The Lincoln School Committee has sent a letter to the state legislature’s Ways and Means Committee in support of a bill that would create a task force to examine the ever-increasing array of statewide educational mandates that Massachusetts school districts are required to follow.
“The issue is not with a specific mandate—it’s that there have been so many coming down at once,” said committee chair Jennifer Glass. “Many have very good aims, but having to do them all at once means it’s difficult to do everything well and with the energy each initiative deserves. Also, over the years mandates get added, but none get taken away. This bill is designed to take a look at them all and analyze what’s redundant or meaningless or even contradictory.”
The letter from the School Committee is reprinted below.
An open letter to the members of the Massachusetts House Committee on Ways and Means:
On July 23, 2014, the Lincoln School Committee voted to join MASS [the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents], MASC [the Massachusetts Association of School Committees] and MASBO [the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials] in voicing its strong support for Bill H.3722. H.3722 is a bill establishing an education mandate task force designed to examine and make sense of the extraordinary number of mandates school districts are required to adhere to each year. In addition to passing the bill, the School Committee urges the appointment of active school employees (district and building administrators and classroom teachers) to such a task force.
As a committee, we fully appreciate the excellent intentions of many of the mandates, and support those that focus on ensuring all students are in high-quality learning environments. However, there are well over 100 mandated regulations and administrative reporting requirements that currently overwhelm school staff, divert necessary resources, and distract attention from our schools’ primary mission: preparing students to succeed in a rapidly changing, highly competitive global economy. This work is difficult to manage for all districts, and even more onerous for small districts, such as ours, that operate with a small team of administrators and support personnel.
On top of the current requirements, right now there are more than 20 education-related bills before the House Ways and Means Committee. All but one of them, H.3722, advocate imposing additional regulations. Unless there is a task force to holistically examine education regulations, districts will be placed in the unfortunate position of treating these regulations as mere compliance exercises, negating any positive impact they were intended to have.
As outlined in the bill, H.3722 proposes establishing an eleven-member task force that, over the course of a year, would inventory all existing regulations and then recommend measures to streamline, consolidate, or eliminate specific mandates and/or reporting requirements that are outdated, duplicative, or inconsistent with current laws, regulations and practices.
We would deeply appreciate your efforts to champion H.3722 and bring it to a vote. Thank you for your continued support of all the students and educators of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Sincerely,
The Lincoln School Committee:
Jennifer Glass, chair
Tom Sander, vice chair
Preditta Cedeno, METCO representative
Tim Christenfeld, member
Al Schmertzler, member
Jena Salon, member
I agree in principle with this letter and suspect the overwhelming number of mandates is confusing and likely gets in the way some of the core aims of our educational system. I do however have an issue with the statement that the primary mission of our school is “preparing students to succeed in a rapidly changing, highly competitive global economy.” This sounds like a talking point from a candidate for political office. It is is incredibly impersonal, and lacks any real meaning. That our school committee cannot state a mission for our children and community in a more reflective, accurate, and meaningful manner is disappointing and confusing. If the aim of this letter is to examine the mandates that impact our learning environment, let us start with our own communication of our mission.