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By Dr. Robert D. Gaudet, Senior
Research Analyst,
Donahue Institute, University of 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. (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)
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