Pedro Martinez: A sound choice for Mass. education commissioner - The Boston Globe (2025)

Before that he also led the San Antonio district, where he was credited with boosting academic performance.

Originally from Mexico, Martinez immigrated to the United States as a child. The state still needs to finalize a contract with Martinez, but once it is signed he would be the state’s first Latino education commissioner, a milestone at a time when Latinos make up a quarter of the statewide student body.

Although he has never worked in Massachusetts, Martinez was previously a finalist for superintendent in Boston, where he made a strong impression and won the support of Latino advocacy groups.

The commissioner oversees the state’s accountability system, and has the power to take schools or sometimes even districts into state receivership if they consistently fail to educate their students. He should also be willing to use his office as a bully pulpit to call attention to areas needing improvement.

Education commissioners in Massachusetts often serve for relatively long terms in office, giving them ample opportunity to shape education policy at the state level. Martinez replaces Jeff Riley, who stepped down last year for personal reasons after a six-year tenure. Riley’s predecessor, Mitchell Chester, served nearly a decade before his death in 2017.

The major challenges Martinez should prioritize in the Commonwealth will already be broadly familiar to him: problems educating special needs students and those who do not speak English as a first language, uncertainty caused by chaos in Washington, chronic absenteeism, and the continuing aftershocks of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He will also face a challenge unique to Massachusetts — avoiding the temptation to rest on our laurels or take false comfort in state-by-state rankings.

By a lot of those measures, the state would seem to be doing just dandy. But rankings only tell us how we’re doing relative to other states; literacy and math scores are down compared to pre-pandemic scores almost across the board, including in Massachusetts. Statewide figures can also obscure disparities within the state, where urban districts continue to lag suburban ones.

In Boston, academic performance was low enough that Riley pressured the district into agreeing to an improvement plan. That plan expires this year with mixed results; Martinez shouldn’t be shy about reapplying the pressure if Boston doesn’t start to see gains.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Martinez won the support of nine members of the 11-member Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and board chair Katherine Craven said he was “the right person at the right time.”

The second-guessing, though, has already begun. “Pedro Martinez will arrive with lots of baggage from his previous positions,” the heads of the Massachusetts Teachers Association said in a statement.

Some of the baggage they’re referring to is his track record in Chicago, where he butted heads with the mayor and the local teachers union and was ultimately fired for “failing to cave in to the Chicago Teachers Union’s outrageous demands for pay raises at double the inflation rate and the hiring of thousands more [union] members,” as the Chicago Tribune put it in an editorial.

Anyone other than the teachers unions would probably see that “baggage” as a plus, though, rather than a drawback. The fact that Martinez refused to make reckless financial decisions, even with his own job on the line, speaks well of his independence and integrity.

Martinez shouldn’t seek out confrontations with the unions, but his record in Chicago suggests he won’t fear them, either. It’s heartening that they are not, to paraphrase the other Pedro Martinez, his daddy.

The DESE board made a good choice. When that other Pedro Martinez came to Boston, the Red Sox were perennial losers. When he left, they were world champions. Let’s hope history repeats itself.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.