Education Week - April 2, 2014 - 13

Mass. Urged
To Not Grow
Complacent
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
Barber, a former top adviser to the
British government on education
issues and a champion for the
sharing of ideas on school policy
across countries.
Massachusetts has consistently
ranked at or near the top for state
scores on the National Assessment
of Educational Progress, and it has
performed well as an individual state
taking part in international tests,
including the Program for International
Student Assessment, or PISA.
Yet the alliance sees recent evidence
of stagnation in Massachusetts' school
performance. "We have grown complacent
about public education and have
failed to recognize the risk that without
significant changes our schools
will increasingly fall behind those of
our global competitors," warns Henry
Dinger, the chairman of the board for
the alliance, in a statement accompanying
the report.
As evidence, the alliance notes that
despite Massachusetts' sterling status
on NAEP, its performance in 4th grade
reading slipped over the most recent
two-year period, and its gains in that
grade and subject over the past decade
on the test placed it in the middle of
the country, not at the top.
The alliance also points to a survey,
released to coincide with the report,
that found that 69 percent of business
leaders in the state said it was somewhat
or very difficult to find people
with the skills needed to fill jobs.
The authors of the report aren't trying
to suggest that Massachusetts'
schools are on the verge of decline, Mr.
Barber said in an interview. Academically,
"this is the best state in America,"
he said. The goal, he said, is to ask
"what would it be like for Massachusetts
to be the best state in the world?"
'Mandate Greatness'
Mr. Barber, who co-authored the
report with Simon Day, another
former British government official,
believes that the state will benefit
if it does a good job implementing
the common-core standards, which
Massachusetts adopted in 2010. But
a central argument in the report is
that the state needs to move beyond
that work and press to make ambitious
changes in how schools are run
and funded, teacher preparation, and
other areas.
Mr. Barber described the challenge
for the state as, "you can mandate
adequacy, but you can't mandate
greatness." To create greatness in the
education system, "the state's role
has to change" and its policymakers
have to become more daring, he said.
The report calls for Massachusetts
to make changes that touch many
areas of education policy, including:
*Giving more autonomy to different
types of individual schools, regardless
of academic-performance level.
Massachusetts currently allows
this primarily in schools required to
make academic turnarounds, where
school leaders can override pieces of
collective-bargaining agreements to
make changes in curriculum, budgets,
and staffing, in exchange for
setting goals for improvement;
*Overhauling the state's school
funding system to make it more
transparent, and to ensure that
money is "weighted" to provide the
greatest resources to schools with
the greatest needs, such as those
with large numbers of impoverished
students or English-language learners.
Massachusetts' state funding is
weighted this way, but that weighting
occurs inconsistently at the
school level, the authors say;
*Changing teacher licensure by raising
the bar for what it takes for teachers
to obtain a credential-but only
after evaluating their performance
in the classroom for a few years. The
state should also take steps to create
professional ladders that recognize
"master" and "advanced" teachers, the
authors say; and
*Establishing new opportunities to
innovate through the use of educational
technology approaches such as
blended learning, interactive social
media lessons, adaptive learning
and assessment platforms, digital
gaming, the use of open educational
resources, and the creation of an "accelerated
learning challenge" grant
competition for schools to fuel innovation
in districts.
School autonomy, and tough standards
for entering the teacher profession,
are often cited as characteristics
of top-performing nations such as
Finland and South Korea. But some
education experts question those
comparisons, saying there is no way
to accurately single out the primary
reasons for any country's academic
success, and it is difficult to apply the
lessons from relatively small countries
with more centralized education systems
to a U.S. system run largely by
state and local governments.
Mr. Barber now works for Pearson,
a worldwide commercial provider of
school resources, many of which are
"
smart for states like Massachusetts
to study the K-12 practices of foreign
countries-as long as they approach
those lessons cautiously. But Mr. Phillips,
who has studied comparisons
of U.S. states' and other countries'
academic standing extensively, also
said he saw no real signs of academic
stagnation in Massachusetts based
on the NAEP and PISA results, despite
the alliance's claims.
This is really good performance [for
Massachusetts]. You should always worry about
complacency, but I don't see evidence of it."
GARY PHILLIPS
Vice President, American Institutes for Research
technology based. The alliance says
Mr. Barber was working in his "personal
capacity" in writing the report,
and the author told Education Week
that his work was "totally independent"
of Pearson. The ideas in the
report are broad, and drew from an
array of education experts, he added,
and are not connected with the company,
which made no attempt to influence
the document's content.
Foreign Competition
Gary Phillips, a vice president for
the American Institutes for Research,
a Washington-based research and
evaluation organization, said it is
"This is really good performance,"
Mr. Phillips said of the state. "You
should always worry about complacency,
but I don't see evidence of it."
Overall, he said, states should
worry that they "don't fall asleep,"
and should keep a close eye on what
their domestic and foreign competitors
are doing. In any state, he added, effective
policy changes are more likely
to occur when many players-including
employers, parents, students, and
teachers' unions-are involved.
Linda Noonan, the executive direc-
tor of the business alliance, argued
that the report is evenhanded in
describing, but not overstating, the
risks of academic slippage in Mas-
sachusetts. She said its overall tone
mirrors what her business group
hears from employers across the
state, who worry about not being able
to find enough workers to fill jobs.
Massachusetts Commissioner of
Education Mitchell D. Chester told
Education Week that he welcomed
the report, and that several of its
conclusions were on point, or at least
worth considering.
Its argument in favor of school autonomy,
for instance, makes sense,
he said. While the state grants significant
operational and academic
leeway to struggling school systems,
as is now the case in the Lawrence,
Mass., district, it's "the exception,
not the rule," he said.
The report also rightly calls for
more transparency in the state's
funding system, he added, so that it
is clearer how much money is flowing
to schools with the greatest needs.
Other recommendations in the
report, however, seem unlikely to
be turned into policy anytime soon.
For instance, the authors call for a
"grand bargain" between the state
and teachers' unions covering a range
of salary and workforce issues across
all districts.
Mr. Chester described a statewide
bargaining agreement as a "very
intriguing notion," but probably a
"long shot."
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link to
"The New Opportunity to Lead:
A Vision for Education in
Massachusetts in the Next 20 Years."
www.edweek.org/links
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Education Week - April 2, 2014

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