Entries by Jim Stergios

Vocational-technical schools working with business

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The local business community has always been heavily involved in our public institutions, through voluntary associations, of course, but also ensuring the good functioning and affordability of a once very robust network of community hospitals as well as our public schools. Throughout the robust education reform debates of the 1990s, figures like William S. Edgerly of State Street Corporation and Ray Stata of Analog Devices brought to bear the view of employers who were wedded to their communities, to a strong liberal arts foundation, and to the idea of preparing students for the workforce. The state’s vocational-technical (VTE) schools have clearly put an emphasis on building relationships with the business community, for resource needs, connections for employment, and for input […]

Choosing to succeed in regional vocational-technical schools

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What sets Massachusetts’s education reform efforts apart from those in other states can be reduced to three things. The reforms begun with the 1993 landmark law: Put into place were comprehensive in that they spanned content, accountability, and choice. Massachusetts did not put all of its eggs into one basket, avoiding the stale conversation about whether choice or standards was the real driver of improvements in student achievement. Recognized what the state could do well and left to the local school districts and individual schools what was best left to them. For example, the Board and Department worked to develop academic goals and teacher and student tests to make sure the schools delivered results, but they did not prescribe teaching […]

Dear Abigail on History

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In what is a textbook example of bad policy on the teaching of history, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is signaling that it has no intention of instituting the MCAS requirement for US History. Currently, the state tests students on three subjects–English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science. In 2009, the US History MCAS requirement was to go into place and three years later, in 2012, graduates were supposed to have passed it. Cue the primary source material–the relevant provision in the regulations (603 CMR 30.03 (4)): (4) Students starting with the graduating class of 2012, in addition to meeting the requirements contained in 603 CMR 30.02(2) and (3), shall meet or exceed the Needs Improvement scaled […]

Fight of the Century

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Education does not only take place in our schools, though we often get caught up debating the merit of governance schemes for our bricks-and-mortar institutions. That is important. While I think digital learning is going to transform our concepts of school and learning, I also think the role of the teacher (the “master” in a way), the adult who hands off a tradition, will always be preserved. The relationship between a kid (and of course even an adult) and a teacher is a special one, which is why we spend so much time, ink and treasure trying to make sure we have effective ones. It’s also why we often have debates (and residual distrust) about things like distance learning, blended […]

Whither METCO?

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If METCO closes the achievement gap, and if closing the achievement gap is a top priority, why are we cutting METCO funding?

Stealing from our ed reform blueprint

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It used to be that Massachusetts was the state that everybody talked about in education. Experts studied it from around the country. And business and political leaders came a-calling: I know you guys have high business costs, but we have to learn how you improved your educational system so quickly. We’re not a yawn yet, but other states are much more influential in state education debates across the country. Trip Gabriel in today’s New York Times highlights the work of Jeb Bush in a number of states. Mr. Bush, for example, has been closely involved in new education bills and laws in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah. And Gabriel further notes the energy in […]

National standards dissent and pep rallies

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About a week ago, the state of Texas responded to national standards proponents, including the federal government, which are trying to drag it screaming into the mix of states who have adopted the so-called Common Core. The Lone Star state released draft state math standards that are built on the foundation of Massachusetts’ now defunct standards and those in place in Singapore. The goal: To craft standards that are the best in the nation. We’ll see how US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will respond now that Texas has the best standards in the land. Closer to home, Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester recently traveled to central Massachusetts to meet with members of the Tantasqua Regional School Committee. The committee […]

Education news from other states

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Last July, while most of the Massachusetts educators were at the beach, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) endorsed Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester’s recommendation and voted to replace Massachusetts’ best-in-the-nation academic standards. There is lots of gab about what all that means—and major media outlets have spilled a lot of ink copying the press releases from public officials. Falling into the category of “So much effort to advance unproven ideas” are the folks at EdWeek, who continue to monitor DC chatter, the national testing vehicles being developed, a thus-far postponed debate on where proficiency will be set (cut scores), and a manifesto issued by the Shanker Institute arguing for a national curriculum. The tentacles of the Gates […]

Vocational-technical schools that work

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A week ago, parents in Boston got their school assignments according to the Boston Public Schools’ constrained choice process. Stephanie Ebbert’s article captured the key moment this way: In a downtown office cubicle, next to a file cabinet topped with a philodendron in a wine carafe, a Boston public schools computer specialist dispassionately clicked a mouse. It was 10:11 on a Friday morning. By 10:18, the computer program had silently assigned nearly 12,000 students to 134 city schools… The following afternoon, that clean, algorithmic efficiency sent waves of emotion rippling through neighborhoods all across the city. Chrissanta Rudder jumped up and down in the hallway of the Old Colony public housing development in South Boston. Kimesha Janey-Rogers of Roxbury sighed […]

Proven reforms for urban students

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There are no silver bullets. In education, our landmark 1993 education reform act was testimony to that dictum, laying out a blueprint based on high academic standards, accountability for teachers and districts, testing for students, and innovation through charter schools. That said, there are those who believe in complicated processes and those who are more decentralizing in how they think about reform. Count me among the latter–and that’s why I have always found parental choice, tying money to the child not the system, and clear rules about school flexibility and accountability interesting. Each of these principles helps create the conditions and incentives for engaging parents, which I think is a crucial pressure point (and frankly the more they are engaged, […]

Teacher pensions: Answering Your Questions

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Last week, I blogged on teacher pensions and the piece drew agreement and criticism. In response to critics, I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Today, I wanted to continue the conversation by following up on the good questions raised by commenters. How much do teachers’ salaries go up on average? Berkman34 and ChuckinMedford asked about the assumption of a 4.69 percent annual increase in salaries that underpins my average salary number for 2011. There are a few things to say on this which can be helpful. First, the 4.69 percent increase is simply what empirically happened between 2004 and 2009, which were also difficult fiscal years, and years in which municipal aid from the state was not seeing the […]

No answers from the Know Nothings

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Boston and Massachusetts as a whole have made some strides toward racial harmony in the past few decades. But we still face what some politicians like to refer to as the “civil rights issue of the 21st century”: education. Fact is from the time of Brown v. the Board of Education, education has always been the civil rights issue. Our history with tolerance has, as we know too well, high points and some really low points. At the same time that we nested some of the early abolitionists, we became a stronghold of vituperative anti-Catholicism. The picture above shows one of the brutal emanations of that intolerance: the Plug Uglies. The Plug Uglies’name was fitting, indeed; commissioned by the Know […]

What’s a retiring teacher’s pension worth?

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TRAIN CRASH – Watch more Funny Videos Well, that’s an easy one to answer. It depends on how much a retiring teacher earns at the end of his or her career. So let’s start there. According to the state’s department of education, in 2009 the average teacher in the Commonwealth earned $67,577 in 2009. That’s the last year for which we have complete data. If you apply a reasonable algorithm, based on the lowest assumption for salary increases (just over 4.5% annually) made by the pension system itself, you get an average teacher salary in 2011 of about $74,000. Retiring teachers, of course, reach salaries that are far beyond the average salaries. You put 30, even 35 years into a […]

The New Monopoly and the Ballot Initiative

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Here is testimony I submitted today to the Election Laws Committee on the attempt by big public labor to undermine the ballot initiative process. James Stergios, Pioneer Institute Testimony ~ Wednesday, March 23, 2011 ~ 10:30 AM ~ Room B-1 HEARING BEFORE ELECTION LAWS COMMITTEE Senate Chair Barry R. Finegold, Senate Vice Chair Sal N. DiDomenico, Senator Kenneth J. Donnelly, Senator James T. Welch, Senator Thomas P. Kennedy, Senator Michael R. Knapik, House Chair Michael J. Moran, House Vice Chair Sean Garballey, Representative Cory Atkins, Representative Stephen Stat Smith, Representative Brian M. Ashe, Representative Dennis A. Rosa, Representative Denise Andrews, Representative Jerald A. Parisella, Representative Daniel K. Webster, Representative Marc T. Lombardo Thank you for the opportunity to testify here […]

Bill Gates doesn’t like liberal arts, Steve Jobs does

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So Bill Gates lets us all know what he really has in mind on standards and the liberal arts. In a speech to the National Governors Association in late February, he suggests that higher education spending be devoted largely to job-producing disciplines. In his view we should drop funding at the higher ed level for the liberal arts, because there is not much economic impact/job creation impact from the liberal arts. Compare that to Steve Jobs, who during his release of the iPad 2 (admittedly not the most successful launch I’ve seen of an Apple product), trumpeted the liberal arts. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that […]

Hollowing out our cities

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So today we learn that Massachusetts’ cities continue to “hollow out.” Secretary of State William Galvin may want to sharpen his calculator a bit, and I am sure that Boston is relieved to know that its population has increased. But Boston is an exception. “Hollowing out” was the term used in the 1990s to describe the trend among Japanese investors to transfer manufacturing assets to China and other low-cost centers for doing business. We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in our New England and Rust Belt cities, where manufacturing jobs have flown off to greener pastures in the South and of course to other countries. In the 1950s alone the South’s Gulf coast there was 10 times the industrial growth experienced […]

Some thoughts on parochial schools

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March 17th marked St. Patrick’s Day. Today, Glen Johnson of the Globe live-blogged this morning during the annual breakfast that featured this year U.S. Senator Scott Brown, Governor Deval Patrick, and a number of our other political leaders. Celebrations including parades were held across the state in places like Abington, Boston, Holyoke, and Scituate. On this day of belated celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, it is only right to kick off a handful of blogs on parochial schools. We know the challenges. After marked growth in the number of schools and of students prior to 1940, the enrollment numbers for the Archdiocese of Boston’s schools has dropped from 151,000 to 42,000 since 1965, the majority of the decline […]

On radiation in Japan

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Decidedly not a Pioneer topic, but one that is on the minds of so many. What are the major pathways for the radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear reactors? See for yourself, with ranges of radioactivity color-coded by region. This map is updated regularly.

Asleep at the wheel – mid-race

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Everyone outside of the Dome knows that Massachusetts is in a race for jobs. When you are in a race, you run the whole race. You don’t just show up for the flag waving. If you listen to Governor Patrick talk about how Fidelity did not give the state an opportunity to “compete for jobs,” I am sorry. Fidelity has been competing all along, trying to beat its competition. It’s the state that has for the longest time turned a blind eye toward financial services, one of its largest sectors, and more specifically toward one of its largest employers. State House News [subscription required] reports that: Back from his 10-day trade mission to Israel and Great Britain, Gov. Deval Patrick […]

We may need someone to monitor Monitor

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(Image from Mother Jones) The Boston Globe piece by Farah Stockman starts out this way: It reads like Libyan government propaganda, extolling the importance of Moammar Khadafy, his theories on democracy, and his “core ideas on individual freedom.’’ The Mother Jones piece by David Corn and Siddhartha Mahanta is even more blistering. In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Nye noted that “there is no doubt that” the Libyan autocrat “acts differently on the world stage today […]

Memo re: public dancing

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MEMORANDUM To: Former Pioneer executive directors Re: Attempts at dancing in public (photo available at WickedLocal.com) Having noticed a recent uptick in dancing activity by former executive directors, we urge great care be shown in considering public dancing. Our mission recognizes competing priorities, which may give credence to the view that former executive directors might like to dance in public. We urge great caution for the following six reasons: 1. Our mission calls for liberty, but also individual responsibility. 2. Our mission does call for accountability; further it emphasizes effectiveness. Where accountability and effectiveness are not observed, one must emphasize the need to “limit” certain activities. 3. Our mission emphasizes the application of free markets, and we have seen no […]

Factory contracts for teachers unions

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As the discussion about public sector unions gains traction across the country (the short list I know of includes Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and now Maine) what often seems to be missing is the main point of public education—making sure that all kids, including the 100,000 poor and minority MA students stuck in failing schools, have access to a good education. It’s not about the benefits and needs of the adults in the schools. In Massachusetts, public sector employees as a whole receive higher salaries than those in the private sector doing comparable work (especially in the eastern part of the state). That’s an issue worth discussion. But people in the teaching profession are not making a killing–and the fact […]

Scott Walker’s double

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The biggest danger that the teachers’ unions, and really all public sector employee unions, face is that of “copycat” Walkers. But let’s be clear: The Wisconsin battle over collective bargaining is not going to play out in Massachusetts like it has in the Badger state. The fact is that there are important differences between our states. Our major collective bargaining issues are local in the short-term and in the longer-term both state and local. In the near-term that means we need to focus on giving local municipal leaders the same ability that the state has to purchase health care benefits in bulk and without negotiating collectively on the benefit packages put forward. But lest unions take the wrong lesson—that Massachusetts […]

What does the Madison catfight mean for teachers?

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The public debate in Wisconsin over the effort by Governor Scott Walker to curtail collective bargaining rights for public employees has all the stuff of a great teaching moment. It has the governor of a state that is known for and has a long history of progressivism. The president of the United States has lined up against the governor. Thousands of workers are swarming into the State House, and legislators exiting across state lines. The story also has the benefit of being about something we all understand—we are broke. We’re broke as states and a nation, and how are we going to work through this. The story has the added benefit of being something familiar to all of us: We […]

The Changing Face of Boston Schools

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Jamie Vaznis reports today on the possibility that there will be 12 new charter public schools in Boston, even as the superintendent of Boston’s district public schools is seeking to shutter a number of underperforming schools under her purview. Of the 20 proposals for new charter schools, 12 seek to locate in Boston. The Boston applications aim to create more than 6,000 seats over the next five years, but the state law caps new seats in the city at about 4,500 — meaning state education officials will have to reject some applications even if the proposals have merit. Of course, the Board could also simply reduce the number of seats made available in the charter school proposals. And my guess […]

Man versus Superman

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Movies like Waiting for Superman have done a great public service by focusing the country’s attention on the now-or-never challenge of making sure all kids have access to a decent school. A broad swath of the public and, importantly, the philanthropic community, has made education a priority. That is fantastic news. But where there is Superman, there is kryptonite. And the Achilles Heel of the WFS set is that the superhero commissioners and superintendents’ records of success are not as stellar or sustainable as you might think. I have written skeptically (here and here, for example) on the view that a heroic reformer armed with foundation dollars can cure what ails our schools. That there has been improvement in NYC, […]