In Manifesto, Patrick Deputy Sayes Education System Locked in the Past' (State House News)

By Michael Norton, Jim O’Sullivan and Gintautas Dumcius
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

BOSTON, JUNE 19, 2008…. Calling for the rebuilding of an education system “locked in the past” and data-driven policies that address the individual needs of all students, the state’s incoming education secretary shed light this week on policy recommendations to be announced Monday by Gov. Deval Patrick.

Paul Reville, who officially takes over as education secretary on July 1, outlined “hints” about recommendations to be released by Patrick’s Readiness Project during an address to hundreds of attendees at a Boston College Citizen Seminar held at the InterContinental Hotel.

The administration’s education action plan will “reflect a set of choices,” he told education system stakeholders.

“These choices don’t necessarily say one strategy is superior to another. But it simply says at this moment in time this seems to be the most highly leveraged point of entry that we can see in order to accomplish the goal of building this 21st century system of education,” Reville said. “There are going to be lots of objectives and strategies that we will be pointing to. Don’t be discouraged if your favorite one is not on the list.”

The Patrick administration will file legislation in December or January to implement some Readiness Project recommendations, after receiving input over the next six months, Reville said. In essence, next week’s recommendations may touch off a lengthy policy debate that’s been on hold throughout this two-year session.

The project will emphasize lifelong learning, starting from birth through higher education and beyond. On Wednesday, three state boards – Early Education, Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education – convene at the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester for an 11 a.m. announcement from Patrick, according to the board aides. Chancellors and presidents from the public universities and colleges have also been invited.

Reville said Massachusetts is “saddled now with an early-20th, late-19th century education system” aimed at helping immigrants in a largely urbanized society to advance in low-skill, low-knowledge jobs. “We are asking the same delivery system to serve us in a post-industrial information age with a very competitive world surrounding us where there is no place to go in the economy, especially in this state, for somebody who doesn’t have high skills and high knowledge,” he said. “It’s the wrong delivery system for the goals of our time.”

Immediately after Reville’s remarks, Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation and a longtime observer of public policy formulations, said Reville had laid out a “splendid vision” but cautioned that “transformational change” will not occur without sustained, loud dissatisfaction with the present course in education, largely because “parties at interest draw a circle around permissible choices” that can prevent agreements on major changes.

“Paul Reville is such a mild-mannered, even-tempered, thoughtful, deliberate, cerebral presenter that some of us might have missed how radical what he was saying was and I don’t want anyone to miss that,” Grogan said at the end of a breakfast cosponsored by MassINC, the LaWare Forum and the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston. “That was a manifesto. He, on behalf of our newly empowered governor, the most powerful governor in the history of the state in education, has issued a manifesto for radical, sweeping, transformational change and in so doing has set a standard for the governor’s own proposals that we will see shortly. Do they measure up to this manifesto? I am hopeful that they will.”

State policies need to help “overcome the learning disadvantages of poverty,” Reville said. “We need to develop a portfolio on each child and give them what they need to get to the place where they need to go,” he added.

The project recommendations will aim to cinch gaps in student achievement between ethnic minorities and the poor and students in wealthier communities, as well as gaps between students in Massachusetts who are scoring proficiently and students in other parts of the world who are thriving at higher levels of learning.

Decrying “mass production education,” Reville called for “capacity building” at the state and classroom levels.

“We underestimated the amount of capacity building it would take to have our system deliver to the audaciously high standard that we set for it,” Reville said. “We said all students at proficiency. All means all. No excuses. No exceptions. That was a bold goal. It was the appropriate goal. It was then. It is now. But we have to build the delivery system to make that a reality.”

The movement on the education policy front, long-awaited but likely only an introduction to years of deliberations, came as Patrick on Wednesday shook up the state board of education, adding a pair of new members with business backgrounds.  Support from business was critical to passage of the last education reform law, in 1993.

Patrick named IBM executive Maura Banta as the new chair of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, formerly the Board of Education, and tapped MassMutual senior vice president Beverly Holmes for a seat on the board. Banta, of Melrose, replaces Reville. She is IBM’s East Coast regional manager for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs, and chairs the board of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Holmes, of Springfield, is senior vice president at MassMutual, and works for the Center for Women’s Business Research. She helped found a Springfield charter school.

In a statement, Patrick emphasized the appointees’ business résumés. “Both Maura and Beverly will bring a solid business background to their new roles, which will be particularly important as we work to prepare our students to compete in the global economy,” he said. “I know that each will be an exceptional addition to the board.”

Patrick administration officials are planning an “aggressive” rollout next week of the education reform effort, they said Wednesday. Doug Rubin, Patrick’s chief of staff, said during a breakfast forum that a “business plan” on how to provide all students with an education, from birth through college, will be released on Monday.

One of the solutions, “Readiness Schools,” was something Patrick crafted with Reville, Rubin said, and is a plan that nobody in the education community is “100 percent satisfied with, but will work with.” The schools are expected to combine aspects of the state’s charter schools and Boston’s experimental pilot schools, particularly flexibility and innovation.

“We need to update our finance system to meet the realities of what we’re asking the school system to do in the 21st century,” Reville said.  “We are steadily raising expectations.  There are going to be financial implications to that.”

Grogan noted that civic and business groups helped lawmakers advance key education reforms in 1993.

“If the governor is to have any hope that his measures that will be enacted will measure up to the radical vision offered by the secretary this morning, it is going to depend on a renewal of this kind of muscular, robust participation from disinterested parties that can change the choices, empower public officials to act somewhat contrary to their respective interests and also to represent the unrepresented,” Grogan told breakfast attendees.
Chris Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and former Board of Education chair, praised Patrick’s “positive” appointments. “Both have a deep understanding about what the business community angle is,” he said.

“The Readiness Project has been telegraphed by Paul Reville and the expectation is that it will contain some substantial, game-changing proposals,” Anderson said. “In order to pull this off, you need a dramatic policy shift, coupled with the ability to pay for it,” “The business community will be an important constituency in what should be a very strategic package that looks at how we inject innovation into the system, how we respond to global competitiveness, and beyond the existing budget structure, how we scale up and roll out across the state the Readiness report.”

The administration’s rollout will come more than a year after Patrick announced the Readiness Project in a speech at UMass-Boston, and ahead of a Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting next Wednesday.

Reville and top education adviser Dana Mohler-Faria briefed lawmakers on the plan Wednesday. The initiative involves a new commission on the needs of children from newborns to age three, reduced class sized in lower grades, and higher pay for teachers in subject areas where there is a need for more. Officials also discussed expanded learning time, lawmakers said.

A tighter focus on individual students appears to be a pillar of the overall package.

“The whole emphasis on really ensuring for each child that they have a chance for success – in a way, that changes the whole conversation,” said one lawmaker who attended the briefing.

While few talk about it, the prospect of new revenue sources is always on the table in education reform debates.