End of an era? Something is badly amiss with education in Massachusetts

First appeared in Contrarian Boston 10.9.24

By David Mancuso

The Grand Bargain of 1993 education reform appears to be unraveling in Massachusetts.?The system is precipitously backsliding away from the standards and accountability that once made Massachusetts the envy of other states.

The latest MCAS scores are miserable, pandemic related learning losses persist four and a half years later, and more than half of Massachusetts third graders can’t read proficiently.

Pouring fuel on the fire is the state’s largest teachers’ union as they blithely spend $10 million or more on a campaign awash in lies and misrepresentations to gut the MCAS as the state’s high school graduation requirement - the only tool the state has to determine our students’ learning competence before they enter adulthood.

Courage from the Legislature is missing. The MTA’s dark cloud of political power rains typhoons of gloom on any attempt at standards and accountability, while school committees and superintendents bumble with local control, and teachers struggle without proper training or support, with many self-funding supplies for their classrooms each school year, despite billions of dollars being poured into the system.

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education has said the state is on the precipice of an “educational crisis that threatens the state’s economic competitiveness and the futures of students and families in our state.”

That seems about right, though many still haven’t woken up to the facts.

According to a Boston Globe summary of the most recent MCAS, "The new data also show that?22 percent of 10th-graders?did not score high enough on the tests to graduate, up from 18 percent in the prior year.”

Fortunately, students get several more chances to take the MCAS to show they’ve learned what they should know in 10th grade by the time they become seniors heading to the workforce or college.

When the early literacy crisis rose to the surface in September of 2023, Katherine Craven, Chair of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education raised the alarm saying, “The house is on fire in Massachusetts, and we need to fix it.”

Fast forward a year: districts still resist using proven reading instruction methods. They are being enabled by the Legislature, which has balked at that mandating schools use methods that have proven to achieve the literacy expected by third grade.

Instead of addressing the situation head-on, Beacon Hill wrote a $20 million check for districts to amend their ways with no obligation to do so, or to prove that they did until we see the next MCAS results. ?

Meanwhile, research on students learning recovery from the pandemic showed that “Massachusetts saw the largest increase in the poor-non-poor achievement gap between 2019 and 2023 of any of the states studied.” ?

Alabama has returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois have done so in reading. Massachusetts? Not so much.

Education experts advised state education and district leaders to use the state’s $2.8 billion in federal education recovery funding to add “instruction time through summer school and tutoring.”?

Instead, former Education Commissioner Jeff Riley implemented a convoluted seven- year-long recovery plan pretty much letting districts do whatever they wanted.

So, here we are, behind Alabama.

Nobody in charge at the state can say which curriculum schools are using in their attempt to meet state frameworks.

Budgeting methods make it impossible to know how much money is impacting student learning, versus being sucked up by the education industrial complex.

Legislators and state education officials shiver at the thought of enforcing district oversight, despite their authority and the evidence that should inspire them to do so.

Though talking about MCAS scores, Associate Commissioner of Education Rob Curtin could have been talking about the question begged by the entire system when he said, “We’re not asking questions about things that weren’t expected to be taught.”

In other words, why aren’t students learning what we expect them to learn? Good question, Rob. Another one might be, does anybody care to fix what’s broken?

A “No” vote on Question 2 would be a good place to start.