What we missed

I didn't want to go into tomorrow's vote for a new Commissioner without reflecting a little bit on the process and how we got here.
Let me start by saying that it's really hard to do this: to boil down all of something--a district, a state--into a description and a series of questions that will somehow reflect what is needed in a leader. Educational systems (and no, we don't just have schools; we have systems) are extremely three dimensional places. They have a lot within them and a lot that influences them from outside. Any attempt to squeeze that into a brochure and two hours of questions will always come up short.

But I was struck, in re-reading the interviews, by how flat they are, by how much we miss.

In my imagined reality, we would have started by throwing the process wide open: hold open sessions across the state. Ask everyone--local unions, school committees, advocacy organizations, student groups--to hold public forums to talk about Massachusetts education and its leadership. Make it an essay/video/column/poem/etc project. Have Board of Education members go out to kindergarten classes and have discussions about what they want to do for the next twelve years. Go find college students and young workers who went to school here and ask them to talk about what worked and what didn't. Pin down everyone who thinks DESE is a scary entity that only brings bad news and find out why. Make it a true Massachusetts process.

And then be really specific about what the Commissioner does. I know I don't know everything about this, but I know more than I did two years ago. What does the Commissioner do all day? What can the Commissioner do? What can't the Commissioner do?
This might involve better defining what DESE does, which I think most of us are still either completely foggy on or very limited in.

Then perhaps we'd have a more three-dimensional vision of what education in Massachusetts is and what the Commissioner does and better define what the new one should be.

One of the ways I judge how state meetings go is by how I feel about sending my kids to Massachusetts public schools as I walk out them. It's been a lousy Board of Ed meeting if I leave it wanting to do something else with their education.

On Friday, I walked out of the Commissioner interviews and went straight to Worcester's arts magnet annual extravaganza, in which all of the arts, by students who have arts every day as part of their schedule, is featured. And yes, Worcester is still managing this, barely, on its vastly underfunded budget each year. The kids that were singing and dancing and acting and playing instruments were--purportedly--those that Friday was about:
Worcester's a Gateway City.
Worcester is majority students of color.
Worcester is majority second language learners.
Worcester's children are majority in poverty.

It didn't feel like Friday was about them.
There were flashes of places when it did: a story here, an anecdote there.

But the lived reality of the 5:30 scramble to catch a bus in the winter cold,
the Monday morning check of how your weekend was for kids for whom meals and warmth isn't a given,
the passed-back work graded over the weekend,
the gym classes,
the question of what's for lunch,
the connection finally made in math class,
the after-school basketball practices,
the afternoon homework and snacks and check-in for those who are lucky enough to have it,
the rush to have things laid out before doing it again tomorrow...
...those didn't feel like Friday.