Education Benchmarks

Massachusetts passed a relatively modest improvement package in 1985. Chapter 188, as the act was known, essentially created a potpourri of grant programs which were not locked into law or budget, programs that had to be applied for annually and that only touched on some of the problems in the schools. A basic defect was that Chapter 188 gave more money to the schools with no performance improvement imperative. Program awards were often collectively bargained, with no requirement of school improvement to secure the funds.

Chapter 727, enacted in 1987, established a more visionary program to provide special funding for schools willing to reorganize themselves along the lines of the Carnegie Forum's recommendations which called for more teacher-centered schools (Carnegie Forum, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century, 1986). It also provided extra money to poorly-performing "Opportunity Schools", and attempted to establish professional development schools. Due to funding cuts, much of the legislation was undercut almost from its inception, and little remains of it today. It may have represented a better approach to reform than did Chapter 188 but still only tinkered on the margins of the educational system. Nowhere in either reform package were improved educational outcomes lead elements of the reform process. In the absence of reliable evidence that these reforms actually improved education, both of these efforts soon sank beneath the public policy horizon.