The Thrive Act -- how all of our students can succeed and thrive

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Today we talk to Vatsady Sivongxay about the Thrive Act. We'll talk about receivership and why it is so damaging especially for our BIPOC community, as well as about the MCAS, what it does to our kids, and we'll also talk about the positive vision the Thrive Act provides.

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 23. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to Incorruptible, Mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics. We know that together we can make the policies here in the state of Massachusetts reflect the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.

So today we have an exciting podcast about education, about the Thrive Act, and a wonderful guest who is with us, Vatsady Sivongxay. And she will be talking about not only the Thrive Act in terms of our educational system, but also its momentum, the impact that it will have, who it is that is being impacted by our current way of having receiverships in schools, in school districts. We'll talk about some places where this kind of receivership is truly a disaster and everybody knows it's a disaster.

We'll talk a little bit about the MCAS and then we'll talk briefly as well about the ballot measure that is related. But before we do any of that, I would love to introduce my two illustrious co hosts. I will begin with Jordan Berg bowers.

Jordan Berg powers. He him I'm coming from Worcester, Massachusetts, and for this purpose I've had several kids in the public school system. I currently have a ten year old in the public school system.

And Jonathan Cohn.

Jonathan cone, he him his joining from Boston and have issue and electoral campaign in Boston and statewide for about a decade now, which is wild, and happy to have Vatsady with us today. Thank you. 

Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford. And I also have a kid who's in the public school system here in Medford and love talking about all this policy stuff with everybody every week. So much fun.

So Vatsady, I would love it if you could introduce yourself and your organization first and then we'll get on to talking about the Thrive Act. 

Yeah, thank you. Thank you Anna, Jordan and Jon for having me on.

My name is Vatsady Sivongxay, I go by the she her series. I also have an awesome young person in public schools and he loves it. And I love our public school here in Cambridge.

I am the director of the Massachusetts Education and Justice Alliance. As folks might hear, we also go by MEJA and we're a coalition, a statewide coalition of organizations led by community members, students, parents and union workers as well. And we work together to improve our public schools k through college, so kindergarten through college.

And we fight in order to get the resources and funds to our public schools so all of our students can succeed and thrive. 

Wonderful. Thank you so much. It's exciting work that you guys are doing. Can you introduce us to the Thrive Act? How long it's been around? I mean, I guess first, just what is it, what does it do? What problems is it trying to solve? 

The Thrive Act is an extremely exciting piece of legislation that is brand new. This is our first year into a legislative cycle, and it really gives us, the community, an opportunity to change the system for assessment and accountability of our schools.

We all know that the state has failed to better improve our schools and to bring our voices into the decision making process. So the Thrive Act gives us that channel to improve through changes in policy, to ensure that our students and our schools are better, that all students, no matter where they come from or what type of background they come from, that they succeed and thrive. So there's like four big changes that this Thrive, our Thrive Act pushes for.

And the first one is a comprehensive vision of the future of all of our public schools based on authentic, evidence based assessment system that actually supports our students. And then, as I mentioned, really driving these decisions about how to best support our students and schools through a more democratic and community driven process. And then also, it changes the graduation requirement.

So we're one of seven states left that requires the MCAS or standardized testing as a graduation requirement, and it ends all existing state takeover, the receivership of schools within a year. So, like, Lawrence, Holyoke Southbridge would have a more democratic governance of their schools and control better control of their school systems in order to really build a better education space for all of our students, families, and educators and staff. 

Amazing. Can you give us a little information? Like, how long has the Thrive Act been around and a little bit more logistical information? 

Yeah, officially, right, we filed, I believe it was in January, it might have been early February. So this year, 2023, it was officially filed. There has been such great momentum in partnerships among all sorts of organizations, from grassroots to advocacy, to policy making organizations.

And it's growing. It continues to grow both at statewide organizations and local organizations. And the momentum that we've seen in our grassroots organizing has been what keeps us going.

Right. The energy from the students, the parents, the educators, and education staff has been quite amazing. And so it's a new legislation, and the momentum continues to today.

And so our partner organizations that help lead the work has been working tirelessly every day to reflect, to hear from the communities, to move forward together. And so we're all excited to share more. A little bit about the thrive act.

Quick thing that I wanted to pop in. So when you were talking about the bill, you mentioned several different communities across the state and the governance of their schools. Can you explain to people a little bit more what is the current governance situation of their schools that the Thrive Act would fix and what receivership means? Yeah, so that's a good place to take a step back.

So when a receivership is the state takeover of an entire school district or individual schools. But in this case, we're looking at the entire school district. So the three districts that I mentioned are Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge.

And Lawrence is going on almost 13 years of being under state control. And state control pretty much means the state makes the ultimate decision to take over the school district by controlling, acting as the superintendent. So removing the superintendent sometimes like removing the power of an elected school committee.

Like in Lawrence, the state has control of what part of the school district they take over. So it may be different in each district, right, and who or what they replace it with, so they can replace it with one person, they can replace it with a nonprofit. And in almost all of these situations, they've been folks and organizations that have no connections to the community and no understanding of what has happened or what needs, how to move things to improve the schools.

Now, if we look at a unique situation, which is Springfield, they call the state Takeover Empowerment Zone. And that's like carving out part of the district and saying you will be under state control and won't have any power, whereas the other parts of the state, the other part of the district will. So it creates two different school systems.

And it's really confusing for parents, right? Like super confusing for the parents who are BIPOC and immigrant low income, who we consider are the majority of the population and families here in these districts. 

Yeah. Jordan, I know we were talking about this before and you have a lot of thoughts about how to sort of explain the fact that, wow, what a surprise that these districts that are under state control are people of color.

Fundamentally, the receivership laws are racist. They're not going to ever put Arlington under know, they're not ever going to put any of the sort of white towns into receivership. And again, because I think the other piece that we haven't talked about, but we will, is just that it's what the reasons for receivership are random and not universal and hard to suss out.

And so you could put Brookline under receivership for the treatment of its black teachers that have complained, or the fact that there's a disparate impact for students of color versus white students, right? But they will never do that because fundamentally, this law is a law that rests on the idea that black and brown people are too stupid and poor people are too stupid to run things. And you need these magical beings who are objective, cue white men, and have no sort of ideological leanings that will color their belief systems. Cue white men, they don't come from the community, right, who won't be bogged down by the histories of corruption and problems, right? It's always this idea.

It's this idea that there are these people out there who can be free of any subjectiveness or any lived experience that can then come in and just fix these problems which are systematic problems, often reflecting our disinvestment and lack of care for communities that are underprivileged and under-resourced. Right. So that's fundamentally, they are always about taking I think the most important thing is receivership is just a fancy word for authoritarian, dictatorial, takeover of democratic control that may take forms in lots of different ways.

But fundamentally, what you're saying is this thing that we take for granted in the more affluent, more privileged parts of the state, where I get a say on what happens in my child's school and the district that my school resides in, you don't get that anymore. You get some other formation of it, but you can't be trusted to do it yourselves. Right? And so that's fundamentally what this system does.

It impacts black and brown communities almost exclusively, definitely poor communities. And it only exists – you cannot understand it unless you understand systematic racism, because nobody would like this would never go, they're not going to do it in Georgetown. This would just never happen to other districts like this.

And so I think that that's an important way to think about this, about the receivership. Yeah. I want us to talk a little bit about a couple of other communities that are outside of Massachusetts.

And I think people in Massachusetts, we tend to think, oh, our state is so much better than other states, and it drives people to donate to politics in other states. It drives people to volunteer for other states. Even people that I know, family members of mine who live in other states, they're like, you're wasting your time doing politics in Massachusetts.

You guys already have it good. Isn't your stuff fine? Isn't your state great? So, like, I want us to take just a moment to talk about a couple of other cities where they have taken over, the state has taken over. And we think it's horrible.

In Massachusetts, we're like, the Republicans are undemocratically, blah, blah, blah, because of people of color. And then let us reflect on that. No, in Massachusetts, we are doing this.

You know, if we can talk about Flint, Michigan first, which is kind of a more of a broad example. Yeah, I'll just go really quickly to just remind people that the crisis of water and Flint, Michigan was when their city got taken over by their Republican governor and put under a receivership or a city emergency manager. It's just euphemisms for took away local democratic control and let it be run by undemocratic people.

That receiver decided to divert where the water was coming from, from a safe, reliable place to a better connected, cheaper place that ultimately poisoned the citizens of Detroit, Michigan. That literally is what happened. And that's what's happening with our schools, I think, when we talk about impact, the other thing I want to talk about is what happens to school districts that go underneath these things.

You're taking out teachers who are if they don't leave on their own. They're probably going to get pushed out, who have been there for a long time, who have a lot of experience. And you're literally poisoning these children with MCAS because what becomes the focus? MCAS prep, math, science I mean, sorry, math reading.

Math reading, but not math, you should learn how to do math well. Not math for a love of math, not math for a lifelong appreciation of math.

Math to do well on the MCAS. And that's it. Drill, drill, drill.

You're not teaching kids to think for themselves. You're not teaching kids to be good citizens. You're not teaching kids you're teaching kids to sit down, shut up, listen, never move, never think critically, fill in bubbles for answers to questions that have already been answered, like that.

You're teaching kids to be rote memorization vessels. And that's what happens. We think of it.

Flint, Michigan is so visceral because the kids were being poisoned. But there's a real poisoning happening to our children's future with these takeovers. It's not just that people lose democratic control and it's racist.

It's also like what happens in these school. Absolutely. And one thing I want to mention here, because the absolute basis for the differences that we see in different school districts is the fact that in America we have this absurd way of paying for schooling, for public schooling, which is tied to property values.

Is anybody surprised that wealthier communities have schools that are better since they're better funded? They have kids who do better on whatever kind of tests you give to them. The whole system is set up to ensure that the communities that are poor and have more people of color cannot pass whatever the vague, bizarre test is for receivership, and then they go under receivership. It is systemically.

It is set up to make these things happen because of the crazy way that we fund public schooling, which is just, I think, criminal. Go ahead, Jonathan. And it's a step beyond that as well, because it's not just how that connects the funding base for the school, but when you do have the fact of in an affluent area, the parents often have more time to invest into the school.

There are more times like they have more money to invest in other aspects of the child's, child's education. You tend to have greater, let's say children often have greater housing stability in an affluent community as opposed to more one food security, lower rates of gun violence, and all of those things that quick fixes in a school system fundamentally can't solve. And that the refusal often and a lot of education reform strategies to look at what's existing outside of children is often something that creates a pathway toward privatization strategies because you can kind of present any idea as a quick fix that your friend with this, who you can give a lucrative contract to, will be able to solve the problems facing the school district if we only do X, whereas they make a lot of money.

But you haven't solved any of the underlying issues that are causing problems for the district. Yeah. Other cities that have.

Yeah, I was sticking with this. And also looking at the impact right, of state takeover and receivership and this cycle that state takeover puts our black and brown and immigrant populations in is that even when you look outside of Massachusetts, when the state takes right, it's the same demographic, the same people. You look at Louisiana when the governor gave away all the schools right to charter schools.

That was huge. Privatization. Now in Massachusetts, when there's a real opportunity because of the Student Opportunity Acts funds going into our schools and providing those resources and funds, who's trying to take the money? Like folks who are not from the community, potentially nonprofits that we have no clue where they're coming from, who's running it right.

We have no decisions on how much they're getting paid, the metrics, the goals setting for the leadership of the state takeover team. Our teachers are put in a place where they're under immense pressure to meet an unidentified goal. There's no goals.

So how are our teachers supposed to improve and share and create curriculum with students and families and report back to families and talk with them when it's like no clear goals of where they need to be as a district? And it's not a system that is for our communities, for our students, and for our families. It doesn't bring in enough funds to improve. It does for sure.

If we look at the record, like as Jordan said, high turnover of right. We don't have black and brown teachers and staff that can really relate to our students in these districts. They don't feel welcomed.

And I wonder why. Because even if they are from the community, they want to give back to the community. They're being pushed out.

And then our students are with teachers who might really be new. So it creates a system where everyone has more challenges than before, and that's not right. Yeah.

I want to bring in one other example from another city and another state, Houston, Texas. If somebody wants to go ahead and give us a little bit of background of what happened in Houston, the schools think, I think should you should talk. You might know a little bit more about the but as I understand it, similar, exact similar situation.

The Republicans gave themselves the ability to come into districts and take out the democratic representation and put in whoever they want. Small d, democratic small d.

Right. They targeted the largest district that happens to, again, be mostly black and brown parents. They sent in somebody who they got rid of the elected officials and sent in one person who's politically connected, who literally has no background in education and has no higher degrees in it.

There just happens to be well connected to the governor as a Republican. And so that person's now running the largest school district in Texas and similarly, I think, to Massachusetts for no reason. We don't know what their goal is.

What will they accomplish except vaguely be less black and brownie? That's seemingly always the goal. So, you know, I think it's a really good there was a lot of outrage on it. I saw a lot of things on the TV about great. There was a woman who spoke up and was basically just went to it.

It was like you don't even matter. Like you're just here for political things. You're going to leave.

And I think it's again, a reminder that when we see these things in Republican states, in Texas and so forth and people get outraged and they're on cable news, those are happening here. That literally is happening here. The exact same scenario is happening here.

And the state, were it not for a lot of pressure, was going to do that to our largest school district for the exact same reasons that it happens to be run by black and brown folks and people of color. Yeah. And that person is really touting that.

They're ready to replace their principals. They're ready to bring outside operators into the district to improve the schools. And it's like we understand that you're doing exactly what privatizers have done to public schools, but can you share with us what the benchmarks are? What are your benchmarks to your goals and what are your goals? Right.

Don't just tell us what has failed in the past. Clearly you don't understand and really should go back to doing some studies and better understanding of what the community of Houston needs. But I think it's sickening that he's just extremely excited to do all of this and very public about, right.

So, like, this is the type of people that take over the schools. They're like, yeah, we're coming in. We're going to replace you all, and we're going to bring outsiders in.

Who says that in any situation, how about if that happened to our court systems, we're going to replace all the judges guys and judges. Those people weren't even elected. They were appointed most of the time, right.

We're actually not even talking about democracy, right? We're actually saying like, hey, actually, we're going to just take all your city councilors and throw them all out and we'll put in our own people that happen to be our political allies, our cronies. You say about who the person is. Can you just talk a little bit about the background about who you're talking about and what they said? Who are we talking about in this case? So I think what's interesting is his name is very catchy.

It's Mike miles. And so he will be the state appointed superintendent of Houston. And he definitely doesn't have the know similarly to other organizations and individuals that are appointed to take care of and run entire districts.

So in some cases, what I'm emphasizing, in some cases, it's a unilateral decision from the top at the state level and then given few people or one person the full authority. So your city council doesn't have it. Your school committee definitely doesn't have a say, whether elected or appointed.

And in some cases, your mayor doesn't have a say. And because it can change from district to district, immigrant folks talk, people color talk, right? Some people better understand through conversation, and it's incomprehensible for a person to understand, okay, so how do I better improve this system? First, I don't even know what this system is. Who do I go to? Who is the person I go to? To, one, understand how this works, and then, two, to then advocate and ensure that our perspective and our voices are part of the decision making, the complexity, it makes it very undemocratic.

So if you're hearing us about how these things happen in other states, these Republicans do these horrible things that we're offended by, that we think are terrible, and we are going to donate our money to other states, we're going to volunteer in other states, you need to hear what we're saying, which is these things are happening in Massachusetts. If you have heard what we said today, that what happens in Massachusetts matters as much as what happens in some faraway state, you need to donate right now $5. Just to tell us that you're listening.

Donate $5. The link is below. It's very easy put that $5 in to show that you have heard what we say on this podcast, which is we are not this wonderful, perfect, progressive state, that our state legislature is failing us in many, many ways.

If you've heard what we have to say, give us $5. I just want to say really quickly that one of the things I love is that this conversation isn't happening in other places. You're not getting 30 plus minutes diving into the understanding of one policy and how it will interact with our schools.

We'll be lucky if they cover it for two or three paragraphs and then never talk about it again. But they will definitely talk endlessly about who's up, who's down, who's for, who's against. They'll talk endlessly how it affects the governor, doesn't affect them, but won't talk about the policy itself.

So if you want to have real conversations about real policies and exactly as Anna said, donate. And just know that, again, it goes to all the people. You don't see.

None of us take a cent of that. It goes to a bunch of people who we pay a bunch of young people, artists, to do some of the stuff behind the scenes to make this happen. Great.

I would love for us to talk a little bit more deeply about the MCAS and Vatsady. If you want to start us off and tell us a little bit about the MCAS and how it works just for folks, maybe, who don't have kids in the public schools and maybe don't know quite as much. Yeah.

A key part of the Thrive Act is ending the MCAS as a graduation requirement. As I mentioned in the Intro, we're one of the last states that require this graduation, this type of graduation requirement. And it particularly impacts, again, black and brown students, low income and immigrant students.

Right. They have to pass the high school, the MCAS, in 10th grade, to receive their diploma. And it just doesn't make sense.

I think, for me, I didn't have to take the test. I think I came out pretty okay. At least my parents are very happy with where, you know, I feel like I'm contributing back to the community.

And the biggest thing about MCAS is that it's extremely stressful for students and educators to ensure that students pass it. It doesn't provide the metrics for our schools and educators to support the students because the data is given way after the student has so, like, it doesn't serve its purpose. Yeah.

What does MCAS stand for? So I try not to know too much about the acronym of MCAS, but let me make sure I get it right. Jordan, you can feel free to jump in. I know that it is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, and clearly by the name, it must be a very comprehensive, well rounded test that gives all of the information that you need to know about students and all aspects of their education, right? Yeah.

To whom? This assessment system gives some data to someone, but not to the folks who need it, not to the students or the parents so that they can see where the students are at in a timely, urgent way and to the educators who are there to build the curriculum together to support the students. The MCAS is an assessment system. Right.

Could be used as a benchmark, but it just doesn't function the way that folks have intended it to be. And I think that we're one of the last states to really see the true outcome of what an MCAS system does. I think that we're hearing a lot from even parents, like, when we go out and discuss, like, what is, you know, the MCAS, like, a lot of parents don't know what it is.

Right. Like, we say, oh, it tests on English and math, and folks are like, what is the test? And then it takes, like, how many I don't know, weeks and months to explain exactly what it is. And parents don't have time for that.

They just need to know, what is it telling us? How can we better improve? How can I be more involved in my students? How can I work with my teachers to ensure that my student and their class does well? And it doesn't do that at all. And I think a lot of the complaints that people have about the MCAS is that this is not teaching kids to think right? It's not teaching children to be creative, problem solvers.

It's not helping them in their future lives. And I know, Jordan, you have a wonderful prop for us in a think. I think there's a couple of things I want to tease out from the MCAS.

The first is just that for people who don't understand what Vatsady is saying I just want to reiterate what Vatsady is saying. You get the scores after your students are gone. So if you wanted to assess how your students are doing, they're now gone.

And you can't use it as a tool to figure out where they are. But even if you gave it in the beginning of the year and got immediate feedback on where they are, it's still a bad test because it's geared towards it is fundamentally geared towards white students. There's a lot of studies about this.

When the MCAS was first introduced, there were three companies that could have been the test behind it. And we chose the test that correlated the most to race. I want to say that again.

We had three tests that were possible. We bought the test that was most correlated to race, and the people who wrote the test at the time said it was not meant to be a standardized test for all students on graduation. They have now changed their tune because they're getting very rich off of it.

But when they first created that assessment, they were very clear that it was a base assessment tool for teachers to get a sense of where their students were. And the reason for that is, if you ask somebody a question about a sofa, and they've never heard that word because they use the word couch, you are fundamentally making a determination that seems objective, but it's actually based on your privileged perspective. And we see that over and over again.

One of the easiest examples, one of my friends grew up in a communist country, and when they did math, right, even their math questions, what do we ask questions about? If somebody sells something, if somebody takes something away, what do we like? Their questions were all about what happens when we come together? What happens when people do things? Even our math questions can be put together in such a way that they reflect back our own biases. And that's without the fact that the MCAS does not make appropriate limitation for people who have learning, who are neurodivergent, and it does not make it for people whose English is not their first language, right? So if you take into effect all of those things, even if we moved it to time it in the right time, it's not doing what parents and people think it's doing. The only thing the MCAS correlates to is family wealth.

That's it. That's the only thing it can tell you. There are much cheaper ways.

To find out where poor people live. We don't need the MCAS to do that. And that's all it does, because a lot of times people parents get the illusion of information, but it's not information.

I think that's really important for people. It is not information. It's just telling you where poor people are.

It's not giving you any information about education. And we need to disavow ourselves of that belief. But what is it doing to practice? What it does in practice is it crowds out other education to what Anna's saying.

So I always have this prop. This is a reminder. My daughter in kindergarten.

This is the second of these books. Two. Look how thick that's math.

What did you do at kindergarten? Parents do not understand fully how much MCAS is ruining their children's future. I promise you, whatever you think about the MCAS, you do not understand. Politicians have no idea what's going on in the classroom, which is why they should never be allowed to legislate about it's, literally, like all these men legislating about abortion.

That's what every politician in Beacon Hill is doing when it comes to education. They have no idea what's happening in a classroom. This is what's happening.

Kindergarten. I want people to get a sense for people who are listening. It's a big, thick book.

It's a workbook. And I love math. I mean, I love math.

Me, too. I was a math major. Man.

Math is my favorite, favorite subject. I promise you, when you go into this book, it is not written by people who understand math. It's not written by people.

It's not age appropriate. It's not even logical. It's literally a lot of times, it's nonsense, because they didn't want to sell this to school district, so they put nonsense in here to just fill pages.

I guarantee you, it's written by college students, people who they're paying minimum wage to just fill pages, fill content, because they got to read. They give you new books every year, even to the same class. They don't want you to use the old ones.

They want you to sell, sell, sell. And so what's happening is it's crowding out other education, especially for black and brown children. My child gets civics one day a week.

Her civics is treated like art. It's treated like gym. She gets science once a week.

She gets civics once a week, and she gets memorization of math and reading every single day, almost the entirety of her day. That is what's happening in our schools. It is really bad.

And I think that we don't really appreciate how bad it is, how much is crowding out, and that's why teachers are screaming to us, do something about this. This is taking away what we think education. There is not one teacher I have ever talked to who has said, yes, this makes sense.

This is what we should do. It not one there's not a single professional who studies how children learn. Who says the thing you need to do is have them memorize information that they can fill out on a standardized test? Not one.

Right. At five years old, not one. Not a single one.

But that's what we're doing right now to our students rather than listening to professionals about what we could and should have done. Yeah, we're going to have to close up soon. We have an amazing this is such a great conversation.

I know we'd love to talk about that piece about the really quickly. I'd love Vatsady to talk about the piece that does people are always worried about what happens after MCAS because this bill thinks about that, the Thrive thinks about this other know. So I think there's some really the good news is that teachers have thought about this and the professionals have thought about this.

So, Jordan, I think what you're asking is what is the alternative to the graduation, to the know the MCAS will still be taken. Right. Because I think one of the questions is that does it completely get rid of the MCAS and the Thrive Act? We would still meet federal requirements, so we would still receive federal funds.

This is a whole system thing. Right. And then what? The option is that the district would have an opportunity to really look at coursework and really see how the student is doing based on the coursework and meeting the standards that is required for passing for that coursework.

So instead of just relying on the MCAS as a graduation requirement for everyone, even for a person who just came to the US. And in the third year, right, and they've only been here for eight, nine and 10th grade, there's an alternative and we can see their improvement in their real understanding of the curriculum and the learning. So not just like not just memorizing, as Jordan said, but application.

It also has a way to replace the test just really quickly. It also has for us to find an assessment that actually works for students. Right.

The commission us to the Thrive Act pushes for a commission to look at what are the other possible assessment systems that are way better than MCAS. And it allows us to bring in a more diverse group of organizations that can help look at the current assessment system, new assessment possibilities, and then really think about what is the best path forward versus just like, hey, let's just go ahead and grab one of these three. Because we have good relationships with this company.

That's not the best way to make any type of management decision. So let's just do the real work, especially about kids. Make our decisions about kids based on which companies we're friends with, right? No, let's not do that.

Wonderful. Jonathan, I am going to have you give us just a quick sentence or two about the related ballot measure just so we kind of understand how these two ideas are related to each of so one thank you to Vatsady. Again, Vatsady, the group of us have talked about the different components of the belt called the Thrive Act.

One part of them probably sounded familiar to people who are listeners, but you listened to our episode from last week around ballot measures. That the one part of the bill about eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement and replacing it with standards based on coursework that had been filed by the Mass Teacher Association as a ballot initiative for next year's ballot. And so that's something that folks will probably end up hearing more about soon.

We'll see. Like ballot initiatives have their own trajectory where there'll be signature collection happening for them in the fall and then a whole timeline after that. But really appreciate Vatsady, you kind of being on here today to talk about all the different parts of that bell as it moves forward for the session.

Wonderful. And Vatsady, I would love to just give you the final word on the show here. Is there anything that people can do to get involved? What do you recommend of people who are interested in making sure that we get this better outcome for our students? Yeah, definitely.

Stay tuned. If you want to quickly connect with one of our partners or Masia, you can email us at info at math@justice.org and we can connect you with the right partner that's working on it.

There is going to be a on the Thrive Act coming up, so we'd love your support. We'd love to hear also your stories and amplify the stories. So please connect with us.

Connect with us at info@massedjustice.org. Wonderful. Thank you so much to everyone, everyone here.

Vatsady, to you, to Meja, and also to everyone listening today, thank you so much. We cannot wait to talk with you all next week. Thank you, everyone.