The Status of Education Reform in Massachusetts
Education reform over the years
Horace Mann left his post as Senate president and became Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. He did many things, but his main legacy was to convince people that public education was a public good that should be publicly funded. As a result, Massachusetts had the first system of public schools in the country.
Mann framed his argument for government support of public education two ways. First, he argued that the economy needed educated workers. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was looming over the horizon, this was persuasive to the self-interest of industrialists. Mann also argued that public education was the great balance wheel of society, that schooling for all could help everyone reach his or her potential. It is interesting that, over 150 years after Mann's tenure, those two arguments - the economy and basic equity - are still current.
Since 1888 there have been over one hundred studies that examined various aspects of public education in the Commonwealth. Many of these were relatively minor efforts that took a look at specific aspects of education - teacher training, textbooks, immigrant education. About a dozen were more comprehensive and looked at education more broadly (for more detail see "The Willis Harrington Commission: The Politics of Education Reform." New England Journal of Public Policy (Summer/Fall 1987).
The biggest education reform study was the Willis-Harrington Commission of 1962-65 which spent $250,000 (a lot of money in the early 1960s) and developed a 600-page report. Willis-Harrington implemented one of its 111 recommendations before it went out of business. That change, to the governance structure of the board of education, did not lead to the substantive changes in Massachusetts public education envisioned by the commission. During the late 1970s and mid-1980s, reforms known as Collins-Boverini, Chapter 188, and Chapter 727 were passed. I am not going to go into detail on these. Suffice it to say, none of them changed public education in any lasting way.
The perennial lesson of Massachusetts history is that we as a state have had very little success in reforming schools. We have enacted specific policy legislation - special education laws, bilingual education laws, racial imbalance laws, but policy makers have been unable to reform the way the public schools work. As one Willis-Harrington researcher noted in 1963, we in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prefer to study education reform rather than to implement it.
This brings us to the lawsuits.
McDuffy v. Robertson
It is hard to understand education reform in Massachusetts unless you understand the role the courts have played in Massachusetts school improvement efforts. The busing orders of the mid-1970s that put Boston on the national map came down from a federal court. However, our interest today is not in court desegregation orders; it is about education reform.
Because of ineffective education reform efforts over the years, a group of citizens went to the courts in 1978 and sued to equalize educational opportunity between high-spending and low-spending districts. The theory was that the major barrier to effective education was the difference in education spending between advantaged and disadvantaged districts. The law suit began as Webby v. Dukakis (1978) and was resolved in 1993 when it was known as McDuffy v. Robertson.[1] (415 Mass. 545) The court put the suit on hold for a few years to see what the state would do legislatively to fix the problem.
In 1992 the Boston Globe summed up the situation:
"In the brief, the plaintiffs ask the court to rule that the state has an obligation to adequately educate every child but has failed to do so. Plaintiffs also asked the court to issue 'basic guidelines' that would force the state to set educational goals, spend the money to fulfill those goals and ensure accountability."
"Repeated legislative forays into the area of educational reform have failed to produce effective remedial legislation," the plaintiffs argued in a 162-page brief submitted to the court In February of 1993. "The Commonwealth's recent legislative enactments are the most recent in a series of inadequate and ineffective responses to immediate crises, rather than attempts to create long-term solutions to systemic defects.”
-Lauren Robinson, Boston Globe,
15 December 1992, p. 25
The plaintiffs alleged that the education reform efforts of the 1980s – primarily Chapters 188 and 727, the education reforms of the decade – had not fixed the problem. The court agreed.
All of this history sets the table for the enactment of the Education Reform Act of 1993. As fate would have it, the Supreme Judicial Court decided the educational funding case in the spring of 1993, about the same time that the legislature was considering a major education reform package that became the law.
The McDuffy Ruling
On June 15, 1993, the Supreme Judicial Court declared that Massachusetts had failed to meet its constitutional duty to provide an adequate education to all public school children. The court based its decision on the wide disparities in educational opportunities available to children attending public schools in the state's richest and poorest communities. In the court's view, educational opportunities were directly connected to funding levels.
The court left it up to the governor and Legislature to devise a plan to come up with the money to close the gap. "We take this approach because we are confident the executive and legislative branches of government will respond appropriately to meet their constitutional responsibilities," said Chief Justice Paul J. Liacos, the author of the 100-page majority opinion. (Boston Globe, Doris Sue Wong, 16 June 1993, p. 1)
The Globe had an interesting quotation on the case:
Lt. Gov. Paul Cellucci, serving as acting governor, said:
"The SJC has clearly stated for the first time that educating
the young people of the state is a state responsibility, and
although the local governments can be required to participate, ultimately it is the state government that must ensure that
the young people of Massachusetts are getting an education
that will equip them with the skills to live and compete in
today's society. It's a very major decision." (Wong, Globe)
Lieutenant Governor Cellucci was correct in interpreting McDuffy to give the state primary responsibility for ensuring that all children have an equal opportunity to learn.
"Liacos, writing for the majority of justices, said that the education clause of the Massachusetts Constitution 'is not merely hortatory or aspirational,' but imposes an enforceable duty on the executive and legislative branches to provide an adequate public education to all children. In fact, it is the only duty imposed on the executive and legislative branches, the court said." (Wong, Globe)
In the same article, Alan J. Rom of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights,
who was among a team of lawyers who represented the students in the lawsuit, said:
"This decision is about more than money," said Rom. "The
state cannot comply with this decision by increasing the
size of checks written to the Lynns, Holyokes and Rocklands
and then sit back on its hands.
"The state has to get off its duff, on which it has been
sitting all these years while claiming it's not our
responsibility and it's up to local government.
"Money has to be spent in such a way so the kids get the
education under the criteria outlined by the court."
(Wong, Globe)
The Education Reform Act of 1993
All of which brings us to the Education Reform Act of 1993. There was a clear intent on the part of the crafters of the reform act to comply with the court's ruling. State education commissioner Robert Antonucci pointed out that the learning goals outlined in the education reform bill awaiting Governor Weld's signature mirrored the Supreme Judicial Court's definition of an educated child. (Jordana Hart, Boston Globe, 17 June 1993, p. 47)
Jami McDuffy, the 13-year old lead plaintiff, was from Brockton, and looking back at how Brockton saw the court ruling and the subsequent reform package helps us understand where we are today in terms of school improvement:
"'Our schools do a damn good job with terribly limited resources,' said Rep. Christine E. Canavan (D-Brockton), a member of the Brockton School Committee for the last four years. 'Imagine what they'll do once they get the money they deserve.'"
"Education reform is expected to provide Brockton with an additional $4.4 million in state aid for education next year, and an additional $25.7 million by the year 2000."
- Michael Grunwald,
Boston Globe , 20 June 1993.
South Weekly section, p. 1,
Brockton in fact received over $42 million in state education aid in FY 99, more than the $25.7 million than had been anticipated by Representative Canavan. Let us take a look at where we are seven years after the McDuffy decision and seven years into the latest education reform effort.
There were three primary tools developed in the Education Reform Act of 1993. The first was substantially increased state aid for under-spending districts. The second was a series of curriculum frameworks that would let school districts know what their students were expected to learn. The final piece was the MCAS, a system of assessments that were aligned with curriculum frameworks developed by the state's Department of Education. The MCAS would be a truth teller. Results would enable us to track reform progress for each district each year.
The theory behind the Massachusetts effort was similar to the theory of most other states. Set high standards, evaluate progress towards meeting those standards, and add resources to traditionally underfunded districts to help them meet the standards.
The goals of the Education Reform Act of 1993 can be reduced to two basic elements:
1. Equalize school spending
2. Improve student achievement
The theory behind this effort was that if school districts were given more money, and if there were a way to measure progress, then the districts would spend that money in productive ways that would improve the schools so that students could meet new high standards. The indicator of progress was the MCAS, a series of tests that every district has to administer every year. MCAS scores over time would tell us how we were doing.
Equalizing Spending
The first goal was to equalize spending among districts. As a result of law suits, the courts ordered equalization of education funding, and one task of the Education Reform Act was to use increased state funding to level the spending field. That has been largely accomplished as illustrated by this chart.[2]
This chart shows per-pupil funding between 1994, the first year of education reform, and 1998. The chart is set up in terms of school district demography.
Based on demography, we have six broad clusters of district ranging from Very Advantaged (Wellesley, Wayland, Cohassett) to Very Challenged, the big cities and some of the distressed towns such as Ware and Winchendon. Communities that are more advantaged demographically tend to spend more on educating their kids than do less advantaged communities.
Back in 1994, there were sharp differences in what different kinds of communities were spending. The more demographically advantaged communities spent more. The gap was significant. This chart represents average spending, but there were huge differences between individual communities. Everett spent $4400 per pupil. Weston spent $8900.
By 1998, that gap had narrowed. Very Advantaged Massachusetts still spends a bit more than the poorer communities, but not nearly as much more. (This data reflects FY 98 per-pupil expenditure numbers. FY 00 numbers would narrow the gap even more.) So, the state did what it said it would do under the Education Reform Act of 1993 – it brought systems closer to more of a general spending parity.
Achievement
The second goal - really the major goal of this effort - was to bring up student achievement so that all students would meet high standards. The additional money was supposed to buy better results. This means students in the suburbs and students in the cities would all perform at high levels.
The class of 2003 will be the first group of students who must pass the MCAS. Passing is defined as scoring one point above failing in English Language Arts and Math. The science curriculum frameworks is being re-developed so the class of 2003 will not have to pass a science MCAS test in order to earn a state diploma.
Let us take a look at the latest set of MCAS scores for eighth graders - the class of 2003, the first class that must pass MCAS. This can help us understand where we are in terms of student achievement.
Statewide- that is all eighth graders who took the 1999 MCAS test from all of our communities - 13% of students failed the English language Arts MCAS test. That's good. On the Math test, 40% failed, not as good.
Those general averages don't tell the entire story, however. When you look at test results in terms of different kinds of communities, we can begin to appreciate the true dimension of the challenge for Massachusetts education reformers.
This chart breaks down performance on the 1999 MCAS 8th grade test in terms of performance by school district demography (see Footnote 2). Students in advantaged systems did much better than did students in less advantaged systems. That is no surprise. What is surprising to many observers is the very large differences in the student pass rates of different kinds of communities in Massachusetts.
Kids will have to pass both math and English MCAS tests to graduate with a state diploma in 2003. The limiting factor for success here is Math; Math is a much tougher test for Massachusetts students to pass than is English. So, since students of the Class of 2003 must pass both English and Math, the Math fail rate is the key determinant of who passes MCAS tests.
Statewide 40% of 8th graders failed
Math. For the Very Advantaged
communities, Weston and such, the fail rate was 12%. For the Very Challenged communities - primarily the cities - the
fail rate was 65%. While the Very
Challenged communities only number 25, they are home to about 30% of out
students.
MCAS Progress1998-1999
In the seven years since passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993 we have only had two administrations of the MCAS assessments. I say "only" because I, like many others, assumed that there would be four or five MCAS tests given during the first phase of education reform. But, at day's end, we have two administrations of MCAS upon which to evaluate reform progress since 1993.
The key variable with which we are concerned is progress - how did we do this year as compared to last year? In a perfect world, students would make solid progress each year towards meeting achievement goals. This chart illustrates what happened between 1998 and 1999 in terms of MCAS scores.
Between 1998 and 1999, MCAS scores went up about 13 scaled score for 4th graders points (all three subjects combined), went down about 13 scaled score points for 10th graders, and stayed about the same for 8th graders.
Hancock v. Board of Education
There clearly is more work to be done to move all children up the achievement ladder. There is a new lawsuit on the books, Hancock v. Board of Education, which is asking the court to reconsider education reform after seven years. Brockton again is home to the lead plaintiff. This time the suit alleges that, even after equalizing spending, some systems simply do not provide the same quality education that others do and that this difference is unconstitutional. I will be doing more work on Hancock v. the Board down the road, but it is likely to shape much of the education reform discussion for the next few years.
For more information, please contact the UMass
Donahue
Institute, (617) 287-7055 or contact Robert Gaudet,
(617) 469-6843; rgaudet@rcn.com