With the endorsement of State Superintendent Mitchell Chester, the Massachusetts State Board of Education voted 8-3 to take control of the public schools in Holyoke.
Chester called it an “opportunity” for the district. Most Holyoke residents who attended the hearing opposed the state takeover.
Odd that in the birthplace of American democracy, local control of education has been removed. There are not many examples of state takeovers that have improved education. Let’s see what Commissioner Chester can do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Democracy is far too important to be left to the people.
Gus Morales is one of the most courageous of all the fighters in this fight. I will stand strong with him in any way I can.
I have been following Gus’s story for a couple of years now and I agree Rosemary. He is amazing.
I hope Mass will do better than NJ has for Jersey City, Paterson, Newark during 20+ years of state takeover.
They are going to do this mid-fall? What a year it will be for these teachers and students adjusting to constant change when they should be focused on test prep!
No, they’re planning for the remainder of this year (‘though the receivership is effective immediately). Changes to the actual schools will come in the fall.
OY … Oh yeah, $$$$$ and power opportunity for some. Wonder who’s really behind this move?
What’s the child poverty level in Holyoke?
I looked up the data and found that “Persons below poverty level, percent, 2009-2013
Holyoke – 31.5%
Massachusetts – 11.4%
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/25/2530840.html
Then there’s this:
In Springfield and Holyoke so many children are poor that this year all lunches are served free regardless of income.
One of the biggest struggles is the fact so many poor children start kindergarten behind their peers whose parents have the resources to buy books, send them to a quality pre-school and take trips to museums.
Those children don’t start kindergarten with readiness skills such as being able to sit and concentrate for any period of time. Their vocabulary is much smaller than their middle-income peers’ and they don’t have the abstract language to understand a concept and analyze on their own level, Ruscio said.
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/springfield_holyoke_schools_am.html
What was the excuse, er, pretext, er ostensible justification for doing this?
Test scores, graduation rates, dropout rate – the new superintendent hasn’t
improved performance quickly enough in his eighteen months at the helm
in the majority view of the Board of Education.
and here I was hopeful we’d have another MarketBasket moment where the little guy prevails.
I suppose the public hearings Paul Sagan is holding across the state to get feedback from parents and teachers on CCSS and PARCC is just a big sham too.
Should it be of interest, my notes from the Board of Ed’s deliberation are posted here: http://who-cester.blogspot.com/2015/04/k-12-board-of-ed-will-open-with-comments.html
All kids, teachers, parents, taxpayers get to be guinea pigs.
Not only that but we get to pay to be experimented on.
Of the few expressing support for the takeover was a charter operator:
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/head_of_holyoke_community_char.html#incart_story_package
Vultures
No, vultures only eat dead or nearly dead organisms and, hence, serve a very useful function. The edubullies destroy perfectly healthy organisms, and not even just to satisfy their own consumption needs like animal predators. I think tapeworms would be a better analogy.
How about vampires, the Marburg virus, Rabies, Smallpox, the Hantavirus, Influenza, or even the Rotavirus?
dianeravitch: you’re giving vultures a bad name.
😎
“What he wants to bring is accountability. This receivership is not being imposed in a non-democratic manner. It is some current leaders that have not been democratic at all and have not been open to new ideas,” Pope said. “This broken system and fear of change needs to be put to rest.”
And if they’re not open to the ed reform recipe for “change” it will be imposed!
They have a fundamental problem with the “public” part of public schools. I think it’s incurable. They can hold all the trainings on “community outreach” they want, this problem is baked-in.
Is it a state takeover or a “receivership”?
In another example of “democracy” for public schools in Massachusetts here’s how to privatize a school system by stealth, again with Mitchell Chester in dual roles as head of the MA DOE and PARCC, with Tommy Chang, late of Deasy’s LA iPad fiasco in a supporting role:
https://digboston.com/special-bps-investigation-the-operators/
All the states in PARCC consortium have their state chief school officer on PARCC board.
Yes, but Chester is the Chairman, not a mere member.
I am quite near Holyoke up in Massachusetts, and it is poverty ridden in so many parts of the town. But what makes me crazy is that government thinks it can solve the problem with private profit seeking management rather than invest the needed funding and resources into Holyoke the way Canada and Finland do.
BTW, Holyoke is surrounded by a higher per capita income and the 7 sister colleges, which make it a very highly educated region overall.
It is indeed the case that those who are poor will be swallowed up in the private market of supply and demand and far less transparency.
Only the solid middle and upper middle class will enjoy the notion of the “public commons and goods”.
Democracy for me and for you, but not for others if they cannot afford to participate in fairness and equity . . . .
And people want to know why rioting broke out in Baltimore? The dots are easily connected: overclass, wealth, power, and excess engulfing the have nots, have lesses, and the working classes.
It’s all carefully wrapped up in the same package deal. The contents of the package or in different parts of the box, but they are all contained in the overall parcel . . . .
This terrifies me in light of the riots.
Massachusetts does have another receivership model and that is the partnership between Boston University and the Chelsea Public School, started in 1988 and concluded in 2008. If my memory serves me correctly, when Chelsea was put into receivership a major difference was the essential participation of the public schools, no wholesale school closings and firings. If Holyoke’s demographics are a challenge, Chelsea’s were worse. Moreover what they learned was shared with other school districts. My impression is that this partnership worked to the benefit of the students.
The story of Chelsea puts me in mind of Jitu Brown’s remarks in the opening keynote at NPE Chicago: colonialism.
Under the arrogant John Silber, Boston University took over the Chelsea Public schools for 20 years. The teachers’ contract was abrogated and many outside “experts” and researchers poured into the schools, many making careers due to their involvement. Money was also poured into the schools. But not much has changed and BU folded its tent and went away and the money dried up. From a study in 2010 by The Urban Initiative at UMass Dartmouth:
“The less positive news is that the challenges that the School District and City of Chelsea faced back in the 1980’s are still present, and in some instances have been exacerbated by state and regional economic conditions, as well as world-wide unrest and economic hardship for many families moving into the area. The challenges include: poverty, unreported immigrants, unemployment, crime, gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, family mobility, low attendance rates, and the continuing issue of English as a second language.
The School District of Chelsea can never be accused of not continually looking for a solution to the challenges it faces. The reform efforts have been multiple and continual over the past two decades. Unfortunately they were not always systemic in nature and were driven by a ‘cure de jour’ and perhaps a myopic vision of the individual factors that needed to be addressed, rather than a broad-based plan that built upon succeeding successes and included the resources needed to fully implement the interventions.”
What has worked in Chelsea was not the expertise of the colonizers, but rather the daily hard work of community organizations to provide wrap around services children and families in empoverished cities to mediate the impact of poverty:
“Perhaps most importantly, there is a growing awareness that the school district doesn’t own the problem; that it is a community problem, and it will take the entire community’s resources and willpower to address the needs of its youth in a proactive and effective way. The growing community collaborations with outside agencies and non-profit organizations have already begun to show promise as a major reform strategy.”
Click to access Chelsea_PAR_Final_Report.pdf
Glad I posted about Chelsea despite my limited knowledge. I would never had known about the report of The Urban Initiative at UMass Dartmouth. Excellent and thorough report. Too bad the state can not take the time to a comparable study of Holyoke before the latest intrusion.
The point about community collaborations needs to be shouted from the rooftops. The public schools have, for some time, been asked to assume many roles beyond classroom instruction, e.g. food, clothing, psychological, parent support, teenage pregnancy, etc. With help from these organizations so much more could be done.
Thank you.
Well said. The community approach is the needed element to make lasting change.
Barbara,
“Challenges..teen pregnancy.” The comments that follow a blog post at Freakonomics, about poor pregnant women and Medicaid, are a worthwhile read. The economist’s work cited in the post is at MIT, where David Koch is a lifetime Board member.
Freakonomics is the blog of controversial free market economist, Steven Levitt, also a MIT grad.
The internet identifies Steven Levitt as a Board member of Blueprint
schools, which has been involved in school reform in Boston.
I had never heard this name before: Michael D’Ortenzio Jr……I am not sure what role he played at the state level of Massachusetts’ board of education…..and I have no idea what his views are…..he was a teenager when he was named, and also the only person with Tourette’s syndrome to be able to vote on policies. I wrote to him to ask his thoughts on Holyoke….and mentioned my own long study of the 12 bullet murder of Tim Bacon, which I talk about on one of my kjoesharastuff you tubes. (judge Block). Kind of a gut feeling to reach out. His name does not appear in a search of this site.
I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that one of the first things the state does is eliminating the dual language program from Holyoke’s schools. 79% of kids in the schools are Latino (the majority of them Puerto Ricans, thus American citizens) and 48% are identified as having English as a second language. But those running the department of ed see bilingualism as a deficit. The Dever elementary school in Boston was taken over by the state earlier this school year. The very first thing the charter operator did was eliminate the successful dual language program.
The fact of a large Puerto Rican population in Holyoke matters. (At the Dever, too, many of the families are Puerto Rican.) As citizens, many Puerto Ricans transit between the island and the mainland due to family and employment factors (again, poverty – when there’s no work, you go back to live with abuelita). Children who move between school systems must be fluent in both languages to flourish academically, as public schools in Puerto Rico are conducted in Spanish. Being bilingual is a necessity and the argument of “if they want to live here, they need to learn English” holds no water when compared with the obligation of the state to provide a free, appropriate education to its citizens.
Oh, and of course linguists know that the only way to build literacy is to begin with the child’s first language.
Massachusetts is also the (so called) “Democratic” state that chose Mitt Romney for governor, whose idea of “fixing” a company was to take it over, fire all the workers and sell off the assets. That’s pretty “democratic,” isn’t it?
So, no real surprise here.
Wasn’t there an issue with those companies that had fully-funded pension
plans – defined benefit plans – for their employees? (At least prior to any
legislation designed to protect those assets.)
Yes, but that was the other Romney, the one who instituted universal health care in MA. He was kept on a short leash by the Democrat-controlled House and Senate. But as we know, the Democrats have sold out to the privatizers, so there will be no leash for Republican Governor Baker on the schools.
Nailed it! All Corporatists now!
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/parcc-changes-info-on-its-states-page-to-encourage-other-assessment-solutions/