Ho-hum to the Guv on education

This morning on the Todd and Tom show on WRKO, Joe Battenfield (who was sitting in for Todd Feinburg) noted that the Governor’s office is claiming that Pioneer’s view of the national standards issue is a result of politics. What they are suggesting is that because Charlie Baker was Pioneer’s first executive director 20+ years ago, we are running defense for him. You can listen to the whole interview here (it’s not too long, clocking in at 10 minutes). My response was

Ho-Hum.

What I noted was that it’s hard to say that when on the day of the Board of Education’s vote to scrap the state standards, we did a press release with Tim Cahill — not Charlie Baker. Does that mean Pioneer is shilling for Tim Cahill? Of course not. No more than we were shilling for Governor Patrick when we helped him craft the Bridge Repair program a couple of summers ago.

Then there are the little details like four major papers undertaken on the topic of state and national standards from January 2010 to July 2010. Dozens of papers on standards in the past half dozen years. The Governor has not been able to respond to the facts so he attacks Pioneer? Man, that is a funny one.

The big picture here is that the Governor could have been a game-changer for education in Massachusetts, but instead he sided with the adults in the system, at the expense of the core business of teachers and schools:

Bringing high-quality academic experiences to kids.

He sacrificed our standards for 33 cents a day per student in Race to the Top funds. He hitched our wagon with places like Mississippi, West Virginia and Ohio, so that each time we want to improve our standards, we will have to negotiate it out with them.

That. Is. Not. Smart. And that is not leadership.

The Governor has no doubt some accomplishments to boast of, but he has not turned out to be the self-described “education governor.”