Paul Reville On MTA Pressure: 'I See This As A Step Backward'

Updated Oct. 20 at 8:20 p.m.

Former Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville joined Boston Public Radio Thursday to discuss an education funding bill currently before the Massachusetts Legislature.

An amendment added to the bill this week would effectively allow school districts to ignore budget oversight from state regulators. The state education commissioner would be able to recommend how districts allocate their budgets, but would not be able to review budgets and withhold funding.

“I see this as a step backward,” Reville said. “Unfortunately, in the process of the bill getting debated and amended in the Senate, they basically took away the commissioner’s ability to push the plan back to the district.”

Reville expressed frustration with the Massachusetts Teacher’s Association, which pushed for the amendment.

"In recent years, [the MTA] has been harshly adversarial. And at times, their position appears to be, ‘Give us more money and leave us completely alone,’” Reville said. “Naturally, tax payers are reluctant to do that."

In a statement to WGBH News after the Boston Public Radio segment aired, MTA President Merrie Najimy said Reville "misses the mark when he criticizes measures in a historic education funding bill that empower our communities so they have more of a say in how their public schools are operated."

"The Senate’s amendment to the funding bill reinforces the importance of giving parents, educators and students a strong voice in the way their local schools are run, and it should be preserved in the final bill enacted in the Legislature," Najimy said.

The former education secretary stopped short, however, of any sweeping criticism of the MTA.

"Our problem within education isn’t unions,” Reville said. "We have got much bigger problems in education and some of them will be solved by the influx of this money. … I hope nothing gets in the way of that.”

Najimy said instead of expressing frustration with the MTA, Reville "should instead be upset with the steady dwindling of the resources that our schools need to help students thrive and the disruption caused by high-stakes testing and top-down mandates."

Paul Reville is former state secretary of education and a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab. His latest book is "Broader, Bolder, Better.”