I'd like to be able to give you some sort of meaningful summary of last night's Board of Ed meeting on the DESE strategic plan (liveblog here), but it wasn't that sort of meeting.
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| Polaris? This is as close as we're getting around here... |
Let's walk through some main points:
From today's Globe:
“It feels a little bittersweet,” said Anthony Clough, a policy analyst at the left-leaning Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. “How are we supposed to celebrate the culmination of this really progressive law when it hasn’t really panned out for anybody in the way we thought it would.”
There is, of course, too much "but why aren't the test scores higher" here, but, as so often, Andrew O'Leary nails it:
“It was a long overdue I-O-U,” said New Bedford Superintendent Andrew O’Leary. “Those of us who worked in urban districts for a long time had seen the result of the fiscal inequities. It was constant budget crises and constant compromises.”
The agenda (which doesn't tell us much) is here.
The livestream is here.
Martinez: setting new benchmarks for proficiency, lower to zero doesn't meet (I think)
he is just saying this aloud; it isn't shown or written out as to what he's saying...this is really hard to follow
I am intentionally posting a stub here, as I am working on this on the train outbound, and my posts go out at 3 PM. Come back for more, between today and tomorrow.
On tomorrow night's Worcester City Council agenda, we have the following:
First a process note: This is coming from the Department of Public Facilities, not from the Worcester Public Schools. That's because school buildings, in a municipal school district, are built not by the school department (which does have its own section on the City Council agenda) but by the city itself. The school department does not run its own building projects, and the School Committee has very, very little to do with building projects.*
Now I want to remind you of where we are with Worcester's school building projects: since 2011, Worcester has rebuilt North High, South High, and Doherty, three of the four comprehensive high schools in the city. Add in Worcester Tech, which opened in 2006, that's all of the largest high schools in Worcester, in the past twenty years.
Let's give credit where due: considering that Worcester also opened a new elementary school in there (Nelson Place, which was literally falling down, opened 2017), that is a stunning pace of building new schools. Genuinely, and I say this as someone who watches this, this is a tremendous pace.
While it has had its highs and lows of effectiveness, I recommend attending. Per the invite:
Interpretation services will be provided in Spanish and Portuguese, childcare is available, and pizza will be served! If you need interpretation services in languages other than Spanish and Portuguese, please let us know by Friday, October 2nd, 2026.
There is a special meeting of the Board of Ed tonight at 6 PM. The agenda is here. It is fully remote.
This is the meeting that they scheduled on the fly during last Tuesday's meeting, when some members argued that they did not have sufficient time to discuss the strategic plan needs of the Department in light of the state accountability results. There was a request that materials be updated in light of that, though nothing has appeared online (that doesn't, of course, mean that members don't have new material; they might).
