Yes, we send state funding to districts that aren't in need

The Mass Business Alliance for Education along with the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce today released a report about the shares of state funding that go to districts that aren't in need, presenting this as a contributing to the growing gap among districts, and one we can ill-afford during the pandemic. You can read WBUR's coverage here and State House News Service's here.

The funding streams here being discussed are hold harmless and minimum aid, the 17.5% minimum state contribution towards district foundation budgets, and below effort gap funding (which is both less of an issue and mainly ends up being progressive, so less here about that).

To take these entirely out of order: the 17.5% minimum aid I have always heard argued as "this way everyone has some skin in the game." But, here's the deal: 

...it's really tough to argue that Cambridge getting 6% of its budget from the state makes it particularly interested in how the state funds, say, Holyoke (save Cantabrigians being interested out of the goodness of their hearts, of course). And it's also hard to argue that anyone is being particularly well-served by the state being required to fund that portion of Cambridge's budget.

I'm picking on Cambridge, incidentally, because Cambridge can fund their foundation budget entirely out of local resources more than twice over. That puts Cambridge in a very rare class, but there are many districts that can fund their foundation budgets and more entirely through local resources. As the report says: 

Of these 157 municipalities, 104 can fully meet their foundation budget obligations from local revenue; the other 53 can fund between 82.5% and 100% of their foundation budget from local revenue, according to the state’s calculation

As a result of the state funding what they do, those districts simply have additional resources to spend on schools; local communities don't reduce their local funding due to the state aid.

As I have discussed when we have talked about Boston before, there are districts--add here Cambridge and Somerville--that are both well-resourced and have lots of children in need. As I note in that post, contrary to the footnote in the report, the needs of the district are included in the calculation of the foundation budget just as they are for every other district, so to calculate from that is the calculate from an equitable place. 

That's the one that's a little more straightforward, to my mind, that the other big one here, which is hold harmless and minimum aid. As I mention in the above post, there's no district that is a greater beneficiary of that than Boston (not a surprise: it's the largest district, but also not a poor one). It's also, though, what has been keeping many smaller, rural (and not as rural) districts with declining enrollment afloat. I've shared this slide from Granby before: 

That big space over the line is the amount of required spending over the foundation budget; the reason a district ends up being required to spend more than its foundation budget is if it's getting that additional money as state aid. That would be hold harmless and minimum aid. This is how we end up with districts that are required to spending 125% and such of their foundation budgets.

It's been well covered here and elsewhere, of course, that a decline in student enrollment doesn't lead to a decline in costs in any sort of a straight line. Losing, for example, ten or twenty students from across the entire enrollment doesn't mean you can cut a teaching position, let alone close a building. 

At the same time, smaller districts carry some of the same costs as larger districts do==you still need a building and custodians and a superintendent and school nutrition staff--and that can make smaller districts expensive, on a per pupil basis to run. 
There isn't a neat and tidy answer to this--and anyone who thinks there is may not realize quite how much space some of our districts in western Mass already occupy. There is, of course, the report due (do we know if any of that work is actually still happening?) that looks at rural schools as part of the Student Opportunity Act. 
I do, though, want to issue a preliminary warning to any who would argue that you can't possibly operate only on a foundation funded budget that some of us already do, which is not to say I recommend it. 

The main point here, of course is that:

• Massachusetts prides itself on a progressive funding system for schools.
• These are not progressive funding streams.
• The state says it doesn't have enough funding for education (or anything) right now.
• These are luxuries we as a state can't afford.

That doesn't mean that this would be popular. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be right. 

I should also note that this was the final of the recommendations Bruce D. Baker, Mark Weber, and Drew Atchison wrote of back in June in Kappan. 

For those who don't teach (but do)

This afternoon, some of the members of the Worcester School Committee went for a bus ride. We're in negotiations with the drivers who drive directly for the district, and they invited us to come experience riding a bus now, and several of us took them up on it.

We started at the WPS bus yard on Fremont Street (seeing some great innovations going on there; more no doubt to come on that!) and went down past City Hall, down Grove and then back up the highway. And there were discussions of masks and spacing and cleaning, which is why we were there, after all. But the talk from the drivers and monitors kept coming back to one thing:

Kids.

The ones who can't sit still.

The ones who haven't had breakfast.

The ones who bounce around in their seats.

The ones who look for their driver every day.

The ones who listen to their music. 

The ones who are quiet.

The ones who aren't.

I was thinking of this as I was reading this Atlantic piece on the load that has been shouldered by school nutrition workers during the pandemic; that even as school buildings closed, they kept coming to work. And now that numbers of children being fed has fallen--which is an emergency of itself--federal reimbursements for school nutrition have fallen, as has the work, and districts are laying off nutrition staff.

There are a lot of people who work in school districts who aren't teachers. And even while our teachers are scrambling to get connected with students online, some of those people are still not going to see kids.

That matters. 

Sometimes it isn't the elementary teacher or your math teacher that makes the connection with you. Sometimes, the adult that matters to a child is the custodian (do you remember your elementary school custodian? I do!), or the librarian, or the lunch lady, or the bus driver.

Today I saw how some of them miss their kids.
I know that some of the kids miss them, too. 

There's going to be some chaos this year

 Find the joy

All are welcome in this place

There's a hymn with lyrics by Marty Haugen that we sing sometimes at Mass for which the lyrics of the last verse (which, being Catholic, we never get to) are: 

Let us build a house where all are named,

their songs and visions heard

and loved and treasured, taught and claimed

as words within the Word.

Built of tears and cries and laughter,

prayers of faith and songs of grace,

let this house proclaim from floor to rafter.

All are welcome, all are welcome,

all are welcome in this place.

It rang through my head as I walked this Friday past the Mission Chapel on Summer Street in Worcester and took the above photo, which seemed rather a metaphor to me. 
How well are we maintaining all being welcome?

It continues to be something I question on how well we in Worcester do as a city: a city which prides itself on welcoming immigrants and numbers of languages spoken, but which too often denies there is any work to be done on inequities by race or ethnicity or language; a city of neighborhoods, where a neighborhood can be a benefit or a barrier; a city where both the shiny new buildings downtown and the shiny new ballpark going up absorb attention and resources but are and will be out of reach for many.

Are all welcome? 

The Worcester School Committee voted 6-1 again this past week to move forward with athletics, and by our code of ethics, that means I'll work to make it work, though I was the vote against it. That means asking how students are to get to practice and to events without cars, and asking if they have enough time to use public transit, and asking how this is constructed so as to make all welcome.

Are all welcome? 

As with much else, the pandemic is of course only making the inequities that already existed worse. If we are truly systems that serve all--which, as rocky as the history of public schools has been and as uneven as it continues to be, is the charge of public schools in the United States--we have to start with that question. It is much more difficult to troubleshoot and run circles to fix issues after the fact. We need to be constructing whatever it is we do from the perspective of those who might struggle the most.
Online school? How does it work for the family with no internet at home, no adult familiar with technology, no adult in the house comfortable speaking in English?
Attendance? How does it work for the family in which all adults have to be at work during the day and the children are left on their own, and no one can ensure they've logged in at particular times?
Food? How does it work if the family has no car, no one free during the day, and there isn't a safe way to walk?
Special education? How does it work for a student who can't engage through a screen? 
And on an don...

In all our decisions, what are the ways in which structural inequities create additional obstacles for some students and their families that aren't there for others?

This is not, of course, just a Worcester thing.
Too often, though, we seem to start from the child who is, at this point in Worcester, least common: we assume a white middle class kid with two parents at home who have flexibility to be at their beck and call with access to cars and food and internet and computers. 
That simply isn't most of our kids.

We need to be constructing and reconstructing our systems to serve those who most need it.
Until we do, all won't truly be welcome in this place. 

What happened at this week's meeting (including a few things that maybe you missed?)

Thursday evening, our Worcester School Committee meeting started at four, and we got out of executive session at close to 11, so forgive, if you would, the delay in posting anything here. I did want to make a few notes here on what happened, as I've generally been behind in posting here, and these are my notes as much as anything. These are not in agenda order, for what it's worth, though the agenda is here. 

BUDGET:

First off, of course, the Committee approved on a 6-1 vote the budget cuts as proposed by administration. Understanding that wrangling with a full agenda can be a bit much, I put just the budget cut memo here so you can see what it is. We can't say this enough:

As I said last night: it's also just completely unfair that this massively mismanaged pandemic crashed the economy the year we finally got the foundation budget bill passed and signed. #MAEdu #FBRC #mapoli https://t.co/ealRTN81ij

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) August 29, 2020

Why did you vote no on the ELA curriculum?

 because "why did you vote no" is a headline I've used before...

Among the roles of the School Committee in Massachusetts is approving curriculum under MGL Ch. 71 sec.50 (aside: it requires a two-thirds vote). Due to the vote to open the year remotely for the district, there was administrative concern over lack of high school English materials, so we were asked to have a special meeting Thursday evening just to review and approve a proposed curriculum for this year: StudySync from McGraw-Hill. You can read the Telegram & Gazette coverage here.
The request was for a single year of this curriculum at a cost of $256,500.

We received access to the materials Wednesday night for Thursday's meeting. This presentation was given at the meeting.

While it was nineteen years ago this past spring that I taught my last high school English class, if you hand me high school English curriculum, I'm going to approach it as a high school English teacher, as it's what I was trained as. My first question, likewise, was how high school English teachers were involved in the selection of this "modified pilot." They...weren't, is the upshot. The district did pilot three curricula last year in the middle school, and the equivalent curriculum from McGraw-Hill was selected for that, so, it was explained at the meeting, the district decided to use the parallel high school curriculum for this year. 

From my perspective--and this is my perspective--anthologies are there as a resource; they're where the literature is. I strove (did not always succeed, but I tried) not to be the "read the chapter, answer the questions" kind of teacher; you have a short story or a poem, and you read it, and you discuss it, and students write about it. Vocabulary lists and end of chapter assessments and such...they're not the main reason we have the anthology.
Again, that's my perspective.
The first thing I ask, then, is what's here? What's the actual written material that's in the anthology? Does it give the breadth and depth needed for getting students reading and giving them access to good writing and thus get them engaged in why we read and write at all?
And the answer for me is that...this could be better. If you review the presentation, you'll see that there's a chart that measures out how many authors in total, how many are women, and how many are authors of color. At least the question is asked. What I continued to run into as I reviewed, though, was whose voices are emphasized; if long works are still mostly the white men of the classic Western canon, have we made any change? 
There also continue to be works included that trouble me. This does not, please note, mean that I think we bar or ban these books or works. Works, though, need to earn their space in the classroom. When we measure the limited time in a classroom, and the limited dollars we have to get works into the classroom, and we consider what it means to have a work taught, what does it mean that we give time and space to writers of British colonialism, when our seats are filled with children whose family history bore the worst of its exercise of power? Or when the stories of Native Americans or Black families continue to be told through white eyes? There are better uses of the time, space, money, and emphasis.

Don't get me wrong: there is writing from across the spectrum here, and these are not the anthologies they would have been twenty years ago. Part of the job of the Committee, though, as it makes purchases and sends those to the classroom, is to ask given the resources available, if this is the best decision. Can we push harder on this (and, given Worcester's buying power, on the vendors)? 

I think we can, so I voted no. 

If you want to see what I said at the meeting, I'm posted the video below, cued to my questions

on testing and contact tracing

Let me preface this by reminding you that I'm not a doctor, so this is in all of my lay capacities. 

One of the ongoing conversations across the United States this year has been "other countries are reopening schools and some are making it work, so what are they doing differently?"

Setting aside ('though we really shouldn't!) that they had national leadership that actually took it seriously and, also, in many cases, they're countries that have universal health care, something that they did was they got the rates low and then they kept them low with widespread testing and contact tracing.
Now, we don't have any of that, save, in Massachusetts, a fairly low rate. Much of that cannot be controlled by Worcester School Committee vote, either, but one thing we can do as a local government branch is make request of other branches, and so last week we passed this: 

Request the state have ongoing, easily accessible, free testing with a quick turnaround in operation across the state before any district brings students back into session

...which then made news. 

I didn't know it at the time, but this is actually part of L.A.'s plan for reopening this fall. I also was only made aware this morning of this study in the August Lancet, which finds that wide testing and contact tracing would stave off a second wave in the U.K.'s schools' reopening.

This is the sort of thing that works best if lots of people ask for the same thing, so go, thou, and do likewise!