There is no need to comment on this.  Ruth’s words do all the talking that is needed:  When educators are devalued, when the business model ALONE is considered a healthy and effective way to run a learning organization, when shame, fear and humiliation are considered healthy and effective motivators for teachers and principals, then the whole child is being left behind. Is that your view of testing?

With the Governor’s appointment of Ruth Kaplan to the Board of Education, the anti-MCAS movement gets a swell of momentum.  Here is a comment from the Legislature’s Education Committee Hearing on MCAS Bills in September 2003: MCAS has failed abysmally to address the circumstances of students with disabilities. This test is destroying the aspirations of some of the Commonwealth’s hardest working students. Why are we placing insurmountable obstacles in the paths of our most vulnerable public school students? ‘One size does not fit all,’ and standardization is the antithesis of special education. If MCAS remains the barrier it has become for these children, then 25 years of progress will be reversed, and a high school diploma will become the ‘impossible […]

The June 5 T&G makes one more point worth mentioning.  As Monty Python used to say, What’s all this then about… free community colleges?  As the editorial notes, the idea “disappointingly fails to address more immediate concerns.”  As the piece notes, Community colleges play a vital role as a portal into post-secondary education — including four-year colleges and technical programs — for nontraditional students, limited-English speakers and others. While state funding may have made community colleges beyond the means of some, doesn’t everyone agree that we have a lot of work to do to ensure that CCs are effective delivery systems for skills needed in the market place?  I mean, a financial services firm, to remain unnamed, has a wonderful relationship […]

The education announcement was long on desire, but its lack of detail and, um, how to get it done (sometimes known as an implementation plan) is buying the Governor more static.  Check out the June 5 editorial in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which makes three points: Conspicuously absent from his presentation, however, were a price tag for the sweeping expansion he envisions and an action plan for overcoming resistance by unions, school administrators and taxpayers to various aspects of his education plan. A decade and a half after enactment of the landmark education reform law, the No. 1 standing of Massachusetts students nationwide has vindicated the “grand bargain” that underlies the effort’s success: a major infusion of funding accompanied by measurable standards and accountability for results. […]