Charles Chieppo/Jamie Gass: School-test conflict of interest

BOSTON What would have happened if the general manager of the MBTA had also chaired the board of Keolis or the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad when the two companies were competing for the multibillion-dollar contract to operate the T’s commuter-rail system? That would never have been tolerated, and neither should a similar situation that is currently playing out in K-12 education in the commonwealth.

Later this year, Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education about whether to replace the historically successful MCAS test with those developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

The problem is that Chester chairs PARCC’s governing board. As such, he should recuse himself from any involvement with the MCAS/PARCC decision-making process.

Chester serves as secretary to the state board and oversees the process for choosing between MCAS and PARCC. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that he heads gathers the information on which the decision will be made and conducts the internal evaluation.

Chester has formed a team of PARCC Educator Leader Fellows within the department. According to a memo from Chester, the PARCC fellows, who receive a stipend, should be “excited about … the Common Core State Standards” and “already engaged in leadership work around them.” The department has no MCAS fellows.

Some local education leaders aren’t buying into the charade that the PARCC/MCAS decision remains an open question. Brookline Superintendent and Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents President William Lupini, in a 2014 letter to the town’s school committee, flatly stated that “MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new ‘next generation’ assessment.”

A strong whiff of conflict tainted the process of choosing between Massachusetts’ previous academic standards and Common Core, which preceded the MCAS/PARCC issue.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested well over $200 million in the development and selling of Common Core. To help inform his 2010 recommendation to the board about whether to adopt Common Core, the three studies Chester relied on were all conducted by Gates-funded entities.

Furthermore, a 2010 WCVB-TV (Ch. 5) report described that he and other department personnel accepted $15,000 in luxury travel and accommodations from Common Core supporters before the board’s decision to adopt.

Gov. Charlie Baker has criticized the MCAS/PARCC and Common Core processes. He told the State House News Service, “I think it’s an embarrassment that a state that spent two years giving educators, families, parents, administrators and others an opportunity to comment and engage around the assessment system that eventually became MCAS basically gave nobody a voice or an opportunity to engage in a discussion … before we went ahead and executed on Common Core and PARCC.”

PARCC is also becoming increasingly desperate, which only increases the temptation to put a thumb on the scale. More than 20 states were originally part of the consortium; that number is now down to seven states and the District of Columbia.

The MCAS/PARCC choice is Chester’s last chance to regain the public’s trust in his department’s ability to manage an impartial, transparent and accountable process.
As chairman of PARCC’s governing board, the first step is to recuse himself from the decision.

Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a senior fellow and Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank. This piece first ran in the Boston Herald.

Don Pesci: In Conn., the fine art of insincerity

VERNON, Conn

Most commentators in Connecticut seem to trust the Quinnipiac Poll. The latest Q poll shows Republican gubernatorial challenger Tom Foley leading Gov. Dannel Malloy by about six percentage points. The same poll shows Independent gubernatorial challenger Joe Visconti capturing about 7 percent of the vote, and that 7 percent represents the ants in the pants of Foley supporters who point out that, during the last gubernatorial go-around, Mr. Foley lost to Mr. Malloy by a very thin margin. The Q poll also points out that Mr. Visconti appears to be drawing equally from Republicans and Democrats, so that his effect on the general election would appear to be a wash.

Still, Republicans are nervous, and Democrats are pleased that Mr. Visconti – unlike Jon Pelto, a Democratic Independent who earlier withdrew from the gubernatorial race – is still stubbornly plugging along. Mr. Visconti’s position on taxes and education is indistinguishable from that of Mr. Pelto, whose position on taxes is indistinguishable from that of Leon Trotsky. Both Mr. Pelto and Mr. Visconti see an increase in taxes as inevitable. Mr. Pelto would hammer the rich in Connecticut by making the state income tax more progressive. There are a number of resurgent Republican conservatives in Connecticut who believe that Mr. Pelto is exactly what the doctor ordered for Connecticut’s billionaires, many of whom continue to toss campaign contributions in the direction of progressives determined to use the contributions to purchase the rope with which they will hang the dupable contributors.

Mr. Pelto and conservative Republicans in Connecticut both oppose Common Core for different reasons. Conservatives dislike Common Core – or, as some of them call it, Common Gore – because it is a federally imposed standard that violates the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that educational decisions should be made by the smallest political unit affected by political decisions: Towns, rather than state and federal governments, should decide how best to shape public and private schools. Mr. Pelto dislikes Common Core because he perceives enforced national standards as a threat to hegemonic teacher unions. Mr. Pelto’s venom tap was turned on by Mr. Malloy, who sneered that, because of tenure, teachers only had to “show up on the job” to continue to miseducate urban school children. Mr. Malloy and other Common Core adepts would change all that once national standards had been put in place. Mr. Malloy since has had second thoughts.

The correlation of political forces in Connecticut, little understood by Connecticut’s media, has not changed since 1991 when former maverick Gov.  Lowell Weicker festooned the state with an income tax. It was the fashion in Connecticut before and after the age of Weicker to insist that Connecticut, a small but rich state, had no spending problem; rather, Connecticut had a revenue problem that became apparent whenever red ink appeared in its budgets. Any deficit could be discharged by a sufficient increase in revenues. Mr. Pelto clings to the same notion today. So do other progressives -- including Mr. Malloy, however much he insists that he has no plans to increase taxes -- so do most political writers in the state.

Since 1991, Connecticut’s forward progress has been thwarted by progressives who now man all the political high ground in the state. Progressives run the governor’s office, all the Constitutional offices in Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional Delegation, both Houses of Connecticut’s General Assembly, and they have captured all these office from moderate Republicans who had never effectively challenged Democrats on social issues. Democratic moderates also have disappeared. For this reason, any effective challenge to Democratic political hegemony in Connecticut must come from right of center Republicans who in the past have been quietly strangled in their cribs by left of center forces.

There is an additional problem.  In the absence of strong state political parties, which have been weakened for many years by campaign finance reform, state political campaigns have been “other directed” by professional armies of political architects that provide strategy and laundered money to candidates.  In the new political dispensation, every candidate is his own political party, multiple dog tails wagging the Democratic or Republican Party apparatus. In such circumstances, political campaigns become detached from political practices, and a measure of deceit is accepted that not so long ago would have sunk duplicitous campaigns.

Given the level of duplicity in political campaigns, saying what you mean and then doing what you say itself becomes a revolutionary act that cannot be tolerated by incumbents who have become practiced in the fine art of insincerity. This crooked politicking alone accounts for the inattention of voters who hunger for authenticity; they are unwilling to sanction with their votes the obvious duplicity of shamelessly duplicitous politicians.

 

Don Pesci  (donpesci@att.com) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon.

Heidi Simmons: Is poetry dead? Does anyone care?

  STONINGTON, Conn.

A decade ago Newsweek Magazine published an article with the provocative headline: "Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?" The author concluded that while "poetry is the highest form of writing," it takes "work" and that our culture was becoming "intensely prosaic."

All true. But back then poetry was still alive. Sadly I believe that the answer today would be different because poetry has been dropped from the  Connecticut state "Common Core" writing standards for the curriculum for kindergarten through Grade 5.

As a result,  overburdened elementary school teachers have little incentive to give it much time. Today the writing focus is on opinion, explanatory texts and narratives.

But if elementary-school students never have the opportunity to explore their natural inclination for poetic expression, imagination, and word use, they will not fully develop their literary skills. Just as an artisan cannot become competent in his skill without understanding his tools, writers must become comfortable with their verbal tools. Writing poetry inspires and refines a child's use of words as tools. A fifth-grade student struggling with self-expression wrote a poem wherein he described his thoughts as a "jumbled mess of words" that were "fighting to get out by rearing, writhing, whipping, lashing, striking, and beating at his head until finally they seeped onto the paper."

The struggle of expressing an idea and the welcome relief when it is finally spread out on a page are clear in this student's poem. Words become friends and writing becomes fun. Poetry is a child's natal language, a voice with which children are born. Their engagement in the poetic elements of language begins in utero with the rhythm of the first heartbeats. The infant's poetic voice evolves into a delight of manipulating sounds. This is precursor to a child's delight in the rhythms and intonations of nursery rhymes.

A second-grade student of mine found rhythmic joy in her description of a thunderstorm. The "blunder slunder" of the storm blew hard through the trees and the "slunder dunder" of the storm rolled past her eyes as the trees were "flit blit" shaking and throwing their leaves.

Another gift of youth so apparent in elementary school is imagination. One of my fourth-grade students imagined sneakers to be alive as they reclined in the closet after a long run, "tired with their tongues hanging out" and their "shoelaces drooping" just before their "eyelets fluttered" to sleep.

Poetic imagination helps children to bridge the familiar concrete world with the strange and abstract world of adults. Children experience their physical world with a sensual scrutiny. They can see, hear, taste, and touch what has become banal and insignificant to adults. They can use the imaginative poetic tools of comparison to communicate and understand intangible concepts.

One young student of mine, in an effort to share her concept of poetry, imaginatively compared it to all the five senses. Poetry felt like a "corduroy jacket," sounded like a "whispering moon," looked like "her chubby orange crayon, dull at the tip," tasted like "summer honey," and smelled like "a lavender wand." In this way she traveled to a place where prose does not go.

These are examples of elementary school children who have had their natal gift of poetry nurtured in a K-5 literacy environment before "Common Core" standards entered the classroom. Before students address the rugged tasks directed by "Common Core" of writing something "supporting a point of view with evidence" or "examining an idea and conveying information clearly," it would seem important to sharpen their imagination and love of words through poetic wordplay.

Students who have experienced poetry writing show greater fluency and sensitivity to language in all their writing. Poetry helps writing to be fun. Surely this is good for our children's intellectual well-being. Is poetry dead? Let's hope not. Does anybody really care? We all should.

Heidi Simmons was the K-5 literacy coach at the Regional Multicultural Magnet School in New London, Conn., for 15 years before retiring this spring. She lives in Stonington. This first ran in the Journal Inquirer, of Manchester, Conn.