When the Boston Globe reported on its front page earlier this month on a brewing backlash against what critics say is an overemphasis on standardized testing in Massachusetts schools, the state’s education secretary, Matthew Malone, seemed to be leading the charge. “It’s assessment gone wild,” Malone told the paper, adding that there seemed to be a consensus that there’s too much testing in schools.

The commissioner of elementary and secondary education, Mitchell Chester, who has direct oversight of the state education department and school policy, had a decidedly different take. He told the Globe he saw a “fair amount of hyperbole” in the anti-testing backlash, suggesting some “worst-case scenarios” have been portrayed to be the broad reality across the state.

It was a remarkable display of sharply divergent views from the state’s two top education officials. Malone is a direct appointee of Gov. Deval Patrick’s and a member of his cabinet; Chester was hired in 2008 by the state board of education, whose members are appointed by the governor.

If their views on testing reveal a striking division at top levels of state government, they also seem to capture a divide that has characterized Patrick’s own thinking and policy on education issues.

Patrick points to his passionate support for public education as one of his proudest legacies, but he has also at times seemed a reluctant soldier in the education reform battles that have characterized his time in office.

Patrick has supported the use of the MCAS test as a high-stakes graduation requirement, but spoke during his 2006 campaign of favoring multiple measures of student performance.

Chester says the proliferation of testing has mostly occurred at the district level, where local school systems are carrying out more assessments in an effort to gauge whether their students are on track to do well on the state MCAS exam. Performance on MCAS has taken on new urgency in the wake of a 2010 law — authored by the Patrick administration — that gives the state authority to take over chronically underperforming schools or entire districts.

That authority may represent the boldest element of Patrick’s education record, placing him in the camp of those pushing for sweeping shake-up of chronically-faltering schools. In 2011, the long-troubled Lawrence school system was put into state receivership under the new law, and is now in the third year of a wholesale turnaround plan that is showing tangible signs of progress.

As for the increase in testing that the law may have spawned, some education experts say districts could dial back some of their testing or better integrate it into a curriculum that is rich in the English and math subject content that students need to master to do well on MCAS. But pulling back on the high-stakes state test itself would yank at the very foundation of the state’s 20-year education reform effort. That initiative, launched with passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, had two big cornerstones: dramatically increased state funding for schools, especially in poorer communities, combined with an accountability for student learning that had been entirely absent.

Patrick’s office was asked for the governor’s views on the testing debate. His spokeswoman provided a comment that did not specifically address the issue, but emphasized his broad commitment to education, highlighting the 2010 law he sponsored, which also raised the cap on charter schools and authorized in-district “innovation schools” that have more autonomy than traditional district schools.

If there’s one area of education policy where Patrick has shown the most ambivalence, it is on charter schools. The independently run public schools have been championed by civil rights leaders for offering more educational choices, especially for poor families whose only other option is low-performing district schools. But charters have been strongly opposed by teachers unions and other public school advocates who say they divert funds from district schools. The issue has been particularly vexing for some Democrats, pulled between the civil rights arguments for charters and the arguments against them by unions, from whom the Democrats enjoy strong backing.

In his 2006 campaign, Patrick said he opposed raising the cap on charter schools without changes in the school-funding formula — a common refrain of charter opponents. Four years later, the reform law that he championed raised the charter cap, but it was also driven by the state’s pursuit of funding from the $4.3 billion federal Race to the Top program. Funding from the initiative was conditioned on states raising their charter school limits.

More recently, however, Patrick has been silent on charter school issues. He did not weigh in during the failed effort this summer to pass legislation further raising the charter limit. He also didn’t stake out a position earlier this year — or when his office was asked for comment now — on controversial changes in state regulations that redefined the formula for determining which communities could have additional charters.

The 2010 law raised the allowance on charter school seats in the lowest performing 10 percent of districts in the state. New regulations adopted earlier this year shifted that formula from one based entirely on achievement scores to one that uses a combination of achievement and growth in scores from the previous year. That change bumped several low-performing districts out of the bottom 10 percent category, and jeopardized the only two charter applications submitted this year, which propose schools in Fitchburg and Brockton. Charter school advocates say the new regulations undermine the aim of the 2010 law to make more charter seats available to students in low-performing districts.

The Fitchburg proposal has since been reworked to be eligible for consideration by including additional nearby districts in its service area. The organization that submitted the Brockton proposal has asked for a waiver from the regulations, which the state board of education plans to consider next week.

Patrick’s own life story, as he so eloquently tells it, stands as the most powerful testimony he can offer to the transformative power of education. He went from the problem-plagued Chicago public schools and a life in poverty on the city’s South Side to the rarified world of Milton Academy, thanks to a scholarship program that sends minority children to private schools.

As his tenure in office nears an end, though, he still seems conflicted over the best path forward for those relying on public education to deliver the same kind of transformative opportunity.