Something I want to flag for #MAEdu this morning:

The Board of Ed meets next Tuesday; agenda is here: doe.mass.edu/bese/docs/fy20…
You will note the second item on the agenda is "Proposed Amendments to Student Learning Time Regulations, 603 CMR 27.00 (Standards for Remote Learning and Hybrid Learning) — Discussion and Vote to Adopt Emergency Regulations"

You will also note there is no backup as yet:
In other words, the actual proposed emergency regulations that the Commissioner will be asking the Board to adopt on the spot next Tuesday are not actually publicly available as yet.

Note that the deadline to file to comment next Tuesday is today at 5 pm.
The Board passing regulations is roughly equivalent to school committees passing policy changes, something which generally goes through multiple readings at multiple meetings (or passes through subcommittees or both) because public process is super important.
Not so much, here.

Let me share the bit that I do know (there is, of course, nothing as yet in writing, because...see above).
You might recall that last month, the Department required all districts to fill out documentation on how they were providing education to students right now: hours in classrooms, hours of synchronous online, hours of asynchronous online, sampling by grade with exceptions noted.
What superintendents were told--and I am very clear on this part--was that it was so the Department could adequately respond to concerns being expressed that X district was doing this...in other words, to respond to hearsay about what was being provided by districts.
(You might also recall that I ever said that this made some sense, as it aligned with DESE's general "collect information about what districts are doing so as to have the story straight" mode.)

Yes, well...
The emergency regulations are, as I understand it, going to lay our requirements on precisely how remote and hybrid learning are to be provided: required numbers of hours of synchronous learning, over required number of days.
This is, of course, coming from the Department--and I could go on at length about this but will not here--that has not engaged in any meaningful way with districts that are remote learning on what is successful, what is not, and why they have made the choices they have.
I could easily dig up quotes from this Commissioner on how he intended to engage with districts, with superintendents, with teachers, with the local level in ways that were a break from past practice.
I won't because A) it's too easy and B) I have actual work to do this morning.
I will say that I am angry and sick about this.

And so so so tired.
#MAEdu
but yeah, reporters, might want to look into that.

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More from @TracyNovick

12 Dec
I want to push some of this from @derspiegel out in a thread, because it's based in part on the sort of universal testing (within the study referenced) that we don't have.
"Since the end of September, the Austrian researchers have paid visits to more than 240 schools. There goal is to perform as many tests as they can at regular intervals throughout the entire schoolyear."
"They hope to test up to 15,000 children between the ages of six and 15 in addition to 1,200 teachers to establish a representative sample size."

So this isn't waiting for someone to have symptoms or known exposure; this is just show up, test everyone, where are we at.
Read 32 tweets
12 Dec
I didn’t catch this yesterday: the Governor changed the revenue projections for FY21 (current year), raising them by half a billion dollars wwlp.com/news/state-pol… #mapoli
Does anyone know what this means: “allow the administration to distribute about $53 million in K-12 education funding without being constrained by a formula”?

That “without being constrained by a formula” seems concerning. #MAEdu #mapoli
The $53M is supposed to be $25/pupil + $75/low income pupil...I hope this doesn’t mean not constrained by *that* formula...
Read 7 tweets
10 Dec
City of Worcester's weekly press conference being led by Dr. Mattie Castiel #worcpoli
...who just choked up giving the number of deaths to date
...seven more this week.
Read 6 tweets
10 Dec
Technical note on this: This would be amending 603 CMR 27.00, which is the time on learning regulations.

The authority of the Board and the Commissioner to establish that section is based on two sections of the Mass General Laws: MGL Ch. 69, sec. 1G and MGL Ch. 69, sec. 1B.
MGL Ch. 69, sec. 1G reads very simply:

"The board shall establish the minimum length for a school day and the minimum number of days in the school year."

That it did, and amended, earlier this year. There is no language here on authority on how those are to be done.
MGL Ch. 69, sec. 1B is significantly longer--it is the "duties of the Board" section--but I cannot find a section that gives authority to establish how education is delivered to students.

I'm quite certain they'll have a nice little legal argument Tuesday. And I am not a lawyer.
Read 11 tweets
9 Dec
so here is a thing that I am thinking a lot about and I wish we were engaging in actual discussion and research on:

What are the trade-offs we're making to put students in classroom right now, and are they worth it?
There's been *just* the beginning, from what I've seen, of a discussion of what hybrid does for fully remote learners (unless they're split, quality seems to go down)
but largely the discussion has been so fixed on "you must go back into buildings" and "don't go back into buildings" that what going back into buildings and more importantly classrooms doesn't seem to have a lot of inquiry attached, from what I've seen
Read 14 tweets
9 Dec
Two things that jump out at me on this Globe article on #MAEdu schools
bostonglobe.com/2020/12/08/met…
The first is this is flat out alarming: "It’s unclear precisely how many people have been infected in schools, but state officials believe they know the maximum number possible, and they see no cause for alarm."
Knowing what we do of the frequent asymptomatic nature of COVID in children, of the lack of access to testing (!), of the lags in contact tracing, confident statements about the "maximum number possible" is just downright frightening coming from state officials.
Read 4 tweets

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