What is our mission?

I've been checking out Dr. Howard's website at www.efficacy.org and I urge those who were not at the Forum on Saturday to do the same. You can listen to an interview with Dr. Howard from April of this year in which he gives a condensed version of Saturday's presentation.

Dr. Howard starts out by differentiating between school reform and education reform. He wants to end the blame game and steer communities away from placing all the blame for the lack of student achievement and responsibility on school departments . Because, let's face it, our students are not achieving at a high level. It's great that over 50% of our tenth-graders have achieved proficient or advanced on MCAS, and that our school district was only one of three urban districts in the state to make this kind of progress; but what about that other 49%? What about the students who drop out in 9th grade and never even take the final MCAS exam? Yes, we've seen progress, but not enough. Dr. Howard wants the entire community and especially the leaders in the community to take personal responsibility for the success or failure of the children in the community. He states that the failure of children is in reality the failure of the adults around them.

In order to engage the community, he said it is important to have a 'clear and compelling mission.' What is our mission? He suggests that it should be 'proficiency for all students in each subject area as well as strong character developement. He proposes a "Campaign for Proficiency" to get all children to that level or higher.

What exactly is proficiency? That word can be a problem since it immediately conjures up a test score. Dr. Howard was not referring to the MCAS score when he spoke of proficiency. It is more of a philosophy, a target for all students to be able to lead competent lives in the 21st century.

Forum on Educational Excellence

The first annual Mary Bacigalupo forum on education was held Saturday morning at the Stoklosa School. The turnout was amazing, a real tribute to the memory of one of Lowell's all-time great citizens.

The forum was conceived as a "living tribute" to Mary Bacigalupo, a way to mobilize people to continue some of Mary's work, especially her community-building efforts in support of education. The community was well-represented on Saturday and while I can't begin to give a complete list of who was there, I'll follow the time-honored tradition in Lowell of naming the elected officials who attended: Marty Meehan and Steve Panagiotakos; Mayor Bill Martin and fellow city councilors Jim Milinazzo and Bud Caulfield; and School Committee members Jackie Doherty, John Leahy, Jim Leary and Connie Martin. There were also business and non-profit leaders, many people from the school department including Dr. Baehr, city manager Bernie Lynch, representatives from UML and MCC and lots of parents. As Attorney Mike Gallagher said in his opening remarks, "the Citywide Parent Council was one of the causes that Mary was involved with from its inception and the one that she was most proud of."

But this was not just a see and be-seen event; the intent was and is to truly honor Mary by coming up with a strategy and a plan for change. The speaker, Dr. Jeff Howard, of The Efficacy Institute (www.efficacy.org) energized the audience to look at the state of education in Lowell and to define a goal and a way to achieve results. I'll write more about Dr. Howard's presentation tomorrow.

We'll be writing more about the Forum all week and invite those who attended to contribute their impressions and feedback. The task now is to keep the energy and commitment alive.