Massachusetts Board of Education, 1991-96 2006, R 2/20

In 1987 and 1988, I was in charge of fundraising at Hale and Dorr for the Dukakis for President Campaign, which was chaired by our partner Paul Brountas. At the conclusion of that losing effort, early in 1989, as I became increasingly interested in participating in Public Service in some capacity, I sought appointment from the Governor to some interesting board or commission. I approached Paul, as well as Don Stern, a former partner in Hale and Dorr who was then counsel to the Governor. Apparently they tried, but in any event, I did not receive any expression of interest, probably because I had been involved in fund raising on Mike’s behalf. His purity often got the better of his judgment as to quality of people for such appointments.

In the 1990 Campaign for Governor, I was supporting Frank Bellotti a well-known politician seeking to succeed Mike Dukakis, but it was a year of political revolution. To everyone's surprise, John Silber, the acerbic president of Boston University, won the Democratic nomination, as a conservative in that race. The revolution also meant that our partner Bill Weld won the Republican nomination over the favored Steve Pierce, the minority leader in these in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Scott Harshbarger defeated the incumbent Attorney General Jim Shannon. The morning after the primary I received a call from Bob Farmer, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, who had run the Dukakis fundraising campaign and therefore was installed in that national position. Bob said "Marty, I assume you were supporting other candidates in the primary but I'm calling to rally all good Democrats around the Democratic party and hope you will support John Silber for Governor and contribute to his campaign." I responded, "Bob, I will contribute to a Democrat for Governor when the candidate represents the Democratic party and its traditional values. Since the voters chose to nominate a candidate who announced that he proudly voted for Reagan twice for President and Bush once, I believe the Democratic party has deserted me, and I'm supporting Bill Weld for Governor. John Silber does not represent Democratic party values to me." Bob said "Marty, I wish you were the first person who said that to me today."

Bill Weld called me later the same day and asked if there was "any chance I would support him in the campaign". I told him that I already was, and would be happy to help raise money and engage in outreach to the Jewish community, which was leaning heavily toward Silber. I organized and drafted a full-page ad in the local Jewish newspapers signed by known Jewish leaders and extolling Bill's commitment to Israel, his insistence on holding a meeting on behalf of the United States Government (when he was Assistant Attorney General of the United States for the Criminal Division) in Jerusalem, rather than Tel Aviv, and his work in that office in bringing Nazi criminals to justice.

After Bill won the very close election, I didn’t contact the Governor's office in any way seeking a position, as I felt it was the Republican’s turn to fill those offices. Bill had appointed me to the transition committee, but that required very little work. In July, 1991, I received a call from someone in the Governor's office saying that the Governor wondered if I might be interested in being appointed to the Board of Education. I discussed it with Wendy, who strongly urged me to take the position, emphasizing how much I had always wanted to be involved in public service.

I accepted and in late summer 1991 attended my first meeting which took place at the Massachusetts Archives at UMass Boston. I was warmly welcomed by Jim Crain, Senior Vice President of New England Telephone, and an active Columbia College Alumnus. At that meeting representatives of four local school systems appeared before the Board and explained their dire financial situation during the current fiscal year. The superintendents of the Brockton, Holyoke, Lawrence and Fall River school systems explained their financial crisis and their failure to obtain additional funding from the voters in special referenda seeking "overrides" of the maximum tax rate permitted under Massachusetts Tax proposition 2 and 1/2, which had passed several years earlier, effectively limiting increases in taxation by local cities and towns.

In the case of Holyoke, the voters had approved a referendum to increase taxes for trash collection and a senior center, but had refused to approve an increase in taxes to fund the public schools. This unfortunately reflected the voting habits of the majority of Holyoke voters who were white, while seventy percent or more of the students were minority, mostly Hispanic.

Following the presentation, there was some limited discussion by members of the Board, and then the discussion came to a close. I then raised my hand, was called on by Jim, and said: "As a new member, I don't know what our procedures are, but it seems that this discussion is coming to an end and I'm wondering what we are going to do about it. Are we going to appoint a task force or something to look into this and try to come up with a solution?"

Jim Crain responded “Yes, let’s do that, and I appoint you as the chair of a task force, with the other members being Paul Reville, who had also just joined the Board of Education, and the new Secretary of Education, Piedad Robertson, to serve as member with me.

Our task force immediately got to work and required Department of Education financial and legal experts to analyze the situation in the four towns and determine how much financial aid they would really need in order to preserve education at the current level in those school systems. By November, we had a proposal to make to the Board of Education, which called upon the Governor and Legislature to allocate $28,000,000 of emergency school aid to be provided to those four districts, and others that could show similar hardships. The funds would be allocated by the Board of Education and the Commissioner, with full accounting for how all funds would be spent by the Department of Education as well as the local school department.

We further recommended that one-half of the aid be an outright grant and one-half be a loan that would have to be paid back out of new education reform funding, which was expected since the Legislature and Governor were hard at work on an education reform package to pre-empt the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from taking action in ordering a statewide system of funding for local schools, which was the subject of litigation coming to a close over the next year.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky, and the courts of several other states had ruled that public education is a State responsibility under all of those state constitutions, and a state could not transfer all of that responsibility to the city or town providing the direct educational services.

The Board of Ed approved the proposal unanimously in late November 1991. I was sitting in my office at Hale and Dorr early one morning in December when a call came in, and Lori told me the Governor was on the line. I took the phone and he said: “Mr. Chairman, I’m here with the President of the Senate (William Bulger) and the Speaker of the House (Charlie Flaherty) and we have two questions. Do the schools systems really need this money? And are you committed to making sure the money gets paid out in a responsible and efficient way?” I said “Yes Governor, these towns desperately need the money and we can get it to them responsibly in January.” I added that it was important to our proposal that the towns had to repay half of the money so it would not simply be a grant, since that would give a benefit to those cities and towns whose taxpayers had rejected spending sufficient funds for education. The Governor then said: “OK, you have the money. We will do it.” Most of the emergency funding, which was passed later that December, was provided to the Department of Education in January and distributed to the school systems that needed it within 30 days. This was an example of government working efficiently and effectively. It was also an example of government decision-making made at the highest level effectively and cooperatively when a Governor, Speaker and Senate President all agree to get something done. Small grants or loans were also given to a few other towns. It is interesting to note that when the education Reform Act was finally passed in June 1992, the legislators from those four towns were powerful enough to provide in the bill that the State would forgive the repayment obligations that were key to its original adoption!

Jim Crain's term came to an end in mid-1992, and Piedad Robertson and Bill Weld asked if l would serve as Chairman of the State Board of Education. I took that position in June 1992, had a wonderful swearing-in ceremony in the Governor’s office with most family members present, including my mother, who flew in from Rochester with Stuart and Judy.

Just before I joined the Board of Education, the Commissioner of Education had retired, and Rhoda Schneider, the outstanding General Counsel of the Department of Education, became, for the second time, Acting Commissioner. We then engaged in a search process which clearly pitted the old line Dukakis Democrats on the Board against the newcomers who wanted to shake up the Department of Education and end the lock held over the Board and its agenda be the Secretary of the Board of Education, a person whose name I appropriately have forgotten. He was a feared figure within the Department, because of his political skill in dealing with other officials of the Department and the Board, acting as a funnel through which all information, and thus control, flowed. Richard Rowe, one of the Dukakis appointees, who told me later that he had thought of resigning from the Board because the Board had become a rubber stamp for the Department and the Secretary of the Board, until Paul Reville, Piedad Robertson and I joined. We four allied in trying to bring in someone as the new Commissioner whom the old guard did not want. The search process led to interviews with a number of interesting candidates, which was finally reduced in number to three. The old guard believed they had the votes to designate one person as the new Commissioner at a special session held at the Park Plaza Hotel. We four raised so many issues and expressed so much dissatisfaction with the search committee, which was dominated by John Gould, a Dukakis ally who was president of Associated Manufacturers of Massachusetts, that I made a motion to reduce the number of candidates to two, and require them to participate in a working half-day session with us on a weekend, which was to be held at the Andover Inn, so that we could determine what it would be like to work with each of them. That motion passed, which led John Gould to resign a chair of the search committee.

Jim Crain thereupon appointed a new committee chaired by Dick Rowe to manage the process of the one-and-a-half­ day session at the Andover Inn.

Those opposed to the old guard rallied around the nomination of Bob Antonucci, the Superintendent of Schools in Falmouth, a long-time critic of the Department bureaucracy. He displayed an extraordinary political and interpersonal skill in dealing with the Board at that session, better than the other very fine candidate, and we prevailed in choosing Antonucci by a one-vote margin.

The Legislature was then in the process of approving an early retirement program with enhanced pensions in order to reduce the number of highly paid state employees, and several Bob Antonucci as the new commissioner made clear that he would love to have certain people retire, and otherwise he would change their job positions substantially. The Secretary and a few others took the retirement packages. In one fell swoop, Bob and we succeeded in reorganizing the Department of Education and placing the power strictly and securely in the hands of the Commissioner and the Board.

At the first meeting of the Board after I became Chair, the Department of Education staffers presented material to us in the same way as in the past: a huge binder of material sent a week in advance, far more than anyone could read; the Department representatives bringing an issue to the attention of the Board and then proceeding to deliver long presentations, comprised primarily of reading the executive summary of the material provided. At the end of that first meeting that I chaired, I made very clear that this was the last Board of Education meeting that would be conducted in that fashion. I actually said that “we all knew how to read” and that we would make it our responsibility to read the material sent to us; and instructed that it not be so long as to be burdensome. The written material sent in advance should be succinct and their presentations should be brief, followed by our questions and discussions because we would have read the material. I also reordered the structure of meetings so there would be a consent agenda at the beginning that would take no more than five minutes, with minutes and other material distributed in advance to the board members, and that we would then address issues in the order of their importance, which would be determined by the Commissioner and me. All other matters would be left for the end of the meeting. We would also limit ceremonial sessions, such as honoring teachers or others, to a 15-minute segment at each meeting.

At the next meeting, the written material provided to us was in the proper format, and the first presenter then started, as might be expected, to read the Executive Summary of the report on the first issue. After about a paragraph, I interrupted the presenters and asked if they had anything to say besides what was in the written material. The two individuals, looking much surprised, said no, at which point I thanked them for their presentation and said that we had read the material, and did not want to waste their time or ours with them repeating it to us, and immediately opened the floor to discussion and questions. Department staffers in the room looked visibly uncomfortable, as they realized that the Board was going to be a serious body, that would do things in their way.

The Education Reform Movement in Massachusetts had been pushed by the business community, eager to improve the public schools in order that the Massachusetts economy would benefit from a skilled and better-educated workforce. This was part of a national movement for education reform being pushed primarily by the business community, and not by education advocates or education unions. The business community was interested in upgrading some of the basic qualities that should be expected in people showing up to work: perseverance, timeliness, attention, loyalty. The business community was also concerned at the testing gaps between American education and education in other countries. A number of states were ahead of Massachusetts in the programs to address these education issues, particularly Kentucky, Vermont, Florida, and several others, which had adopted education reform laws, and standards of what a child should know and be able to do upon graduating high school. These became known as the Common Core of Learning, and a number of states had significant problems when the Common Core included "values". I had learned about some of these "values" battles from the National Association of State Boards of Education, after I became a member of its Board of Directors in 1992. William Smith, a fellow member of the NASBE Board, and a member of the Board of Education of Pennsylvania, appeared before our Board to describe issues that had arisen in Pennsylvania around values that were in the process of being adopted by that state, and to which many conservatives objected as state interference in the rights of parents. We all watched a movie that he provided which had been prepared by one of the conservative groups opposed to a Common Core in Pennsylvania, headed by a woman who later became an almost successful candidate for governor of that State, espousing conservative "values".

Our Board took several steps in helping to promote education reform. Governor Weld and Secretary of Education Robertson had been developing their own bill. The business Community, was allied with Representative Mark Roosevelt, Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Education and a group headed by Jack Rennie, of which Paul Reville was the full-time coordinator. Senator Thomas Birmingham, also co-chair of that committee, ultimately submitted his own bill, more closely tailored to the wishes of the education unions, to which he was closely tied. Ultimately, the Massachusetts Teachers' Association came forth with its own bill, as did a more conservative business group, which wanted to emphasize charter schools.

With the possibility that rival bills could mean that none would pass, we on the Board decided to evaluate the various bills and release our analysis directly to all of the members of the Legislature. We were objective in analyzing the bills, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses in each, endorsing various provisions in each in hopes of building pressure for compromise. Meanwhile, pressure was building from cities and towns to obtain the additional funding that was promised in conjunction with education reform. Meanwhile, the legislature and the business community were in no mood to provide the additional funding without the reform. And there was fear that the Supreme Judicial Court might rule that the then current funding structure did not satisfy the Massachusetts Constitution’s requirement that education be provided to all students as a state responsibility, that could not simply be assigned to the cities and towns.

A consensus was finally achieved and a quite extraordinary Education Reform Act was adopted in June 1992, and signed by the Governor at a public school in Chelsea. The next day, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the structure of education funding that existed prior to the Education Reform Act did in fact violate the Massachusetts. The SJC had clearly waited to release their opinion in the hope that reform would be adopted, as it was, without the Legislature having to act under a court order to reform in order to comply with the Constitution. Thus, Massachusetts was the only state to adopt legislation making funding more equitable among cities and towns without waiting for a court order requiring the legislature and Governor to amend state law to achieve equity.

Since we knew that any education reform act adopted would call for a Common Core of Learning, the Board on its own took the initiative to develop such a common core and appointed a commission of forty members to hold hearings, receive ideas, study the common cores adopted by other states, and propose one for adoption by the Board of Education.

Since this seemed to be the most fun possible in the education field, I appointed Madeleine Marquez, a Weld appointee to the Board of Education, and the vice chair of our Board, who also was Special Assistant to the President of Mt. Holyoke College, to serve with me as Co-chairs of the Commission.

The first action of the Board was to designate members, and we made a public appeal for applications to serve. Bob Antonucci, Madeleine Marquez and I chose the forty members out of several hundred applicants and individuals who had been nominated.

Our commission held numerous hearings, encouraged all local school committees to hold hearings, solicited written comments from the public, and encouraged ideas to be provided by the associations of school committees, superintendents, principals, teachers' unions, parent, teacher and other advocacy groups.

The Commission received approximately ten thousand written suggestions, and we estimate that fifty thousand people participated in the hearings and public sessions held by the commission, school committees and others throughout the state.

It wasn't easy to draft the common core, but we decided to divide it into a few sections, with no more than forty or fifty separate points, since we believed that Vermont and several other states went overboard with approximately one hundred and fifty to two hundred separate goals for students--literally a list too long to read at one sitting without losing track with what one was doing.

At one point in the process, with that all done, perhaps fifty or sixty ideas, all floating around in different categories, I went to Geneva to visit my son Ben, who was then working for the World Economic Forum. I took the draft with me, and Ben and I discussed it at some length over two lunches. The first was at a Michelin two-star restaurant in Annecy over the border in France, and the second at a restaurant in the village of Gruyere in Switzerland. Ben simply took out a piece of paper and a pen and reorganized the whole thing, telling me what was wrong (a great deal) and what was right (some).

His relatively elegant solution to how to categorize different items and which were important and which not, and where to place them, and in which order of priority, led to a quite compelling draft. When I returned to Boston, I made photocopies of what he and I had developed, and presented it to the Commission as an idea of how to solve our problem of coming to closure. Pretty soon in the discussion by the Commission and the Board, this became referred to as "the Ben Draft" to my great pride, the Ben Draft became the most important organizational aspect of the entire common core of learning.

Having been forewarned by the Pennsylvania experience, we decided that we would seek to avoid the conflicts from conservatives over issues of "values". Therefore, in our first draft presented to the public for comment, we included no values whatsoever. At a public hearing in Worcester, the relatively conservative Mayor angrily stated that the draft was seriously defective in failing to set forth important values, such as hard work, integrity, perseverance, respect for teachers and other students, and other such values. We sat there with great joy, because he gave us the opening to insert the values and then respond when attacked, that we did not propose them Rather, we were responding to the public and specifically to the excellent comments of the Mayor of Worcester, who wanted important American values set forth in our Common Core of Learning.

We also established a hot line at the Department of Education, and all calls relating to the Core were to be taken by Carole Thompson, a high ranking and outstanding professional. She, Bob Antonucci and I, together with Rhoda Schneider, again General Counsel, agreed on how she would handle all calls. Carole received quite a few asking that we remove all the "values" from the Common Core. She then expressed confusion; asking, “what do you mean?” What values are you talking about to which you object? The flustered caller would usually say “I don't know; but I was asked to call you to tell you to take out values”.

The Board of Education was ready to vote on the Common Core of Learning in June 1994. Several conservative individuals showed up at our meeting to challenge again on the values issue, saying that we were interfering with the rights of parents. I asked them to be specific, what values should be taken out? Integrity? Do they object to the value of integrity? Do you want us to take out respect for others and respect for teachers? Did they object to that concept? While we couldn't convince them of anything, we made pretty clear that the conservative attacks would not get any traction in Massachusetts, thanks to our learning from the experience in Pennsylvania. We were prepared and outsmarted them.

About two years after becoming Chair of the Board, I was elected to the board of directors of NASBE, the National Association of State Boards of Education. About a year later, as part of the increasing movement to recognize gay rights of students, I made a motion that the NASBE board strengthen our anti-discrimination policy statement that was proposed for students in all states by including sexual orientation as a protected category along with race and religion. The board approved that for adoption at the annual meeting of the members from all states, and that led to a fierce battle at the annual meeting. The expanded policy was approved, with two amazing statements from two different states. A woman representing Mississippi stated that she was casting Mississippi’s vote in favor of the amendment even though it may not be popular at home. However, the chairman of the Board of Regents of New York State voted against it fearing a backlash, in a sad example of lack of leadership on a moral issue which I found most disheartening.

The Massachusetts Board then took up this issue and promptly adopted the expanded expansion of classes protected against discrimination. That led to an attack on me and the Board by the chairman of the Massachusetts Catholic Rights League, a man named Donahue. One of the Boston radio stations asked if I would engage in a debate on this issue with him by telephone on radio and I agreed. On the live broadcast, he at his office and I at mine, he said that he didn’t see any movement by the Board of Education to protect Irish Catholic students. I firmly intoned: “Mr. Donahue, if I thought the Irish Catholic students of Massachusetts needed protection in the public schools, I’d be the first to propose it!”. That was about the end of that debate.

Our Board also proposed expanded sex education as part of our health initiatives. The flashpoint became the Newton School Committee, with several conservative activists passionately opposing sex education. I made a point of appearing at Newton public hearing on the issue, blasting their conservative point of view, inflaming the audience on both sides, and the Newton School Committee proceeded to adopt the sex education policy.

One of my favorite performances at a Board of Education meeting was our hearing from Cambodian representatives from Lowell stating that the school system was not providing translators for their students. The superintendent explained that they could not find competent translators to do that work. I asked if he had thought about hiring some of the Cambodian parents who had appeared that day and hire such parents to serve as translators. Our Board ordered the superintendent to solve the issue within one month and return with the problem solved.

Our Board of Education also began the process of developing curriculum standards in the eight major areas of curriculum, as required by the Education Reform Act as the means of implementing the Common Core. We completed five of them before our Board was replaced with a new board which I will describe later. Toward the end of our tenure, we were presented with the social studies curriculum frameworks, which we rejected as being soft and fluffy, too politically correct, and without enough emphasis on either American history or world history. I suggested to one of the new conservative Weld appointees, the well-known writer and critic Abigail Thernstrom, a major conservative intellectual, that she and I could together rewrite the curriculum frameworks in a manner that would satisfy both liberals and conservatives who believed in really teaching, history and social studies rather than trying to be politically correct.

She considered it, and agreed that we could accomplish my goal, but she was busy on a major work relating to education and social policy with her husband, the Harvard professor Stephen Thernstrom. Subsequently, the curriculum frameworks were reviewed and went through another three drafts when John Silber was the Chairman of the Board, which debates featured sharp clashes between Thernstrom and Silber.

My term as a member of the Board was set to expire in February 1996, and in late summer 1995 it became clear that Weld was considering appointing the man I helped him defeat for Governor, John Silber, to be chairman of the Board. I believe it was a Boston Globe editorial that surmised that perhaps it would be a good idea to have a Czar of education, a thoroughly un-American notion.

(As an aside, I should note that the Boston Globe almost never sent a writer to actually cover Board of Education meetings, unlike the Boston Herald, which was ably represented by Pat Mangan, who subsequently wrote for the New York Daily News and the New York Times. Occasionally, following a meeting, I would get a call from Diego Ribadeneira, a Boston Globe reporter, who covered both education and religion, asking me if anything had happened at the meeting that they should write about. I would always say yes, and you should have been there, and by the way Pat of the Boston Herald had been there.)

I called Weld's office and indicated that I had to see him, and we met, perhaps in September 1995. I stated that it was not crucial to me to be re-appointed to the Board of Education, although I would live very much to continue. However, I felt my firm was tired of my spending 450 to 500 hours a year on education and would probably like me back practicing more law.

Bill had been very much influenced by the 1994 elections in which the Newt Gingrich Republicans took control of Congress, and he believed the future of politics in America was conservative. Indeed, he had run a conservative campaign for reelection in 1994 emphasizing taxes, crime and welfare as his hot button issues.

I suggested to Bill that he consider appointing Jerry Grossman as Chairman of the Board, a Republican moderate, a prominent doctor who was President of Tufts New England Medical Center, a member of the Federal Reserve Board in Boston, and a significant intellectual as well. Weld said that he thought he wanted to appoint Silber because that reflected the conservative times. I pointed out the problems with Silber serving as Chair, all of which came to pass, but Bill said he felt that he really should appoint someone who was conservative since he had run his re-election campaign as a conservative. I said to Bill that I knew he had received seventy percent of the vote in his campaign for re-election against Mark Roosevelt and asked him what percent he would have received had he run as a liberal, as he did in 190 against Silber. He smiled and said, quizzically, "sixty-eight percent"? I said “yes, therefore Governor, you don’t have to move to the right on education policy, do you?” He acknowledged that he did not, but thought that's where the political world was going. I pointed out how much we had achieved on the Board of Education, and he said "Oh, Marty, you know, it's only politics?" I replied "Really Bill, I thought it was a lot more about policy and that's why I’ve been putting in 450 hours a year."

We have remained cordial when we run into each other in restaurants and at airports from time to time. I always keep in mind however, that though my relationship with Bill certainly did not work out in the end, and I regret that he appointed John Silber, who proceeded to unravel much of the education reform we had achieved. Weld had a number of conservative education advisors who pushed for more charter schools, did not understand how difficult it is to change an entire education system state-wide and failed to grasp how well we on the Board and the Department were doing. However, I always remember that it was Weld who gave me the opportunity to perform my most significant public service, and not Mike Dukakis.

During the fall of 1995, when it was clear that I would be replaced as Chairman of the Board by Silber, Weld proposed a series of education law changes that went completely against the grain of the entire education reform movement in the Education Reform Act of 1992. Working with my son Jon and with his friend John Giesser, I worked on a written attack on their proposals, and called a press conference at the State House in connection with the goal of derailing them. Tripp Jones, the son of my law partner Hugh Jones, and a close friend of my son Jon's, had been the campaign manager and the key aide for many years to Mark Roosevelt. He marveled that there were thirty people from the press at the Press Conference, since Mark Roosevelt could only get about four or five when he was running for Governor. I can't take all the credit for derailing the proposals, which among other things, called for the elimination of all standards for teachers, so that anyone could be hired to be a teacher, with no training, certification, whatsoever. All of the proposals died in the legislature.

It was not clear that Silber would accept the position of Chair of the Board, since he would not have control of the members who were then serving. He made clear that he would only agree to take the position if the entire structure of the Board of Education was changed, with a new board put in place, which of course would require legislative action. The network of Bill Weld, Bill Bulger, President of the Senate, and Tom Birmingham, Chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, and the heir apparent to the presidency of the Senate, worked out a deal with their friend Silber and gave him everything he wanted, including a new board with the only holdovers being our most pliable members. That was the end of true education reform at the Board of Education level in Massachusetts for some time.

Saddest of all, Silber proved to be a blowhard, coming to meetings ill-prepared, spouting off without any preparation, and surprising even his friends with outlandish ideas. One of them was to require every student to take the GED, the Graduation Equivalency Test, before they could graduate high school. That proposal died, but that’s the kind of idea he would bring up at Board meetings without any prior study or analysis. The Board and Massachusetts backed away from the Education Reform Act’s requirement for authentic evaluation and assessment of students, and my Board’s interest in applying that approach to teachers and administrators as well, and emphasized testing, testing and more testing to prove that kids were actually learning more. In fact, the emphasis on testing was driven by politicians, especially Republican politicians throughout the country, and was not part of the education reform movement originally pushed by the business community. As testing became an ever-increasing component of education, test preparation required by politicians became a substitute for real education. It is a major cause of the of the perceived failure of the United States education reform movement.

As the politicians took over education as an issue from the business community, throughout the country, they depreciated what it was all about, because they really didn't understand it. It all became testing, particularly among Republican politicians, with an emphasis on getting the scores up, as if that would prove that students had learned more, rather than they had simply learned how to satisfy the test requirements. The business community had wanted students to learn how to collaborate, work together, because that's how work is done in any profession or job anywhere in America, from the factory floor, to an accounting or law firm, or even medical practice. Instead, education reform has been reduced to every child learning the same thing and satisfying the tests, with little emphasis on cooperative projects and true assessments or evaluation of students by their work in the classroom, and in conjunction with others. The business community has receded from the scene, leaving the politicians to debate, more money (most Democrats), and more testing (most Republicans). In Massachusetts the Education Reform Movement went off the tracks with the new board which completely de-emphasized anything that our Board had done. They criticized the Common Core of Learning and most of the open-minded innovation that we were promoting.

I did have an opportunity to write an op-ed attacking what Silber and others were doing that derailed most of our efforts. I also responded to an op-ed by Ed Delattre, the Dean of the Boston University Education School and a member of the Board, who made fun of the use of the phrase that students should “understand” certain concepts in the Common Core of Learning. I did have one experience in South Carolina relating to Delattre. He served on the board of a South Carolina college there, along with Virginia Self, a significant person in Greenwood and South Carolina. She was a member of the family that owned Greenwood Mills and Greenwood Development Corporation, and was a, to say the least, a forceful personality. Several of us from the Kann Rasmussen Foundation were having dinner with her in the bar section of a restaurant in Greenwood and I happened to mention my criticism of Delattre. Virginia then reported on some of his ideas as a member of that college board and said in an ever increasingly loud voice until everyone in the bar stopped talking: “ Ed Delattre is one big ASSHOLE!” I responded “Virginia, you are too kind.”