The state of Massachusetts appears ready to take control of the Boston Public Schools at its meeting tomorrow, despite the fact that state takeovers have failed everywhere. The state does not have a special reservoir of knowledge that is lacking at the local level, and if they did, they could provide it without taking control of the school district and ending local control.
This morning, as a seeming prelude to takeover, the state released a “blistering” report about the condition of BPS.
Boston Public Schools is largely stuck in “entrenched dysfunction” and its failure to achieve systemwide change on a number of fronts is causing thousands of students to languish in their classrooms, even as school district leaders have taken initial steps to help remedy some of the problems, according to a blistering state review released Monday.
”The district has failed to effectively serve its most vulnerable students, carry out basic operational functions, and address systemic barriers to providing an equitable, quality education,” the review states. “The problems facing BPS are abundantly clear.”
And the report makes the case that state Commissioner Jeffrey Riley and the state Board of Elementary and Education will take action, although the report doesn’t state what specific steps will be taken. The state education board is scheduled to discuss the report’s findings at its monthly meeting Tuesday...
The new review paints a devastating portrait of the state of BPS, but gives outgoing Superintendent Brenda Cassellius and the school system credit for launching several new district-wide initiatives that show promising signs for boosting student achievement.
Among them: Raising high school graduation standards to align with entry requirements to the state’s public universities, adopting a new literacy curriculum and higher-quality instructional materials, and expanding the diversity of its teaching staff. But full implementation has not been realized yet, and the report raised concerns that the efforts could be thwarted by the district’s lack of a strategic approach to training staff and setting clear expectations and deadlines for schools to embrace the changes.
Despite these improvements, takeover is on the horizon.
The Boston Teachers Union plans a rally tomorrow to protest the state takeover:
As announced last week– we are attending the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) meeting tomorrow to say NO to receivership!
BESE just announced a location change for this meeting. The meeting will now be at 1 Ashburton Pl, Boston, MA 02108 (NOT Wellesley HS). We will meet in front of the State House at 8am and walk over to the meeting together.
You can drive and meet us there but parking is limited and expensive in that area. You can also take the T to Park Street. Or we’ll still have two buses leaving at 7:30am:
- Boston Teachers Union in Dorchester (180 Mt. Vernon St. 02125. Be sure you go to the address in Dorchester, not downtown). Lots of free parking.
- St. Stephen’s Youth Programs in the South End (419 Shawmut Ave, 02119). Limited parking.
If you haven’t already, RSVP here if you can join us.
If you can’t join in person, you can watch the livestream of the meeting at https://livestream.com/accounts/22459134 and take action here. Follow the conversation on Twitter by following the hashtag #OurCityOurSchools.
Tomorrow BESE will hear from students, parents, and educators united against state takeover!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Glad to see the BTUnion taking action…though a demonstration probably won’t be enough. This is heartbreaking for those of us who worked in large school districts–or anywhere, for that matter. Progressive people in the area need to join them.
LikeLike
Sadly, once again Massachusetts is replicating failure since state takeovers do not work. Instead of working within schools from the bottom up, the Boston schools want to impose top down mandates that have repeatedly failed in other states.
LikeLike
It’s not Boston schools that want this. It’s our GOP Governor and his army of privatizers that want it.
LikeLike
How does a state that is (supposedly) so Liberal and Democratic manage to choose so many Republican governors?
LikeLike
The Republican Governor appointed a state board of education filled with corporate reformers
LikeLike
Here’s how: Massachusetts has a long history of Republican governors who, in comparison to other Republicans, looked a lot like Democrats–Bill Weld, Mitt Romney. Romney, for example, who as governor CREATED for Massachusetts what is now known as Obamacare and then felt compelled to repudiate his own highly successful program when running for the Republican presidential nomination
LikeLike
Romney may appear to be a moderate Republican by today’s standards (as would Richard Nixon), but I think only a fool would consider him a Democrat.
So why did so many non-Republicans vote for him for governor over the actual Democrat?
Why did so many overlook his slash and burn methods at Bain?
Why did so many overlook the fact that he was actually living and claiming his Utah home as his primary residency in the years preceding his run?
And why did so many overlook Romney’s lies about and on his tax filings?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/8/17/1121206/-Ex-Fox-s-Major-Garrett-Never-Knew-Romney-Caught-Lying-On-1999-2001-Tax-Returns
I think the answer is that they did not overlook these things but were simply clueless about them and never even bothered to find out about them if they did hear about them.
And otherwise intelligent people continue to be incurious about Romney’s past.
Same as it ever was.
LikeLike
Romney has always been like a subatomic particle, which, according to quantum mechanics can live in two places at once.
It’s only when you try to pin him down that he collapses into one state or another.
LikeLike
Romney is Schrodinger’s Politician.
LikeLike
Who can simultaneously claim two contradictory “truths” until you pin him down. At which point he rewrites history (and his tax return) to imply that he always supported only one of the “truths”
LikeLike
By the way. I was living in MA at the time and I can assure you that these things were actually not a big secret.
And Romney struck me as as fake as a two headed coin.
LikeLike
Allow me to translate the blistering state review in just a few words: Question 2 was soundly defeated and we don’t get to privatize for profit at will. Waaah!!!
LikeLike
This has failed again and again and again, so let’s do more of it!
The Education Deform motto
LikeLike
You name it
Virtual schools
School takeovers
School grading
VAM
Test-score-based merit pay
Mandatory standardized testing
Third-grade retention
Vouchers
Charters
Flipped classrooms
Innovation districts
“Personalized” learning
It’s soooo ironic and tragic that the folks who harp constantly about DATA-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY are never accountable for the data showing the complete failures of their policies. No amount of failure of these policies is enough to crack their allegiance to these ideas.
One is tempted to conclude that Education Deform is a cult. However, it isn’t just ideology that drives this. Being pro-Deform is quite lucrative. Consider, for example, the Fordham Institute for Securing from Oligarchs Big Pay for the Officers of the Fordham Institute. I spent much of my life in the textbook industry. Had I been willing to sign onto to the Deform agenda, I could easily have translated that into millions in contracts. I’m quite serious. But there was this little impediment of what was good for kids and teachers and society as a whole.
LikeLike
Bob,
Quite right to point out that every corporate reform has been a failure. They never learn. They do the same things over and over.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Geez. I left Common [sic] Core [sic] off the list. Another utter failure (predictably so).
LikeLike
It’s not that the corporate “reformers” never learn.
It’s that the people who believe their intention was anything other than privatization and monetization of schools never learn.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You are right about that, SDP. When reformer strategies like state takeovers, evaluating teachers by test scores, bringing in TFA, etc. fail to produce results, they do “succeed” in disrupting education and advancing privatization.
LikeLike
The takeover will fail because no one, including Diane and the commenters on this blog, knows how to make a high-poverty district succeed.
LikeLike
Ponderosa :
I was one of those Boston Public School special education teachers in the early 1970’s and I can tell you what my very high poverty middle school in Dorchester needed to succeed: RESOURCES. I walked into a broken boarded up windowed boiling hot class room (that was freezing in the winter) in September that had 45 drilled to the floor old wooden desks that had ink holes still in them! There were 50 old torn dictionaries and maybe 30 primary level “readers” for my sp ed below level students !
Those Dick and Jane books (all blond children with 3piece suit wearing fathers and intact families who lived in the suburbs ) were considered appropriate curriculum materials for my street wise students of color! I was shocked and refused to even keep those books in my classroom. (I had previously student taught in 2 inner city college campus highly successful lab schools in New Haven and Bridgeport, CT with wonderful multicultural resources and constant support from my college. So I felt well prepared for, and was excited to teach in the inner city ..
I needed to buy pencils and paper and my own books for my own class of 12 (state law) students ranging in reading levels from pre-primer to 3rd grade, making $7,000 a year .
I worked like a dog those 4 years (applied for small grants to buy appropriate books; traveling on weekends to public libraries-bless them-for free books and secured expensive ditto copy paper to run off “Language Experience” stories that my sp ed students told me for daily reading material that they would actually READ and not throw at me!!! My hands were constantly purple and my students actually called me Miss Ditto ! I taught phonics using their favorite song lyrics (think Michael Jackson) not primary workbooks! I also read aloud books from black writers as a consequent of good behavior (my “behavior/management plan”) They loved hearing these read alouds
-probably considered a subversive activity at the time because the Black Panthers were taking over Boston University at the time (my husband was attending) but because no administrator ever stepped foot unannounced in my classroom for those 4 years, I never worried .
Look I could go on but do you understand my point? I was in the same school district as Lily white Boston Latin HS -do you honestly believe we had even half the same RESOURCES AND SUPPORT to succeed on corporate/privateers metric:standardized test scores?
LikeLike
Thank you, Joanne. That was 50 years ago. Has anything changed?
LikeLike
Yes, and since then many urban districts have been well-funded –to little avail. By all means give money, but that’s not the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is bad curriculum and social capital deficits at home leading to kids who struggle more and more as they advance through the system, leading to self-defeating behaviors that are the death knell to real learning. The dirty secret of our public schools is that a large percentage of kids are de facto drop outs starting around Grade 5. They’re physically present, but they’re not learning. They never study or do homework. They merely go through the motions in class. They fail and get passed along (retention is dead), or teachers give grades for effort to conceal the lack of real learning. Some actively undermine the class; most just sit and let their minds wander, or chat covertly with friends. This is the reality that few liberals/progressives are willing to acknowledge (and few non-teachers fully comprehend because there’s a conspiracy of silence among teachers about this). But until we get honest and empirical about this situation, we’ll never fix anything. The only movie that dares to expose this reality is the French film The Class. Watch that and then tell me what fixes you envision.
LikeLike
Dear Diane, I don’t know ?
We left Boston after 4 years and I continued and finished my public school teaching career in 2017 on the North Fork of Long Island, NY (where you know very well, I understand!)
Joanne
LikeLike
Say hello at the IGA!
LikeLike
Awww Diane, I just want to say, I love you and can’t thank you enough for all you do for us public school teachers, retired or still in the trenches! I read your site every single day.
PS I also had the privilege of working for a short time with the wonderful David Gamberg! All these connections…..
LikeLike
Why, Thank you, Joanne. Nice to hear a kind word when I have attracted a lot of enraged trolls lately.
LikeLike