As ye sow, so shall ye reap

 Yes, I post this, as always, in my personal and exasperated capacity.

One year ago today¹, I wrote the following: 

Massachusetts has the distinction of being the first state in the country to enshrine in its original constitution public education. In the passage I keep at the bottom of this blog, John Adams outlined in 1779--before we had a country--a requirement that the state ensure that children raised in the Commonwealth had an education, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the continuation of democratic governance in the state. Adams had written a great deal on governance; it was not accidental that he was tapped to write the draft of what became our state constitution. Something that Adams thought a great deal about was how it was that a democratic country was to create and to sustain itself, in contrast to Europe, which was most of what Adams and others of the founders at the time knew. In earlier writing, you can see Adams grappling with this challenge of a system that did not fall into other systems of tyranny. Education is what is needed, Adams and the others who put the document together held, is what is necessary not simply for the good of the individual, but, as the state constitution puts it, "necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties." In the 1993 McDuffy decision, the court took the elegant language of the Constitution, and let the state government know that it was more than pretty words:

What emerges from this review is that the words are not merely aspirational or hortatory, but obligatory. What emerges also is that the Commonwealth has a duty to provide an education for all its children, rich and poor, in every city and town of the Commonwealth at the public school level, and that this duty is designed not only to serve the interests of the children, but, more fundamentally, to prepare them to participate as free citizens of a free State to meet the needs and interests of a republican government, namely the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It was thus that the Legislature passed the 1993 Education Reform law, due to the Supreme Judicial Court's finding that the state government had an obligation to every child in the state "rich or poor, in every city and town of the Commonwealth." No more could the state largely leave it to each town and city to muddle along in its school funding as best it felt it could, nor could the state simply leave it to each town and city to decide what it was doing about public education.

This was the blog post on why I voted no on question 2: because it was unconstitutional; because it asked the wrong group of people to do the wrong thing; and because it would leave us in a mess.

And that's certainly borne out.² 

The latest round of the mess is the shock, shock, of some in finding that we might somehow have the state check to see if the kids in high school have learned anything at all in their various courses in some sort of fashion. Possibly a test (those are much cheaper, incidentally, then other options). Probably standardized across the state standards, created by teachers, that we have for all our students. And there might be actual consequences to those test, because we have the constitutional obligation to every child that they've actually received an education.

I stand in front of groups all the time and strongly recommend that they read the education section of the Massachusetts state constitution. It isn't long--that's it in full at the bottom of the blog here--but it makes a very strong, and frankly revolutionary, commitment to each child in the state, and it does it, as the McDuffy case outlined, not only for the child's good, but for the good of the Commonwealth. 

The state has the educational authority and makes the educational commitment in Massachusetts. The state--and that is US, to be clear--has a responsibility to ensure that it is being carried out. 

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¹coincidence. I didn't realize til I went to look for the post.
²Cassandra must have been exhausted.