Okay, #MAEdu, let's talk FY22 and the Student Opportunity Act: https://t.co/o1tgppGy4K

First up:

The FIRST year, Governor Baker?

This is the second year of SOA implementation: you're missing one.
So, are we going to do this in six years, or are we just going to kick the can ANOTHER year on kids?

Remember, school funding is builds on prior years.

We never get that missing funding back.
Also: what are the base numbers being used?

Is the Governor dropping enrollment, even though we all know that was an artificial drop?
There's a decent chance that a WHOLE bunch of those kindergartner and preschoolers are going to be back this fall if we manage to get kids into buildings, PLUS we'll have the USUAL enrollment of preK and K!

...and less funding than usual?
Next up: low income count.

No, you don't get to up the count of kids and NOT increase the AMOUNT the 1/7th or 1/6th of the way to the goal.
Let's not play that game this year.
There being more kids who are low income doesn't mean that each kid should see less implementation of the full funding needed.
Oh, and do we know how many low income children there are *really* in the Commonwealth right now?
In short: I'm approaching this framing with skepticism, given the past history of the Governor's framing on education funding (and...everything else).
This is absolutely not the time to underfund public education, particularly state-dependent public education, particularly education for the kids hardest hit by the pandemic.
I've been less than impressed with the state's handling of the pandemic already; adding half measures on SOA will only make it all worse.
and with that, we'll await Wednesday...#MAEdu
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OK I am going to be tackling this as surveillance/open source intel gathering exercise, because that is my background. I blew away 3 years of my life doing site acquisition/reconnaissance for a certain industry that shall remain unnamed and believe there is significant carryover.


This is NOT going to be zillow "here is how to google school districts and find walmart" we are not concerned with this malarkey, we are homeschooling and planting victory gardens and having gigantic happy families.

With that said, for my frog and frog-adjacent bros and sisters:

CHOICE SITES:

Zillow is obvious one, but there are many good sites like Billy Land, Classic Country Land, Landwatch, etc. and many of these specialize in owner financing (more on that later.) Do NOT treat these as authoritative sources - trust plat maps and parcel viewers.

TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND EVALUATION:

Okay, everyone knows how to google "raw land in x state" but there are other resources out there, including state Departments of Natural Resources, foreclosure auctions, etc. Finding the land you like is the easy part. Let's do a case study.

I'm going to target using an "off-grid but not" algorithm. This is a good piece in my book - middle of nowhere but still trekkable to civilization.

Note: visible power, power/fiber pedestal, utility corridor, nearby commercial enterprise(s), and utility pole shadows visible.
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
When the university starts sending out teaching evaluation reminders, I tell all my classes about bias in teaching evals, with links to the evidence. Here's a version of the email I send, in case anyone else wants to poach from it.

1/16


When I say "anyone": needless to say, the people who are benefitting from the bias (like me) are the ones who should helping to correct it. Men in math, this is your job! Of course, it should also be dealt with at the institutional level, not just ad hoc.
OK, on to my email:
2/16

"You may have received automated reminders about course evals this fall. I encourage you to fill the evals out. I'd be particularly grateful for written feedback about what worked for you in the class, what was difficult, & how you ultimately spent your time for this class.

3/16

However, I don't feel comfortable just sending you an email saying: "please take the time to evaluate me". I do think student evaluations of teachers can be valuable: I have made changes to my teaching style as a direct result of comments from student teaching evaluations.
4/16

But teaching evaluations have a weakness: they are not an unbiased estimator of teaching quality. There is strong evidence that teaching evals tend to favour men over women, and that teaching evals tend to favour white instructors over non-white instructors.
5/16

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