Patrick names three chairs of new Readiness Project

Banner Staff

When you set forth a vision as broad as the one Gov. Deval Patrick recently laid out for reforming the state’s public education system, you’re going to need some help to make it reality.

Patrick announced Sunday he had named former Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tom Payzant, EMC Corporation Chairman and CEO Joseph M. Tucci and Wheelock College President Jackie Jenkins-Scott as the three chairs of the Readiness Project, the group responsible for enacting his far-reaching education plan.

“To ensure our children receive an unparalleled education, we need a team of the brightest leaders and thinkers … to work through the challenges and the solutions we face,” said Patrick. “We know where we are headed. The job of this team will be to implement that vision.”

The Readiness Project team is charged with developing a 10-year implementation strategy that will include an array of recommendations for putting Patrick’s plan — which Jenkins-Scott said she believes “will be an historic turning point for all students in Massachusetts” — into practice.

“With leadership, vision and a willingness to work together to make tough choices about the fundamental elements of our education system, we can take public education where it needs to go,” said Payzant, now a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

According to a statement from Patrick’s office, focus areas will include delivery of universal early education, care and full-day kindergarten for children; expanding learning time; improving teacher licensing processes and professional development opportunities; improving the MCAS test while adding other assessments; and universally extending education for an additional two years.

Tucci emphasized the importance of improving access to high-quality education because of the many important things it engenders, such as “the ability to acquire and extend knowledge, the habit of lifelong learning, and the readiness to compete and meet life’s endless challenges.”

The final key element on which the Project will focus, however, may represent the governor’s biggest obstacle: to “fund the education system as envisioned adequately, equitably and reliably.”

Next up for the Project: selecting members of a leadership team to create several issue-specific subcommittees to develop recommendations for executing targeted elements of Patrick’s plan.

The leadership team — which will include representatives from the fields of early and K-12, community colleges, higher education, human services, workforce development and business — will then put together the recommendations into a strategic plan, complete with benchmarks, cost projections and timelines, and present it to the governor by March 31, 2008.