Testimony before the Joint Committee on Education

My name is Tracy O’Connell Novick and I live in Worcester, Massachusetts. I am a former high school English teacher and the mother of three daughters.
The first time I testified before this committee, I was sixth months pregnant with my first child. That daughter is now a third grader at West Tatnuck Elementary in Worcester. I am pleased to be able to tell you that I no longer have to flinch when it rains, as I did when she was in first grade and the ceiling in her classroom had six leaks. It finally became our turn for a roof repair.
At least she has only 18 kids in her class. There are a number of city schools that are running kindergarten classes of 27 students. At least her building doesn’t need periodic inspection of how tilted it is, as does another school in the city. At least she has books, as many of our high school English classes do not. At least she’ll get to go to the library once a week, as some schools do not have the parent volunteers to run them.
Last year when her younger sister was in kindergarten, she came to me and asked when “the computer lady” would come back to put the math games on their classroom computer. I had to tell her that I didn’t know, as there’s only a single technology person for the public schools. My five year old daughter asked me how much it would cost it to hire another lady, saying , “They can have my money, Momma.”
I could go on with examples—and I assume that many of you have other such examples—but I will stop here to point out what all of these examples have in common, besides being in Worcester: not one of them will be made a bit better by Race to the Top funds.
Should nothing change, as of right now, Worcester is facing a $26 million shortfall next year in the public school budget. Lest we depend on the oft-cited $12 million under the tax levy cap the city of Worcester has, allow me to point out that even if it were raised all of that next year and every cent of it went to education, we would still be facing a $14 million shortfall. We’re in dire straits and we’re hardly alone.
The Race to the Top money does nothing to help that. It solves no current problems we are having in education in Massachusetts.
This is not the time to re-open the can of worms of charter schools. While oft-debated, Massachusetts has come to the conclusion that for now, we have enough. You have, here in the Legislature, debated and re-debated that, and you have gone over and over the funding of charters. More charter schools—which serve a select few students and have mixed results in educating them—are not some magical solution to education, as Secretary Duncan seems to think. They don’t solve the larger issues of educational equity and of dependable fair funding of public education. Quite the reverse.
This is also not the time to try out merit pay. A quick perusal of education articles from around the country will allow you to see how well that works: it doesn’t. Would you work harder if your pay was dependent on how many bills you passed? Would that improve the quality of the bills passed? And how much does the number of bills passed depend on you, as an individual? Teachers, likewise, do not work somehow better if their pay is dependent on their students’ test scores. And how exactly are we in Worcester to determine which teacher is responsible for a student’s test score when we have a 40% mobility rate?
Let me read to you something written by a Worcester school teacher:
Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them…
The schoolteacher was John Adams, who taught in Worcester for several years. The quotation is taken from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Massachusetts is, so far as I can discover, the only state in the union that includes public education in its original Constitution. As the home of the country’s first college and the home of Horace Mann, we, of all states, have the stature to be able to say “no” to the Secretary of Education. Let us faithfully execute the words of that Worcester schoolteacher John Adams and spread “the opportunities and advantages of education” to all of our students. It is, as he said, your duty.