our parish and diocesan schools who are residents of the city, excluding those who attend private Catholic schools. Using the latest reported average cost per student in Worcester, St. Paul Diocesan Jr/Sr High School, St. Peter Central Catholic Elementary School and Our Lady of the Angels Elementary School saved the city $10,380,735 this school year.

There are several common errors here that are at work:

• Most of the funding for the Worcester Public Schools is not from "the city" at all: Worcester is a majority state funded district, thus only 26 cents of every dollar we spend is a city dollar.
  
  
• Far from costing taxpayers---Worcester or otherwise--nothing, the private and parochial schools in the city of Worcester are, by state law, provided with bus transportation at no cost to the diocese, the schools, or the families of students. Thus some of those WPS taxpayer dollars are indeed supporting the diocesan schools.
  
  
• Finally, the "average cost per student in Worcester," as supported by the state's progressive--that is, meeting greater need with greater dollars--funding system funds a student body that is 60% low income, 31.7% English learner, and 20.9% students with disabilities.
  I am quite sure that is not reflective of the student body of Worcester's diocesan schools. The $10M figure thus is simply incorrect; the student body of the diocesan schools, were they to join the Worcester Public Schools would not cost the district anywhere near that kind of money to educate. Those dollars thus are not being saved.

Proposed goals by Superintendent Binienda

 For those who haven't had a chance to check the Worcester School Committee agenda for tomorrow evening, the following are being proposed by Superintendent Binienda for her goals this year:

• Starting in August 2020, participate in ongoing professional learning opportunities to further develop my leadership skills and to inform district decisions.
• By June 2021, use data to identify achievement gaps and implement improvement practices and resources to support learning for each student.
• Throughout the 2020-21 school year, develop a plan for staff recruitment and retention and implement strategies that will increase access to well qualified, diverse professional candidates.
• Throughout the 2020-21 school year, create a school and district community environment that promotes two-way communication with families and provides resources for effective student learning and performance.
• By June 2021, develop an annual budget that is aligned with the Strategic Plan and ensures equitable and efficient distribution of resources.
• By June 2021, create a learning environment that reduces barriers through use of the frameworks of Culturally Responsive Teaching, Universal Design for Learning, and strength-based decision making.

A few reminders:

• The superintendent proposes goals, but ultimately the decision on what those goals are belongs to the School Committee.
• Goals are required to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
• Goals of the superintendent should be specifically aligned with the district strategic plan.
• Goals of the superintendent should be responsive to the most recently completed evaluation, to district data, and to community need.

Should you have thoughts, please be in touch.

and he huffed and he puffed...

 I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but as we're going to see a bunch more "Baker pushes to have schools back in person" headlines, I did want to note a handful of things quickly here:

• Carlisle, where Governor Baker visited, is a K-8 district of about 600 students northeast of Boston. It is 73% white; it has a student poverty rate of 4.4%. In FY19, they were budgeted to spend about 2x their foundation budget for their district. 
  This is not a district that looks like most of Massachusetts.
  
  
• Baker was there, of course, because Carlisle is one of the relatively small number of Massachusetts districts that is back fully in-person. Not only is this difficult or impossible to do for districts that look nothing like Carlisle, as noted by Carlisle's neighbor (and the other half of its regional high school district) Concord, it also can be impossible for districts that look more like Carlisle. As Concord/ Concord-Carlisle superintendent Laurie Hunter noted in her message to her districts today:
  

  The context and circumstances of the current operations, safety measures, and feasibility vary from school to school and district to district.

  She then--in something she and her Committee no doubt have done over and again this year--lays out the reasons for the decisions her districts have made: the small number of students who are fully remote, the spacing for health, the complications of transportation and nutrition, and so on.  

• This is not, of course, something that Superintendent Hunter, or any superintendent, should be having to argue today, but it precisely the position the Governor has put districts in. Governor Baker has attempted to weaponize any districts that are operating as he sees fit, while ignoring the circumstances that make that possible, creating further dissatisfaction in those whose districts are not operating that way. 
  That most of those are whiter and wealthier perhaps explain why they are being heard. 

• None of this explains why it is that a governor, in the midst of a pandemic with again rapidly rising rates, on the edge of what we know will be a terrible season, in an economic depression, with hunger and homelessness rates either rising or tending so, with both budget deliberations and a presidential transition happening, has decided that his battle is with district leadership. There are actual things he could usefully be doing with the power of the Executive branch. 
  
  This isn't it. 

If you get a chance, Matt Murphy of State House News captures the absolute whiplash of Governor Baker's messenging today.