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Governor Baker Appoints New State Police Chief, Pivots Around Questions Regarding Dual Retirements Following ‘TrooperGate’

Governor Baker Appoints New State Police Chief, Pivots Around Questions Regarding Dual Retirements Following ‘TrooperGate’

Evan Lips

BOSTON — Governor Charlie Baker announced the appointment of a new superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police on the heels of Colonel Richard D. McKeon's abrupt retirement days after a state trooper slapped him and the agency with a federal lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to scrub embarrassing and lurid details from the arrest report of a prominent judge's daughter. 

"Today I swore-in Lieutenant Kerry Gilpin as the new superintendent colonel of the Massachusetts State Police," Baker said during a brief press conference. "She has a 24-year history with the department, has served a variety of roles, is well-qualified and I believe will do a terrific job. She knows that we expect her to do a review of the policies, procedures, and protocols associated with editing arrest reports, and we'll also be removing the observation reports from the files of the two troopers involved in this issue."

How to Fool the Public, One Education Test At A Time
Commentary

How to Fool the Public, One Education Test At A Time

Sandra Stotsky

What do you call the seller if you label new English Language Arts test items as more rigorous than those on the original tests with the same name and then sell another state these new English Language Arts test items knowing that parents there expect the original test items, not those wrongly described as "more rigorous"?

That's the situation in Rhode Island, which is adopting/buying from Massachusetts educational test items based on Common Core's standards called PARCC (which stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers). Only many people in Rhode Island don't know that, because the new Rhode Island test is named after MCAS (short for Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), a pre-Common Core test that had more rigorous English Language Arts standards than the current ELA PARCC tests.

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