Education Benchmarks

The Education Reform Act of 1993 provides an opportunity to transform our schools. The Act can be understood in terms of two basic changes it brought about:

• Sharply increasing the amount of state aid targeted at disadvantaged, low-spending communities; and

• The establishment of statewide academic performance standards (and curriculum frameworks) and an assessment device to measure progress towards meeting those standards (the MCAS).

The desired outcome of all of this is improved student achievement. The annual MCAS statewide assessments are one way to gauge changes in student performance over time. MCAS is only given to a few grades (currently 4, 8 and 10 with changes on the way), and it cannot replace local assessments. Districts concerned about helping all children learn should use other tests to supplement MCAS results. For example, a district that employs the Stanford 9 for its local assessments should set up a process to track student progress year-to-year.

Seven years into the endeavor, there has been relatively little research done on the impact of the current education reform effort. We do have some information most of which is from First Findings (cited below):

• We know that billions of dollars in new state school aid has been distributed. Some cite a figure of $6 billion; others cite a lower number, generally around $3 billion. (The explanation for the different numbers reflects how one calculates the increased aid. There has been over $6 billion in new state aid since 1993, but about half of that would have been distributed anyway. The additional $3 billion or so is new funding that was mandated by the Education Reform Act of 1993.)

• School districts have attained the target of 100% of their foundation budgets on schedule. The new funding was intended to give each district a basic foundation level of resources. That has happened. (See First Findings: The Summative Report of the Educational Management Audit Board, Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, March 2000.)

• Most districts have hired additional teachers, and teacher salaries are up. First Findings found that for the subset of districts considered, teacher salaries rose about 6% faster than inflation. The increases for veteran teachers was more, with real salaries growing by roughly 12%. (See An Update on School Reform in Massachusetts by Thomas J. Kane, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, which was done in conjunction with First Findings.)

On the other side of the ledger:

• Costs related to special education services absorb a disproportionate amount of the new financial resources.

• Most districts have not utilized governance changes establishing performance-based contracts for principals.

• While nearly all school districts have created school improvement plans, many of these plans do not address student performance or test results.

• There is so far little correlation between the increased investment in the classroom as measured by per-pupil net school spending and achievement.

The message of First Findings was that, while some changes have occurred, most school cultures and school systems have not fundamentally reorganized themselves to boost student achievement. The post-reform education delivery system in Massachusetts is essentially the same as it was pre-reform. Since March 2000, when First Findings came out, we have had another MCAS administration that shows relatively little change from the first two administrations. This past summer, Boston and Malden made an effort to change teacher contracts to make schools more effective in teaching students. In both cases, the teacher unions essentially rebuffed the reform efforts. Indeed, the rallying cry at contract negotiation time was that proposed changes were "anti-teacher" and showed "a lack of respect." Thus, as the new century begins with the challenge of doing a better job of educating all children, the work rules, which govern virtually every aspect of how schools are operated in Malden and Boston and other districts, are basically unchanged from what they have been for many years.

Public policy is written in bold strokes. Of necessity, a law or a program must be drawn broadly enough to cover all contingencies. Once a public initiative is in operation, however, the game may change. Seven years after passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993, I would suggest that several points have emerged.

• Education reform is not a singular enterprise. Given the vast diversity of the Massachusetts educational community, a school improvement plan in a town like Natick must be quite different from a plan in a city such as Taunton. Most of our students in middle-class and advantaged districts are already within relatively easy distance of passing MCAS. Most of our students in demographically challenged urban communities are not. The remedy for the cities will be quite different from the prescription for the towns.

It is clear that the cities need a more robust education reform effort. Seven years and three billion dollars into this effort, the general reform tools provided by the Education Reform Act of 1993 do not appear to be strong enough to make a difference to the educational success of urban youth.

The challenge in Middle Massachusetts and Advantaged Massachusetts is to move students up to Proficient and Advanced. That is a far different quest than providing a young person in Boston or Worcester with the basic literacy and math tools needed to have a good chance for success in life

• We do not know how well we are doing. There is a remarkable lack of evaluation of education reform in Massachusetts. Less than one-quarter of one percent of state education reform funding has been used to evaluate how well we are spending the other 99.75% of the money. The state Department of Education recently developed School Performance Rating Reports. The Massachusetts Education Reform Review Commission has done some thoughtful work. The Department of Revenue's Education Management Accountability Board has done the most extensive reports. The best single effort is First Findings (cited above), but that enterprise was never intended to be a definitive evaluation of the current school improvement effort. It is not productive to point fingers about which agency should have done this or that. What is needed is to jump-start a careful and sustained analysis of education reform in Massachusetts.

• We need to improve the schools. With a booming business sector for most of the late 1990s, some of the structural shortcomings of the Massachusetts economy may have been hidden. Living in Massachusetts is very expensive; the climate is very cold. The Commonwealth does not attract many people from out-of-state into the work force. For Massachusetts to sustain its economic viability, we will have to find a way to find productive employees in-state. Thousands of these potential workers now attend urban schools that, as of today, are not preparing them for success in life or in the job market. If we are to continue to set the standard for economic success, then we must reorganize urban schools to be effective in educating urban youth.

After three years of MCAS, we do see slow progress. A pace of incremental change that may be acceptable in a middle-class district, where just about everyone passes MCAS now, is not good enough for a system with high percentages of students who do not possess basic skills and who fail MCAS.

• MCAS did not create the reality of thousands of students who cannot read, write, or do math at a basic level. MCAS has only identified the underlying reality that many students in many districts are awarded a high school diploma without possessing the basic skills expected of a high school graduate. MCAS is unique in Massachusetts educational history in that it is the first program that tests all systems every year. Pre-MCAS, each school system could choose its own assessment tool and declare victory based on the results. As a Boston public school parent in the 1980s, I was routinely assured that students were learning. As a Massachusetts citizen of the 1990s with access to MCAS data, I know that those statements may have been a tad inaccurate. MCAS has leveled the playing field in terms of assessments. We now know how well our cities are doing relative to our middle class towns relative to our advantaged communities.

MCAS is a truth-teller of sorts in that it assesses all systems every year using the same scoreboard and rules. That is a unique contribution to our understanding of how well our schools are doing. People of good faith and sincere heart can debate various aspects of MCAS, but in the absence of a means to evaluate what our students actually know, schools and districts can declare themselves successful in educating students regardless of the objective reality. It may be that, had MCAS been in place ten or twenty years ago, we would not have seen the routine social promotion that has placed thousands of high school students in situations where it will be very difficult for them to demonstrate any mastery of skills.

This study captures the role that demography plays in student performance on the MCAS. While demography is not destiny, it does establish a tendency. If we overlook the tendency of disadvantaged districts to produce low scores, then we will continue to consign the children of those districts to a future of unfulfilled potential. After seven years of education reform, demography still plays too large a role in the school performance of our children. In Massachusetts in 2001, where you happen to live has more to do with your success in school than any other factor.