...as reported by State House News Service shared by WWLP:
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education announced Tuesday that it will conduct public interviews Thursday with three finalists for the open Department of Elementary and Secondary Education commissioner job.
Board members will consider Jack Elsey, Lily Laux and Pedro Martinez.
Elsey previously worked as chief of innovation and incubation at Chicago Public Schools and as assistant superintendent at Detroit Public Schools. In 2022, he founded the Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative, which Massachusetts officials described as "an organization committed to addressing the teacher shortage crisis and building a more robust educator pipeline for Michigan."
Laux works as executive director of Economic Mobility Systems. Before that, she spent seven years as deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency, a role that involved overseeing academics and efforts to shift from a "compliance focused" approach to an "outcomes-driven" one, DESE said.
Martinez leads Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest district in the nation. He previously worked as superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District.
You can find the Boston Globe report here, and Chalkbeat, which has a Chicago bureau, focuses most only Martinez here.
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| please enjoy this sign left at an Orange line station in Boston after the march |
I am going to strain to keep this post very straightforward, and I'll give some preliminary thoughts in another post.
First, the obvious: all out-of-staters, no internal finalists (remember the elephant in the room).
Martinez has a pretty thorough Wikipedia page; Jack Elsey has a Chiefs for Change bio; there's this Sched bio on Laux.
Both Elsey and Laux are former teachers, BUT through Teach for America (we'll come back to that); Elsey in the Bronx, Laux in Memphis. Martinez, rather fascinatingly, holds an undergraduate degree in accounting and first joined the Chicago Public Schools as a budget director (when Arne Duncan was running the schools); before that, he was an auditor. He is a Broad Academy /Network graduate, as is Elsey.
We probably know a bit more about Martinez locally* because he was a finalist for the Boston superintendency in 2015, when the Boston School Committee hired Tommy Chang. You can read Wikipedia for why he resigned in Washoe County (it had a lot more to do with them than with him). Most recently, Martinez has been in charge of the Chicago Public Schools (thus the Chalkbeat coverage), where he was fired without cause in December, as Chicago transitions to a partly elected, partly appointed school board. The crux of the conflict:
The union and Johnson have argued that the district should add more staff, reduce class size, and agree to a litany of other proposals. The mayor’s team suggested over the summer that CPS take a high-interest loan to cover the new costs — and then redouble its push to line up new revenue from the state or other sources. The Martinez administration countered that any prospects for new funding are uncertain, and the district should avoid adding to its significant debt burden.
Martinez has run school districts; before Chicago, he ran San Antonio schools. The 74, which I'd characterize as being pro-"ed reform" in quotes, characterizes his tenure as "reform-darling San Antonio" where schools seen as needing "turnaround" where turned over to charter schools. This isn't something that has particularly characterized his more recent time in Chicago.
While Laux's most recent "like this" job was Deputy Commissioner of School Programs for the Texas state department of education (that's what "Texas Education Agency" is), she's now running Economic Mobility Systems which says it:
helps partners leverage powerful new technology platforms, digital credentials, and case management tools to drive new and equitable college and workforce outcomes**
...which seems to be a data management platform that is sold to schools? I think?
In Texas, per her bio, she oversaw "Standards and Support Services including Digital Learning, Curriculum, Instructional Materials, and School Board of Education; Special Projects; Early Childhood Education; Elementary, Middle, and State Programs; and College, Career, and Military Preparation" which sounds very appropriate for someone moving to Commissioner. Because she oversaw assessment, you can find her being interviewed about STARR testing moving online. Her dissertation at UT-Austin was "Teaching Texas : race, disability, and the history of the school-to-prison pipeline."
Her time before Texas was working for Teach for America, so she isn't just a former TFA teacher; she is former TFA management.
Also, I suspect that her Linked-In profile now leads with "Proud product of Massachusetts public schools" isn't a coincidence. Bonus points to the first person who figures out where.
Elsey is now running a 501(c)3, the Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative, which is working to create educators in Michigan. It's a little hard to find much on how much they've done; they've gotten some funding from the state itself and also from New School Venture Funds. Per a bit on the National Council on Teacher Quality:
Five years ago, Jack Elsey was sitting at his desk reviewing school staffing data at the Detroit Children’s Fund when he realized Michigan’s teachers and students needed a new strategy. Each year, his organization raised roughly $7 million to invest in initiatives to expand educational opportunities and create more equitable systems for students citywide, yet over half of those dollars were being spent on talent acquisition.
Hiring and retaining great teachers was, and continues to be, a glaring need not only in the Motor City but across Michigan. That need drove Mr. Elsey to establish the Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative (MEWI), a nonprofit where he and his team design, implement, fund, and support innovative approaches that strengthen educator pipelines.
The Detroit Children's Fund, which Elsey left to start MEWI, funds programs associated with or in the Detroit schools, both the public school system and charter schools.
Elsey hasn't worked in a public school district or state education agency since 2017, when he spent a year with Michigan's state turnaround agency. He came there from Chicago where he was Chief Innovation and Incubation Officer, having entered educational leadership back in Detroit through a Broad fellowship; he rose to assistant superintendent in Detroit. His Broad time followed time also working in management for Teach for America.
opining to come
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*no, not because of the Red Sox, and I am struggling to not put on my "con" list "we would never escape baseball metaphors"
**the whole website reads like that.
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