On Friday September 24^th, Governor Deval Patrick held a forum with Boston area teachers at the Sea Port World Trade Center. The event lasted about a hour and a half and featured brief opening comments from Governor Patrick and Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville followed by both of them answering questions and discussing issues with the teachers. (I would estimate a little over 100 teachers were at the event) Below is my attempt of a summary of the event and to provide links for further reading on some of the topics discussed.

Deval started off admitting that he was not an educator or an expert education; however he tries to keep up to date with the latest research and information in the field, gets daily briefings from the Secretary of Ed, and he attempts to visit at least one school in the state a week. He then went on to tell some anecdotes about how education was the key that opened doors throughout his life. He talked about going to underfunded public schools in the South Side of Chicago while his family was on welfare. When he was to enter High School in 1970, his seventh grade teacher filled out an application for Deval to enter The Better Chance program which provided Scholarships for students to attend prestigious schools such as Milton Academy where Deval ended up going. He also mentioned that he built 3 strong lifelong relationships with teachers (2 from Chicago and 1 from Milton Academy) who stayed in touch with him and attended his wedding and college graduations. He then shifted to talking about his education record as Governor of MA and the fact that we are first in the nation when it comes to student achievement, but that there was still a persistent achievement gaps that were drawn on socioeconomic lines that he believed were not only education/economic issues, but moral ones as well.  He then went on to take questions from the crowd. (I never got called on) At times Gov. Patrick admitted he was not familiar enough with a question to answer it and then differed to Secretary of Education Paul Reville. Here are the major bullet points from his answers to the questions.

· He is skeptical of standardized tests though he believes they can serve a purpose. Nevertheless, he believes that there are many things that MCAS and similar tests can not measure such as the compassion, character, and the team work ability of students. Secretary of Ed Reville went on to add that in the past few years the term “whole child” has almost become a dirty word in education circles and that he believes it should not be and that aspects of a student aside from their performance on standardized tests should be taken into account when assessing a student. They went on to discuss that they are currently developing Common Core Standards with 26 other states and they hope to add different type of assessments aside from standardized tests. ( here is the URL with more info on those Common Core Standards http://www.corestandards.org/)

· Both Reville and Patrick stated that they believed that the current methods to attempt to evaluate teacher performance based on student performance (Value Added Measures) have not been proven to be reliable enough to be considered valid forms of measuring teacher performance. Reville added that he would like to have more observations of teacher’s classrooms in order to assess them especially in their first few years as a teacher and the assessments should be done in a way that guided the teacher to improving their pedagogy (For those who do not already know these type of Value Added Assessment of Teachers have been in the news a lot lately: Here is the URL for a recent New York Times Article . http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp) 

· Patrick mentioned that they are creating an advisory council consisting of current classroom teachers who will evaluate and give feedback on future teacher performance standards. Moreover, he for the first time put a teacher on the Board of Education.

· Patrick admitted that the both the old ways and new ways to try to help English Language Learners (ELLs) students have not worked well and one of the biggest challenges he and others face in Education is both determining best practices in educating students who are learning English and how to make those best practices possible on a large scale.

· Patrick frankly stated that the biggest obstacle in education is not improving teachers or assessment measures but poverty. This led to the most heated exchange of the evening. A man whose name I did not catch who was a science teacher and union leader from Brighton High School criticized Patrick and other democratic leaders stating that lack of funding for schools and poverty are major problems; the teacher from Brighton High went on stating that Patrick and other Democrats were not forceful enough in advocating taxing the richest Americans at much higher rates than we currently do in order to fund schools and create more programs to fight poverty. (here is an interesting chart with the tax rates for richest Americans during the last 70 years:  http://politics.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977623449) Patrick kind of deflected the criticism pointing out that he was savaged in the media and had a very difficult time just increasing the sales tax. He then pointed out that many different views about what the role of government should be and how to pay for it exist in the state and in the country and it is very difficult to get any sort of consensus on those matters. In addition he stated, that he and others need to do a better job in connecting the services that government provides with their costs stating “we all own the roads” and to do our best to get rid of actual waste in government and the perception of waste.

· Going along with the talk about funding, he mention that Chapter 70 needs to be reformed in order to address wealth disparity and that will be one of his first priorities if/when he gets reelected. Chapter 70 is the program that determines state aid to fund school. More info can be found about that here: http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/chapter70/

· When discussing Charter Schools, Patrick said that he does not like that the initial purpose for Charters as “test labs” to see what work seems to have been lost. However, he believes that some charters serve their role and do a good job and that is why he lifted the cap on those charters. He admitted that “creaming” is a problem when it comes to charters. For more info about the idea of “creaming” at charters go here http://gothamschools.org/2009/02/17/toward-a-new-definition-of-creaming/

· Patrick also mentioned that the center piece of his education reforms was not charters but creating more so called Innovation Schools. For more information about the concept of innovation schools go here: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eduterminal&L=7&L0=Home&L1=Government&L2=Special+Initiatives&L3=Education+for+the+21st+Century&L4=Commonwealth+Readiness+Project&L5=Readiness+Goal+4+-+Innovation&L6=Innovation+Schools&sid=Eoedu&b=terminalcontent&f=innovation_schools_facts&csid=Eoedu

· More stuff was discussed and touched upon, but I did not take any notes on them and I do not want to risk going by just my memory and accidently grossly misstating the Governor’s position.