Politics & Government
Title I Threat, MCAS Results Highlight Framingham's Education Crisis
The City Council and Mayoral strategy of cutting city funding of the Framingham Public Schools budget has caused major damage to our kids.
This week national, state, and local events combined in a unique way to highlight the downward trajectory the Mayor and City Council have forced on the Framingham Public Schools with their city fiscal austerity program and its consequent diversion of education funding from the schools to address city infrastructure maintenance.
First the national news.
As reported in the publication Education Week on September 26th, 2023:
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"House Republicans have been pushing for massive cuts to federal spending, including an 80 percent reduction in the billions of Title I funds that high needs school districts receive. House Democrats, who have pushed to increase funding for that program, in a press release called cuts of that magnitude an 'assault on education.'"
Title I is a federal education program in the United States that is part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was first passed in 1965. Title I provides financial assistance to schools and school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families. The program's primary goal is to help ensure that all students have access to a high-quality education and the opportunity to succeed academically. In Framingham, a rapidly increasing percentage of our low-income students are also not native English speakers.
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Cutting Title I funding by 80% is clearly draconian and would presumably receive little support from the Framingham community which values education highly and typically votes strongly Democrat, by a 3-1 margin in any given election.
Framingham Public Schools (FPS) received about $2.1 million in Title I funding for FY24, as noted on p.99 of the FPS Budget Book: https://www.framingham.k12.ma.... So an 80% cut would mean about $1.7 million less in the FY24 FPS budget.
The good news is that this 80% cut remains simply a threat, which is unlikely to become a reality, as it will not draw enough votes to pass the House. It is simply too extreme.
The bad news is that Framingham Public Schools have already been subjected to much greater local cuts to education funding which been forced on our children by the Mayor and City Council.
In the last two fiscal years, local education funding for the FPS annual budget has been cut by $10 million/year. Local property tax revenue funding of the annual FPS budget – the ‘local contribution’ is now about $80 million, down from about $90 million two years ago. These cuts were proposed by the current Mayor, in collaboration with key City Council members, and sailed through the City Council without a single dissenting vote.
See the chart below, which shows ten years of increases to the taxpayer funded portion of the school district budget: the FPS budget ‘local contribution’ (LC). Dark blue shows the town period increases. Green shows the Spicer administration increases, with one decrease due to the impact of the pandemic. Red shows the drastic Sisitsky administration cuts.
Just as Title I cuts would undermine education for our most disadvantaged students, so this chopping block collaboration between the Mayor and City Council has severely damaged the educational prospects of these same children. Extremist US House Republicans would be impressed at how effective the Mayor and City Council have been in defunding public education in Framingham. The GOP has achieved its most extreme successes by gerrymandering. Framingham has no gerrymandering, but it has achieved the remarkable result of electing a Mayor and a City Council who both fully embrace fundamental Republican principles of low taxes, defunding public education and suppressing financial support for low-income, immigrant populations.
Nothing makes the consequences of defunding of our local public education system clearer than the latest MCAS results just reported by the state.
The best measure to look at is 3rd grade ELA (English Language Arts) results, which provide a check on student reading proficiency.
It is widely recognized that reaching reading proficiency by the 3rd grade is critical for subsequent good educational performance. Up to 3rd grade, students are learning to read, and after that they are reading to learn. Not reaching reading proficiency by 3rd grade is a very big educational setback. Google "third grade reading ability" and you will see how important 3rd grade reading proficiency is.
By this measure Framingham is in deep trouble.
Here are the 3rd grade ELA MCAS results for Framingham, as reported in the Boston Globe recently: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/19/metro/2023-mcas-ela-scores-grade-3/
ELA MCAS Results for 3rd Grade at Framingham elementary schools
Alternatively, you can look at complete MCAS results, by school, on the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) website, as shown here for Harmony Grove Elementary School:
You can browse to other schools using the control at the upper right section of the DESE web page to switch school, then click Assessment.
It is devastating that 93% of the Harmony Grove Elementary School 3rd grade students are not proficient in critical reading skills. How can these kids survive in 4th grade?
FPS is almost completely failing most of Harmony Grove’s 3rd grade students. These are the children whose home language is not English and whose families are low-income. They desperately needed fulltime, free pre-K instruction, both to rapidly learn English and to overcome a complete deficit of English reinforcement at home but could not get it because the pre-K program had only 1/3 of the necessary capacity and cost $7,000/year per student.
A critical fact which the Mayor and City Council consistently ignore is the rapid changing demographics of our student population, as shown in this chart.
Just when we needed to reinforce the FPS budget to address the rapidly rising student population who need strong English language support, the Mayor and City Council shifted $10 million/year away from their education!
The Harmony Grove picture is corroborated by looking at the trend across all of the Framingham elementary schools. For each elementary school, MCAS scores for 3rd grade ELA increase as the proportion of low-income students decreases from school to school. See the chart below to show that trend.
From all of this data, it is obvious that across all elementary schools, 3rd grade ELA proficient % rises as the low-income student % falls. Barbieri bucks the trend simply because its dual language program gives better language support to its students. It is the exception which proves the point.
Reinforcement of language support for low-income students stands out as the single most important investment needed to improve student achievement. The message is clear:
IMPLEMENT UNIVERSAL, FREE PRE-K IN THE NEXT YEAR AT A PRICE TAG OF ABOUT $7 MILLION/YEAR!
It is time for the Mayor to act decisively, remembering that, as a member of the Framingham School Committee, his mission is to make sure our youngsters maximize their educational potential. It is time for him to stand up to the City Council and restore our school system finances. Return most of the ‘stolen’ $10 million/year to the schools!
Absent this action, as each year passes, the school system will inexorably drown in a rising tide of struggling students, created by our own intentional, institutional neglect, which will make every class in every grade in every school a huge challenge for even the most capable teachers to overcome.
The Mayor let us know recently that he will be running for re-election in two years.
No Mayor would wish to be remembered as the Mayor who destroyed the education system in his city.
In the 2025 election year, none of the 15,000 voting parents in the city will much remember the new dog park, or the improved farmers market, or even the purchase of Bethany, or plans for a community center. But they will remember the daily reports of nightmare classes thousands of children will convey to them if the Mayor does not make re-investing in classroom education our number 1 priority.
