Three things to pay attention to from last week's Board of Ed

In the days since Tuesday's Board of Ed, I've been reflecting on a few places where the meeting raised some flags with me.

I offer the following in my capacity as someone who's in the room for these and has been for years, nothing beyond that: 

1. The Board voted against the Commissioner on a major policy recommendation. As far as I can remember, that is the first time that has ever happened to Jeffrey Riley as Commissioner, and I have to go quite a way back in my memory before him to come up with any recollection of it happening at all. 
   Riley may have said whatever the Board decides  "we're totally fine with it," but he had also made it very clear for months that this was a big priority for him that he was staking a great deal on. I have never seen a Board meeting room clear of Department staff as quickly as it did Tuesday, and it was abundantly clear that the Commissioner was not a happy man on leaving. 
   I'll leave that there. 
   
   
2. The state accountability system is a big deal. It impacts, for better or worse, a lot of what we do in K-12 education in Massachusetts. It's also part of a deal we have with the federal government under the Every Student Succeeds Act (the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). When we last did that major overhaul, the Department held hearings across the state and took testimony for months in advance.
   Thus it was concerning enough that a change to the system was being rushed by the Commissioner between January 8 and 24 (which is what it amounted to, if you actually got the request for comment). It was clear in the meeting, most markedly stated by Vice Chair Matt Hills, that at least a piece of the objection from some of the Board was the lack of process on the change.
   Thus it is incredibly concerning that entirely out of the blue, in the middle of a deliberation on a different indicator entirely, that Chair Katherine Craven tried to negotiate a change in accountability on district literacy curriculum. Even if that change was simply a 'report what you use,' that's a change coming without announcement, discussion, weighing, anything. 
   If it were, as she was first posing, a change that requires particular curricula in return for points, that would seem to be removing an authority granted school committees in Massachusetts. As Member Michael Moriarty noted, the Board doesn't make the laws; the legislature does. The Legislature has granted that authority to select curricula to school districts, not to the Department, and not to the Board. 
   A few of the members have been pushing on the amount of pressure the Board can exert on districts around curricula for some time, but this was a new level of that. For it to come up in the middle of a meeting without any sort of public warning...it's worrying. 
   
   
3. A fundamental principle of public bodies like the Board of Ed is that the public, on whose behalf they make decisions that then impact that public, know in advance what is being discussed about which those decisions are going to be made. 
   This is why public comment--which may be on any topic at all, including ones that are nowhere announced in advance--is not responded to by public bodies. Deliberation without a posting in advance is a violation of the open meeting law; it does not allow the public to know and to do what advocacy they may wish regarding a topic.
   This is true of any topic. A unannounced panel, invited by the Chair, (This can be viewed at 52 minutes into the meeting.) that moves into critique of curricula and pedagogy on Israel, including calls for vetting of curricula, and then is responded to by multiple Board members, who discuss webinars and a resolution: that was clearly "reasonably anticipated in advance" by the Chair.
   And it is absolutely something that should have allowed for the larger public input a posting would have provided. 
   UPDATE: Tom Marino at This Week in Worcester just wrote about this last.