By J.J. Huggins
Staff writer
April 06, 2008 05:00 am Gov. Deval Patrick recently named Paul Reville the next secretary of education for Massachusetts. The 58-year-old will oversee the newly created Executive Office of Education, putting him in position to influence schools around the state. Reville said lengthening the school day is "imperative." "We're trying to attain 21st-century education goals on a 19th-century system," he said. He noted a school in Cambridge that added time to its day is now offering a Chinese class. A school in Worcester is setting aside two hours for "uninterrupted reading," and a Boston school is using additional time for music lessons. Reville has a kindergartener and a high school junior of his own in Worcester public schools, where he believes they can get a good education while being exposed to diversity they wouldn't encounter in private schools. Reville is well-known in education circles. He is the chairman of the state Board of Education, appointed by the governor last August. He previously served on the board from 1991 to 1996. He is president of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy in Cambridge, and the director of the Education Policy and Management Program and a lecturer on educational policy and politics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also is co-chairman of the National Center on Time and Learning and is the co-founder and former executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. He assumes his new role as secretary of education on July 1. In a nutshell, what is your job description? The purpose of this position was to serve to coordinate and integrate and make comprehensive the commonwealth's education system — pre-K all the way through grad school — to link together the different systems in which services are delivered now, to bring those together and also to complement that work with integrated services that are coming from other divisions of government. For example, employment training and health and human services. We've got to focus sharply on closing the achievement gap, and it's going to take a unified effort to accomplish that. How does the length of the school day in Massachusetts compare to other states? School time and the way it's used about the country is remarkably similar ... except in the charter (school) sector (which have longer days) ... which serve high proportions of low-income students. How do you feel about offering free tuition to community colleges? I think it's a recognition that in order to be successful in the kind of economy that our children are moving into, it's going to require more than a high school education. We need to make that available for everyone, whether it's free or whether we provide kind of a guarantee that money won't be an impediment to anybody. I think we gotta work out the details in financing. How does the quality of a public education in Massachusetts compare to education provided by other states? We are generally regarded around the country as having the top public education system in the United States. ... There are a lot of reasons, I think, we can be proud of what we have accomplished. But on the other hand, when we peel back that data, you don't have to look too hard to find we have enormous achievement gaps. It's something we had hoped to eradicate during education reform. ... We've not been able to do it yet. What town do you live in? Worcester. I often say I am the first chair of education in a long, long time who has children in an urban school system. I have children in the Worcester public schools. I'm not talking in the abstract about these issues — they affect my family every day. Why do you keep your children in the Worcester public schools, rather than put them in private school? I want them to have the kind of education that exposes them to the diversity and complexity of a kind of society that they're going to live in and, I hope, make a difference in.
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