The dog that didn't bark in Brockton

 blog title from "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" among the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, referring to the dog not barking being a key clue in solving the mystery, as one would have expected it to, given the circumstances of the mystery.

The Old Post Office Building,
now the Crosby Administration Building of the Brockton Public Schools

One of the duties assigned to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (specifically by MGL Ch. 15, Sec. 55A) is district comprehensive reviews as follows:

The office shall perform not less than 40 school district audits annually, not less than 75 per cent of which shall be in districts whose students achieve at low levels either in absolute terms or relative to districts that educate similar student populations. The remainder of the audits shall be divided equally among districts whose students achieve at high levels relative to districts that educate similar student populations and randomly selected districts

You can read a bit more about them here. The most recent ones are posted online here. Each one looks at:

• Leadership and Governance
• Curriculum and Instruction
• Assessment
• Human Resources and Professional Development
• Student Support
• Financial and Asset Management

Now, if you're like me, you're seeing "audit" and reading "DESE" and thinking "YIKES!" I want to encourage you to take a look at them, though, as they are a useful perspective across the whole of a district. Worcester's, being from 2017, is increasingly dated but it is here.

So it was that I was interested to read an article that the Brockton Public Schools District Review Report was out (three weeks ago: I am behind!) from the Department's pre-pandemic visit in early March.
Brockton, of course, is the fourth largest school district in Massachusetts and home of the plaintiffs of both the McDuffy and the Hancock legal decisions. When it comes to gaps in school funding, thus, Brockton is a kind of ground zero. Brockton also was the nationally lauded district for closing the achievement gap without becoming a "drill and kill" sort of school system. What happens when those two things are true of the same system, decades or so on?

From the perspective of the Department per the opening paragraph, this:

Since its previous height nearly a decade ago as a recognized leader in closing the achievement gap, Brockton has experienced a continual decline in academic outcomes according to the most recent state data, with 10 of its 21 schools now ranked in the lowest 10 percent of Massachusetts schools. The district eliminated 212 positions from 2014 to 2019 due to budget cuts. These positions included key curricular and instructional leadership roles that were either eliminated entirely or their responsibilities redistributed elsewhere. The district’s decision to reduce leadership, primarily at the secondary level, in order to protect teaching positions has resulted in unstable systems and practices to create and drive improvement initiatives.

(as an utter side note: I do want to laud the writing on these; they're not full of lingo, they're easy to follow, and they're well constructed.)

There are many things I could say about this report--for one, I think the understanding it brings to "policy" is off-base--but I want to focus on this one, which is the central driving theme, but is also interesting in terms of what is not said. 

The argument is that Brockton has had falling achievement due to a hollowing out of its administrative management through its budgetary prioritization and thus there hasn't been the sort of alignment and oversight that is needed for good teaching that reaches students where they are. 

Let me first note that I don't dispute the premise--which some would--that having some degree of management that ensures things like all of the third graders get to the standards of third grade math, no matter where they are in the district, or that what happens in fourth grade logically follows what happens in third, and that the feedback loop of assessment showing that either of those two things are not happening then shifts what is going on in classrooms is necessary. I agree that it is necessary, particularly in a district where those third graders are in different buildings, where students move in and out, and where there are possibly more elementary school teachers than one can easily fit in a room. 

As much as not funding administration properly is frequently an argument during budget deliberations, having an underfunded administration is also, though, not something that's necessarily going to surprise anyone from Brockton. It has been clear from the district's own numbers that they are short administrators. See, for example, this from October of 2018:

From the October 2018 "Take of Four Cities" presentation

That $3.5M FY17 gap in the top line is real positions that didn't (and one assumes still don't) exist in Brockton. They are legitimately short central administration. This is not uncommon among Gateway Cities, and it was also noted over and again during the fight to get the Foundation Budget Review Commission's recommendations into law.

The Department's report continues:

The decision to reduce the leadership force was not informed by district goals or an analysis of data. It was based on the idea that teachers can be effective without sufficient leadership and ignored the value of having high-level leaders to support and monitor high-quality teaching. This approach also avoided the reality that even with fiscal restrictions, it is possible to provide clarity about strategies and expectations for high-quality teaching practices, along with structures to support teachers and monitor the quality of instruction. Evidence gathered during the review indicated that the district did not fully appreciate the cascading impact of reduced leadership and supervision on the quality of curriculum, instruction, and student support services. Consequently, student achievement continues to deteriorate, even with added support and intervention from DESE’s Statewide System of Support.

This is, of course, just the sort of argument that drives a school committee member in a district that the state has conceded is massively underfunded to fury, and, as we see in the article, it did:

Minichiello, the school committee member, said an ever-tightening budget forced leaders to make a series of lose-lose decisions.
“What are we supposed to do? Hire more administrators?” he said. “Don’t tell that to the mother whose first grader is in a class with 30 kids.”

The argument that it had to be one or the other, that it literally was teachers' jobs on the line, isn't made up. Here's the FY17 comparison of Brockton's actual teaching corps versus what it should, by the state's foundation calculation, be:

From the 2018 "Tale of Four Cities" presentation
You are reading correctly that it is a 414 teacher gap.

In other words, while Brockton undoubtedly did cut central administration staff to save teaching jobs, the district still remained catastrophically--over 400 teachers, per the foundation budget--short of teaching staff by the state's own measures. 

The reaction the School Committee thus had this past spring to the promised first year of the Student Opportunity Act thus perhaps was not surprising: they planned to hire teachers. To this, the Department offers this critique (on page 5 of the Executive Summary under "Financial and Asset Management"):

The district is anticipating an additional $21,093,362 in Chapter 70 state aid following the passage of the Student Opportunity Act (2019). At the time of the onsite review, the district had begun to prioritize how to allocate the funds. However, the school committee had approved restoring 93 teaching positions before the full development of an updated strategic plan or district improvement plan. While this added infusion of funds can go a long way toward remediating some of the serious effects of reduced personnel, programs, and services the district has experienced in recent years, the district and its students would benefit from more thoughtful analysis and decision-making.

Again, I am entirely in favor of both thoughtful planning and of ensuring alignment with overall district goals. It would seem from the above gaping holes in personnel, however, that priority one for the district, spoken or otherwise, may well have be "stop bleeding."

The report offers a number of critiques that, from where I sit, potentially don't cost a dime. There is a discussion of consistent and timely assessment of students, followed by shared timely and actionable data, with a repeated note that this is something the School Committee should be using in their decision making (which, you may be sure, captured my attention in more ways than one; there are a number of things Worcester should be noting from this document). There is a challenge to share evidence of district performance with the community in multiple ways, and there is a critique (which I would echo) that the district could well use more accessible budgetary documentation. 

Fair enough. 

The "challenges and areas for growth" section of the Leadership and Governance section argues:

By focusing on external factors such as budget challenges rather than analyzing data and focusing on improving teaching and learning, district leaders have lowered expectations for themselves and students and have not recognized their power to improve all students’ performance, opportunities, and outcomes.

By failing to recognize that budget challenges are a key factor in student, school, and district performance--something which is not in dispute--the evaluation of the district misses a real opportunity to evaluate what can effectively be done by a district that is catastrophically underfunded and runs a real risk of the recommendations that are less monetary dependent being dismissed wholesale due to the documents non-barking dog.

My sense of this evaluation is this--and please note this is entirely surmise and conjecture on my part:

We have, as I have noted in the past, a tendency at the classroom, school, and even district level to talk about "the state" as if that is a single entity in education in Massachusetts. It is, of course, multiple entities, and that is, I think, what causes this report to be silent. 

What we refer to as “the state” is the Legislature, of course, and at the end of the day, the funding lies there, more than anywhere. The interaction between the Legislature and the Department is, in my limited experience, somewhat odd, as, again, the Department isn’t entirely subject to the Governor. It is the Legislature that has effectively been absent this year in the funding of Student Opportunity Act, due to when the pandemic hit. It was the Legislature, however, that (finally) had recognized the need to first look at the foundation budget and then change the calculation. By passing a bill unanimously in both chambers, they put the Governor in the position of either signing the bill or having his veto overridden. His hand was forced.

Evaluations of districts are, as I noted above, a function of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. As such, they are a function of the Executive branch, if one that is quasi-independent of the Governor. Changing the foundation budget has not been a priority of this Governor, nor has it been a priority of the Secretary of Education he appointed, nor of the Board of Education most of whom he also appointed. This all lends itself to a Commissioner who, while he has upon occasion mentioned the undercalculation of the foundation budget, has not centered his leadership on this issue, for all that his most notable experience in leadership prior to this one was in Lawrence. 

We thus don’t have an activist Department around education funding, for better or worse, and I recognize that there are multiple perspectives possible on that. Do note, that more activist Boards and Commissioners have existed in the past—look, for example, at where much of the energy around desegregation came in the 1960’s and 1970’s, for all that they were not successful. That is not this Commissioner, nor, thus, is it this Department.

This seems, then, to effectively tie the hands of the Department when it comes to noting the real impacts of decades of underfunding on school and district performance. The evaluation does not--cannot?--parse out what is in fact poor governance on the part of the district and what is due to simply not having the money to get the job done.

Both are possible. Both may well be the case in Brockton. 
That dog sure isn't barking, though