Lowell Sun: Taking Huck Finn Out of Curriculum a Classic Disaster
With its adoption of Common Core, Massachusetts has chosen to hit the reset button on nearly two decades of unparalleled student achievement.
Jamie Gass is Pioneer Institute’s Director of the Center for School Reform. At Pioneer, he has framed, commissioned, and managed over 100 research papers and numerous policy events on K-12 education reform topics, including several with Pulitzer Prize-winning historians. Jamie has more than two decades of experience in public administration and education reform at the state, municipal, and school district levels. Previously, he worked at the Massachusetts Office of Educational Quality and Accountability as Senior Policy Analyst-Technical Writer and in the state budget office under two Massachusetts governors. In the 1990s, Jamie worked for the Dean of the Boston University School of Education/Boston University Management Team in its historic partnership with the Chelsea Public Schools. He has appeared on various Boston media outlets, as well as talk radio shows throughout the country. He has been quoted in Bloomberg/Businessweek, The Economist, Education Week, and The Boston Globe, and his op-eds are regularly published in New England newspapers, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Hechinger Report, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, Education Next, and City Journal. He’s won school reform awards in Massachusetts and Florida for his work on U.S. History/civic education, vocational-technical schools, and digital learning. Jamie speaks on academic standards, school choice options, and school accountability at events across the country.
With its adoption of Common Core, Massachusetts has chosen to hit the reset button on nearly two decades of unparalleled student achievement.
Because of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to adopt weaker national standards known as “Common Core,” students will learn less than half as much classic literature and poetry than they did under Massachusetts’ previous standards.
But with its adoption of Common Core, Massachusetts has chosen to hit the reset button on nearly two decades of unparalleled student achievement.
But with its adoption of Common Core, Massachusetts has chosen to hit the reset button on nearly two decades of unparalleled student achievement.
The so-called Common Core State Standards in English and math were almost entirely developed inside the Beltway by a small group of D.C.-based education trade organizations.
“Testimony to the Joint Education Committee” was provided in May 2011.
Special interest groups opposed to charter schools and highstakes testing have hijacked the state’s once-independent board of education and stand poised to water down the MCAS tests and the accountability system they support.
The purpose of Pioneer’s policy brief is to spell out the successful standards-based reforms that have made Massachusetts the highest performing K-12 state in the country, and to suggest how the BESE and the 21st Century Skills Task Force can strengthen the state’s nationally recognized curriculum frameworks, student assessments, educator licensure regulations, and teacher subject area tests.
Considering this record of low student achievement and the deep pockets of chronic under-performance, the Patrick Administration’s Readiness Project and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) are right to call for a long, hard look at the state’s achievement gaps, education accountability, targeted assistance, and policymaking.
This study, produced by Pioneer Institute’s Center for School Reform, analyzes school district performance assessment data reported by the Massachusetts Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA). This agency audits school districts regularly to evaluate their progress in implementing the reforms articulated by the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 (MERA).
This study, produced by Pioneer Institute’s Center for School Reform, analyzes school district performance assessment data reported by the Massachusetts Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA). This agency regularly audits school districts to evaluate their progress in implementing the reforms articulated by the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 (MERA).