The stories we tell ourselves: Worcester's past 75 years of superintendent transitions

Stories are how we make meaning for what has happened to us; they give form to the past. Sometimes, though, our stories about how things happened once become stories of how they always happen, and we can miss pieces that might make better meaning of the current time.

Thus it is with superintendent transitions.

Thus, here, with my particular gratitude to the Worcester Public Library for having Worcester Telegram & Gazette archives, to whomever scanned decades of Worcester City Council manuals, and to L.H. Larned, whomever you are, are the past seventy-five plus years of Worcester superintendent transitions.

"Us" and "them"

And I know I say this a lot, but you should read Deb Meier:

I hope we will criticize the many reform ideas that rest upon false assumptions about the differences between "us" (especially middle- and upper-class whites) and "them." The "these kids need" arguments that I find most distasteful about many of the charter schools networks I know—spouted by folks who are hardly experts on "those kids," and whose solutions support the continuation of schools with a test-prep curriculum and military/prison-style behavioral norms. (See the popular current fads being pushed by author Ruby Payne about educating poor kids.)

I want all kids to have a chance to go to schools of the sort where Arne Duncan and President Obama send their own kids. I want us to stop assuming that only "some kids" can handle complexity, uncertainty, and depth of curriculum or self-regulation—what we used to call "agency."

I want us to stop pretending that the only thing upper-income kids get from their mothers is more books and reading aloud! Nonsense. What their parents offer them most of all are advantages that come from money, money, money and status, status, status and a sense of entitled power.