| Article Index |
|---|
| 2009 Charter School Testimony |
| Readiness Schools Provisions |
| Determination of Underperformance and Chronic Underperformance |
| Recommendations |
| Specific Concerns |
| All Pages |
MASC President Debra Bibeau, Secretary-Treasurer Dorothy Presser and Executive Director Glenn Koocher testified at a standing-only-hearing before the Legislature on Thursday, September 16, 2009 in opposition to raising the cap on charter schools and on concerns around the proposed Readiness Schools and the expanded regulatory authority of the DESE.
Testimony and Recommendations of Massachusetts Association of School Committees
Relative to H-4164, An Act Establishing Readiness Schools
Relative to H-4163, An Act Relative to Charter Schools
Before the Joint Legislative Committee on Education
September 17, 2009
The Massachusetts Association of School Committees is pleased to present in detail a summary of our areas of support, concern and objection to H-4164, proposed legislation which, on its face, seeks to establish three levels of Readiness Schools. However, this bill does far more than simply establish three alternative models for school management. It is, in short, a blue print for the greatest expansion of state regulatory authority over local government in the history of the education reform movement. Through embedded language, certain provisions would expand the power of the state educational bureaucracy and create the danger of significant abuse.
To be certain, many of the legislative proposals in the bill will help school administrators and publicly elected district policy makers work with teachers and others to deliver more effective teaching and foster higher levels of learning. On the other hand, several provisions which we will identify and address do nothing more than shift power and authority to the state educational regulatory bureaucracy.
MASC represents over 300 school districts who have operated under the nation's most rancid regulatory climate. Their city, town and regional school departments are subjected to what we believe to be some of the largest and most voluminously imposed regulatory burdens in the United States. We now come to the legislature to ask you to examine carefully what is stated and what is embedded in this bill. We are trying to emerge from a period during which regulation and punishment rather than collaboration and incentives defined the operating principles.
We ask you to improve this legislation by making it fair, workable and a model of good public policy.
We wish to explain at the outset that, because our efforts to work with the Department of Elemementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have at too many points been adversarial, especially around rulemaking and regulatory activity, some of our comments will recommend in careful detail our alternative recommendations. This is because we want to be very specific and avoid the danger that comes from both ambiguous legislative language and regulatory authority that is not carefully defined or limited.
