View from Beacon Hill



MALDEN (AP) - Mitchell Chester, the state's incoming education commissioner, is so new to Massachusetts that he's still learning names, which can be a good thing for someone who has said he doesn't want to come here to "manage the status quo."

Chester, currently the second in command at the Ohio Department of Education, is the first commissioner in 20 years to be coming from out of state. As an outsider, he's not made allies nor enemies - yet - in Massachusetts.

"I am not bound by any covenant with folks in the system here," Chester, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. "I bring a fresh look and a certain liberty to call for changes that I think need to be made, without stepping on toes. I see that as an advantage.

Chester, praised in Ohio as a consensus builder, took a flight to Boston on Thursday and spent the day meeting business leaders, union officials, lawmakers and top aides to Gov. Deval Patrick, completing the day by attending Patrick's State of the State address. On Friday, he visited the Department of Education headquarters in Malden.

Like other states, Massachusetts has an achievement gap, evidenced by test scores that consistently show low-income students performing worse than their better-off peers. That gap generally falls along racial lines, with minority students trailing white students.

Chester says closing that gap is among his top priorities. Strategies include highlighting the problem, learning from schools that beat the odds, and providing better "wraparound" social services to students in poverty.

"If the way we're doing business now in a given school or district is not getting the results, then doing more of the same is not going to change the results that we get," Chester noted. "My hope is that the unions, the administrators, the communities will work together on looking for better ways to do business."

Chester was the unanimous choice of the state Board of Education whose chairman, Paul Reville, said there was no overt desire for an outsider, only a search for the best candidate.

"He appealed to an ideologically diverse board," Reville said. "He's not an ego-driver person. He's modest. His views as an educator begin with his views as a parent."

Chester, who is married, has two adult children and two adult stepchildren, along with a 10-year-old son whom he and his wife adopted several years ago. Chester says it's his mission to ensure that schools not only teach kids to read and write, but build skills such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving.

That belief, he said, is rooted in the experience of his late father, Herbert Chester, who was a superintendent of schools in Bloomfield, Conn., outside Hartford, when the town changed considerably, from being mostly white to a place where black families moved and bought homes.

"He always kept his eye on the twin goals of excellence and equality, and understood that one without the other was a hollow promise. That's really propelled me," he said.

Deb Tully, spokeswoman for the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the state's second-largest teachers' union, said Chester helped ease the union's fears about a Harvard-backed project using a "medical rounds" model in which problems in failing schools are "diagnosed" and fixed.

"There was a lot of fear that it would be used for hiring and firing teachers," she said. "It took a lot of trust for us to get together and try to do that. He was one of the people who helped work through the differences."

Chester's unanimous selection comes amid pending changes in Massachusetts. Patrick appears to have strong support for his legislation creating a powerful secretary of education and expanding the number of seats on policy-making boards, thus giving himself greater control. Some fear the state is on a path to undo strict accountability standards, though Chester's appointment says otherwise.

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Ken Maguire covers the Statehouse for The Associated Press.