"...what he can help, and what he cannot"

 Two things a man should never be angry at: what he can help, and what he cannot help.                                                                                                                                                         Thomas Fuller

It's the end of another Board of Ed week, and I find myself again starting at multiple tabs open on my laptop--

•  "Riley rips Boston schools – again" from Commonwealth Magazine
• "Blindsided’: State slams BPS over O’Bryant plans" from the Boston Herald
• "One year into school improvement plan, state official grades Boston’s progress 'incomplete'" from WBUR

--and struggling to put into words just how weird this all is.

Now to be fair, close to 5% of the K-12 students in Massachusetts public schools attend the Boston Public Schools: DESE has to care about Boston. But let's remember what it is that the Commissioner has the Department (I guess?) closely attending to:

• Bathrooms
• Buses
• Data
• Special Ed
• English learners

Now, I have little argument on those last two, though I'd argue that what they're focusing on--which appears to be a lot about opining about hiring of administrators--is probably not the best use of any authorities, let alone competencies, of the Department, nor does it rise to the level of threating state receivership. Outcomes? Governance? Yes. But we don't hear nearly as much about those as we do about open positions or how they have been filled.
Data...I can see data being on a list, but "you don't have a good use of data, so we're threatening you with receivership" seems a bit much.
Buses...look, I think my bona fides on the importance of transportation are pretty strong. The degree to which the Commissioner has demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding of much of anything around transportation in the city that regularly is cited as among the worst in the world on traffic, in a national bus driver shortage, in a city that has to bus all parochial and private school students in its borders under the same terms as public school students, and that is ongoingly still attempting to sort out its own tangled history with segregation. If you're going to weigh in, at least have some sort of an informed opinion.

Bathrooms...again, my own history on the importance of bathrooms and access speaks for itself here. But the complaints have been, from what I have heard in meetings, that the bathrooms that BPS said it was fixing in some cases already had been, and now, that the timelines hadn't been met. Anyone who has been attempting to complete facilities work in the past several years will be familiar with timelines not being met, because we're still having both labor and supply line issues.

But, of course, we never hear that part, because the Boston deliberation--and if you don't think these discussions are about making a decision about Boston, I suspect you haven't been listening to them--are never on the posted agenda, and thus the discussions are a violation of the Open Meeting Law, and Boston isn't at the table for the discussion. 

And both of those things are wrong. 

Even all of that, though, isn't what causes me to continue to leave these tabs open. It's the anger. 

It may be that you have to be in a lot of meetings to perceive this (or maybe you don't). The Commissioner doesn't take a particularly active role in the discussions. He introduces reports, but then has the staff take the questions (even ones that really ought to be answered by him). He rarely weighs in over the course of the meeting. 
So the bulk of his time is his report at the beginning of the meeting. And the flavor of his comments on Boston are completely out of line with the tone of everything else he does. 
He's clearly furious.
He's chiding, scolding, sarcastic particularly when it comes to the monthly mention of Boston's leadership coming and PROMISING, he always says, to these terms. 
I wrote about this back in March after the Board approved the Worcester Cultural Academy Charter:

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. 

I'm not someone who casually brings sex and gender into the conversation, but I mean it when I say that Mayor Michelle Wu and then-Superintendent Brenda Cassellius fighting off state receivership and coming before the Board to draw a line over what was theirs and what was the state's clearly is an ongoing issue for Riley. And I also mean it when I say that there is no way on this planet that we'd still be hearing about that--that defiance of state authority--had the mayor been Tom Menino or Marty Walsh. 
For all that K-12 education is predominately female, there continues to be a gap in women in leadership. The gaps in women in political leadership in this country are also stark. And I wish I had a pithy conclusion here beyond "this is not okay."

If we're going to talk about Boston, let's talk about Boston, appropriately posted.
But then it has to be actually about Boston.