Todd Gazda, superintendent of schools in Ludlow, Massachusetts, posted a blog that expresses the outrage that so many educators feel today as a result of federal and state meddling in the work best left to educators.
Gazda writes: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
For his courage and wisdom, I am naming him to the honor roll as a champion of public education. If there were hundreds more Todd Gazda, no thousands more, we could reclaim this nation from the ignorant policymakers who seem determined to test children until they cry and to cripple public schools by overburdening them with mandates and demands while cutting their budgets. If our public schools manage to escape this era of austerity and chaos, it will be due to the leadership of educators like Todd Gazda.
Here is what he wrote:
We are at a pivotal juncture in this country with respect to education. Over the past decade, we have seen a dramatic escalation in the involvement of the Federal Government in education. There seems to be the belief in Washington that the alleged problems in public education in the U.S. can be corrected through national standards, increased regulations, standardized testing, and mandates regarding what and how our children should be taught. It seems that government at both the State and Federal levels want to take control of education away from locally elected officials and place that control in the hands of bureaucrats in the various state capitals and Washington. Nowhere is that practice more evident than here in Massachusetts.
We are drowning in initiatives. Even if they were all good ideas, there is no way we could effectively implement them all. They are getting in the way of each other and working to inhibit necessary change and progress. The number and pace of regulations to which we must respond and comply is increasing at an alarming rate. The following information is taken from the testimony of Tom Scott, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, presented to the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Education Committee on June 27, 2013. An examination of the regulations and documents requiring action by local districts on the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website demonstrates that from the years 1996 -2008 (13 years) there were 4,055 (average of 312 each year) documents requiring action of local districts in response to regulations. The same examination conducted on the four year period of 2009-2013 reveals that there were 5,382 (an average of 1077 each year) multiple page documents requiring action by local school districts. How are we effectively supposed to implement local initiatives and meet the needs of our students when we are mired in this bureaucratic nightmare of a system?
Education is an inherently local pursuit. To view it otherwise is misguided and detrimental to the mission of educating our children. In order for schools to be effective they must be responsive to the culture of the community in which they reside. The culture of those individual communities differ greatly and mandates which dictate uniformity for schools across the state, and now even the nation, are in direct contravention to that reality. Educational historian, David Tyack, stated that “The search for the one best system has ill served the pluralistic character of American Society. Bureaucracy has often perpetuated positions and outworn practices rather than serving the clients, the children to be taught.”
Current education reform is not designed to truly change education it merely adds additional levels of bureaucracy to an already overburdened system. The extreme emphasis on standardized testing is an unproductive exercise in bureaucratic compliance. As educators, however, if we speak out against the standardized testing movement and the amount of time it takes away from instruction then we are not for accountability. If we point out that many of the standardized test questions are not developmentally appropriate for the age of the students to whom they are being given, then we are not for rigor.
Assessments are an essential part of education. They serve as diagnostic tools that afford teachers the opportunity to determine areas where students need extra assistance or demonstrate when a topic needs to be re-taught. However, standardized tests whose scores take months to arrive, often after the student has moved on to another teacher, have a limited utility for shaping the educational environment. I am concerned that we are creating students who will excel in taking multiple choice tests. Unfortunately, life is not a multiple choice test. Enough is enough!
It is time for educators to push back against the standardized, centralized, top-down mandate driven school reform environment. I agree with the need for standards, but those standards need to be broadly written. Local communities, school boards, administrators and teachers should then be afforded the flexibility to demonstrate how they have worked to creatively to implement local initiatives in order to meet those broadly construed standards. The problem is that it is difficult to boil down creativity to a data point and that makes bureaucrats uncomfortable to say the least.
Well, where does that leave us? Education in the United States is constantly being compared to the systems in countries around the world. One important characteristic of education in those countries, which is consistently linked to the success of their students, is the esteem with which they hold their educators. It is time to treat our teachers with respect. It is time that we involve teachers in the discussion to set the direction for education in this country. They are the ones with the training and expertise. They are on the front lines in this battle. It is time that as educators we let our representatives at the state and federal levels know that we are headed in the wrong direction. It is time that, rather than be influenced by special interests, we focus on the students and the skills they need to be successful in our modern society. I will do my part. Will You?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Brilliant!
Thank you Todd Gadza… you are definitely a hero to both students and teachers around this country. I hope your wisdom prevails and a lot more school administrators speak out loudly and forcefully. All your words hit home. One particular comment struck a raw nerve. You said,”The problem is that it is difficult to boil down creativity to a data point and that makes bureaucrats uncomfortable to say the least…” This really hit home. Art teachers are being forced to complete Student Learning Objectives which basically boil down to making art classes set up to fit into a “data collection” model! So an art teacher has to create a particular activity just to set up … yes… just to set up a baseline for measuring a students’ creativity. Then the teacher must “measure” a students’ “growth” through “hard” data at specified intervals throughout the year. The teacher needs to quantify creative process! Really? THIS IS SICK. This defies the very nature of the creative learning process and yet all art teachers will be held accountable for this buffoonery. And the same buffoonery applies to every classroom teacher forced to do the same. Students learn at different paces and there is SO SO MUCH wrong with this bloated top-down bureaucratic data-obsessed time in public education. SO MUCH WRONG.
“We are drowning in initiatives. Even if they were all good ideas, there is no way we could effectively implement them all. ”
I don’t even work in a school and I can tell they’re drowning in initiatives. I agree they can’t do them all, let alone do them all well. No one could.
IMO, we’re looking at the what is not a coherent and well-designed POLICY effort, but instead the chaos that results from the nature of the ed reform POLITICAL coalition.
In order to hold the ed reform political coalition together, each faction has to get their pet policy, their pet project. So, for example, we get a vast expansion of privatized schools and vouchers to placate the “choice” wing, along with promises on pre-K to hold the “liberals” in the coalition. We get rhetoric on how we must not “teach to the test” from the “quality” people while they peg everything to tests to appease the “accountability” faction. There is no priority setting, no discipline or common sense, no one ever says “no” to a faction, because they need a political coalition to ram this stuff through.
It’s incoherent and often at cross-purposes because it’s POLITICAL, not substantive.
They’ve also set this up politically so anyone who says “this is incoherent chaos, it’s harming my public school, and no one could do 500 things well” is immediately smeared as self-interested.
They’ve effectively insulated themselves from any criticism or pushback. That’s just a recipe for a trainwreck.
“Education is an inherently local pursuit. To view it otherwise is misguided and detrimental to the mission of educating our children.”
How do we get to fully equitable funding of education for all kids in the US if we operate under this paradigm? I don’t see any way to get there unless K-12 funding is fully federalized.
The feds are not proposing that they fully fund education. IMHO that would be a disaster anyway. The further the funding is from the recipients, the more opportunity for mismanagement and the less opportunity for oversight. My state does a poor enough job of fulfilling their obligations without sending our money even further away. At least local authorities have some say, however flawed. Not a ringing endorsement for local control, is it?
We should demand what they have in the ACA: insurance must pay 85% to patient services, 15% overhead. That’s what we need in schools. Get the money to the kids!
The Florida Education System has a Legislator heading that division whose sister and brother-in law manage a Charter Management Corporation- Florida charter schools have a 740% higher failure rate over Public Schools ( But the Charter school system’s
profits have soared ) The Kids have failed though….surprise .. when we deregulate the criminals “The inmates are running the jails”
I am a teacher in Bridgeport, CT and I would like to commend Superintendent Todd Gazda of Massachusetts. We need a strong voice to speak up for children. There are so many initiatives put into place at the expense of children during that particular timeframe. When one of my sons was in school, many teachers believed that phonics and spelling were no longer important, based on the whole language approach, so my son had to learn how to spell correctly, with prodding from his parents. I’m sure there have been many more initiatives over the years that have left children lacking in something that they should have learned. Although I still manage to teach science and social studies to my sixth grade students, each year there is less and less time to do so. Teachers are so inundated with paperwork from evaluations, testing, and other mandates that there is barely any instructional time left. I agree with you, Mr. Gazda that enough is enough and I will continue to do my part, to teach our children life skills and everything else that they should be learning. We cannot let the bright ideas of the moment steal away the education of children until the next bright idea, that doesn’t work either, comes along.
I’m not a teacher anymore.
I’m an implementer of bureaucratic initiatives.
Supt. Gazda is right. I wish there were many more like him.
LAUSD School Board–could you please hire Mr., Gazda as our new superintendent, effective immediately!
Reblogged this on Rickarcher1959's Blog and commented:
We need more superintendents to do this around the country. Unfortunately, most of them are part of the problem. Many school board are bought and paid for as well.
….. it’s time to take back our schools! Nothing is more important. Unless there is a huge global market for people who only know how to take standardized tests….then we MUST change. If we want to be the best and the brightest, then we better stop taking steps backward and start to move forward. All we hear about is that we must foster creative, critical, out of the box thinkers and yet we are acting against that philosophy by giving the utmost importance to a paper and pencil standardized test that is taking away from VALUABLE teaching time. WE CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS! BE innovative or be left in the dust by countries who are choosing innovation. Friends….PLEASE SHARE and give your children a chance to really thrive in our schools. SPREAD the WORD!
I had a co-worker who said we can either do a few things well, or many things poorly. No one can do it all.
I agree that the emphasis on standardized testing and more specifically common core has reached a point where it damaging our youngest, most vulnerable students. I do believe that there needs to be some standard in which to measure student performance in order to ensure that teachers and school districts are getting the job done. I am a Massachusetts parent and not an educator so my question is what do educators propose as an alternative to the systems that are currently in place. Again I think the train (to borrow this frequently used analogy) is about to jump the track but I have yet to find information about other solutions. I would love to hear more.
Invested MA parent,
Here is a suggestion. Massachusetts has many excellent private schools. Find out what they do. They are not testing their children with standardized tests every year. How do they know that their students are learning?
I dont believe you can compare private schools to public schools (and I am a product of both). I hear nearly all educators express that poverty is an overwhelming contributor to poor academic performance (of course there are exceptions to everything). Private schools have endowments and give scholarships but clearly any parent below the poverty line who has gone to those lengths for their child to attend private school is already exceptional. In private school, students learn because there is motivation and an expectation from home. Also most private school teachers are not unionized, if they are not effectively teaching they are not protected by tenure and can be shown the way out.
Thanks for finally talking about >A Hero Superintendent in Massachusetts Speaks Out Against the Madness | Diane Ravitch’s blog <Loved it!