With all the brouhaha surrounding the probation department, it’s easy to assume that all state employees got their jobs because they were Bob DeLeo’s godson.
So, yes, you should stay up to date on what’s going on with probation (it now appears that a federal grand jury is investigating). It’s important that what went wrong in probation be corrected.
But it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of good people in state government who toil away for years in relative obscurity doing good things like helping communities build schools. The Globe has a terrific story on Katherine Craven, long the head of the Mass. School Building Authority, and soon to be Treasurer-Elect Steve Grossman’s top deputy. Craven sounds like exactly the kind of person we all want working for the state: smart, hard-working, and creative.
In interviews with the Globe, those who have worked with her exhausted their vocabulary of superlatives to describe her abilities, work ethic, and professionalism….
“She’s almost unreal,” said Bernard Feldstein, chairman of the designer selection panel of the School Building Authority.
“Katherine’s the most intelligent, quick-thinking, fair-minded person in any job, public or private, that I’ve encountered,” the retired architect said. “She has a great deal of humility and great personal warmth and wit.”
“She has a skill base that is incredible,” said Paul Andrews, a former school superintendent who often deals with Craven in his capacity as director of professional development and government services for the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents….
Representative Viriato M. “Vinny” deMacedo, Republican of Plymouth, … who knows Craven from her years on the House staff, called her “one of the brightest state employees I’ve ever met.”
Also, not irrelevantly,
Craven, who earns a salary of $159,000, has remained in government [for about 15 years] and passed up more lucrative opportunities in the private sector.
Congratulations to Ms. Craven on what sounds like a very well-deserved promotion.
Also well worth reading is a story on some of the fine work that the late Middlesex County Sheriff James DiPaola did while in office. Whatever his shortcomings may have been, DiPaola cared about the people who came under his authority at the Middlesex House of Correction, and came up with creative ways to help get them back into society.
He ran community counseling centers in Lowell and Cambridge. He launched a culinary arts program to help inmates develop job skills. He ran a program that brought at-risk youth to the jails to hear from inmates and corrections officers. And he ran a popular, free summer camp for children.
“He was the type of sheriff who realized that approximately 90, 100 percent of his population would be back on the streets, and what he tried to do was prepare them,” said James O’Donnell, a longtime truant officer in the Billerica public schools. “He was ahead of his time on issues like that.”
And whatever it was that drove DiPaola to take his life, this kind of thing has to have brought him some comfort:
His culinary arts training program was praised for dramatically reducing the county’s recidivism rates. A few weeks ago, DiPaola was having lunch at Salvatore’s Restaurant in Medford Square when one of the cooks, a graduate of the program, came out of the kitchen to greet him and thank him for his help in turning around his life.
I actually think that the people of Massachusetts already know that, sometimes, government does actually work. Otherwise, Charlie Baker’s (irresponsible?) call to slash 5,000 unspecified state employee jobs would have resonated a lot more than it did. Nonetheless, amid all the depressing stories about probation and all the cynicism that they engender, it’s well worth it to point out some of the many success stories that state government has going.
just as there are good and bad people in the nonprofit and private sectors. The problem is that people in government tend to be easier targets for the media, partly because so much more information is publicly available about them.
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p>While the Globe is right to call attention to the out-of-control patronage in the Probation Department, I donder if the paper is putting the same effort into uncovering similar corruption involving the nonprofit and private sectors, e.g., bonuses taken by executives of bailed-out companies and sweetheart deals in contracts between public sector and nonprofit agencies.
I agree.
There are, in fact 5,000 stories out there about state employees like direct care workers who make 18,000 a year, file clerks in the DOR who make 25,000 and registrars in the DMV who make 35,000 a year and on and on and on
Having worked in the state, federal, military, and private sectors, I can’t say from what I’ve seen that people are too different from one to the other. About 20% of the people working are superior employees, about 60% do their jobs as required, and the other 20% range from awful to bloody awful. Management or labor makes no difference, the ratios seem to still apply.
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p>“It is better to wear out than to rust out.” –Richard Cumberland
I’d put genius at 1%, highly functional at 40%, keeping up at 40% and needs support at 19%.
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p>At home with family I’m middle of highly functional, at work I’m at the high end of highly functional I think, at good neighborness, I’m keeping up, and at taking care of my health I need support.
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p>Where you?
I’m amazed that we have a school building authority. Don’t the municipalities handle school building?
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p>I suppose we could turn around and call it the “federal-state-local funding co-ordination authority for municipal education structures” and you would be less confused.
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p>All in favor, raise your hands…
So this is why we close a high school in Hyde Park, but spend state money to build a new high school in Hyde Park. It’s the buildings that are the problem? We know what happens when public construction becomes the end rather than the means.
Don’t know about Hyde Park, but in my town there is at least one and maybe two buildings that have no business still being schools, but we can’t close them until we have another school built to replace them.
what does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
Much of the state and federal money is dedicated to building new schools in the place of failing schools, often in the form of charter schools or some other kind of “innovative” program. The main intent of these programs are to break the teachers unions by draining students from the regular publics and putting them into less regulated schools (which do in fact work better).
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p>Of course we could never just DO that… we have to come up with this charade of creating whole new buildings just to change the work rules for the teachers.
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p>Maybe this person is a great worker, but besides being in charge of a fundamentally dishonest effort, she is great at a program wastes a colossal amount of money on bricks and mortar to the benefit of the usual suspects. It’s unfortunate there are not better places for her to put her talents to use.
…to back up your assertion that school buildings and charter schools are at all related in the way you say?
…it often comes with a lot of state financial assistance. With that assistance comes various standards and requirements.
Could this be a regular feature, spotlighting an elected official or civil servant going above and beyond?
Is Ms. Craven related to the late “Dean of the House” Jimmy Craven of Jamaica Plain? If so, that was probably her ticket into state government. Just curious.
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p>Sincerely,
Wayne J. Wilson, Jr.
Roslindale
Regardless of what her “ticket in” (after she graduated from Harvard) was, she has obviously excelled since then.
As a former school teacher (who is still moonlighting at UMass Boston), it feels so refreshing to see something other than sneering and cynicism directed at public employees.
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p>This not being Lake Wobegon, not all teachers, or other public employees are above average. But by and large people try to do the best they can. Many do far more than anyone ever hears of. And we need to encourage that effort. Articles like this are an important way of doing that.
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p>Thank you.
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often have to be more talented than effective employees in the private sector because there is so much duplication and so many obstacles to getting the job done.
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p>Katherine is a superstar. Dedicated, smart, willing to listen, and courageous enough to take on the hardest tasks around (mainly because she can turn mud into gold). She has done an incredible job of turning a $11-13 billion backlog in school building needs that was going nowhere under the auspices of the Department of Education into an effective authority under the Treasurer’s office (with really great support from Tim C).
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p>My organization (Pioneer Institute) gave Cahill and Craven a Better Government award for the tremendous work they did. I know, I know, the dreaded Pioneer Institute, which I am sure you have heard in this reality-based blog was a conservative shill for Charlie Baker…. đŸ˜‰ Golly, and in fact Tim and Katherine won the award the year that Deval Patrick was the keynote speaker at the Better Government dinner.
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p>BTW, it is really great news for the Commonwealth that Steve G is keeping her as a holdover — and also to see that the incoming treasurer is making transparency a priority.