Incoming education commissioner outlines priorities

Literacy, teacher recruitment and retention, and promoting bilingual education are at the top of the priority list for the state's new K-12 commissioner of education.

Pedro Martinez will begin running Massachusetts's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on July 1, after former Commissioner Jeff Riley stepped down in March 2024 and over a year of interim leadership.

Speaking at his first public event in Massachusetts since he was chosen for the role, Martinez outlined some of his priority goals on Tuesday at a Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education event in Boston.

Among them is getting students back on track when it comes to reading.

"This issue has been front and center for students, as students return from the pandemic. And by the way this is national. Anybody who was a parent of a young child remembers, and remember our third and fourth graders today, those were children that were going to start their education during the pandemic period. So it's not a coincidence," Martinez said.

Teachers, education advocates and state officials in Massachusetts have been talking about improving student literacy for years, as young people have struggled with reading and writing after the pandemic. On last year's state testing, 41% of third through eighth graders scored in the "meeting or exceeding expectations" range for English Language Arts.

Currently the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, Martinez said that in the city "we realized that the only way to really solve this is we had to go back to the basics."

"So we had to bring them in as soon as possible," he said. "So we expanded universal preschool across every one of the 77 communities. Free, full-day preschool. There we started laying the foundations."

In Chicago, they began "implementing the foundational skills from pre-K through fifth grade — some people call it the 'science of reading,' " he said. "The instruction incorporates best practices such as abundant reading of diverse texts, frequent opportunities for students to write about what they read, and teaching students how to communicate with digital environments."

Science of reading is not one specific curriculum program that districts can buy, but a collection of research based on phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The approach to teaching reading differs from past approaches partially by emphasizing phonics instruction — teaching students to understand how letters and groups of letters link to sounds and spelling patterns — though it is not wholly based on phonics.

The term science of reading has been around for over a century, but has recently become shorthand to discuss using cognitive research on how children's brains work while reading, and using more classroom time on learning to sound out words and work on comprehension.

"I'll tell you, going into classrooms and seeing kindergartners write about something they've read, it's priceless, especially in high-poverty communities," Martinez said.

Gov. Maura Healey launched a program dubbed "Literacy Launch" last year that secured $20 million in the state budget, in addition to $38 million in federal literacy grants, focused on getting higher-quality literacy materials into dozens of districts, which they're hoping will translate into improved reading scores and an improvement in the foundational skill on which all other learning depends.

"I know that Massachusetts recently adopted a long-term plan to improve literacy as well. I commit to you I will do everything in my power to ensure that that plan is successful," Martinez said.

In addition to literacy, Martinez said he'd be focused on recruiting and retaining high qualified educators.

He shared a story about a teacher who he said changed the trajectory of his life. His sixth grade teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, Mr. Asher, "was the first teacher that told me I was actually below grade level. He was actually the first teacher that said, 'I'm going to hold you accountable and you're going to make sure that you're going to rise up to that challenge.'"

Martinez credited Mr. Asher with his coming out of 6th grade above grade level, and eventually becoming the first in his family to graduate high school and finish college.

"Mr. Asher changed my life," he said. "A highly qualified educator is the number one way to really close achievement gaps, and therefore, how we recruit, how we retain teachers — there are proven strategies across the country — and that's what I really want to look at."

He recommended a few ideas, including teacher residency and internal recruitment programs.

In Chicago, he said, the district created a program called Teach Chicago Tomorrow.

"We're always complaining that we can't find highly qualified teachers, but guess where the students start? They start in K-12, right? In the districts. And so in Chicago we started working with the higher ed community, identifying students that had a passion for education, giving them really a clear path for them to be able to not only get support financially, get mentorship all the way through finishing to become teachers in our schools," Martinez said.

He added that thousands of paraprofessionals also moved into teacher roles through a similar program.

Another priority Martinez highlighted Tuesday was bilingual education.

"I think we need to go even deeper in Massachusetts," he said. "One of the blessings that I feel is to be bicultural, to be bilingual is such a gift. It is such a gift. And so why wouldn't we want that for all of our children in Massachusetts? Why wouldn't we want all of our children to have access to multiple languages?

Martinez immigrated to Illinois from Mexico when he was five years old.

The last priority he highlighted was helping connect Massachusetts students to higher education.

He talked about working in the San Antonio school district in Texas, where he saw people move from out of state to take advantage of Texas's strong economy while local students struggled to get jobs.

"Texas imports a lot of their labor, and then we have individuals that grew up in Texas, and there was a mixed bag. And so my question in Massachusetts, how do we make sure that it's our students that live in Massachusetts? How do we make sure that it's our students that are taking advantage of the amazing, amazing higher ed infrastructure that exists in the state?" he said.

He added that "one thing that I'm really anxious to talk to everyone about is, how do we get rid of this conversation of careers or college? That's not a thing everybody."

Martinez proposed working with community colleges and creating pathways in manufacturing, technology and health care to connect higher education and career opportunities for students after high school.

"I can't help but just recognize where I'm at in Massachusetts. This is a rich history, as everybody talked about, of education here," he said. "I can just imagine in 1993 when many fine individuals in this room came together to pass the Massachusetts Education Reform Act that has now put Massachusetts, in my opinion, number one in the nation. So think of this moment now. This is a time when we can come together, we can build a similar bold vision about what we expect our students to be able to do after high school."