Reader Christine Langhoff sent a warning that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is poised to take control of the Boston Public Schools. This would be a mistake. No state takeover has ever led to better education. The state is not wiser than the city. If anything, the state education department is far removed from daily practice, as it is simply another bureaucracy. The current board is dominated by advocates of choice. Apparently they are unaware that the root cause of low test scores is poverty. The best the board could do would be to reduce class sizes and to promote the creation of community schools, which makes the school the hub of valuable services for children and families. Such proven strategies are unfamiliar to choice advocates. They prefer a failed approach.
Christine Langhoff wrote:
It seems that MA DESE is poised to place Boston’s public schools under receivership, perhaps by a vote as soon as May 24. Doing so would fulfill the Waltons’ wet dream which has been frustrated since the defeat of ballot Question 2 in 2016, which would have eliminated the charter cap.
The board is appointed by Governor Charlie Baker, whose donors are, of course, the Waltons and the Kochs. Four members of the board have day jobs tied to the Waltons: Amanda Fernández, Latinos for Education; Martin West, Education Next; Paymon Rouhanifard, Propel America; and Jim Peyser, New Schools Venture Fund and the Pioneer Institute. Baker is a lame duck, which may explain the haste to pull this off.
No state takeover has yet been successful, and once a system enters receivership, there is no exit. BESE has pointed to low MCAS scores to say our schools are failures, but Boston’s scores, invalid as they may be during the covid pandemic, are higher that in the three districts the state runs: Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge.
The Boston Teachers Union has an action letter if anyone is so inclined to support public education in the city where it originated:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sadly, I think a strike is what’s called for. A strike by Boston teachers–and the Massachusetts teachers. NEA & AFT should get involved somehow. The proposed state takeover should be unacceptable to all who care about actual kids and actual good schools. Unfortunately, we are like frogs in the skillet–we may have waited too long.
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how many years have we thought that one: NEA AND AFT SHOULD GET INVOLVED, and yet here we are
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Horrendous mistake, and once you’ve got it, it’s really hard to get rid of. Trust the RI experience.
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Governors are not education experts. Instead of looking at evidence, they look at what other states have done and blindly follow. Parents and teachers should kick up a fuss, or the state will emulate more failure.
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No matter what the “solution” – if it’s not local, if there is no local feature – it doesn’t work.
Three (ok, probably more) attempts sort of worked:
Community Schools – they work!
Desegregation. Hold on before you shout at that one. In many cities, parents/guardians and kids in “failing” schools chose to go to more successful districts -(operative term: CHOSE = parents paying attention) AND city schools get state funding to Locally determine how to rebuild with oversight as phase back in occurs. Thousands of students graduated and succeeded at increasingly higher numbers had they stayed. There’s a LOT of collateral damage (neighborhoods) – but kids learned
Locally governed state control – an appointed local board to eliminate fiscal and management issues AND a superintendent (educator, not business) to run the schools. (Assuming the appointed folks understand how and who to hire as an effective superintendent
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“BOSTON STUDENTS AGAIN OUTPERFORM URBAN PEERS ON NATION’S REPORT CARD”
Boston Public Schools students continue to outperform their peers in nearly every large city across a variety of measures, while BPS educates a far more diverse population than other cities, according to new results released today by the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card.’ The assessment measures academic progress for 4th and 8th grade students.”
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/site/Default.aspx?PageType=3&DomainID=4&PageID=1&ViewID=6446ee88-d30c-497e-9316-3f8874b3e108&FlexDataID=3158
If the Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate succeeds in eliminating Boston’s public schools, no school district across the nation will be safe.
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In St Louis MO in2003 the region’s business community got the control of the City school board and brought in Alvarez and Marsal. At that time, the City district was two points away from full accreditation. Eventually the district lost accreditation. Not too long after that, the state took over the district, mostly due to the mess generated by bringing in the corporate turnaround firm Alvarez and Marsal. The district was only recently given back an elected school with actual power.
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Thanks, Diane!
Lloyd is correct; MA DESE lacks any data which shows the state is more capable of running Boston’s schools that its own elected leaders.
Our City Council has voted against the proposed takeover 10-1, with one abstention.
https://schoolyardnews.com/councilors-pass-resolution-opposing-state-receivership-for-bps-almost-unanimously-but-not-quite-3b4e458eedac
The new mayor, Michelle Wu, whose two small sons attend BPS is opposed as well, and has just released a Green New Deal worth $2 billion to rebuild our schools which have fallen into disrepair as the past mayor was a fan of privatization.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2022/05/16/wu-pledges-2-billion-for-school-buildings/
A large coalition opposes the takeover as well.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2022/05/20/a-growing-coalition-opposes-state-receivership-in-bps/
Will we be able to stave off receivership, which is privatization by another name? Stay tuned; it’s going to be a near thing.
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Please read my response to ponderosa from the first Boston takeover text that Diane posted on MONDAY.
Thank you. Joanne
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MA poised to do the wrong thing; raise cut scores to make MCAS test harder. They quote the Papay report as a reason. : https://www.nber.org/papers/w20802
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97 legislators think it’s a bad idea:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dmd36zi5n1y18GbI9wjZZiQu_kcfVo5X2WqVD0tklOg/edit
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well what is true, about the 97, but we have been asking our legislators (Merrimack Valley) to rein in DESE for 10 years now and they just simply can’t do it. Baker, the power of lobby groups like Pioneer Institute , the MA Business Alliance… the power has to be addressed. Perhapswhen there is a new governor in the office? We have had too many republican governors in a row (starting with Celluci and even Patrick had the Rahm friendship ties in the U.S. Department of Education)… Hardening the schools, the austerity of “shock and awe” used on our own kids. I appended my letter to Jeff Riley onto the Commonwealth MASS Inc discussion and hope that some taxpayers and citizens will read it… or listen to the Brockton principal speaking up for the students there. Jeff Riley has been a shill for the charter school industry (under Baker’s tutelage)… And, I also commented that Martin West on the BESE edited books with chapter by John Eastman the infamous “lawyer” who wrote the illegal plans for trump and Guliani. Those people at Harvard like M. West have a fetish about “free markets” that keeps propping up the Chicago School, the Friedman economics and Schumpeter or some other Viennese economist. Jeff Riley bringing a paper from PAPAY at Brown U. is supposed to make everything all right while ignoring the work of Angrist, Papay and others who try to bring a question to the deliberations about what we are doing in the under-resourced schools (instead of making “cut scores” more restrictive for children ).
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I added the references to the letter to Commissioner Jeff Riley .. but the people are probably too lazy to read the articles and will take the one that Jeff Riley hands them.
REFERENCES.
Angrist. Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality Angrist, Joshua. , Peter Hull, and Parag Pathak) NBER working paper no. 29608, 2021
Weitzman. Am J Dis Child 1989 Oct;143 (10):1234-9. doi: 10.1001/archpedi.1989.02150220142035. School Breakfast Program and school performance ….A F Meyers 1 , A E Sampson, M Weitzman, B L Rogers, H KaynePMID: 2801668 DOI: 10.1001/archpedi.1989.02150220142035
Goldhaber, D. , Kane, T., McEachin, A., Morton E., Patterson, T., Staiger, D., (2022) The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic. Research Report. Cambridge, MA: Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University
Lavin, Richard & Melvin Levine. EPSDT in Lawrence Children’s Health project. Children’s Hospital study in the on BEEP and EPSDT (Brookline early childhood & Lawrence public schools) (final report by Abt Associates) Lawrence Children’s Health Project /EPSDT. A proposal to integrate Health and Special Education Services for Children. A School-Based Demonstration Project.Final Report ED236257. Chelmsford, MA.
Palfrey, Judith. Penny. Hauser-Cram, Martha Bronson. Eugenia Chan. The Brookline Early Education Project: A 25-Year Follow-up Study of a Family-Centered Early Health and Development InterventionJuly 2005PEDIATRICS 116(1):144-52 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2004-2515
At one time , MA was a leader. The Carnegie report and the EPSDT study in Lawrence describe the nation’s first health and developmental programs sponsored by a public school. Results of a follow-up study conducted between 1998 and 2001 show the potential of high quality interventions.
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cx. I was trying to illustrate a contrast between the cherry picked report Jeff Riley brings to the discussion ( and the work of Angrist, Goldhaber and others) but my sentence did not come out clearly.
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if you notice the latest things from the legislature like Civics Education 2018 , the law is prepared and then “well we will set up a foundation to bring in the money to do the work”… and then they did it again (when addressing things like racial justice — just create a foundation … I thought the legislature was supposed to appropriate funds to do the work when they pass laws…
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