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Closing Springfield’s Achievement Gap
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Business leaders, educators, policy makers, and civil rights advocates are increasingly dedicated to fundamental reform to close the achievement gap that limits hope and opportunity for students from historically disadvantaged groups. Substantial gaps in academic achievement between groups of students based on race, ethnicity and similar factors should have no place in American society in the 21st century.
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School-Based Management
Located in the “bicep of Cape Cod,” the Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, is widely considered that area’s economic and municipal hub. Home to a thriving business sector, healthcare facilities, an airport, and a host of other municipal services, many of Cape Cod’s citizens rely upon Barnstable and its seven surrounding villages for economic and cultural prosperity.
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Why MTEL, Not PRAXIS, Will Maintain Teacher Quality
The tests Massachusetts uses for licensing teachers, the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTEL), have been developed for the state by the Evaluation Systems group of Pearson (ESP) under continuously renewed contracts with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Prospective teachers in Massachusetts must take a reading and writing skills test as well as a test of their subject-area knowledge.
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The Know-Nothing Amendments: Barriers to School Choice in Massachusetts
This paper will consider a sad phenomenon in American history—19th-century nativism and in particular, anti-Catholic prejudice—and its lingering and deleterious effects on American primary and secondary education.
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Accountability Overboard
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.
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A Step Backwards: An Analysis of the 21st Century Skills Task Force Report
The purpose of this policy brief is to help DESE set priorities for implementation of the task force's recommendations. It outlines areas where Pioneer believes the task force has crafted useful recommendations and suggests how they might be implemented. It also calls attention to recommendations that we believe are mistaken in their emphasis on skills and pedagogy over academic content, and display a lack of practicality and knowledge of both state policy and local, district-level realities.
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Strengthening Standards-Based Education
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.
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Vocational-Technical Education in Massachusetts
Massachusetts, a pioneer in many ways, has always been at the forefront of vocational technical education. A century ago, the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School opened in Northampton. Smith is still operating today, and is the forerunner to a mode of education that remains vitally important to the state’s workforce. Massachusetts’ Vocational-Technical Education (VTE) is a unique method of academic, career, and extracurricular activity that creates a comprehensive blend of opportunity and advancement.
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Enrollment Trends in Massachusetts
Enrollment in public schools in Massachusetts has fallen by 24,000 students, or 2.5 percent, over the past five years. The total number of students in Massachusetts public schools is now just 936,000. The decline started several years ago, and is likely to accelerate over the next decade. The drop in enrollment is steepest in Western Massachusetts and Cape Cod, and urban districts are losing students faster than suburban districts.
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Differential Pay for Math and Science Teachers
Teachers are critical to attaining world-class levels of performance in mathematics and science. A growing body of research has documented a wide range in the effectiveness of individual teachers with respect to raising student achievement.
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How to Strengthen K-12 Mathematics Education in Massachusetts
This position paper suggests how Massachusetts can strengthen K-12 mathematics education in its schools, drawing chiefly on the findings and recommendations presented in the final report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (henceforth referred to as the Panel). The Panel's report was released in March 2008 after two years of work and deliberation by seventeen researchers and scholars appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
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Scaling Up Educational Innovation
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.
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Testimony to the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight on the Secretary of Education
Charles Chieppo provides testimony to the Joint Committee on…
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Middle School Aspirations and Pathways to College (MAPS)
The Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood prepares its students to enter, succeed in, and graduate from college. A public, grades 6-8 school, Roxbury Prep is founded on the philosophy that all students are entitled to and can benefit from college preparatory programs when: 1) the curriculum is rigorous and well-planned; 2) character, community responsibility, and exposure to life's possibilities are emphasized; and 3) a professional network supports a student's academic, social, and physical well-being.
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MITS Summer Institute
The mission of the Museum Institute for Teaching Science (MITS) is to raise science literacy by improving the quality of elementary and middle school (K-8) teaching in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Science literacy is a critical skill that, if learned at an early age, helps develop critical thinking, reading abilities and computation skills needed to make informed decisions in daily life. America's science literacy, however, has suffered in recent years, posing a serious risk to the nation as the world leader in innovation and its economic future.
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School Choice Without Vouchers: Expanding Education Options Through Tax Credits
The school choice movement has suffered a number of severe setbacks during the last decade. California and Michigan voters rejected school voucher ballot initiatives in 2000, state courts in Colorado and Florida ruled that their voucher programs were unconstitutional, and during negotiations over the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush abandoned provisions that would allow students in failing public schools to switch to private schools. Fifteen years after Milwaukee instituted the nation’s first voucher program, fewer than 35,000 non-special education students receive publicly funded school vouchers nationwide.
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Transforming Urban School Districts through Choice
The Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA), based in Albany, New York, has been implementing a school-choice initiative — the Albany Project — that has created high-quality charter schools to serve more than half of the local public school student population in the state's capital city. FERA believes that a district composed of choice schools can better serve students, parents, and the community than the traditional urban school district system. The Albany Project is demonstrating that the charter school model — freedom from state regulations and education bureaucracy, freedom to innovate, and increased accountability—can better serve all students, not just the small segment of the population fortunate enough to win an enrollment lottery or afford a private school.
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The Electronic Grants System for Education
The Michigan Electronic Grants System (MEGS) is an initiative that permits online education grant applications to feed directly into the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) system. By removing a time-consuming step from the application process, MEGS has improved performance and slashed administrative costs without any additional state funds. A similar program could benefit both the Massachusetts Department of Education (DOE) and the grant applicants who hope to put state funds to work.
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Education Reform in Massachusetts: Aligning District Curricula with State Frameworks
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).
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Education Reform in Massachusetts: Using Student Data to Improve District Performance
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).
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Summary: The Road to a National Curriculum: The Legal Aspects of the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and Conditional Waivers
Despite three federal laws that prohibit the federal government from directing, supervising or controlling elementary and secondary school curricula, programs of instruction and instructional materials, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) has placed the nation on the road to a national curriculum, according to a new Pioneer report written by Robert S. Eitel and Kent D. Talbert, two former counsels general to the USDOE.
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Massachusetts Private School Survey: Gauging Capacity and Interest in Vouchers
This paper takes up the practical question of whether sufficient private school seats would be available for a voucher initiative to get off the ground in Massachusetts. To collect the necessary data, Pioneer Institute designed and conducted a survey of the 524 private, K-12 non-special education schools in Massachusetts. One hundred ninety-four schools serving a total of 50,435 K-12 students responded to the survey, representing 37 percent of all K-12 non-special education private schools in Massachusetts and approximately 43 percent of private school population.
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Urban School Reform: A Case Study
Frederick (Rick) Hess, an education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, led a team of experts in evaluating a seven-year comprehensive reform of the San Diego school system. He presented the team’s findings at Pioneer Forum June 9, 2005. The Forum also included remarks by Nonie Lesaux, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the San Diego review team members, and Thomas Payzant, Boston schools superintendent, who once served in the same capacity in San Diego. Excerpts of all three participants’ remarks follow.
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Massachusetts Collaboratives: Making the Most of Education Dollars
This paper proposes specific policy changes that could result in a more efficient, effective, and equitable system of public education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although collaboratives are local organizations focused on meeting local needs in a cost-effective manner, the state needs to take a leadership role in fostering their development and utilization.
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Parents, Choice, and Some Foundations for Education Reform in Massachusetts
Drawing from a telephone survey of 1,000 public school parents in the ten largest school districts in Massachusetts, this paper critically examines public school parents’ knowledge of and interest in alternative schooling options.
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Civic Education: Readying Massachusetts’ Next Generation of Citizens
This paper reports on the state of civic education in Massachusetts, focusing particularly on the performance of charter schools in preparing their students for responsible citizenship. Data were collected in an extensive, original survey project that included schools from across the entire state.
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Standards-based education reform in Massachusetts
"Standards-based education reform in Massachusetts" was provided in February 2001.
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School vouchers and expanded parental choice in education
School vouchers and expanded parental choice in education was provided in October 2000.