Mitchell Chester

BOSTON – Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, who later this year will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the board) about whether to replace MCAS tests with those developed by the Partnership for the...

This past week, at the urging of state K-12 education commissioner Mitch Chester, Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts Board of Education took a vote against Massachusetts’ nation-leading and achievement gap-closing charter schools. The vote reminds us once again how intellectually warped so much of...

Today, at the recommendation of Commissioner Mitchell Chester, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted unanimously in favor of a regulatory policy that will alter the way that the state determines and measures school district performance, limiting charter public school...

Twenty years after the passage of the landmark Massachusetts education reform law, how did the Bay State get to a place where it is unclear whether the Commonwealth’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is abiding by federal and state law...

In the letter below, Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios raises important questions about academic accountability and legality with regard to Massachusetts’ administration of student assessments. New PARCC tests related to Common Core national standards are being field-tested in Massachusetts this year,...