For Aristotle, virtues required wisdom, the ability to find balance between extremes. So, famously, he noted that courage was neither cowardice nor charging ahead with a devil-may-care attitude. Regulations require that kind of balance even in a virtual age. Virtual learning is a huge untapped opportunity in Massachusetts. Some people consider its potential to individualize instruction and address some portion of the ever-present classroom problem of kids learning at different paces as game-changing. The conversation sometimes feels like the conversation on stem cell research–perhaps overblown, perhaps not. The fact is we are early in finding out. The issue of the pace at which kids learn is an important one. Many kids are bored because teachers have to adjust lessons to […]

Sometimes failure is not just in a handful of schools, but in the majority of a district’s schools. In those cases, a broader application of key principles of the 1993 Reform Act (empowering principals and teachers, clear measurement of student performance and accountability for performance, and competition for students) is needed. One way to do that is to pilot a fully decentralized network of schools that are given charter flexibility at the school level. Angus McBeath, the former superintendent of the Edmonton Public School System, took a school system 30 percent larger than Boston’s and gave district schools the same freedoms and accountability that charters have. The so-called “Edmonton model” empowers principals, teachers and parents by decentralizing budgets to the […]

Massachusetts’ students have made impressive gains in math and science over the past decade and a half. Consider that in 1992 Massachusetts stood below national averages on the SAT. Fast forward to this past year, when the state ranked among the highest performing nations on the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). In fact, on the TIMSS, Massachusetts 4th graders ranked second and third worldwide in science and mathematics, respectively. Our 8th graders tied for first in science and ranked sixth in math. But the 2007 TIMSS identified areas of particular weakness. Over 40 percent of 4th graders in Singapore were advanced in mathematics, compared to only 22 percent in Massachusetts. A similar pattern holds for 4th grade […]

When you spend $9 billion a year on schools, accountability must go beyond student performance. We must also manage money without fraud or waste, maintain our buildings, and fully implement state policies. The Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA) was an independent district and school audit agency established by the Legislature in 2000 as part of the accountability system required by MERA. From 2002 to 2006, EQA evaluated more than 175 school districts, most of which were urban districts, which spent about half of total education dollars in the state. Opposition from teachers’ unions and urban superintendents led to EQA’s closure in spring 2008. A nascent accountability office designed to replace EQA delivered its first reports in 2009, and […]

In a recent blog, I noted how bloated the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has gotten, even as the state cuts local aid to schools. The DESE has grown diffuse, has protected its personnel and added highly compensated deputy and associate commissioner positions, and shared in none of the cuts made to actual programs (METCO, Special Education funding, etc.) and schools. It’s important to send as much money of our education budget to schools (and frankly to get superintendents to do the same). It is just as critical to ensure that the state office is supportive of reform and not simply a compliance office. The current state of play is this: We’ve created a web of nominal education […]