Romney forms task forces to shape state policies

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has made headlines over the past several months for his creation of a number of expert task forces intended to explore his reform initiatives and make legislative recommendations. The major goals he has announced since September are to investigate and overhaul the commonwealth’s Department of Corrections, establish a “foolproof” death penalty bill based on scientific evidence and improve underperforming school districts.

But as the year draws to a close, Romney supporters and opponents are anxiously awaiting the commissions’ reports, which could be released any day. With little idea of what the reports might say, some opponents and political analysts think Romney’s plan – to rally support for his initiatives by introducing commission-endorsed legislation – has the real potential to backfire if the task forces present findings contrary to his policy goals.

And while some are praising the governor for creating advisory commissions, the controversy and debate surrounding the issues the commissions are examining will not end with their reports, opponents have vowed.

EDUCATION

In early September, the state released the results of the 2003 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam, which showed unprecedented high scores for students in every grade throughout the state.

But several school districts that had been labeled “underperforming” by the commonwealth’s Department of Education, including Lowell, Fall River and Chelsea, continued to show declining MCAS scores.

In Lowell, for example, the DOE’s District Report found that although Lowell is one of the five largest school districts in the state, its achievement levels are well below the state average. The report also found that the district’s schools have high rates of absenteeism, suspension and grade repetition, and that the school faced significant budget hurdles.

Although many district reports revealing similar statistics were commissioned and released before 2003, Romney announced the creation of an education task force that would “devise intervention strategies” to improve lagging school districts, in the wake of the state’s best-ever test results.

But Romney drew a firestorm of criticism when he announced that he wanted the commission to examine specific solutions he had endorsed, including greater leeway for principals to hire and fire teachers, full-day kindergarten for children whose parents take a weekend parenting class, “merit pay” for teachers with excellent records who have long worked in urban school districts and new rules that would remove students with severe discipline problems from the classroom, according to a Romney press release.

In several media reports, education advocacy groups blasted Romney’s implication that only parents of students in underperforming districts – many of which are urban and primarily populated by minorities – need better parenting. They said he was insensitive to the fact that many of the parents work weekend jobs and could not attend if they wanted to.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a little more than one in every seven families and nearly one in every four children under 18 in Lowell live below the poverty line. Nearly 4.5 percent of the population in Lowell is black, and 14 percent is Hispanic or Latino.

Norma Shapiro, the Massachusetts ACLU legislative director, said it is essential to consider who the members of a task force are when trying to determine its effectiveness.

“My criticism for the education task force is that it’s very light on practicing teachers, on people with experience dealing with limited English or special education [programs] or people from a variety of different kinds of distinct experiences,” Shapiro said.

“There are people who are well known for their support of the current status quo in the Department of Education … and I’m not criticizing that kind of thinking,” she said. “But if you start with a task force with a particular point of view, what they come out with will not be responsible.”

Shapiro said Romney’s creation of the several different task forces over the past few months was necessary because of his lack of government experience and it should not necessarily be praised.

“He comes to government with no experience dealing with the kinds of issues government deals with, and he comes to government not understanding that it is not easy to measure success,” Shapiro said. “It’s much easier to measure success in business – you either make a profit or you don’t.”

DEPARTMENT OF

CORRECTIONS

Before August, the name John Geoghan was associated with one of the biggest sexual abuse scandals in the country’s – and the Catholic Church’s – history. These days, Geoghan’s name is associated with the biggest overhaul of one of the biggest industries in the commonwealth – the prison industry.

Since Geoghan, the defrocked Catholic priest who was one of the first clergymen prosecuted for child molestation in the recent scandal, was murdered last August by another inmate while incarcerated at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, prisoners’ rights groups have been calling for a major revamping of the state’s prisons, run by the Department of Corrections.

Shortly after Geoghan’s death, and in the wake of a press conference held by advocacy group Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, Romney announced he would establish a “blue ribbon” commission to conduct a sweeping investigation of the prison system at the request of Public Safety and Homeland Security Secretary Edward Flynn.

While Shapiro said the education task force’s activity has been kept very much in the dark, Correctional Legal Services Director Leslie Walker said the group met with the task force last Wednesday and “they seemed receptive to our suggestions for critical issues that need to be examined at the DOC.”

Though Walker said the commission’s creation should be praised, she added that it was long overdue.

“As Scott Harshbarger has said, no one’s really looked at the DOC in about 30 years,” she said. “It’s a three-quarter-of-a-billion dollar industry between the state and county prison system and the [commonwealth], and no one is watching where that money is going.”

According to the DOC’s annual report on recividism rates, 52 percent of prisoners released on parole were re-incarcerated within three years, an obvious sign that the system is not successful, Walker said.

Walker said she hopes Romney’s commission will address are “classification; [prisoners] stuck at high levels of security they don’t need to be at; no programs, no education, no preparation for release to the street; and a culture of brutality that’s been allowed to exist and a few bad-apple guards who are allowed to remain and spoil the whole environment.”

DEATH PENALTY

Probably the most controversial of Romney’s three main initiatives is his task force to develop a state capital punishment statute based on scientific evidence. Romney asked the panel, which was created in September, to investigate and craft a bill that would apply only to a narrow set of especially horrific crimes.

Dr. Fred Beiber, a professor of pathology at Harvard University Medical School and one of the panel’s co-chairs, recognized at the press conference announcing the panel’s formation that the task force may not be able to craft a bill that would ensure only guilty people would be put to death.

“In offering the council’s recommendations we must remain mindful of the finality of such punishments, the failures of others and the chances for human error,” Beiber said.

Massachusetts ACLU legislative counsel and death penalty expert Anne Lambert said Romney is “more than naïve” to think he can come up with a perfect death penalty bill in Massachusetts, one of 12 states that does not have such a statute.

“There’s nothing that we can do to squeeze all the errors out of it,” Lambert said. “I would be very surprised if [the commission] placed something that they even pretend is a perfect system on [Romney’s] desk.”

Lambert said she doubts Romney would follow the recommendations of the panel if they were to tell the governor it was impossible to draft an infallible bill. The governor indicated at the September press conference that he would continue to push for a capital punishment statute even if the panel returned empty handed.

ROMNEY’S TACTIC

Michael Ebeid, an associate political science professor at Boston University, said Romney’s flurry of commissions may be his way of trying to strengthen the Massachusetts Republican Party by establishing panels beyond the jurisdiction of the Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats.

“One way of kind of circumventing and stimulating competition with the state Legislature is to create a number of entities that are in effect outside [the Legislature’s] jurisdiction,” Ebeid said. “One, he’s trying to strengthen the Republican Party in Massachusetts which has traditionally been the much weaker party in the state, and two, I think he is also sort of trying to demonstrate his bona fides to the national Republican Party, and one of the ways he can do that is by strengthening the Republican Party in his state.”

“So he’s clearly a man with higher ambitions,” Ebeid added.

But Ebeid said the governor’s plan has a chance of backfiring, unless he has more control of the commissions than he is letting on.

“If these commissions really function in a way that they could publish reports and recommendations that he … has not signed off on ahead of time – if it’s out of his control to that degree – then it certainly could” backfire, Ebeid said. “I think [it is] definitely right to think that this could lead to an embarrassing situation.”