Why has it taken over 23 years to update our sex ed curriculum?

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Every other curriculum framework in Massachusetts has been updated in the last nine years -- except sex education. Ours currently does not include consent, is not required to be medically accurate, and leaves out LGBTQ+. And is it a coincidence that we are now considering updating it when we have an LGBTQ+ friendly governor?

Cara Berg Powers joins Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan as we chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 20. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics. We know that together we can have a state whose policy reflects the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.

So today we are going to be talking about sex ed curriculum and we have a very special guest, Cara Berg Powers, who is going to be joining us to help us understand what's happening at the state level. We're going to be talking about a new curriculum framework. If you remember the Healthy Youth Act, this is taking some pages from that, some ideas from there and we'll talk exactly about what's in it and where it is in the process. We're also going to talk a little bit about why is it so hard in Massachusetts to get things like this done, which seem like total no brainers and don't have a lot of powerful opposition here in Massachusetts. So before we get to all that, let me introduce my two super fabulous co hosts. I will start with Jordan. 

Jordan Berg Powers, he him and I have several years experience in Massachusetts politics. And Jonathan.

Jonathan Cohn, He him his joining from Boston. And I've also been working on the issue and electoral campaigns here for a number of years now. And happy to have our special guest joining us! Back to Anna. 

I am Anna Callahan. She her, coming at you from Medford. Loving state politics, local politics, which is a big favorite of mine as well. And I am super excited that we have the amazing Cara Berg Powers. Cara, do you want to say a little bit about who you are and the organization that you're with? Sure.

Jordan makes me do this. Dr. Cara Berg Powers.

Oh, thank you. Her pronouns and I am a full time higher ed educator, public and private. I teach sociology at Worcester State University and full time in the education department at Clark University.

So I work really closely with educators that are in K-Twelve and then I am on the board of too many organizations. But amongst them and near and dear to my heart is Educate US, which is a c.4 affiliate of Cekis which is a really long acronym for works nationally on Sex Ed. And Educate US is a really groundbreaking step in that work started by Jacqueline Friedman who is a longtime member of the Healthy Youth Coalition.

And I'm really excited, worked with Jacqueline really closely on a number of projects over the years around media and sex ed. And then in Worcester, where we are coming from on getting a specific curriculum passed here two years ago, three years ago. Amazing, fantastic work.

So we would love to get from you a little bit about what is this new curriculum framework, where is it in the process, what's in it? And a lot of our listeners will kind of recognize the Healthy Youth Act and might know something about it. So differences between those two would be helpful to some folks as well. 

Yeah, absolutely.  I think one of the first things is understanding the kind of the structural differences between the two. So the Healthy Youth Act, one of the things that it does is mandate that if you are teaching sex ed in Massachusetts, it has to be this checklist of things, right? Including that it know, medically accurate, evidence based. I don't know if we're saying evidence based or evidence informed before.

And I'm sure we'll get into what the difference between those things are. They're both good. And that it is inclusive in particularly LGBTQ inclusive, and also that it includes consent.

Right. And that's really important. 

I have to pause for one sec, I have to pause and just say how insane it is that in Massachusetts we don't already require it to be medically accurate, inclusive of LGBT, and include consent. Like, my mind is blowing up that we don't like, why? Anyway, it's crazy that we don't already have that. I will return it back to you after my moment of outrage.

That's exactly right. Right. But this is a slippery slope that we get into, right, is that this is literally all we're asking for.

But what ends up happening whenever we on the left talk about anything related, I mean, honestly, anything that we care about or believe in, but especially as it relates to sexuality, human bodies, we concede so much ground before we even start the conversation. So we have allowed the right, the very small fringe of hate groups like Mass Family Institute to drive this conversation, and we see what's happening nationally with this. This is part of why it is so critically important right now that we still pass the Healthy Youth Act.

And it's really important that the administration do the things in its power, which include our Department of Education is part of the executive branch. And so there are things there. There are things that they do not control, which is messed up in his own dysfunction of how Massachusetts politics works, including who gets to actually hire and fire the Commissioner of Education.

But I digress, but actually putting policies and procedures in place is something that the executive branch via the Secretary of Education can do. And so that is what's happening right now. And that's really important because actually, the fact that we hadn't updated those frameworks since 1999 and still have not fully as of right now, the frameworks have not been updated since 1999.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I have a ten year old. I was not a young parent. Quickly, can I just ask a clarifying question? So you're saying that the curriculum framework that has not been updated since 1999 is no longer in sync with the needs of today.

Very well done. It is not. I'm not even sure you could find something like that on the back street.

Um, so it is really important, right, that we actually look at what, what we were requiring then and make changes just like we have to everything else. Other than that, the furthest back curriculum frameworks go is 2014, right? So it's a pretty big difference. The frameworks themselves haven't been updated, but they are currently right now in the public comment period for 1 second, I want to make sure that the audience caught it.

That what you're saying is the sex ed curriculum has not been updated since 1999, but of all the other curriculums, they've all been updated since 2014. All of them. And I think framework, let's talk a little bit about the distinction between so the Massachusetts state framework, I know that you all understand this because you work in politics, working in education, everyone thinks they understand your job.

And so they throw around words that we have all kinds of random collective meanings around but actually do mean things in our field. So the curriculum frameworks are not curriculum. They are frameworks for curriculum.

So in Worcester, what we adopted was a specific curriculum and the curriculum that we adopted was the Advocates for Youth curriculum. And that is free, that's available for any district to use and it is evidence informed, which means it was not measured over a ten year period, but it drew from ones that were. And then the actual classrooms are going to drill down even further and take that curriculum and make lesson plans and decide how they're going to use it and implement it.

So there is kind of levels. So what frameworks do is they say any curriculum has to do these things. I want to accomplish these goals, include these topics.

Students should know these things when they do this, right? So the most recently updated curriculum frameworks that we have for Massachusetts are the history and civics frameworks due to a lot of activism from lots of really great folks, especially young people, and really championed by our former state senator here, Harriet Chandler. And they're really great. They're I would say the two best among the two best in the country.

The other is Hawaii, and they're actually the only ones that the Zinn Education project rates as covering reconstruction. Let that sink in like above 50% rating. So we have really solid frameworks, right? And then what happens is so for the frameworks for say, third grade history and civics, you are going to have a set of headers that are like Massachusetts local history and it'll be about indigenous communities, it'll be about town histories.

But it's not going to give you a lesson plan. It's going to say you should kind of COVID these topics and these are the competencies. Right? So that's an important way that we've actually updated the way we do frameworks is that we actually talk a lot, not just about what content students are learning, but what we're hoping they learn to do from that content.

So what kind of leadership skills are being developed? What kind of critical thinking skills are being developed? What kind of language and communication skills are being developed? And those are all kind of built in. Those were absolutely not part of, like, they were not as deeply part of things 20 years ago, because fact is that education is a pretty young field in terms of how we do it now. So we have learned a lot.

So that's kind of the difference between frameworks and curriculum. And then, of course, even curriculum that's more at a district level, you're going to adopt curriculum in your classroom in different ways as well. Great.

So the reason there's a need for the sex ed is because the framework is still a big part out from the actual. It's a checklist right down to the actual, and the Healthy Youth Act would still be needed, because that's obviously going to create more than… One, you can update frameworks. So one, it's not a law, so if a new governor comes in and is like, actually, we’re going to do something else, you don't have any oversight. And two, it's still not guiding as much as creating a law that says that you have to build out these things. You have to actually hit all of these different marks.

And I think the other piece that's really important is that this should not be hard, it should not linger. Right. I think how long has the Healthy Youth Act lingered for now? 

Well, we printed this, what, a year, two years ago? So this was our healthy youth act flier, it feels like–

We’ve been working on this for a little while.

Yes, that's right. We printed this probably two years ago. Twelve.

And just, again, just to say that if you teach sex ed, which we should be mandating it, but we're not even mandating it. And I want to talk about it from the perspective of a parent, because I think it's important. A lot of times people hear sex ed and they hear consent, and what they immediately think is like, we're going to be teaching every child, every part immediately, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But what happened in my daughter's classroom? What did my daughter learn as a third grader and a fourth grader underneath this curriculum? The first thing she learned was, people can't touch you without your permission. And there were kids who opted out. And you know what those kids did to my daughter? They bullied her.

I mean, just look, there's a one to one for kids that didn't learn the importance of keeping their hands to themselves because their parents opted them out of this sex ed curriculum. There is a one to one. I mean, it's anecdotal it's not like thing, but there was a one to one in her classroom.

The two kids that touched her hair that we had to have make sure they moved out, that were constantly hitting her without her with, touching her without her permission, were kids who got opted out of sex ed. So the sex ed curriculum, we say sex ed because it is a part of kids understanding the importance of like. And again, if we're not so boys in particular, but kids generally who don't learn from a very young age the importance of consent become adults who don't learn the importance of consent.

And so if we don't mandate this conversation because kids learn, they need to learn. So if we're not teaching kids, they're going to learn bad. They're going to learn things that they otherwise right.

They're going to learn really that we don't want in society. That's right. I wanted to bring up something about the fact that Maura Healy is our governor and she as someone who is in the LGBTQ community, this is important to her personally.

And so I am not surprised that now is when we are having some motion forward on this particular, you know, when we got the driver's license bill passed. I know some people who were involved in the passing of that. And they said that one of the reasons that it passed was know Mariano wasn't quite as against it as DeLeo.

I just want to make one little comment on how when we have less democracy, as we have in the State House, where we cannot see what's happening, we can't know what's happening. And in fact, what ends up in that situation is that a very tiny subset of people pretty much controls what legislation is worked on, what legislation is brought forward, what legislation is voted on. Then it leaves it up to the whim of the person in a single office whether or not important legislation and a no brainer legislation gets passed.

Absolutely. The one thing I would want to tag in with that as well is you have the problem, I feel like, with the Healthy Youth Act for a number of years, where the legislators who outright oppose it don't want to publicly own their opposition. So that despite often broad support and passing the Senate multiple times, it doesn't move in the House, and nobody's willing to really talk on record about who the problem is for that, which is kind of a reflection of what you're saying, where so much of that decision making actually is happens behind closed doors.

It leads to that inertia. And I'll just say that I'm going to guess that there's probably one to one with people who are opposed to it, that people have problems with consent and keeping them hands to themselves. Yeah, you're probably right about that.

I'm going to take a little pause here. Just put the conversation on pause for one moment and mention that we do have folks who help us to make this podcast as great and amazing as it is, who help us with the graphics. They help us with the editing.

They help us with social media. They help us to make sure that this gets into the ears and into the brains of as many wonderful progressive folks in Massachusetts as possible. And we really are able to make this podcast happen because of your amazing donations.

So thank you so much to everyone who has donated. If you have not donated, I encourage you to put in, even just put in five a week, five a month, something that would make you feel really happy every time you listen to be like, hey, I am making this podcast happen. I am one of those people supporting it, and we would love you for it.

And once that is said, I want to go ahead and return. We're going to talk a little bit. Let me first just ask Dr. Cara if there is anything–We're going to move in a second from this legislation into talking about some other legislation that really should be a no brainer. But I want to go ahead and let you kind of close it up in terms of what can people do? How can people get involved? 

I think that it is so urgent right now that we address this. As Jordan said, as parents, we see the impacts of not being able to ensure that people are getting this information from very early ages. Right? We all seen on TV, like the Talk, when did your parents have the talk with you? But it's not a talk, right? We are talking about consent with our daughter all the time. Teachers are reinforcing the kind of skills and tools of good communication, of respecting one another, of taking care of ourselves and our surroundings all the time, right? So all of the skills and tools that we're learning in these things need to be reinforced for us to have a healthy and safe ecosystem.

Right? And that's incredibly important now because we see the attacks, to your point about Governor Healy being the one who's pushing this forward, the attacks nationally, especially on trans kids and on trans and queer teachers. Right? I work in a teacher prep program, right? Like, that's a big part of my work. I work a lot with young people who are going to be our future teachers, and I work in some cases with future trans teachers.

Right? And they're scared right now. Right? I'm tearing up a little right now because my students are scared to do the thing they love, right, because of who they are. And so it's really important that from the ground level, we are creating environments of respect and community and really embracing all of who people are.

And this is really important to that. It's not just about healthy relationships. So it is that as well.

It's not just about ensuring that people are able to recognize and halt sexual assault and abuse, though. It is that as well. As a survivor myself, I know how important getting sex ed was to me, identifying that's what had happened.

Right. And to Jordan's point before about the one to one of like, we know that people who are opposed to this have reasons that they're, you know, one of the biggest opponents here that thankfully has since retired has standing allegations credible allegations of child rape against him and served in office, overseeing curriculum in our schools. Having access to children in our schools for years unchecked.

Right? So we're in such an important moment right now where it's not enough for us to prevent or try to do our best for Massachusetts to not have these kinds of attacks on kids we need to push so far back. Right? And this is one piece of that. So, as I said, there's a really great grid on the state frameworks website of the kind of timeline of the process, I think.

Take a look at the frameworks, give comments. You can also find it on the Healthy Youth Coalition's page as well. They link to the public comment and just say how important it is, why we need to get this done.

As we said before, frameworks only matter in so much as they're enforceable. And unfortunately, there really isn't an enforcement mechanism unless we also pass the Healthy Youth Act. So I also recommend that people reach out to the Healthy Youth Coalition and get involved there as well.

Fantastic. I just want to quickly note, like, August 28 is the deadline for submitting public on that. Thank you.

Great. So please do that. You are hearing from us things you can actively do right now to move things along.

And we're going to go ahead at the last few minutes here, we're going to talk about why we all have to spend our time on something like this that literally should be a total no brainer. It should be a no brainer, and our legislature should have already passed it. There is no well funded, corporate powerful majority of people who are against these policies.

And so the fact that we have to spend our time lobbying and making public comment and being aware of all these things, that why they're not happening and how long it takes really says something to the dysfunction of the state legislature. And there are plenty of other things that aren't happening. I mean, frankly, the budget is late already.

And so just we're talking super basics, like they could pass the budget when they're supposed to pass the budget. But there are other things. And Jordan, I know you wanted to talk about gun legislation, which seems in Massachusetts like, I mean, what organized powerful interest against this gun reform? 

So I think it's important because it came in the news this week that there is dysfunction on how to pass gun legislation.

The House wanted to do it the way the House does things, which is to just do it in the dead of night, having no one oversee it and have no public hearings whatsoever about it, by the way, when we say that the legislature should pass things, that's not what we're talking about. Some of the senators were like, shouldn't we hold a hearing about it? But I think it's important because the legislature wants to take a victory lap. I've already seen House representatives talk about the important legislation they've done around gun safety and how they're really taking it seriously.

But that's easy for them to like to point. Like a lot of the things that they are celebrate doing are things that in Massachusetts, there isn't in well organized opposition. Republicans are for gun safety legislation.

There's no powerful people opposed to it. None of the hospitals are going to oppose it. None of the large corporations are going to oppose it.

They're like, yeah, that sounds great. So there's no cost to the legislators to do this thing. There's nothing hard about it.

And while it's important to have good gun safety rules, it will literally save lives. It is still marginal compared to this types of impact because we already have good gun safety laws updating. The laws will have impact, but you're not going to fix the teeth.

It's not going to take on powerful interest around health insurance. It's not going to really fundamentally dig into the ways in which our housing policies are fundamentally a document on the fact that our legislature is racist and continues to act in racist ways. And housing is a way in which our racism just lives on year after year, generation after generation, right? It's not taking on these big questions.

It's still taking on things that are relatively easy. But they are going to take a victory lap on it, and it's frustrating, even victory lap. And they're going to take time, right? They're going to delay, and they're going to you still talk about it.

They might not delay. Yeah, maybe it'll move in the dead of night or move it in the dead thing. That I would also note what you were saying is it also speaks to the fact that there are always opportunities to strengthen the existing laws where we have strong laws.

However, to make the real continued reductions when it comes to gun violence requires, let's say, addressing poverty, where if you have a lot of the areas that tend to have high rates of gun violence are also kind of lower resource communities. And then if you want to actually address things at their root requires a much more comprehensive way of addressing the fundamental of, say, like lack of resources, lack of stability, lack of investment, lack of public goods. Kind of that community face that you can go a lot by just on direct gun violence prevention and of course, do it, but then you'll eventually hit a wall if you don't address the underlying force.

Absolutely. What a great point. So well said.

So well said. And so what we're kind of saying is and we've said this before in the show as well. The state legislature will every term, which is two years, they will find one thing that progressives have wanted for years and years and years that they passed, and then they're like, oh, look at how great we are.

And that allows them to get a pass for not doing any of the difficult work. And it's not that passing this curriculum isn't important. Of course it's important.

It's not that the driver's license bill wasn't important. Good grief. Like 20 years of not passing it of course it's important.

It's not that these gun safety laws aren't important. It's that they should already be passing them without spending years and deliberating. They should deliberate, but without having to have hundreds, thousands of volunteers lobby them and all of that.

Those things should just be passing so that we and they can spend their time on issues where there actually is some sort of powerful interest that might spend millions of dollars if it were on the ballot. You know, making sure that these things don't say it actually reminds me of Toni Morrison's quote about the function of racism. Right.

Which is that the deep, meaningful function of racism and I'm paraphrasing here, is to distract us by which means it's to have us spinning our wheels. It's to have us constantly fighting back. It's to have us stuck in the mud.

That's the same thing that these fights over things that shouldn't be fights do for the progressive movement. Right. All of these volunteers that could be working on moving our state forward are still fighting 20 years ago fights.

Yes. Excellent point, Jonathan. No, I think that's really well said.

I was just thinking before about how the contrast with other states where we might see states going through an agenda that has been held up for a while, and they take back power and they're like, okay, these are the things that we've been wanting to do. Let's do them. And in our state, where they always have their supermajority is pretty much immune to any electoral pressure.

And in some ways, that's a great thing that there's a supermajority that's that large, but it leads to a real complacency because they expect to be there again the next year and the next year after that and the next year after that. So any sense of urgency connected to time just withers away because we'll still be in charge. We can get to that later.

Absolutely. I think the other piece is, like, the thing that's so frustrating and when you hear people complain, like, for example, Minnesota, right? Minnesota isn't just passing the things that it had laying around because it's had Democratic legislature things for you know, they took on Uber and Lyft. Right.

Like, yes, it got sort of pushed back on. But they are they are forward thinking. They're trying to lead on things.

And our legislature has a hard time keeping up with Republican states 20 years ago. Would you say that part of that is that we have a Democratic majority but they have a progressive majority? Yes, I would. I sure would.

Because I think part of what this exposes right. Is that we have a supermajority. But do we have a consensus in that supermajority about what's important? No.

Yes. Right. You're getting at the underlying thing, which is that I think that I've said this before on the podcast.

Most of them don't have any ideology, which is to say that they don't have any belief on how things could be better, should be better, or an understanding or a framework to understand the policies that we're asking them to pass. They literally wing it based on what the speaker tells them they should do. Yeah.

Oddly, they have an agenda. It's called the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform. And yet it appears that the leadership who basically control everything that passes and doesn't pass and what gets worked on is their primary agenda is to prevent that agenda from ever coming true or at least to do as little as possible of it.

As little as possible without upsetting anybody, any particular interest that has power or anything. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about the media's obsession. They call it tax relief, which is laughable.

It's just a laughable term. Like, we don't pay that much in taxes. I'm sorry.

We don't. We just don't. We don't need relief from it.

And they are obsessed with it. Right. Rent relief is socialism, but tax relief is regular.

It is this weird. There's the power base, right? There's this thing in Massachusetts where power has so moved the conversation so far to the right that Democrats don't even have they're not moored to anything. Right? They're moored to really basic culture war stuff that's like to oppose what's happening in Mississippi.

But they're not really moored to any sense of who are the people they're fighting for? Who are the people? And the whole system is in place. That just really disconnects it so you they don't so they don't think about how am I legislating to make regular people's lives better? How am I legislating to make people who are struggling financially to get by? How am I making it better for people who can't drive and can't afford cars to get around? How am I for people who rent? How am I ensuring that they can live here because they're unmoored from the fact that that should be their base? 

Yes. And on that incredibly positive note, we encourage everyone to make public comment on the new Set Ed curriculum which is a really great step forward to donate to the show, which is right below here and to look forward to our podcast next week where who knows what we'll talk about.

But we guarantee you it'll be fun and exciting and informative and we look forward to chatting with you all next week. Bye.