NO ONE WAS more disappointed than Ricardo Moreta when he learned that he had fallen short on the math portion of the MCAS exam, for the third time, and would not graduate with his class in June. But now, as he prepares to give the test another go this spring, the 18-year-old Dorchester High School senior has some pretty high-level help from a new math tutor: Jim Peyser, chairman of the state Board of Education.
Every Friday morning for the past year and a half, Peyser has made his way to Dorchester High, the lowest-achieving high school in the state’s largest district, where he spends 50 minutes helping a student who has failed MCAS negotiate everything from the Pythagorean Theorem to quadratic equations. (His first tutee passed the retest in December, freeing up Peyser for Moreta.) But it may be the ed-board chairman who’s getting the real education. “Obviously, it’s helpful to make concrete and visceral a lot of this policy talk,” says Peyser.
The concrete reality at Dorchester High is that just 57 percent of this year’s seniors have cleared the MCAS hurdle; the remainder will not get their diplomas in June, even if they’ve otherwise met Boston public schools requirements. But seeing these consequences up close has done nothing to shake Peyser’s MCAS resolve.
“I think it’s been more validating than anything else,” he says. From his own observations, and from talking to students and teachers, Peyser is convinced that MCAS has brought a sorely needed level of focus to the school–and the students.
“They knew what the task was, and they pushed themselves in ways that most of them hadn’t done before,” says Peyser, noting that the 57 percent passing rate is more than double the 26 percent that had passed prior to December’s retest. “I would bet that probably none of those students would have been in a math class in their senior year had they not had to pass this test to graduate.” At the same time, Peyser says his time at Dot High has taught him that education problems do not start in high school.
“Most of the students I’ve encountered lack some basic foundations, both conceptually and in terms of specific skills,” he says. “So it brings home the fact that this is not just a problem of high school math instruction, but goes back well before that.”
The one-on-one tutelage has brought the 46-year-old Peyser back full circle to his unlikely entry into the education field. While working as a manager at Teradyne in the mid-1980s, Peyser responded to an ad on an MBTA trolley for school volunteers, and started tutoring Boston High School students in math.
It was an eye-opening experience, one that led Peyser into the public policy world. As executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a free-market oriented Boston think tank, Peyser staked out a prominent role as a critic of the education status quo, embracing charter schools as a way to push public school improvement from the outside, and high-stakes testing as a prod to achievement from within.
In 1996, he was named to the state Board of Education by then-Gov. William Weld; he became chairman two years later. In 2001, he put on a second education hat, giving up his post at Pioneer for a full-time position as education advisor to then-Gov. Jane Swift. He’s retained the two-part portfolio under Gov. Mitt Romney, though Peyser is now the administration’s number two policy official under Peter Nessen, Romney’s education secretary-designate.
Peyser has done nothing to make a public example of his MCAS tutoring work, but acknowledges the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is symbolism of his weekly forays to the ed-reform frontlines. “It’s sort of all hands on deck,” says Peyser. “If I’m part of the policy-making apparatus, I think it’s only fair that I pitch in on the ground.”
