Massachusetts documents released this week

Two documents released by DESE this week of interest:

• Last night, the superintendents received guidance on "COVID-19 events" which includes this quick reference:
  
  This also includes elsewhere in the document this sentence:

  “Before a final decision is made on a school or district closure, the superintendent must consult with DESE for further guidance.”

  But in consulting with DESE, it is NOT the Commissioner the guidance connects to.
  
  Thus the Commissioner:
  A. does not want districts to make the call to close themselves, but also
  B. does not want to make that call himself.
  
  
• Earlier this week, the Department sent out this guidance on the submission of fall plans.
  Of note:
• By July 31, districts must "must complete and submit a preliminary reopening plan summary to DESE" which includes "district’s contact information, key findings from the district’s feasibility study on in-person learning, and the district’s preliminary thinking about which of the three reopening models it may use to open the school year this fall." Then each of the three models needs to be described further (400 words) which "include support for High Needs students." Emphasis added.
  That means that, indeed, some level of decision-making at the local level IS being made prior to July 31. I have argued and will continue to argue that it should be shared locally.
  
• By August 10, districts have to post their plan for the fall. This needs to be "plans should be written in a parent-friendly format, translated into the primary languages of students’ homes, and posted on the district website." This includes what the choice is, with a summary, out of time plans, health and safety information and more (see page 2 for the full list).

Worcester Voter Registration Initiative presentation

Students presenting on "increasing voter turnout in the city through community engagement, workshops, and civics lessons"
only one out of six registered voters vote
encouraged and excited to vote
civics bill and education and projects and experience in civics
all student run: college and high schools
targeting voter education: getting information to our youth
educational lessons for different age groups: elementary, middle, high
"my own education growing up in Worcester, I wasn't able to have the education I would like it to be"
really connect with our peers
talking about the voting process, how to participate in the community, local state and federal reps
2018 bill only provides a short
especially on the local level
test run with Nativity School in a week
building through Zoom; interactive
talking to different neighborhoods in Worcester
"has to start at our schools"
"especially with the diversity in our city"
"can't have [lack of voting] happening"
have an internship program: making videos, making content
suggestion of what you guys would want and bring it out to students
work with specific history teachers
learning about community and our city
college students working to teacher in different classrooms
using their platform to get information out

Questions frequently asked

Just what is our actual goal here, Massachusetts?

I ask because, after last week's assumption by the state that districts are stuck on how to arrange desks, the Commissioner's On the Desktop this week features this in the opening letter:

As I said on Twitter on Friday:

“I am requesting that you hold off on announcing any final decisions about what reopening will look like for the fall in your district until early August.”

With all due respect, Commissioner, Worcester isn’t going to have twice as many buildings in three weeks. #MAEdu pic.twitter.com/pdX7CG4e81

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) July 10, 2020

Neither the infection rate nor the federal stimulus is going to double or triple the number of buildings in Worcester. Our--or any district's--failing to let families and staff know what we know of that NOW is dereliction of duty.

So what are we really trying to do here?
Read through the FAQ and see if, in your view, this indeed addresses the most pressing questions on the minds of district leaders right now.

What is the main goal? It is to reopen schools.
Why are we reopening schools? There is no substitution for in person instruction.

...and so on. This will mean little to some of you, but it reminds me of nothing so much as the Baltimore Catechism, the learned-by-rote recitation that a generation of Catholics were drilled in that you may or may not have absorbed much from but you could snap out the "right" answer when you were asked!

This is about control.
Somehow, in the middle of this pandemic, facing the worst crisis to Massachusetts education in at least this generation, if not several, the most important thing for the Commissioner is not that students and staff are truly kept in healthy conditions--and note that staff continue to have little said about them--nor that district leadership have all the information they need to make decisions--you can't run schools without a way to get kids there, yet we have no transportation guidance as yet, for one--nor that districts make the best plan for the resources available to them--and that INCLUDES BUILDING SPACE--but that he run the show.

As Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone wrote today in Commonwealth Magazine:

There may be a limited number of activities in which we can engage at this point in time while keeping COVID-19 at bay. We need to admit that to ourselves and to the public. I’m the mayor of a city with a $400 million a year local restaurant industry. We would love to have indoor dining fully up and running. It would do wonders for our local economy, restaurant owners, and employees. Yet this disease forces us to make difficult choices. The safety and operational capacity of our schools should come first. If we can run one extra thing and then try to build around it, that thing should be our schools. 

Instead, the state has put schools at the back of the line. We reveal our priorities with what we do. And Massachusetts just entered a new phase of reopenings called Vigilant that opens casinos in advance of opening schools. That’s where our priorities currently reside.

There are a myriad of ways in which we in Massachusetts are doing better than other parts of the country are doing, but when it comes to school reopening, our priorities are messed up across the board. We aren't doing what is needed to get kids back in buildings safely, and we're attempting to force districts not to be straight with staff and families about what is possible, while building plans for what is impossible.
This is far too important for power trips and literal gambling. 

What parents want

I tweeted this out early this morning (and you can find the thread unwrap here), but for those who like having things in more than 280 characters at a time, here's a prosey version.

I've continued to see this truism online that the "overwhelming majority" of parents want their children full-time back in schools this fall, like so:

Great story about teachers' fears re going back to school. But what about working parents and vulnerable kids, who overwhelmingly want & need to go back? What happens to them if schools don't reopen? When do they get to be centered in the reopening story? https://t.co/gZAfbZI5jK

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) July 11, 2020

It's in today's New York Times again today. This may even be part of the calculation behind the President's push on reopening.

It's not something I'm seeing in my own little corner of the education universe. Here's what I am seeing, all of which is anecdotal, and a lot of which is determined by my own relationships and such, of course.

First a lot of teachers are parents. In fact, a lot of educators--superintendents, business managers, custodians, and on and on--are parents. Drawing a line that puts educators on THIS side and parents on THIS side thus isn't actually possible.
Those who are in education, particularly those who are in or close to the classroom, by and large aren't under a lot of illusions about how this spring went. It was an emergency, on-the-fly, coping with an emerging disaster. Some things went right, a lot of things didn't, and there's a reason why we're getting "How Much Learning Was Lost" pieces now.
It's also a pandemic. And teachers know, school staff know, what school budgets look from their angle even in non-disasterous times. They know what their buildings are like.
And they're scared.
I would add to this group those who are most school-adjacent. There are parents and guardians who don't work for school districts that "get it" when it comes to schools. Maybe they're related to teachers, maybe they volunteer in their schools, but whatever their connection, this is not a group of families that are shocked to hear that districts are scrambling to find funding for COVID supplies or that their buildings that are crowded in regular times are not now magically going to fit all those kids back in much more spread apart.They get the impossibilities.
It's important when we talk about teachers to note:

• they're college educated
• they're public employees
• they're widely (though not universally) unionized
• they're predominately female
• they're predominately white

That set of characteristics means many, many things.

One thing it has meant during this discussion is that it lends itself to gendered arguments: those who have concerns are labelled "hysterical" or it is condescendingly assumed that they don't understand the science. There is also a long history of teachers as martyrs that this falls neatly into; see this headline from the UK from May:

No. Don’t guilt teachers into this. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued and then, like nurses, patronised in a time of crisis. The unions are right to worry. There are too many unknowns about the virus. We don’t want heroes. Or martyrs. We want people to be protected. pic.twitter.com/PG4YSXpkah

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) May 15, 2020

And wow, are we seeing all of that in spades.
And no, those arguments don't all come from men (nor are they all directed to women).

There are also parents who see education largely or entirely as a service which they are being denied and which they are demanding return.
We are reluctant to talk about class in this country--we're all middle class, the story goes--but what I see here is the removal from the perspective of educators, These parents in no way identify with their children's teachers and are in no way sympathetic to their views, or if they are, they're viewed as an inconvenience to be overcome. Teachers should get back to work; after all, supermarket workers have.
(We don't, of course, treat service workers well, either.)
And parents can always "choose" not to send their children back to school, after all.
This reminds me of this passage from the book I finished last week, Lily Geismer's Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party:

“The word choice thus joined the pantheon of terms that provided white suburban professionals a means to combine a commitment to abstract notions of equality and self-interest with more specific forms of class privilege.”

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) July 5, 2020

Schools are intended to be the bedrock of at least the Massachusetts, if not the country's, democratic system. They're not a convenience, and they're intended to work to best serve all students.
Some such families are discovering to their surprise that their schools are not well provided with supplies, or staffing, or space.

Families with students with special needs, we know from much earlier coverage, have in many cases particularly struggled, particularly if their students can't receive services and support remotely (or well remotely). At the same time, many of these children are medically fragile, and thus are at increased risk to their health by attending school with other. They face an impossible balance.

Black, Latinx, and indigenous people, due to, as the CDC acknowledges, "[l]ong-standing systemic health and social inequities" face significantly higher rates of both illness and death from COVID-19.
I have read a lot of coverage of white middle-class moms' perspective on schools planning for the fall. I have read very little perspective from parents in any of the above groups.
And those are the majority of public school parents in this country now. We need to reflect that in our consideration and in our coverage.
It has also been observed that for some children of color, this past spring was more peaceful and safer because they were not at school, due to the systemic racism within the K-12 educational system (note that the link there is to the U.S. Department of Education; the government itself has said this). We should be ashamed that this is the case, and we as a country should commit to do better by our kids.
I thus wasn't entirely surprised by the results from Mass Inc when they surveyed parents on kids going back to school:

In some cases, those driving for all students to be back full time now are citing students of color as their argument--surely such students need to be back in buildings!--without asking or consulting their families on what they want and need.
That isn't being a good ally.

There are also lots of families--some encompassed in the above!--who are really torn. They want their kids back in classrooms, both for the kids' sake, as they learn more there, and for the adults' sake, as we get more done with them there (or can get anything done at all). Kids get services at school, from food to mental health supports to kinds of therapy to sports and arts, that they simply don't get at home.
But parents also don't want their kids to get sick, or their kids' teachers to get sick, or their kids to bring the illness home to family.

As much as I am seeing it said, one thing I don't think is the case is that the majority of parents simply want their kids back in school full time. It's much more complicated than that.

DESE room diagrams

Each week, the Commissioner sends to all of the superintendents in Massachusetts and all of the Department's staff an "On The Desktop" memo, which later gets posted over here. By virtue of the Commissioner's position and those with whom he communicates, these messages are public documents.
I was sent this week's message, which went out Thursday evening ahead of the holiday weekend. The accompanying presentation is shared ahead of a session this coming week on arranging classrooms. I have posted this presentation here; I shared it as a Twitter thread here, and as a Facebook album here, those all shared without commentary (intentionally). Below are screenshots of the slides.
The opening slides are as follows:

Add caption

I want to take a step back here and talk about what this is: we're in the middle of a pandemic, one that is not only killing people, but is leaving others with lifetimes of aliments; we have the worst economic crisis (consequently) that the country (the world?) has seen since 1930; we are scrambling to figure out how to best educate children while protecting not only their health but their teachers and other staff's health and their families' health...

...and the Department thinks that the most crucial contribution that they can make at this point is telling us how to arrange desks?

REALLY?

Let's call this what it is: it has been widely noted that DESE's reopening guidance is poorly supported, the first several districts (led by Lexington) have pushed back--let's note that Amherst Pelham wins best headline--

...and now the response from the state is "you just don't know how to arrange your desks correctly."

Condescending much?

I've started a thread over here of things DESE could be doing that would be useful rather than creating PowerPoints and having presentations on seating charts. I'm happy to take further suggestions, as I think there is a real role for the state here.

On to the diagrams:

Let's remember the ground rules under which DESE guidance is playing:

1. Six feet apart "if feasible" thus all of the below plans are three feet apart (from edge of seat to edge of seat)
2. Students will be moving minimally, if at all, over the course of the day, and will be facing the same direction

And here are the diagrams they have shared: 

I would urge you to consider these from several perspectives:

First, given what we know of COVID, does these feel safe to you?
Here is why that matters: it's hard to learn if you don't feel safe. If this doesn't feel safe, then it is not going to make nearly as much difference to have kids back in schools.

Second, consider the logistics of this: the students don't simply appear in these seats: they must walk there. How does each student get to that seat without crossing paths with others? And where is the teacher during that time? 

Third, once there, what happens? If the student in the back needs to use the restroom, does that whole line and the one next to it empty into the hall? Or is the space only "feasible" if no one needs to use the restroom or visit the nurse?

Fourth, how does this work as a learning environment? Every student spaced, facing frontwards, and cannot move or turn....

...which of course reminds me: have you met children? Or even people? I don't think adults could stay in these seats, facing entirely frontwards, for hours at a time.

Where is the teacher instructing? How does that teacher check student work? They can't pass papers up; they can't hand things from one to another. The teacher can't go to the back of the room. How does that work?
And of course, there's no group work, no pairing up, no talking to the person next to you...much of the good work of learning is gone.

Fifth, all of this furniture you're moving out is going...where, exactly, since we're using our libraries, gyms, cafeterias, and more as classrooms, and we need our hallways as wide as possible for passing safely? 

Sixth, where do these classrooms of students eat lunch? The guidance is clear that if the masks are off, as they must be to eat (of course), they must be spaced six feet apart. These desks are three feet apart. Are half the students going elsewhere for lunch? Where, if their cafeteria is now classroom space? 

Seventh, look back up at those diagrams.
Now talk to me about kindergarten.

Or computer science.

Or lab sciences.
Or art class.
Or music class. 

I could go on (and on and on) at length about how impractical and poorly focused this is, but I won't, because I think that would be repeating DESE's error here.
Halve each of those classrooms--that would be six feet again--and we're getting somewhere. That's that many fewer bodies, that much less to manage, that much greater ability to work with students with compassion and understanding, that much greater ability for teachers to do the good work that is missed when students aren't with their teachers. 

Spend some of that energy then figuring out how you align staff with students such that someone else (not the same teacher) is working with the students who are at home, rotationally.
Doing all of this while balancing family schedules, teacher and staff health needs and schedules, the ongoing tech and training gaps, the cleaning and nursing needs, and how we're going to pay for all of this is going to take a LOT of logistical work over the next several weeks.

We don't have time to be pushing desks around. 

Worcester School Committee: Budget update and fall planning meeting

The agenda is posted here.
Allen: To the best that we know at this time
ASBO /AASA costs that would be needed for cleaning, supplies, nursing, custodial
average district of $1.7M; 10-14% of our size
estimate for us would be $12.7M

Early literacy: Board of Ed

Report on early literacy: the slide deck isn't posted, but there's a backup here.
Director of Literacy and Humanities Katherine Tarca did the presentation.

This is an outgrowth of DESE's 2019 Literacy Strategic Plan, which set as priorities "high quality core instruction" and "evidence-based early literacy." This report speaks to the latter.

There is grave concern regarding not simply early literacy but demographic differences among our students in literacy; grade three MCAS is the earliest statewide data available and "suggests that many, many of our children are not developing early literacy and writing": 

The Department will issue literacy guidance to the field related to early literacy in order:

• to provide information about reading and writing acquisition and instruction based in current evidence
• to describe evidence-based literacy practice to seek to have used in schools and in ed prep programs
• to compile quality instructional resources and useful references

Teaching is "an extremely complex activity" and DESE heard in developing the strategic plan of the wish for trusted resources

content will be on the Department website

new "Literacy Champions" advisory panel, also national and international researches engaged in

will be developing guidelines about reading difficulties

will be capturing video of excellent teaching 

will offer early grades literacy grant for PD and instructional resources

Department-led professional development : conference and networks

develop free resources PD and curricular materials

new tools for ed prep, as well

DESE has also applied for the Comprehensive State Literacy Development grant; applied for about $20M from fed; "extensive support to our high need districts in support" awards expected to be announced in August

Moriarty: "incredibly excited" about this work

"systematic racism exists in a lot of different places...and we have to call that out and we have to own it and we have to act with real attention"

"otherwise whatever statement we want to make is a platitude"

disparities between Holyoke and the surrounding communities

impact on children's lives if they're not going into fourth grade reading proficiently

"I've been living with the third grade MCAS ever since"
"If it doesn't start right, it doesn't tend to get right, in any endeavor in life, and that includes K-12 education"

"something like this cannot stand"
"if we can provide the resources and the intentionality and support"

West: echo enthusiasm for this initiative

"because of the equity implications that he's spelled out so clearly"

aligning current practice with research done elsewhere

what students need to be come proficient readers

appreciate that it extends into educator preparation as well

also issues with the MTEL

Peske: revising the grounds on which teacher ed programs are evaluated

"evidenced based early literacy" training will be part of that

also including in networks and conferences

Tarca: MTEL is not revised continually, only occasionally

dovetails perfectly with this guidance

foundations of reading test; reading specialist test; general curriculum test; early childhood test

reading specialists seen as reading experts in their buildings, really giving them up-to-date knowledge

Rouhanifard: have seen firsthand the imporance of phonics, phonemic awareness

how it connects to CURATE and the overall curricular network for our schools?

Tarca: curricular materials that are in use in schools often dictate pedagogy and how students are taught

have worked to ensure as we review curricular materials for CURATE

discovering many of the products on the market have gaps in them

hoping for funding to produee open source reading materials

"there is no one thing that a school can go out and buy"

high level literacy development includes phonics and phonemic awareness, and also, equally important, includes authentic engagement with text and language and language-based materials

"both of those are evidence-based practices and both of those are provided in our guidance"

Hills: what districts do you expect to take advantage of this?

Tarca: sense is these resources will have broad relevance

virtually all of our districts are interested in best practices

Hills: do you expect broad interest?

Tarca: different districts take different approaches to early literacy that are in different spaces in aligning with best practices

Peske: if federal grant is received will be targeted at highest need districts

multi-prong report

Stewart: "anti-racist MCAS notwithstanding"

have a whole cohort of students who are far behind due ot COVID

outreach for parents?

Tarca: web based and interactive

designed to be navigable by parents and families

series of webinars in center of instructional support for educators

planning for re-entry

look at a valid and reliable screening assessment

Stewart: anything that the Department can do to ameliorate costs for screening and such

what is the direct actual outreach that is planned for families; how are parents supposed to know that this is a resource

Tarca: at least one assessment approved is free; typical cost is $1 to $7 per pupil

Peske: try to have stakeholders in mind in design

would welcome invitation with parent groups from anyone on the Board

hope that federal grant would eleviate some of cost of doing some of this work

Morton: offer enthusiastic support

would like to hear more in future "is the why behind it's important for us to do this work"

economic and social determinants impacted by third grade reading