There's actually some really interesting points on enrollment in this report

 ...but friends, you are not going to glean them from reading the Boston Globe's coverage.

Please enjoy these lovely flowers from Montreal,
which have nothing to do with this post otherwise.

In June, Joshua Goodman, a professor at BU, and Abigail Francis, who is pursuing her doctorate there, released a study looking at Massachusetts school enrollment from pre-pandemic levels to now. Massachusetts is a handy one for this because the state tracks not only public school enrollment but private and homeschool enrollment (not all states do). 

Their research uncovers three main points: 

I have tabs open today, too

 Here are three to read:

• The way that we know what is going on with our local government, including our schools, is through local news, which is being infected by AI-generated slop. WGBH has good coverage on this "pink slime journalism."
  

• Josh Brake applies Frog and Toad's "Cookie Box Principle" to AI use. I would go a step further and go all the way: toss it entirely.

• The 74 takes up the new "AI Academy" [wince] that the American Federation of Teachers has announced they'll open. The title of the piece is "Will new AI Academy help teachers or just improve tech's bottom line?" The issue of course is even worse than framed by the question, which remarkably is actually framed in the article: 
  

  Writing in her Substack newsletter, ed-tech critic and AI skeptic Audrey Watters called AFT’s partnership with the tech companies “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”
  Unions, she wrote, “should be one of the ways in which workers resist, rather than acquiesce to … the tech industry’s vision of the future.” By joining forces with big tech, she said, AFT is implicitly endorsing its products. “Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools does not help students as much as it helps Microsoft. Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools is not so much an ‘academy’ as a storefront.”
  Benjamin Riley, who has also written critically about generative AI in education, said observers should “100% worry” that the new partnerships represent a play for market share.
  “It’s very obvious from a product standpoint that they see education as one of, if not the primary, place to go with their product,” said Riley. “And the fact that AFT is willing to say, ‘Cool, let’s get some of that money and we’ll build a training center to help teachers use it,’ I can see why OpenAI would jump all over that.”
  But he questioned whether AI training is what AFT members really want. He suggested instead that the union should recommit to helping teachers more deeply understand how learning works. “They haven’t been opposed to it,” he said, noting that it has long run an “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column in the magazine it mails to members. “But in reality it just hasn’t been a priority. Improving pedagogy hasn’t really been, to my eyes, a union priority for a long time.”
  Riley, who in 2024 founded the think tank Cognitive Resonance to explore AI issues, said an organization like AFT should ideally be thinking about whether embracing AI will lead to better outcomes for children — or whether it could “potentially erode and devalue the work of human teaching” while opening up schools as customers for AI companies.

   

  
  

Perhaps the line is drawn at education

Two stories from the end of last week about school funding have something in common: Republicans rejected school funding cuts.

Some things to read this week

From tabs I have open today:

• I thought this look at the "anti-conviviality" of generative AI was very interesting and important for those who are in education: 
  

  The expertise you would have gained by growing your own fruit, by trying in fits and starts to make your own vision a reality—these opportunities for growth are completely lost. Unless you actively work against the natural way to use these tools, you become increasingly dependent on them. You can produce and produce without ever growing yourself. Even worse, it's not hard to see how the skills you do have will slowly atrophy from lack of use.

•  Intriguing question being raised by the courts in Canada on if social media companies might hold a "duty of care" to school boards: 
  

  Should the Court recognize a novel duty of care in this case, social media companies could be found liable to individual users and public institutions, such as school boards. 
  
  

• And speaking of Canada, a recent report from the Ontario Ministry of Education yielded this post on the importance of recess: 
  

  As researchers who have long studied the links between school environments and children’s well-being, we know that reducing or restructuring recess time can negatively impact learning and development.
   Indeed, research consistently shows that recess plays a vital role in academic success, mental health and overall well-being.

• You should always read what Zahava Standler at New America writes; today she writes on the crucial role a national Department of Education fulfills and what we stand to lose by not having that: 
  

  Across these policies runs a common thread: We are not in this together, we owe each other nothing, and the future is not our concern. It is a small, mean vision of America.

• Relatedly, the New York Times has a lengthy piece on the damage the Trump administration is doing to community colleges, and, by extension, our communities: 
  

  Community colleges already subsisted on budgets that most four-year schools would find laughable, lean operations that delivered hefty returns on investment for their areas. Get care at a local doctor’s office, or prepped for surgery at a hospital, or treated after an accident, or have someone come to your home to do repairs — “those are all community-college grads, all of them,” the community-college leader told me. “This collateral damage is going to end up being regional economic damage.”

  and the joy in this quote! 
  

  “Milton is the GOAT!” he cried out. “‘Paradise Lost’ is everything that I love!”

What we have here is a failure of imagination

I was wishing for a high school English class with whom to discuss irony when I read this last week:

That master of horror himself Stephen King is throwing the towel on fighting the monster is just a little too on the nose here. 

So now we're losing kids

 Don't miss that the next chapter in the Worcester confrontation with ICE is that now the two girls are missing from DCF custody:

After their mother’s arrest, Nayara Ferreira de Moura and a second daughter, Karoline Ferreira de Moura, 13, were placed in the custody of the Department of Children and Families. On Thursday, Worcester police confirmed there was an ongoing investigation to locate the 13-year-old, Karoline, who is considered an “endangered runaway due to her age,” spokesman Joseph Cersosimo said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists both of the sisters as missing on its website.

An attorney for the family told the MassLive news publication that the 17-year-old, Nayara, had returned to Brazil to reunite with her older sister. She was last seen in Lancaster on June 5, according to the center.

Karoline was last seen in the custody of the state’s child protection agency on July 20, police said, although a witness told the Globe she had given the younger girl a ride to the Philadelphia area this past weekend.

So now, in addition to the mother's arrest not making our community safer, we have absolutely put those two kids in danger.  

No, he can't make you do sit-ups

A funny side effect of this week's declaration by Trump that he will be re-what? declaring? the Presidential Physical Fitness Test¹ was a nice social media sharing of everyone who had dreaded it, or hated some parts of it. In the above linked article, the Washington Post even notes this: 

There have long been concerns that the test can involve public shaming of children in front of their peers. It is often described as “embarrassing,” “humiliating” and “traumatizing” by those who had to take it.

As for if it would work: 

 ...it is most beneficial to exercise consistently, which is not necessarily addressed by twice-yearly tests.

It did motivate me to create something which you may find ongoingly useful: 

¹Personal take: if we're going to bring back Cold-War-era PE things, why can't it be gymnastics? Uneven parallel bars and balance beams were fun, even if they were harrowing for any of us using them in basement cafeteria spaces!