Gov. Patrick's Readiness Schools Plan Better Than His Charter School Plan But Still Problematic

Shortly after publishing an editorial critical of Gov. Deval Patrick's proposed expansion of charter schools in Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago, Open Media Boston received an email from Patrick's Executive Office of Education taking us to task for essentially only talking about half of his latest education proposal - and not discussing the other half, the Readiness Schools proposal, as well. I thought that was a fair criticism; so this week, I'll take a look at the Governor's plan for Readiness Schools and a union-backed alternative - and see what can be seen. To recap, Patrick is filing two bills with the state legislature, the Charter School "Smart Cap" bill and the Readiness Schools bill.

The Charter School bill would expand the amount of money availble for charter schools in the state's lowest performing school districts - increasing the number of available seats statewide from 10,000 to 37,000 (in Boston the number will increase tenfold from 660 to 6,600).

The lowest performing districts will be determined by looking at statewide student performance on the Mass. Comprehensive Assessment System - the state's high stakes standardized testing system at the K-12 level. Proponents of charter schools say that they are innovative education laboratories that raise the bar for elementary and secondary public education. Opponents, led by teacher's unions and a solid cross-section of educational leaders, say that charter schools have not been able to demonstrate much improvement over traditional public schools, that they cherry pick the best and brightest students, that they are almost totally un-unionzed nationwide and that they leech needed funds out of the traditional public system - while leaving the publics to handle the most difficult and needy students out of their shrinking budgets.

Open Media Boston went on record criticizing the idea of charter schools on the grounds just mentioned and called for a fully funded public education system that will make every school statewide as innovative and responsive as the few charter schools that have lived up to the promises of their partisans. Working closely with the education unions every step of the way. But not forgetting that sometimes union rules stop bad teachers and administrators from being eased out of their positions into other positions where they could conceivably be more effective and less harmful to students - so educational reform must include some contractual reforms to be truly successful. Just not contractual reforms that are simply aimed at destroying education unions. OMB remains steadfast against that kind of thing.

The Governor's Readiness Schools proposal, meanwhile - if implemented as planned, which is a "big if" - sounds like it could go part of the way towards that vision. It would create 3 types of Readiness Schools that would receive state (and therefore, federal) monies to "remedy conditions of persistent underperformance" by - among other things - allowing for teachers union rules to be modified, expanding the school day and year, suspending "burdensome" school district policies, getting parents more involved with their children's school systems, partnering with outside institutions, and evaluating school performance annually.

The first type of schools - and the one with most state oversight - are to be called Readiness Acceleration Schools. The Mass. Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education will identify "underperforming" and "chronically underperforming" schools. Together with a group of unnamed "stakeholders," the commissioner will develop an "innovation plan" for each school in question. For underperforming schools, the school district's superintendent will be held responsible for implementing the innovation plan. For chronically underperforming schools, an "external receiver" will be responsible for plan implementation. The resulting Acceleration Schools would create the most drastic changes in the day-to-day functioning of schools. But the Readiness Acceleration school plan does call for spending more money on such schools to make things happen.

The second and third types of proposed new schools, the Readiness Advantage and Readiness Alliance schools will be created at the local level by either retooling existing public schools or starting new ones from scratch.

So the the Acceleration plans will run similarly to a state receivership plan, the Advantage plans will be run like publicly overseen charter schools, and the Alliance plans will be run like publicly overseen charter schools with additional oversight by external entities like universities in a manner reminiscent of the way Boston University ran the Chelsea, MA school system for many years.

Innovation plans for Readiness Advantage schools would be overseen by school faculty and administrators. Innovation plans for Readiness Alliance schools would be run via "comprehensive partnerships with external partners such as universities, museums, or charter school operators." Small grants are already being made available to communities like Somerville to start planning to convert some of their schools to Readiness Schools starting in 2010.

The enabling bills for the Readiness Schools and the Charter School "Smart Cap" plan will "be a key part of Massachusetts’ December 2009 application for federal “Race to the Top” funding, which provides $4.35 billion nationwide to support education reform. By passing the state bills this fall, we will maximize our ability to receive millions of federal dollars to support our public schools.

Now then ... as I said in our editorial on Charter Schools, a big reason for Patrick to pursue the very educational strategies he was elected for opposing is that much-needed federal education funds have been linked directly to Charter School expansion.

But Patrick wants a good chunk of that money to go into what amounts to the creation of charter schools through the existing public school system - and that may not be a bad thing - except that the teacher's unions seem to be denied a significant role in implementing the educational reform plan. The Charter School money as currently defined will be controlled by non-union Charter Schools - operating with public oversight, but outside of serious public control.

The Readiness School proposal, on the other hand, seems to take a step towards the kind of "make every unionized public school an educational laboratory" approach that Open Media Boston supported in our original Charter School editorial.

However, although the Readiness School bill was released at the same time in mid-July as the Charter School expansion bill, it has gotten a lotless scrutiny in the press. As such, our opportunity to talk about it in this editorial is most welcome because we do have some serious questions about it.

First off, the Readiness Plan is built top-to-bottom on the idea that standardized testing (specifically, MCAS) is a good yardstick with with to measure whether schools are underperforming or not. I fall in the camp of people that feel that the evidence supports the position that when you force teachers to "teach to the test" then you help create conditions that breed underperforming schools by stifling teacher's innovation and experimental acumen; so I certainly think using MCAS as a primary metric is highly questionable.

Second, to paraphrase a well-known labor educator hereabouts, the Governor's Readiness Schools plan (like his charter school plan) is getting "tricky" by pushing charter school ideology (the idea that charter schools really represent a major improvement on traditional public schools in the absence of solid evidence) where it really doesn't belong to get needed education funds. Instead of spending serious political capital to pressure Pres. Barrack Obama to back off of his plans to link large amounts of federal education money to state expansion of charter school programs.

Third, the Readiness Schools plan - like so many public policy initiatives from on high - incorporates lashings of communitarian rhetoric about stakeholders and inclusion - but looks like a pretty top-down affair when one cuts through to the somewhat obscured chase. A great deal of power will be in the hands of state officials - while local teachers and school committees will be brought into the process to vote on the language of innovation plans and performance contracts, but not given final say over Readiness School implementation. Nor will unions be easily able to maintain a traditional collective bargaining environment under the Readiness School regimes - which is a matter of great concern to tens of thousands of unionized teachers in the Commonwealth. Particularly since teachers in Readiness Advantage schools will bear primary responsibility for overseeing their innovation plans and performance contracts. And unions are only really mentioned in the Readiness Schools plan as a kind of negative force to be brought to heel. Not as a committed partner and critical participant in any educational reform process.

Finally, as with the Boston Teachers Union School that I mentioned in my earlier editorial on this topic as an alternative to pushing charter schools, there is a union-backed alternative to Readiness Schools. On July 17th, in response to the Governor's proposal, the Mass. Teachers Association "called on the Legislature to adopt a model for Readiness Schools that taps into the expertise of educators in affected communities." That is they called for a plan that fully involved teachers, their unions and school committees.

The Mass Partners for Public Schools plan - named for the coalition of the same name that includes the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, the Massachusetts Elementary School Principals Association, the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators' Association, the American Federation of Teachers/MA, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Parent-Teacher Association, and the Massachusetts Association of School Committees - was created to address this and other problems with the Readiness Schools bill.

In an MTA press release explaining the MassPartners plan, the union states that the final bill "contains an insufficient assurance that all local voices in the affected communities will be heard, does not provide for sufficient input from educators and their unions, and seeks to diminish the collective bargaining process that has helped Massachusetts schools rise to the top in national and international rankings."

The background and specifics of the MassPartners plan, are as follows:

The MTA, which will oppose the Readiness Schools legislation in its current form, will advocate instead for the MassPartners proposal, which sets forth a demonstrably collaborative approach that is preferable to the state-controlled model introduced today.

The MTA believes that Readiness Schools will be more effective if they are based on the following premises from the MassPartners proposal:

Readiness Schools should be part of public school districts, and school committees should have final approval of the establishment of such schools.

A role for educators and their unions should be preserved in the process of creating Readiness Schools without allowing either the superintendent or the president of the local union to have veto power.

The MassPartners plan includes the following steps for the creation of each Readiness School:

Phase One: The local union and the school committee bargain the Readiness School process.

Phase Two: The Readiness School proposal is evaluated by a screening committee composed of all stakeholders identified in Phase One.

Phase Three: If the proposal is approved by the screening committee, a Readiness School plan is developed by the design team identified in Phase One.

Phase Four: The Readiness School plan is subject to a vote of the teachers at the school in question and a vote by the school committee. The plan could include agreeing to change provisions of the current contract for teachers in that school or freedom from school district policies.

Sounds a lot more democratic to me. The power to develop and launch Readiness Schools is put in the hands of the teachers, parents and school committees. While this approach does not address all of the criticisms I raise above, it is still a preferable one to the Governor's model at this juncture. Whether the MassPartners plan will still help the state qualify for some of the federal aid on offer is another question. And whether the education unions and associations should continue working within the frame dictated by Patrick and his team or not is still another.

So asked to state the better of the two plans, I'd say that the MassPartners plan will go much further towards meeting the needs of Massachusetts students for a top quality public education while ensuring a more democratic enabling process that involves key constituencies from the ground up. Therefore, OMB would logically have to give it our qualified support.

Were OMB viewers to ask whether I thought the MassPartners plan was an ideal solution to the problems besetting public schools, I'd probably say no. I've already made clear in past editorials that I want to see progressive taxation implemented to pay for increases in public spending for public goods across the board. In that scenario, there'd be more than enough money to make all our public schools top notch across a variety of metrics. And there wouldn't be a need to couch such reform in the failed language of conservative stalking horses like charter schools.

But in this time of shrinking budgets, with neoliberals like Patrick still clinging to public-private approaches to handling sectors - like education - that should be solely public, that kind of sea change in the Massachusetts political economic order still remains little more than a pipe dream.

And more's the pity. But perhaps progressive advocates will be able to make their presence felt more strongly - in education policy at least - over the next couple of years. And maybe new possibilities will open up through whatever strategy of tension they are able to start up. That would definitely be a good thing. Then OMB, like teachers, students, and parents, would be presented with options for educational reform that were truly worth backing full stop. And wouldn't that be nice for a change.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston.