Friday, October 28, 2005

UTEC Candidate Forum

UTEC has it all over the rest of us in terms of spirit and turnout. There must have been 150 people there last night. They also seem more adept at technology and despite some glitches were able to intersperse videos and music into the agenda. They had a unique format where they paired the councilors and each pair had to answer the same question. So, there were only nine questions in all, but they were good ones. In between there were cool teen performances of rap songs and hip-hop and poetry. As one councilor said, “UTEC rules!”

Darius Mitchell was in his element and the most comfortable of all those present (“Is UTEC in the house?” he challenged and got the crowd going). Richard Douglas was preaching to the choir, but managed to keep up the momentum he had gained at the UTL forum where he impressed a lot of folks with his closing statement. Most of the candidates rose gamely to the occasion and the spirited audience was polite enough to clap for all of them – even the ones who didn’t support or seem to understand some of their issues.

I learned that UTEC started out with one volunteer - now they have a budget of $1 million dollars, a full and part-time staff and over 1000 teen members. What they need now is a building to house all this dedication and energy. Their fundraiser, "Building our Dream," will be held on Dec. 8 at Lenzi's. I hope people will make an effort to come out for UTEC.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

UTL Candidate Forum

The United Teachers of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley Central Labor Council sponsored a candidate forum for both the city council and the school committee last evening at Lowell High’s Little Theater. In a brisk two hour program, viewers and the thirty-plus members of the studio audience were treated to rapid fire questions and answers that offered repeated glimpses of each candidate’s personality and ability to think and speak under pressure (time pressure, at least). The forum was broadcast live on Lowell Educational Television channel 22 by the students and staff of the Lowell High School telecommunications academy. Here’s the rebroadcast schedule that will be repeated up until the November 8th election on channel 22:

Fridays at 1:00 A.M.
Fridays at 8:00 P.M.
Saturdays at 4:00 P.M.
Sundays at 4:00 P.M.
Mondays at 2:00 P.M.
Tuesdays at 1:30 A.M.

Here’s how the forum worked: Questions were posed by Sheila Kirschbaum of the Citywide Parent Council, Mike Lafleur of the Lowell Sun and John McDonough of WCAP radio. Each candidate was given a 30 second opening statement and a 1 minute closing. In between, they took turns answering questions asked by the above-named panelists. To expedite questioning the eighteen council candidates, the Forum organizers wisely divided them into two groups. The first council group in their order of seating consisted of Rita Mercier, Joe Mendonca, Curtis LeMay, Darius Mitchell, Richard Douglas, Rodney Elliott, Kevin Broderick, Armand Mercier and Eileen Donoghue. The second group of council candidates consisted of Jim Milinazzo, Bill Martin, Sambeth Fennell, Kristin Ross-Sitcawich, George Ramirez, Edward “Bud” Caulfield, Dave Laferriere, Mike Zaim and Rady Mom. The evening was closed out be school committee candidates Regina Faticanti, Cecilia Okafor, Tim Lavoie, Jackie Doherty, Vesna Nuon, Jim Leary, Connie Martin and John Leahy. Incumbent Kevin McHugh who’s employed as the business manager of the Wilmington school system, had to miss the forum due to a Wilmington School Committee meeting.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

State Takes Over Holyoke School

The state Board of Higher Education voted to take control of a middle school in Holyoke yesterday, declaring it to be “chronically underperforming.” The state board now has the power to remove the school’s principal, fire “bad” teachers, hire “good” teachers and pay them more and do other things intended to improve student performance. An article in this morning’s Globe says this is only the third school to undergo this fate. Everyone should watch the progress of this school very closely because it’s predictable that not much will change. The Department of Education’s dictates are just empty rhetoric – if you took those same “bad” teachers and put them in a school filled with students from affluent, stable families, those teachers would magically become “good” teachers. But now the Department of Education has acted and for once, we can measure its performance.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Dropout Report for 2003-04

Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Driscoll periodically posts a “Commissioner’s Update” on the Department of Education’s website. The lead item in his October 21, 2005 report is a comment on the department’s 2003-04 School Year Dropout Report. Here’s what the Commissioner writes:

The annual dropout report we are releasing today shows that the number of teens leaving high school prior to graduation has reached an all-time high. This may be in part because of our improved data collection system, but it is likely that other factors are involved as well. I am especially concerned about the number of juniors and seniors who are dropping out, many after earning their competency determination. I call on each of you to study this problem in your communities, and do an in-depth analysis of the reasons why students are not completing high school. Once you have reviewed the issue locally, please submit your findings back to us. We intend to compile a report of the major reasons and begin to develop a set of statewide strategies to address them. Thank you for your attention to this pressing matter.

The Commissioner of Education is just now discovering that we have a problem with dropouts and should try to determine the cause? If the Commissioner spent more time talking with people in urban high schools than he does threatening to fire them all he would realize how absurd his comments are. Poverty is the number one factor in causing students to dropout. Many must work 40 hours per week, not to pay for late model cars and other amenities, but to help feed and house themselves and their families. The intensity of such a work schedule deprives the student of the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities and sports, the types of things that create the intangible connections with the school that help the student succeed. After working 40 hours a week, a student might decide to sleep in, increasing absenteeism. As schools crack down on students who don’t go to school, the inevitable result is to cause some of them to leave school, especially when the state fails to provide sufficient funds for urban school districts to implement non-traditional alternative schools or the type of intensive, individualized attention that many of these students need to succeed.

Monday, October 24, 2005

City Council Forum - tonight!

Our School Committee Candidates' forum was a great chance to observe the candidates and learn their views on many issues; tonight we can do the same for the city council race. Tonight's forum is sponsored by the Non Profit Alliance of Greater Lowell (of which the CPC is a member) and will be held at the Lowell Senior Center on Broadway (across from the Market Basket). It starts at 7:00 p.m.

Before I got involved in public education issues, I didn't pay much attention to the city council. Then, when the school department had to make deep cuts in 2003 (cuts which for the most part have not been restored) because the council would not fund the school budget, I had a long overdue revelation. I started paying attention. I finally realized that the city council makes decisions that directly impact everything that happens in this city - including what happens in our schools. People who care about the schools need to be informed about the issues, about who is on the council and how they are voting. So, come out tonight and learn what the candidates have to say on education and many other topics.

Schools & Society's Troubles

An editorial in today's Globe asserts that many of the disciplinary problems that arise in schools are the direct result of physical and mental trauma experienced outside of the school by the misbehaving student. In-class anger, rudeness or withdrawal can be symptoms or reactions to dealing with out-of-school problems such as violence or abandonment in the home. The editorial commends a new state program that provides funding for training teachers at 20 state schools to recognize and deal with these situations. This, of course, is just a drop in the bucket. Much more is needed to address these types of situations but society does not seem to have the commitment to provide schools with the amount of money needed to deal with such problems. But it's not simply a question of pouring money into schools. "Solving" the problems with public education will require a far greater effort from all echelons of government, not just those in the education establishment.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

LHS Distinguised Alumni

This past Thursday evening, Lowell High School awarded its Distinguished Alumni Award to five more graduates. Honored were the late Dr. Brendan Leahey (Class of 1922), a noted eye surgeon who performed the first corneal transplant in New England back in 1938; The late James Conway Jr (Class of 1941) who was president and CEO of the Courier Corporation and who served as chair of the Lowell Plan; Dr Joseph McCarthy (Class of 1956) who is one of the leading facial reconstructive surgeons in the world; Elinor Lipman (Class of 1968) who has written seven critically acclaimed novels and who is a columnist for the Boston Globe Magazine; and Ted Leonsis (Class of 1973) who is vice-chairman of America Online and is the majority owner of the NHL's Washington Capitals and a minority owner of the NBA Washinton Wizzards, the WNBA Washington Mystics and the MCI Arena in Washington, DC. Each of the award recipients (or the children of Leahey and Conway) made it abundantly clear to the audience that their time at Lowell High school played in integral role in their subsequent success. Lowell Educational TV was taping this event. Hopefully it will be broadcast often on Channel 22 so more Lowell residents can see what five of their fellow citizens have accomplished.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Massachusetts Leads the Nation

If you rely on the Lowell Sun and its constant drumbeat of negativism for your education news, you’ll find this startling. According to the just released results of the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (which, according to an October 19, 2005 Associated Press article, is “a federal test considered the best measure of how students in every state perform on core subjects”), Massachusetts 4th- and 8th-graders had the highest average math and reading scores in the nation, and Massachusetts also led the country in the percentage of higher-scoring students. To see the particulars regarding these test results, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/. But how can this be? Isn’t our system of public education is shambles? Here’s how I see it: the MCAS is a very difficult test. You can be quite confident that a student who scores well on MCAS is well educated. But because the bar is set so high (and rightly so), it’s very difficult for many to attain its standards. Yet rather than acknowledging the difficulty of MCAS and searching for more effective ways of educating children, ideologues in political office and the media glom onto low test scores as Exhibit A in their quest to dismantle our system of public education. Most of the critics have no interest in improving the system: their goal is to undo it. Take the state department of education; despite all its talk of non-performing schools and threats of state takeovers, it hasn’t actually taken over a school or a district thus far. And why not? Because it wouldn’t have any more success than those currently running the school districts. It’s a lot easier (and if you’re pursuing a political agenda) a lot more effective to stand off and be a critic than it is to take real responsibility for getting results.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Candidate Forum Follow Up

Thanks to all who made Monday night's Citywide Parent Council forum with the school committee candidates such a great success. The Sun wrote a nice article about the forum (although the school committee article was buried on page 13 of the paper while the article on the city council forum - which was sponsored by the Sun - made page 1). One of the highlights of the CPC forum was the ability of folks watching the live broadcast at home to submit questions via email. Perhaps a dozen such questions were received during the broadcast. With additional questions from the studio audience and others that were submitted in advance, a wide range of issues were discussed by the candidates. If you missed the live broadcast, the forum will be shown repeatedly on Lowell cable TV channel 22 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 7:00 P.M. and on Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 A.M. Special thanks to the students and staff at the Lowell High Communications Academy whose technical expertise and spirit of cooperation would rival the most sophisticated commercial television operation. Thanks also to the computer staff at LHS for setting up the computer and email connection that allowed us to receive questions by email. Finally, if anyone has any suggestions on how we can improve our candidate forum for future elections, please let us know now while it's fresh in your mind.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Candidate Forum Tonight

Be sure to tune in to Lowell Cable TV Channell 22 this evening at 7:00 P.M. to see the Citywide Parent Council's 2005 School Committee Candidate Forum. This event will be broadcast live, with frequent rebroadcasts up until the election. All nine candidates for school committee are expected to attend. The format will allow each candidate to make a 2 minute opening statement and a 2 minute closing statement. In between, candidates will respond to questions submitted by audience members. Everyone is welcome to attend in person. It's at the Lowell High School Little Theater. If you can't make it out of the house, please watch it on TV and submit questions by email. Send your questions either before or during the forum to mailto:lowellcpc@comcast.net.

Friday, October 14, 2005

Beverly HS to Lose Accreditation

Yesterday's Globe reported that Beverly High School is on the verge of losing its accreditation, making it only the fourth high school in the state to suffer that loss in the past 20 years. The reason? Maintenance and structural problems. The town has repeatedly neglected a long list including bad plumbing, outdated windows and science labs, broken furniture and a lack of accessibility for the handicapped. While Lowell High passed its accreditation evaluation last year, the issue of building maintenance - or lack thereof - is an increasingly serious problem throughout the Lowell school system. The city has many new schools, more than probably any other community in the state, but most of these buildings are not 12+ years old and little thought (or money) has been expended on maintaining their good condition. This neglect is starting to show throughout the system. Ironically, it's not the school department that's responsible for building maintenance, rather, it's the city's department of public works. So the next time you child complains that two of the three stalls in the school rest room have been broken since the start of school, don't call a member of the school committee to complain, call a city councilor.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

School Funding & City Taxes

WCAP has provided a great service to the community by having all candidates for city council and school committee on the air for 18 minutes each over the past few weeks. Yesterday morning, incumbent city councilor Bud Caulfield was asked about the likelihood of a property tax increase during the coming months. Councilor Caulfield responded that if taxes do go up, it would be due to the council, on June 16, 2005, voting 6 to 2 (he and Rita Mercier oppossed, Rithy Uong abstaining) to provide the school department with $2.2 million in additional funding contrary to city manager Cox's recommendation to the council. Unfortunately, this version of events is misleading in that it only tells part of the story. The entire $2.2 million budgetary increase for the schools was due to the newly negotiated teachers' contract. That contract was negotiated, on the behalf of the school department, by the four school committee members who did not have conflicts (Doherty, Faticanti, Martin & McHugh), Mayor Armand Mercier and Asst City Manager T J McCarthy (the city manager's representative on the negotiating committee). According to published reports in the media, at least two school committee members oppossed the contract, but the mayor and the assistant city manager voted in favor of it. Without their votes, there would have been no contract and there would have been no need for an additional $2.2 million dollars. When the time came to pay the bill, however, the city manager reneged on the commitment made by his designee on the negoatiating team and recommended against providing the school department with that extra money. Recognizing that without the additional funding, the schools would have to absorb $2.2 million in devastating budget cuts, a majority of the city council did the right thing and voted for the additional funding. So if anyone should be blamed for a tax increase, it's not the schools, but the members of the negotiating committee that provided the key votes for the teachers' pay raise.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Marketing Lowell High School?


I stumbled upon an interesting article in today’s electronic edition of the Eagle Tribune (they don’t use “Lawrence” in the title anymore, but that’s another story). “School’s educate selves on marketing to lure back students” describes how the Haverhill School Department is trying to attract students who live in Haverhill but who attend other schools, both private and public, with a marketing campaign. Using ads in local newspapers and on cable TV and direct mailing to the families in Haverhill and to area real estate companies, merchants and business people, the school system is promoting the positives and confronting many of the misperceptions about Haverhill High School. Lowell should try this. The breadth and depth of the various academic, athletic and extracurricular activities at Lowell High make the school a great product to sell. And most of the fears parents have about LHS fall into the urban myth category that can be diluted if not eradicated by the application of some facts. But can you imagine the reaction if the Lowell School Department ever allocated any funds for marketing Lowell High? The editorial staff at the newspaper, various talk radio folks, and perhaps even the city council could seriously injure themselves in the scramble to be the first to condemn such “wasteful” spending. Far from being wasteful, such spending would be a prudent investment in our schools and in our city that could significantly improve academic performance, particularly on standardized tests such as MCAS. Logic says that a student who meets the entrance requirements of most private high schools, let’s say, would probably pass the MCAS test. Add a few dozen of those students to the population of any urban high school in Massachusetts and that school will show improvement statistically on its MCAS performance. Such improvement would make the school even more attractive thereby attracting additional high achieving students, further improving the school’s reputation and self-image. What would be wrong with that?

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Stoklosa School saga continues

Well, the Sun finally sent a reporter over to the Stoklosa School and the story is very different on Friday from what it was at Wednesday's school committee meeting when the Mayor responded to pressure by saying we'd be in after "Thanksgiving" and the school department couldn't even give a date for when the project would be completed. I've been driving by the school for weeks and have never seen more than 10 workers. Now, there are apparently 50 workers on the site - perhaps for the benefit of the Sun reporter? - and the opening is projected for the "end of the month." Whether it's to avoid bad publicity and save face for city hall or to keep irate school committee members from asking difficult questions, I'm thrilled that they seem to be finally turning on the steam. The sooner the school opens, the better for everyone!

In an accompanying story, the headline "Displaced students, staff making the best of it at other city schools" gives a generally positive feeling that is contradicted (as is typical in the Sun) by the content of the story. Yes, the staff and students are making the best of it, but some students are still going to class in a basement supply closet and the alternative program is running at 1/3 of it's capacity (a fact not mentioned in the story).

Thursday, October 06, 2005

The real scandal

The real scandal in this city is that the Stoklosa School is not done and won't be done by Columbus Day as hoped. When I spoke to the editor of the Sun about a month ago, he was very patronizing about my concerns. He said it was 90% done and that it would be done soon and done right, blah, blah, blah. Well, right after that I started hearing that it was "70%" done. The crews still don't seem to be working that hard. The Manager and the City Council have nothing to say about it, it (but the Manager still gets a raise and a commendable rating from most councillors) and the Sun won't cover the story!!! Instead, they are trying to direct public ire against the police unions, the teacher unions, the school department - anything to keep attention away from what's happening at city hall.

In the meantime, the 5th and 6th graders who should be at the Stoklosa School are housed in unsatisfactory conditions at the Cardinal O'Connor. The regular Cardinal O'Connor students who are part of the McHugh alternative program are down in the basement and the program is running way under capacity because of the space constraints.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

No story, no scandal

In another example of slanted reporting to further its own agenda, the Lowell Sun ran a story in Monday’s edition entitled “City schools close, yet custodians increase.” The reporter makes the point that two schools were closed, the McDonough City Magnet and the Demonstration School, yet the district hired five new custodians. First of all the McDonough building is still in use, now as the Freshman Academy, and therefore still needs custodial services. The Demonstration School was part of the University and was cleaned by the University, so its closing had no effect whatsoever on the District’s need for custodians. The story goes on to explain that four custodians were hired for the new Stoklosa School and are currently split between the Cardinal O’Connell and the Molloy, where the Stoklosa students are temporarily (we hope!) attending school. The fifth new custodian went to the Pawtucketville Memorial, which was short one custodian. In other words, there is no story, no scandal, just an inflammatory headline that is designed to whip up support for a movement to privatize the district’s custodial services.