Don’t count on an MCAS compromise

Sometimes poetry catches what prose can’t quite encapsulate. That’s certainly the case with a jawdropping phenom like University of Iowa hoops supernova Caitlin Clark. Her play, as war poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. wrote of flying, slips “the surly bonds of Earth.”

It’s also true of an opposite sort of astonisher, Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page, though his performance calls to mind a different kind of verse. Like, say, the anticipatory lament that Scottish bard Robert Burns offered in 1786, some 236 years before Max began his storm-tossed tenure as MTA chief:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder free us...”

As for those blunders? Well, like the British in Johnny Horton’s ballad about the Battle of New Orleans, they have kept a-comin’, and though it would be grand to report there aren’t nigh as many as there were a while ago, recent events demonstrate the contrary proposition.

Consider just the last month or so. First, the MTA invited Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the MTA’s parent union, to town for a March 6 legislative hearing on the union’s ballot question. The goal of that question is to end the requirement that high school students must pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam in order to graduate. That is, by the end of high school they must demonstrate competence in sophomore English and math, as well as in a branch of science.

Legislators at the hearing asked the logical question: Under the MTA’s scheme, what assurance would anyone have that a high school diploma represented a minimum uniform standard of statewide learning? It was a reasonable query that went without a realistic answer.

According to numerous Beacon Hill sources, state Senator Jason Lewis, Senate chair of the Legislature’s joint education committee, hopes to broker a compromise to keep the question off the ballot. Thus talk has circulated of a meeting of half a handful of education-space figures under the auspices of Senate President Karen Spilka.

Enter two other MTA blunders. On March 21, the union held a webinar whose supposed purpose was to help teachers understand anti-Palestinian racism. Although it was closed to all but MTA members, there was a pronounced backlash among the MTA’s Jewish members.

That reaction, as the must-read Contrarian Boston reported, caught the attention of a certain Jason Lewis. That is, the aforementioned Senate-side education chair. He and fellow senator Rebecca Rausch sent a withering whiskey-tango-foxtrot email missive to Page.

“[T]he MTA’s Anti-Racism Task Force hosted a webinar that purported, by its title, to offer support to teachers in addressing anti-Palestinian racism,” they wrote. “By all accounts we have received, the webinar did nothing of the sort and instead spent the better part of two hours proffering anti-Israel and antisemitic political propaganda.” The three-page email epistle got even more scathing as it went on.

To state the obvious, it isn’t auspicious to receive a scolding like that from the State House figure most active in searching for a workable compromise on your key issue.

In that light, it’s noteworthy that the Spilka-sponsored meeting did not take place. Still, it’s hard simply to blame that on the MTA’s clumsy venture into Mideast politics. Why? Because of a second Page misstep. The Senate president wanted a small gathering of principal figures, but Page is said to have insisted he needed an MTA retinue to accompany him.

State House sources say a different gathering is now planned, this one to be held at the office of Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, who backs the MCAS as graduation requirement. Spilka, who has yet to take a position, apparently won’t attend.

Will anything come of the gathering? Call me dubious. Page has been engaged in a bout of bluster, insisting that the union’s polling shows the ballot measure is bound for victory. Savvier sorts aren’t impressed; though they acknowledge the nix-the-MCAS scheme is currently ahead, they see that lead as evanescent.

Meanwhile, Page has at least a short-term incentive to hang tough: He and MTA vice president Deb McCarthy, who came to union fame for refusing to administer the MCAS to her Hull fifth-graders, are running for reelection at the union’s convention later this month. Indeed, given that waging war on the MCAS is McCarthy’s big cause, their combined political considerations may well dictate barreling forward to November, even at the very real risk of a humiliating loss.

So the pro-MCAS community shouldn’t figure on having a costly ballot fight averted. Instead, its members should plan on raising significant resources to wage a public-persuasion campaign. After all, if there’s one thing at which the MTA leadership has proved itself adept, it’s spending millions in members’ dues to achieve ballot-question victories.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association’s blunder-prone leaders have incentives to stick to their guns.