Massachusetts

"State lawmakers have scheduled a public hearing to consider nearly two dozen bills aimed at special education policies in Massachusetts. The bills address funding, transportation, enrollment and reimbursement policies. One of the bills would create a special commission to conduct an investigation into special education as it applies to low-income students. The bill would require the commission to recommend strategies that address potential problems 'from over-identifying low-income students as students with disabilities.'"

" Under a new state metric to determine whether public school students are economically disadvantaged, far fewer Massachusetts students will be counted as living in poverty, according to state data. For years Massachusetts has used students' eligibility for free or reduced lunch to measure if students qualified as "low-income." Now, Massachusetts will scrap that method and instead deem students "economically disadvantaged" only if the student participates in one or more specific state-administered social welfare programs: food stamps, foster care, medicaid or transitional assistance for families with dependent children."

"Massachusetts has scrapped a decades-old method for defining low-income students in public schools, resulting in a dramatic decline in the number considered to be living in poverty, according to a Globe review of state data. Now, less than half of Boston school students are regarded as being from impoverished homes, compared with the previous figure of about three-quarters."