The End's Just Beginning

The new school committee seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief to have inked the superintendent's final one-year contract this week after four months of work.

That means it's time for the rest of us to really start paying attention.

Local politics can devolve into a near-contact sport between individual electeds jockeying to fill a leadership void with what they think is best. The recent out-of-left-field push to implement the IB (International Baccalaureate) in conflict with the high school's own plans is a good example of this.

Systemic educational improvement, however, requires multi-year strategic plans drawn up by strong educators who know what they are doing. A local board can help by giving feedback to the superintendent on the plans, by crafting policy to make sure they are executed, and by explaining/supporting them in public.

Without a strong educational leader backed by a majority of a board, we could see ... who knows?

One possible and terrible future scenario was described in a post on the Cambridge Chronicle website after news about the contract broke. 'Very Disappointed" wrote: "Would you have [us] go back to the days when all the principals were basically looking out for themselves and the nights when school committee meetings were a political circus with everyone fighting for their school and their children and the school committee only cared about getting what [they] needed for their 2 or three school communities?"

In fact, I think things are already devolving. Witness the push by a SC member to open up her own school to non-residents to bolster enrollment there. You might ask how this jives with the system's plans for closing the achievement gap. The answer: it doesn't.

I witnessed and served on the board in those bad old days described so well by Very Disappointed; I've seen how much can be accomplished in more recent, getting-better ones. So I think it's critical for a majority of the committee to work with the out-going superintendent and his staff on an educational to-do list, with the whole district in mind, for the next year. That means having the courage to vote against anything that would distract from getting through the list.

I guess we'll just have to watch and see how it goes.