New Bedford’s super talks up public education

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Andrew O’Leary is the first New Bedford superintendent of schools I can remember who regularly shows up at events around town wearing the school colors of red and white.

There is no doubt that this Cork, Ireland, native bleeds New Bedford red and white as he enters the third year of his leadership of the system. What he really bleeds, however, is belief in urban public education.

I wanted to talk to O’Leary about that in wake of all this news about President Donald Trump dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.

O’Leary has a reputation as a moderate, thoughtful booster of the city’s public school district. Over the past two decades, he’s worked his way up through the system, garnering a reputation as a helpful and dedicated guy. He’s especially known as the numbers person who has figured out how to bring a spate of grants to help pay for public education in a city that struggles to pay for it on its own.

O’Leary is on the record saying that the recent federal education cutbacks that have taken place already — the squashing of research that helped urban and rural districts, the laying off of half the 4,000-odd DOE employees, the cutting of some $600 million in federal grants used to fund programs in low-income districts — will eventually be a problem for New Bedford. 

But what does this well-respected local school leader think about the philosophy that the federal government should bow out of the education mission that is behind all these cuts? That’s what I wanted to know.

The thing is, Andrew O’Leary really believes in New Bedford’s public schools. 

“I don’t like the expression ‘government schools’ because it’s ahistorical,” he tells me. 

A self-described history buff, O’Leary says he thinks calling public schools government schools is a pejorative, a political term used to undermine people’s confidence in their own schools.

He talks about the early 1900s social movements to end child labor and extend public education. Leaders like the Cork-born Mother Jones, he said, led the fight to end child labor in America and extend opportunity for children. 

“Community schools were created as a marker of American progress,” he said. “And the government in many cases stood in the way.” 

You don’t have to go any further than New Bedford to know about resistance to education for working people. Here, early in the 19th century, “pauper” schools were meagerly financed by the public with minimal instruction.

Soon after Trump took office this year, O’Leary got some social media and talk radio flak because he had sent out a letter to school staff informing them that the New Bedford district follows state guidelines that restrict building and information access from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities.

O’Leary feels strongly about his system’s immigrant students. He spoke at a Saturday City Hall rally, objecting to a March 21 New Bedford raid where, he said, several children who attend city schools “woke up to terror” when federal agents in military fatigues broke the door to their home.  

He says the criticism hasn’t bothered him because as superintendent he’s the person who can better deal with rebukes so staff can go about their jobs educating and protecting children. He is particularly concerned, he said, about continuing the New Bedford schools’ inclusive philosophy toward marginalized populations like undocumented immigrants and transgender and nonbinary people.

“All the criticism came to me because you have seen scenarios out there, around the state and around the nation, where this individual teacher and this individual principal got targeted,” he said. His voice then grew quiet. “I would hate to see that” in New Bedford, he said.

According to O’Leary, the political debate around education has been so debased that the very existence of public schools is under fire.

There’s been a lot of myth-making designed to discredit these schools, he said, myths that social science research has debunked.

Among the myths, according to O’Leary? That American schools are underperforming, that the public school system is wasteful, that the schools have too much bureaucracy, and that the school systems are overly unionized.

“None of those things stand up to scrutiny,” he said.

The movement to do things like abolish the Department of Education and divide the present public school system up into privately-run schools by way of devices like vouchers is the result of people believing these myths, O’Leary said.

The superintendent has said that the two areas of the New Bedford public schools that would be most endangered by cuts to the federal education budget would be English language learner and special education programs. Assistance for the free school lunch program, in a city where a fifth of residents live below the poverty line, could also be on the chopping block.

About 8% of the New Bedford schools budget is funded by the federal government. But through budgetary planning, O’Leary said the New Bedford system has set aside enough money that it would be able to avoid program elimination for a few years, even with some of the devastating cutbacks the Trump administration has enacted.

“Structurally, systemically, we have an 8-10% cushion,” he said. “So if 8-10% is in danger, then 8-10% is in danger over the medium and longer term.”

O’Leary has talked about the city’s immigrant community as a large asset to the city in terms of its work ethic and economic contributions. They rely on the federally-funded ELL programs.

Trump has not specifically said what will happen to federal ELL assistance, although an executive order he signed on March 1 could endanger them. The order rescinded a prior policy by former President Bill Clinton that mandated federal agencies to provide language assistance for individuals with limited English proficiency.

For a guy like O’Leary, who is all about Team New Bedford Schools, the whole situation is wrong-headed.

Business roundtable-type organizations, he said, have incorrectly convinced the public that schools should be about producing skilled, high-earning graduates for the commercial sector.

That’s the wrong paradigm, according to the superintendent.

“I think we’ve listened to the wrong people around that, and what it does is, it diminishes what a school actually is for: its community,” he said. “It’s a place where students grow and flourish and develop as young people who can contribute to society in all sorts of ways.”

O’Leary is doing nothing less than laying down a marker that the New Bedford schools are not about business or careers or even getting into college, but rather about boosting the people of the city and how they feel about themselves.

“What concerns me the most is that these are community assets,” he said. “Schools are the hubs of neighborhoods. Schools, where our young people are, are one of the most important things that society invests in, and they belong to the community.”

Public schools have traditionally been thought of as something for the whole group, not for one individual, he said.

“Eroding a community asset is something we should raise concern about,” O’Leary said.

Contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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