Three years on: civility and gender and power

 This has been buzzing around in my head since the Board's vote. I'm still wrestling with how to put this; there is much more to be said on this.
As always, this is simply my personal perspective as a single member of the Worcester School Committee.

The pins on my lapel the night the Board met.
The raven says "Nevermore."

When asked for their reflections on the public hearing regarding the proposed charter school, Board of Ed members Matt Hills and Michael Moriarty both said something similar.

They said the hearing was civil. 
That people were respectful. That people were polite.

And both men meant that as praise, clearly, from the context of that remark: it was good that Worcester had been respectful.

I have blogged, generally live, Board of Ed meetings at this point for years. I've followed the appointment of a new Commissioner (I was at the meeting at which it was announced the prior Commissioner had died in office that morning), the changes to regulations required by federal law changes, the shifts under federal administration changes, the various responses to a pandemic, and much more, including lots and lots of votes on charter schools.

And yet, I haven't gone back to the end of February vote to cover it. 

Partly, it's psychosomatic; I had norovirus during the meeting, and I can feel the symptoms coming back when I open the video. 

But also, this was a vote that I put a lot into (as has been noted; thank you for that), and I genuinely do not remember one in which the level of contempt for the thoughtful, logical, relevant concerns was quite as clear as this. Far from being treated with respect, we were dismissed.

But there have been other meetings recently that have been similar.

Let's note, for example, the Commissioner and Board's ongoing (and usually not properly posted) dramatic exasperation with the Boston Public Schools, which often is led off by the Commissioner expressing his sardonic puzzlement over how it is that whatever it is they've decided is the problem this month could be possible when city and district leadership came before the Board and assured  them, and so forth.
Tell me he would have done that if Marty Walsh were still mayor, or if Tom Payzant were still superintendent. 
But Boston is, and has been, under female leadership--women of color, in more than one case--for some time now, and so this mocking tone is something the Commissioner brings to the Department's purported oversight. 
And the Board's "oversight" of the Boston Public Schools is of course much less oversight than it is following wherever it is the suburban writers of the Boston Globe feel is the latest "scandal" (seldom if ever informed by anything happening in the education world at large) which somehow (again, without posting) find their way to the table of the K-12 education system for the entire nearly one million students in Massachusetts. 

And thus while I am at heart an optimist (I don't know that I could bear to do what I do otherwise) to some degree the vote at the end of February I suppose shouldn't have surprised me. The known motivations of a Board nearly entirely appointed by Governor Baker have been well-known, and largely have little to do with the largest concerns in public education at this time. (Let me note the quite marked exceptions of the Secretary, and the student, parent, and labor seats, as so often.)

We were respectful, it seems, but we were unheard. While I have, as a member of a public board myself, respect for processes of public procedure, gestures towards 'respect' may not be heard.

There is a massive effort across the country to privatize public education funding through voucher expansions. Last year's Supreme Court Carson v. Makin decision opened the door wider to public funding of religious schools, something which could well be built upon should the Supreme Court decides in favor of the school in Charter Day School v. Peltier. Trans youth are under open attack across the country, including in Congress itself. There is a wave of book banning and limitations of education across the country. Far from grappling with the systemic inequities in education, we have states doing nonsensical things like setting up CRT hotlines. Youth mental health has been declared a national crisis. 
And teacher turnover has hit a new high.

Today marks the third anniversary of the weekend when it was made starkly clear to us in Massachusetts that we in local leadership were on our own--it's the weekend when literally every single superintendent in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called off school due to the pandemic prior to the Commissioner (who had told superintendents to hold off) and the Governor taking action. That it wasn't catastrophic was due only to local leadership.
Unfortunately, that lack of leadership was indicative of what we would see throughout, and now, with crises of many kind spreading across the country, we have this lack of support and lack of care and thought and focus only continuing. 

I'll say what I said when I ran to get back on the Worcester School Committee three years ago:
We deserve better.

I do not know how we get out of this without major changes on the Board (the Board, recall, appoints the Commissioner). The only way that happens is action by the Governor, unless the Legislature takes the step (as it did in the 1990's) to remake the Board itself. 

It is, though, a disservice to not only local leadership in education, but to everyone in public education in Massachusetts, and most importantly, to our students throughout the Commonwealth to allow this lack of focus on the raging emergencies in public education to continue. 
It's simply far too important.