What happened last night in education?

What an election night, huh?

So what happened in education?

• Close to home, of course, the Worcester School Committee drops Colorio (by 291 over Biancheria) and adds Comparetto. A few things to keep in mind on that: Colorio's two big issues were Common Core--gone because of the standards redrafting and ESSA==and overtesting--which appears to be less of a concern in a state in which the state test is regularly racking up rates of 99%--so she didn't have as much to run on this year. Comparetto, of course, ran as a progressive, though the big issues around education--race, school-by-school inequity, police in school--were never brought up by him or anyone else. I'm dubious about how much of a victory it is for "us" when a newcomer wins a seat by spending (what I believe to be an unprecedented) over $45,000 to win a school committee race. At a time when we're seeing school board seats be bought for big money (don't forget LA), I'm going to say bluntly that if we care about representative democracy locally, this isn't something we'll find encouraging. Note also that McCullough moved up the ranking while Biancheria moved down (in fact, for awhile it looked as though she might be bumped instead). 
• On the Worcester City Council, Gaffney is out and Rosen replaces him at large. The two newcomers, representing districts 1 and 5 respectively, are Sean Rose and Matt Wally. Rose has kids in the schools, and Wally has parents who were WPS teachers, so at least initially, that looks like possible education support. Aside from general supportive messages for schools, and Wally specifically talking about getting South and Doherty done, we haven't heard a lot on that. Also, someone should ask Rose about a new Burncoat.
• Farther afield, the big news is from Lowell, where the non-binding question on putting a new high school downtown won by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, and the City Council race went to those who supported that location as well. For those who haven't been following this issue: Lowell's only high school is right downtown, and many students walk to and from school. The district runs a good number of programs that keep kids in and around the building during and after school; it's widely seen as one of the strengths of the district. The school committee has wanted to keep a new high school in that location, in order to keep those programs and that access in place for students; the City Council instead wanted to move the high school out to a more suburban location. In Massachusetts municipal districts, the city (not the district) builds schools, so when the City Council voted to put the high school in the more suburban location, the School Committee balked, and then sued, and then lost. Meanwhile, a group of citizens who wanted to keep the high school downtown had collected enough signatures to put the a non-binding measure on the ballot. It has by far dominated the municipal election, and, last night, the downtown supporters won big. All of which demonstrates that the MSBA was wise to postpone dealing with Lowell until after their election. Also, pro-tip? A major concern of MSBA is the academic program and how the building supports that. Lowell's suburban site was not making good arguments for that.
• We can't talk about last night and education without recognizing two mayoral races that bring new mayors in from the State House coming out of races that spoke about school funding: Representative Paul Heroux was elected last night in Attleboro, defeating seven term incumbent Kevin Dumas. Note that Heroux himself cites school funding as one of the factors of his win; Attleboro regularly dances on the edge of barely making minimum net school spending. In Lynn, Senator Tom McGee beat incumbent mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy by a 64/35 margin. Lynn, of course, has been the city that has been so far under net school spending for years that the state has had a few rounds of renegotiating how they're ever going to make up ground on it. The outgoing mayor had variously referred to minimum spending as "a thorn in our side" and had spoken of the school budget "swallow(ing) the city budget". Those are weak arguments in a city in which the school budget is funded a full 75% by the state.
• Framingham elected their first city school committee, choosing a mix of incumbents and newcomers. 
• In New Bedford (h/t Kat McKiernan), incumbent Josh Amaral (disclosure: Josh is a friend) won re-election, and and the city elected two new members, one of whom, Colleen Dawicki, is an interesting city policy wonk type and becomes the only woman on an all-male board.  
• In Malden, where a ward school committee candidate had attracted an enormous (for school committees) amount of dark money, the non-dark money candidate Jennifer Spadafora won, and by a fairly significant margin.
• I put together a bit of a thread last night about school committee races across the state (which does not claim to be everything; let me know if you have additions). 

To peek nationally a bit:

• You'll no doubt hear about Tyler Titus, who won a seat on the Erie County School Board, becoming Pennsylvania's first openly transgender elected official. Congratulations to Tyler! Massachusetts, of course, has had at least two openly transgender school committee members for a bit.
• Portland, Maine voted to renovate four elementary schools.
• Maine as a state overturned the decision of their governor and voted to expand Medicaid to 70,000 people. And yes, health care has to do with education.
• As Matt Barnum notes, Colorado had several of the school board races that brought in big outside dollars. In Aurora, the union-backed candidates were ahead as of last night, which would be a change, as Aurora has had administration that focuses heavily on charter schools. In Denver, it looks like a split. In Douglas County, the switch in the board may have implications on a case around vouchers; the previous majority was attempting to bring a big push on vouchers and had been brought to court over it. 

I'll add more to this over the course of the day...

Vote hope, not fear

The cities (whether they call themselves so or not) of Massachusetts have local elections today, including my hometown of Worcester.
I've already posted once in this election season about Worcester, as my district race had a preliminary contest. I'll be going in later today to vote for Matt Wally, with a fervent hope that he steps up to learn more about education funding, and backs way off the policing focus, should he win.

In the at large race, I'll tell you that Mayor Petty has walked the talk on school funding. What WPS most needs, when it comes to budgets, is a mayor who goes to Boston and actively advocates for the change to the foundation budget that has Worcester functioning at something like 4/5ths of the budget it should have. He gets it, he's internalized it, and he's served us well.
On other aspects of other education policy, we don't always agree (check four years of roll calls if you don't believe me), but he came into the mayor's chair knowing that he needed to learn the school committee side. And he doesn't pretend to know what he doesn't, which is one of the biggest drawbacks of many a politician (that's also my other main test of who NOT to vote for).

Overall, though, here's what I'll recommend across the board:
Don't give votes to people who try to make you afraid.

We again this election have had a wide array of people running for office whose main pitch to voters has been fear. The District 5 race has focused largely on policing and taxation, and neither in any way that is positive or moving forward or forming relationships or trying to be constructive. We've seen in on Council over and over in the past two years: we should fear immigrants, or poor people, or anyone who isn't like us. Frankly, I'm not going to vote for very many at large candidates--maybe two? beyond Petty--because so many councilors have, at one time or another, made it clear that they view fellow denizens of Worcester as "those people."

And that's particularly dangerous when it comes to schools.

And it's been particularly pervasive when it comes to schools. I won't walk you back through two years ago--it's already been said, and better, by others--but the mystery of the suddenly safe schools post-election doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to place.
It isn't just school safety (though we saw another round of "the safety budget must go up" as well as "but the policing is working!"). This past two years saw a concerted effort to make parents afraid of wireless internet in their buildings, in defiance of all science. The campaign has seen an effort to make PCBs, after all the testing has come back below EPA levels, an issue again. It also has seen yet another "but the Common Core" push, after two rounds of standards revision post-Common Core.

I'll tell you bluntly that refusing to vote based on fear won't give you many options. But you should never be ashamed of a bullet vote.

Vote hope, not fear.

Worcester School Committee "Community and Schools Forum" at Worcester State

I'm blogging tonight from the "Community and Schools Forum" at Worcester State University tonight. It's co-sponsored by the Latino Education Institute, Adelante, CENTRO, Southeast Asian Coalition, and African Community Education. This is a good one, because Worcester is a majority children of color system; the stats for last year are: 

Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity (2016-17)
Race	% of District	% of State
African American	15.4	8.9
Asian	7.4	6.7
Hispanic	41.8	19.4
Native American	0.2	0.2
White	31.1	61.3
Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander	0.0	0.1
Multi-Race, Non-Hispanic	4.1	3.4

Worcester has--and will continue to have, regardless of the results of the November election--an entirely white school committee.