Why “almost despite himself”? Well, to take Deval at his word, this isn’t even a big part of his “vision” for education. Looking at his ersatz eternal campaign/parallel government website devalpatrick.com, his spiel on education doesn’t mention a SecEd. Instead, he talks about how the Education Reform Act “recognized that there is no more important issue than education”. Ha! The ERA opened the door for hacks and academicians to stumble around school districts, trying to recreate a pedagogic idyll that never existed.
However, the Herald among others places a higher priority on Deval’s effort here. Patrick filed his proposal for a SecEd under Article 87, which demands that the Lege vote it up-or-down, with no provision for amendment. Furthermore, such a bill must be voted upon within 60 days.
And promptly vote on it, the Legislature did. Apparently, the Legislature can embrace change quickly and efficiently if it believes said change has merit. The vote was a combined 168-24 in favor. If “Elder Affairs” and “Veterans’ Services” deserve dedicated cabinet-level positions each, so too does education.
Despite the legislative malpractice that is Dubya’s and Ted Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind, it is the state of Massachusetts that does everything from adjust funding formulas to writing curriculum. While I have some sympathy with questioning the need for a federal Secretary of Education (not least of due to its root not in Constitutionality but rather the pernicious spending power of Washington), it’s a no-brainer to me that the state needs someone to manage education.
The state spends roughly $6 billion in education. It services just under 1 million public school pupils.
Don’t those numbers indicate a need to have a single, important person in charge? I don’t believe too many companies turn a $6 billion branch that serves 1 million customers over to a group of shadows at the helm. I do want a specific someone, too, not a collection of appointment hacks who are a mixture of current and past administrations and meet about once a month. A place for the buck to stop, as it were.
Though Chris Gabrieli has some wacky ideas on education, I could look forward to his tenure as SecEd. On the other hand, if Deval tries to install Dana Mohler-Faria, grand poobah of that dysfunctional mass of byzantine capriciousness that calls itself Bridgewater State College, I take it all back.
Oh, and one last thing. This isn’t a sop to teachers’ unions, that ever-present bad guy. My union isn’t nearly as powerful as people want to believe. It doesn’t have much influence on its members, trust me. If my union was this powerful, we wouldn’t be suffering under No Child Left Behind, further exacerbated by a completely arbitrary toughening of standardized test benchmarks because not enough schools were failing it was too easy.
on this issue. Here and on my blog I’ve echoed many of the same ideas, but I have never considered them in relation to the SecEd position. This is what I would have liked to have written.
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p>Mark
Some irony that the creation of the Department of education under Carter gave the Federal Government the firepower to finally advocate for and get, the No Child Left Behind Law which the NEA now decries.
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p>So lets install a central Secretary of Education to do to the local districts what the Federal Government did to the state.
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p>The final irony will come when the local teachers union sue the new Secretary of education just like the NEA terrorists are doing to the Department of Education. Full circle.
I don’t think that word means what you think that word means, or what Mitt Romney thinks it means for that matter.
I was just quoting the Secretary of Education.
but even within the post lie implicit arguments against creating a SecEd. Massachusetts has, indeed, done everything from adjusting funding formulas to writing curriculum, but has done most of it only since the position of SecEd was abolished in 1995. And the dangers of politicizing the SecEd position are clear: our support for creating it should not depend on who we think may be appointed to it. At some point, it is inevitable a Governor we don’t agree with will come along and install a SecEd we don’t like. Our only recourse, then, would be to ride the pendulum and hope to abolish the position whenever a Governor we don’t like is elected and recreate it when a new Governor we do like comes along.
Does being able to call Harry Spence on the carpet or praise him improve DSS, or just give us someone to blame when something goes wrong?
and I don’t know much about what’s happened to DSS since Spence left. But it’s harder to measure than that: Did the scrutiny that Spence received a number of times add up to better performance by DSS while he was there, and going forward? (Maybe AmberPaw can help us out with an evaluation of that.)
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p>I think having a dept. head that can take a beating in a legislative hearing is generally a good thing … if thankless.
In one of the earlier Republican debates, Fred Thompson was asked one thing he would do to improve education. Without hesitation, he replied that he would eliminate the National Education Association (NEA). Central planning is not effective for a function that takes place under such varied circumstances as education does.
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p>In Massachusetts, the State tries to maintain control by collecting tax money and then magnanimously doling it back out to the districts. There are always strings attached when the funds come from state or federal sources. It rarely works when the government tries to legislate fairness or equality.
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p>If somebody wants the “equal” that my school system offers, let them come and live here. Success will not be achieved by redistributing income to lesser-performing operations because they lack a vital ingredient. Namely me and other like-minded individuals that provide support, direction, constructive criticism and a continual presence so that education is not administered in a vacuum.
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p>Ask yourself why the Metco program in Boston is maxed out when Mayor Menino recently reported that he compares Boston schools to the best in the nation. The parents with children in the Metco program do not share the Mayor’s view.
struck back in the Globe a few days ago.
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p>A former member bases his case against “politics” (for which I usually read: democracy) on a claim that the ERA has been a great and ongoing success. I take it you would dispute this.