Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

State boards of education are generally viewed as dull or weak citizen boards when compared with local school boards–which tend to be much livelier and far more involved with educational issues (often to the chagrin of local school administrators). There are many reasons why state boards do not have a reputation for being active or strong guardians of the public interest in their state. They tend to consist of people who work full-time and don’t have the time or energy to delve into the details of all the regulatory or policy matters that state boards must approve by statute.  They tend to meet only once a month–which doesn’t allow time for finding all the devils in the details of any important policy-laden issue. In addition, the recommendations of the commissioner or state superintendent of education are too easy to rely on if the person was appointed by the board on the basis of professional credentials, in contrast to being elected or a governor’s political appointment. And in many states, board members themselves are appointed by the governor and are often chosen for reasons other than having a reasonable familiarity with K-12 education or a reputation for asking enlightening questions instead of grandstanding, pontificating, obsessing over a few specific issues, or expressing stream-of-consciousness ruminations.

Yet, despite their flaws and weaknesses, there is a case to be made for revitalizing and strengthening state boards of education, especially at a time when efforts are being made to leave both local and state boards of education in the dust on vital matters of curriculum and instruction in the name of equalizing academic expectations for all students and obtaining comparable test scores across states.  These are desirable educational goals in themselves but not to the exclusion of goals that take cognizance of differences in students’ interests, talents, and abilities. At the least, we should not enfeeble state boards of education by structural changes that centralize educational decision-making and minimize the possibility of getting corrective feedback from informed public discussion of proposed or implemented policies. In what follows, I offer an analysis of how the Patrick administration in Massachusetts effectively silenced what was once known as a strong state board.

In November 2006, I was appointed by outgoing Governor Romney to the nine-member Massachusetts Board of Education. In January 2008, the legislature passed the bill Governor Patrick wanted establishing a cabinet-level position of secretary of education and expanding the board to eleven member–with almost no opposition registered.  My term of office was specifically shortened by a year and a half.  But, three and one-half years on the board was enough to discern the effects of these changes on statewide educational decision-making.

It is worth noting that in testimony at a 2003 hearing for an ultimately unsuccessful bill proposing a similar position for a different governor, Paul Reville, then director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC, warned that an education secretariat…seems to create “three masters” for the commissioner of education: the governor, the secretary of education, and the board of education including its chair.  How wrong Reville was. The position of secretary of education created in January 2008, to which the governor appointed Reville several months later, did not create confusion for the commissioner of elementary and secondary education.  It in effect created one new boss for him: the secretary of education, who was to oversee the budgets and coordinate the policies of the state’s three education agencies as well as serve as a voting member on their boards.

Expansion was the key to minimizing independent thinking on the K-12 board because it required alteration of all members’ terms of office. These changes were carefully spelled out in the 2008 bill to enable the governor to control the majority immediately and, by appointment, re-appointment, or non-re-appointment, all but the student member within a few years.

To reduce potential power plays between Secretary Reville and the board chair (whose appointment was already in the governor’s power), someone who could run meetings on time and had no political ambitions was needed and quickly found.  Indeed, the regular presence and seating of Secretary Reville at board meetings came to symbolize his role; newly appointed Commissioner Mitchell Chester was sandwiched between him and the chair, Maura Banta, at the head table. Banta, in turn, was flanked on her other side by the board’s union representative. Not much wiggle-room for Commissioner Chester.

The first clear sign that the governor’s office, not the board, was Commissioner Chester’s boss was his appointment of Karla Baehr, former Superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools, as a second deputy commissioner within two months after Chester’s appointment in 2008.  The governor had wanted her for commissioner of elementary and secondary education, but the board had selected someone else for other reasons. The board knew nothing officially about the addition of a second deputy commissioner to the department of elementary and secondary education until the media announced it.

Since spring 2008, the board has voted on very few significant policies for K-12.  Indeed, when asked to note for the 2009 summer retreat what important decisions they had made in the previous year, hardly anyone could think of even one. The bulk of the board’s time has been spent discussing (in excruciating detail) and voting on charter school applications or issues, as evidenced in its monthly agendas.

Almost all meeting agendas have been determined by the secretary of education and commissioner, with no board input desired.  Secretary Reville told the board directly at a 2008 summer retreat that meetings would be too long if every topic members wanted discussed became an agenda item.

Because the governor controlled a majority of board members from 2007 on, discussion was minimal on most, especially non-charter school, issues. The secretary of education rarely asked questions at board meetings because he didn’t need to; the chair usually asked none. Although the board regularly received brief updates on the Common Core initiative, there was clearly no need to waste time discussing the implications of national standards for Massachusetts or the quality of Common Core’s evolving standards. Patrick-appointed board members knew they were going to adopt these standards no matter what condition they were in. The draft copy placed in an appendix in its January Race To The Top application (explicitly noting the commissioner’s intention to consider adopting them in the future) was of such inferior quality that it had to be completely revised for the public comment version released in March. The chair was the only board member who saw that application before it was sent off,  and no board member raised a question about it after hard copies were sent to all board members in response to my request for a copy.

With the non-re-appointment in June 2010 of  the two board members appointed by former Governor Romney (Tom Fortmann and me) and their replacement by more Patrick appointees, the board has become little more than a facade satisfying a statute that requires a citizen board to provide oversight of the department of education.

The ostensible results of the 2008 legislation have been exactly as intended–complete control of the state’s educational agenda by the Executive Office of Education, with minimal public discussion of important matters.  But, by centralizing policy-making and appointing a politically partisan board with little understanding of K-12, the administration has prevented its own officials as well as the public from learning about flaws in the policies it proposes or adopts. The bill for that hubris will begin to come due when teachers in the Bay State start implementing the inferior national standards this year.  And what will the fallback explanation be to parents when high school students deemed “college-ready” by grade 10 or 11 state tests based on those standards go to college and fail some of their college courses?  Or will they not be allowed to fail?  These are questions that all state boards adopting Common Core’s standards  should discuss and need to be prepared to answer.