Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Mail not going through?

Setting aside for the moment the question of "testing irregularities," which we in Worcester seem to have now gone a second round on (let's not forget Goddard is why we have increased scrutiny over MCAS testing procedures), can we ask what the heck is going on with this:
On Tuesday night, Ms. Binienda said she had not yet seen the state’s letter to Ms. Boss
We learn from Scott O'Connell earlier in the article that the letter is dated July 12.
Her office has had this letter for six weeks.
Are they not opening the mail? Ignoring emails?

I shouldn't even have to say this, but the Worcester Public Schools cannot be ignoring the communications of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We can dislike them; we can argue with them; we can't ignore them.

Possibly even more worryingly:
...her belief was the education department had not definitively discovered what led to the score anomalies. She said there had been some focus on an unexpected server issue that occured during the testing that led to several computers shutting down, but that “we weren’t able to determine what effect that had on things.”
The state feels it has definititively discovered what happened, and it has issued a letter of reprimand to the principal over it. Letters of reprimand are rarely issued at all; this is a big deal. That isn't computers shutting down.
Again, we can dislike the state's conclusions. We don't get to pretend they didn't happen and have no plan to deal with it.

Here's the deal: we have, it seems, several schools in turnaround (not that we've ever seen any public declarations or plans). Worcester is always going to be under state scrutiny on how we're doing on things. That's just the reality of being a city.
We've got to open the mail, and we've got to deal with the state.
The above is just...dangerous.

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