A Decade of Learning: Education Reform in Massachusetts
Accomplishments, Challenges & Strategies

Closing Plenary: Summary Transcript

May 1, 2003

Special Address
Governor Mitt Romney, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Moderator
S. Paul Reville, Executive Director, Center for Education Research & Policy at MassINC and Lecturer, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

Panelists
Mara Aspinall, President, Genzyme Pharmaceuticals and Genetics
Sheldon Berman, Superintendent, Hudson Public Schools and President, MA Association of School Superintendents
Rep. Thomas Finneran, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives
Kathleen Kelley, President, Massachusetts Federation of Teachers
Steven Leonard, President, City on a Hill Charter School
James Peyser, Chairman, Board of Education; Chairman, Educational Audit & Management Council
Mark Roosevelt, Vice Chair, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education
Michael Sentance, Secretary's Regional Representative, U.S. Department of Education

SUMMARY: The following is a summary of the main points of the forum. It is not an exact transcript and should not be relied upon. This summary was prepared by State House News Service and is reprinted here with their kind permission.

Since its passage, the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 has resulted in landmark reforms of educational policy and practice. Over the past decade, the Commonwealth has made significant accomplishments and confronted major challenges in implementing this legislation. Massachusetts is now considered a national school reform leader. This session recognizes the anniversary of the Reform Act and reviews our many achievements, while highlighting those areas of policy and practice that still require attention and leadership. Join us for a moderated, fish-bowl discussion with state and community leaders as they share their thoughts on where we have been and where we are going.

Gov. Mitt Romney, House Speaker Thomas Finneran, business and teaching interests and a pair of architects of the Education Reform Act of 1993 last week looked back on ten years of education reform and discussed the challenges ahead.

Participants covered everything from holding adults accountable for student achievement to the implications of the new federal education law, the role of early childhood and higher education, and the future of labor-management relations in public education.

The forum was co-sponsored by MassINC's Center for Education Research & Policy and New Skills for a New Economy Campaign and hosted by FleetBoston Financial.

The following is a summary of the remarks, not a verbatim transcript:

MassINC Co-Chair Peter Meade: I am the co-chair of MassINC, or Gloria Larson's caddy. Our day jobs require us to work in the office. We are seeing an extraordinary job done by the MassINC staff. They have been performing without an executive director for five months. We intend to do something about that in the next month. It's my pleasure to introduce the governor. Everyone knows who Mitt Romney is and most know what he has done. What we try to do at MassINC is to put partisan perspectives outside the door so leaders make informed decisions. Mitt's dad was a three-term governor. His mother was a candidate for U.S. senator.

Peter Meade, Co-Chairman of MassINC, introduces Governor Romney

Governor Mitt Romney: With Mother's Day coming up, I think very much about their contributions. This is a time of celebration of individuals who brought the heart and spirit of education reform. Congratulations. We have work yet to be done. I come not so much to praise what's been done, but what has to be done from here.

We have leveled the playing field to a certain extent to ensure that each kid receives a fair amount of funding. That was an enormous step forward. At the same time, the concept of MCAS, testing individual students. I am sure you can't have a perfect test, yet the concept of testing and how we are doing as educators and as a system was a very powerful concept and is paying huge dividends. This is changing the way teachers are teaching and the ways students are studying and the result of that is very positive. The program also illustrates large holes or gaps or problems or places of opportunity. We can exert effort and focus and accomplish dramatic improvement.

I was disturbed to see 90 percent of the total population pass the MCAS and only 70 percent of our Hispanic students. The overwhelming majority were born in this country and taught in a bilingual system. It underscores that our bilingual system has not been working and we need to move towards English immersion. Fortunately the voters agree. That is something we will continue to fight for.

Another element is a recognition that not all of our school districts are performing equally. In some district 92 percent of kids passed, with percentages much lower than that at first. Other communities are seeing as many as 30 or 40 percent of kids not pass the MCAS. Why is that? What do we do about that? We have districts and schools seeing a very large number of kids not passing. I will continue to fight for my ideas.

First we can't wait until receivership. Under the current structure there is a period of time for changes and improvement and then the state can take over a school. Waiting that long strikes me as too long and too onerous a reaction. I would instead turn to immediate actions in schools that are not succeeding. Look at the successes of schools. We have charter schools that have been highly successful. Their leaders attribute their success to a few things, which form the basis of my thought currently. One is an extensive level of involvement of parents.
Number two, the ability of the principal to actually manage the school, and finally the evaluation of the management itself. Looking at principals and determining whether the principals are up to the jobs that needs to be done. We need full-day kindergarten in all of those districts with high levels of failure and to insist that parents participate in preparation programs. The idea that we take a child and put them through 12 years of education and yet we do not expect the parents to be involved in that process from the very beginning and understanding their investment in the process is one which I would like to change.

Secondly I would like to have an audit of leadership in school districts with high levels of failure. What kind of a job are we doing? Third, I would like to make sure that when we have the right principals in place; they have the ability to manage. Summer school not just for students, but also for teachers if necessary. And in some cases the principals could remove up to 10 percent of faculty. I know a lot of people don't feel it's appropriate to ever have the principal be able to remove faculty. It's an essential element of having our education system recognize that our kids come first.

Peter Meade, John Schneider, Jenny Armini, and Gail Snowden greet Governor Romney

Of course money is part of the equation. I am not convinced spending more money will automatically improve our schools. We are spending more. It has had a positive effect. Our total spending in my budget, wrapping up all spending, we add about $25 million, not a big increase. But we basically hold education level. We put in place an updated formula so we just don't allocate on an old politically and perhaps easy formula, but look at enrollment and adjust based on enrollment. We had some districts in my proposal that got a good deal more money, such as Sandwich. Those adjustments, holding the total constant and adjusting our formula, are important provisions to assure education advancement.

I don't know if the suggestions I have made are the be all and end all. There may be better ideas. I am all ears. We have to put our kids first and our teachers right behind them. I care very deeply about teachers. I want the teachers to be successful and I want our kids to be successful, and I want to make sure that the politics of the union leadership come way, way, way lower. I am convinced that we are at a great point. I spoke with the secretary of education not long ago. He pointed out that what has been done here is in many respects a model for the nation. No Child Left Behind is following principles being championed here. That speaks volumes. But we have to keep that lead. The opportunities revealed, we have to take advantage of and act upon. It is unacceptable for 30 percent of our Hispanic-American kids, 25 percent of African American kids, largely in urban schools, not to be able to meet the basic standard. They have to be able to. That's our charge.

Center for Education Research & Policy, Executive Director, Paul Reville: Let's look at what we have achieved and what we have not done so well. Mainly we will focus on the future. Let's keep this lively, no opening statement or long soliloquies. We are looking for short, pithy responses. Not everyone is obligated to respond to every question. Let's look back first. Mr. Speaker, it's ten years. You have been in leadership all along. You have made a big commitment with the Legislature and honored it.

House Speaker Thomas Finneran: The element of which I am most proud is the political cohesion evidenced since the passage of the act. There was controversy about financing and the relevance and necessity of MCAS. Each element came under attack at different times. Now you have four governors and a number of legislative leaders who really stood up to and faced as one on each of those elements.

The point I share a bit is while we pat ourselves on the back, it's wise to acknowledge how truly lucky we were. We were very, very lucky. [Former Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman] Pat McGovern would shake her head with skepticism and tell us we were crazy to meet the seven-year commitment. She was the most learned person in the room on state financing. Having learned a bit at her knee, I would say we were truly blessed. We expanded health care, did 42 tax cuts, built up the rainy day fund and had surpluses every year.

Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, President, Kathleen Kelley: It's important to celebrate ten years of remarkable accomplishment. You have to mention Jack Rennie. He helped so much with the development of the law. At conferences across the country, Massachusetts is held up as the leading state. The challenge is to keep it a priority and provide stable funding from year to year.

Genzyme Pharmaceuticals and Genetics, President, Mara Aspinall: The other thing to celebrate is the cooperation and fundamental interest of business. It was there in 1993 and before that. This was a rare instance that it was not the political establishment fighting the business world. The business community is still there and interested in education reform. It's good for the kids now and for businesses moving forward.

City on a Hill Charter School, President, Steven Leonard: I celebrated when the law came into existence. It gave me as an educator a target. I have been a little disillusioned by the fact that over the years we have not admitted that we needed more money spent educating the poorest and least able kids in the state. The world has changed. We have upped the ante of what it means to be an educated person. Now we are talking about level funding.

Paul Reville: Let's talk about funding. How important was the funding commitment?

U.S. Department of Education, Regional Representative, Michael Sentance: It was absolutely essential. Studies have shown Massachusetts is one of the few states that provides more funds to low-income students than the average student. That is a remarkable commitment.

Paul Reville: We are going to hear a call to roll back on accountability due to resources.

Board of Education, Chairman, James Peyser: I reject that. In the end, the only reason we are involved is to benefit students. I don't understand how diminishing our resolve about expectations for performance and high levels of accountability for adults does them any good. We have a continuing obligation we need to meet on the funding side. The foundation budget has to be held sacrosanct. That is fulfilled under the administration's budget and the House budget. There are questions about stability of funding that are troubling. We have created expectations that exceeded even those of the authors of reform. The return to earth in the last several months is certainly disruptive. We are fulfilling our commitments to adequacy.

Paul Reville: Superintendent Brooks Baehr, any thoughts on linkage between resources and performance, having served in Wellesley and Lowell?

Lowell Public Schools Superintendent, Karla Brooks Baehr: I was a superintendent in Wellesley when education reform was born. Now I am in Lowell. Kids can't wait. It's the slogan of an organization. The new federal law says so. Schools are being judged by results. We have no choice but to move forward with holding ourselves accountable for high-level results, inventing better ways to do that. Adequate finances are essential but they are not sufficient to meet the challenge. You have to have the will and skill, in terms of learning how to do it and transform schools so there's deep and lasting improvement and not just change.

Paul Reville: Many experts say in the end it has to be about the core of learning. The agenda about improving teachers, what do we need to do?

Kathleen Kelley: We are going to have cuts of between 5 and 25 percent. Local aid and Chapter 70 are being cut. I am going to continue to fight for the revenues needed. Two pieces of reform have not been implemented, early childhood care and education and higher education. Not only is it important to continue the investment, but we need to look at how we are investing. We need to concentrate resources in the classroom. The most important relationship is the teacher and the child. More than 45 percent of teachers will be brand new or in their first five years.

Paul Reville: How can we be most helpful to that 45 percent?

Kathleen Kelley: You have to redirect resources to the school level and look at mentoring programs. We have an enormous attrition rate that we cannot afford. I would budget for what's needed for children first. We have got to get away from all of the minutiae, the change of regulations and the constant change of mandates. Let us do our jobs effectively and judge us on that. I am a first grade teacher first and a union president now. The only reason I am in this business is to make children succeed. That is the only reason any teacher goes into the business. I am not against accountability, never have been. I am interested in accountability that is fair and effective and in making sure we get the resources to do that.

Steven Leonard: The most important person is the person who comes face to face with students. There needs to be Kleenex in my office and professional development. That's money. The state has figured out that professional development has to be more than a two or three-day workshop. Education is much more than an art. It really is a science. There are practices and skills that can be and have to be taught. The technology and the knowledge base people have to know are changing. Teachers are one of the few folks that have to keep up with that. Resources, resources, resources are what help keep teachers in the business.

Paul Reville moderates the closing discussion

Karla Brooks Baehr: Education reform brought a reduction of autonomy in some respects. A lot of that was healthy. There was no core curriculum. Not many districts had a district-wide curriculum plan. Teachers arrived in classrooms on their own, making every decision about what to teach. The reform act put an end to that kind of mindless autonomy and teachers floundering for much too long. There is a basis for teachers to collaborate and learn together, a foundation of content for powerful professional development. We have to hold on to teachers and enable them to continue to learn.

Mara Aspinall: You cannot run a business with an attrition rate of 50 percent. In early childhood, it's 29 percent. I get worried when my turnover hits 15 percent. It's clear how you show the value of an employee - you give them appropriate compensation and appropriate development. We need to have the continuity of care and education. We cannot have 29 percent turnover for kids who are 3, 4, and 5 years old. We need to put the compensation and development into the system that will show the return from that. Teaching becomes a great career. My sister could not make a living being a teacher and walked away from it. The governor spoke about leveling the playing field. We need to level the sand box before some of these kids step on the playing field. There needs to be a respect for the system that starts early.

James Peyser: A great, untapped asset we have to improve the quality of teachers is the higher education institutions. They have been on the sidelines of education reform until this time. We need to go a lot further. There's a lot more we can do. In some ways that's the next great frontier for education reform - pulling higher education in as a partners.

Kathleen Kelley: We are living under a bureaucratic structure that has to change. We have fabulously well educated teachers and we don't use half the capacity. We use consultants and experts. My definition of a consultant is a man who has 101 ways to make love but doesn't know any women. [Much laughter]

Paul Reville: A premise of reform is that all students make progress. We heard about proficiency standard above where we are. What do we need to do to give students what they need?

Speaker Finneran: Early childhood education is the way to do it. Absolutely, positively. This is absolutely positively the most important frontier that lies ahead, with all due respect to Jim's comment about higher ed. Early childhood is a breakthrough opportunity for this state and this nation.

Steven Leonard: It is belief systems across the state and in every house that every kid can meet the standards. We need the support for schools and communities and parents so we can all be invested in the village raising the child. The time we have to effectively educate children is too short.

Paul Reville: So more community involvement and more school time?

Steven Leonard: If I could keep my kids in school all the time except for sleeping, we still wouldn't have enough time. We have not come close to talking about what kids could do if we had more time.

Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Vice Chair, Mark Roosevelt: Too many teachers are still engaged in their practice in a totally isolated way. Professional development, as envisioned under the bill, has been implemented in a far different way. Professional development needs to be integrated every day. Bring in master teachers. That has to happen and it hasn't happened. We need to recognize we need to change labor management relationships. This is a tough one. Too often labor and management are in adversarial postures. Contracts from outdated collective bargaining obstruct student learning. It needs to be addressed. Both sides need to put student learning at the top of their agenda and put behind them some of the impediments to have schools transform their learning environments. Teachers could be included more in the decision-making process, but stop some of the work rules that prohibit management from doing things.

Michael Sentance: The governor talked about preparation of parents. We have not talked about professional development of school board members. The superintendent takes his or her cues from that group. There has always been in the literature on education reform a glaring issue of what that responsibility might be. We need to pay a lot more attention to what they do and how they do it. There are states that have modules required for professional development. This is a great role for the business community to undertake, to help school boards understand how to set policy and not micromanage superintendents. We don't want the state to be so involved in so many schools that it becomes a significant part of education reform. We need local school boards to understand the role and take on the responsibility first.

Paul Reville: And as far as collective bargaining changes that need to be made?

Kathleen Kelley: Collective bargaining can be a very positive force for real change. There have been wonderful examples in Boston. Part of the thing I believe strongly in is management has consistently fought class size initiatives. Obviously there has to be a change in the relationship. The people I feel sorriest for in the whole education reform act is the principals. They are asked to do ten different things other than what they should be doing, which is being in classrooms. We need much more autonomy with principals and teachers, and active parental involvement rather than those furthest away making decisions and telling us we have to be accountable.

Paul Reville: How do we strike the right balance with accountability?

Steven Leonard: We can declare you are accountable or make people feel accountable. I prefer to make everybody feel accountable. To do that, I use data. It says here are the standards everyone is supposed to meet. It says in the schools, you are accountable for this. The principal can say hey, we have a problem. When they think of the answer, they own the problem. The smart principal will walk around and try to catch people doing things right. That's what has to happen school by school. Every place I have had success, teachers and parents were involved and I took any heat. Accountability has become a bad word, as opposed to a productive word.

Paul Reville: What's the appropriate intervention for under-performing schools?

Steven Leonard: If a school isn't working, it's because people there don't know what to do to fix the problem. Mostly likely the state isn't going to put anything in place to make it work. They can help the people there to make it more effective. It boils down to teaching people to identify problems keeping students from achievement and number two, fixing that problem. There is no cookie cutter.

James Peyser: As long as you consider accountability to be punishment, this whole comparison of students and adults fades away. Having standards and graduation requirements is not punishment. It is leverage for improvement and change. I consider it to be a benefit. It is fair to say we have been faster in getting out standards and assessments for students than schools and districts. We now have a data set and are putting together a system not based solely on numbers, but boots on the ground looking at districts and evaluating their performance. In the absence of that direct examination, it's difficult for the state to have credibility. Even with all the data, knowing what is necessary to change performance would be arrogant for me, or others in the state, to say we have figured out. It has to happen on the ground. You cannot mandate or legislate that.

Paul Reville: What is it we ought to be doing to turn around performance?

Mark Roosevelt: This is the toughest issue we face. It's a very hard balancing act. You do have to intervene. It does not mean the state is going to run school systems. The constitution obligates the state to educate its children. Providing resources and a test mechanism is not sufficient. In my view, you have to have enormous flexibility. In many places, let's be honest, there is a deep dysfunctional culture. Some are on cruise control at 10 miles per hour. The state has to figure out what it is going to do.

Karla Brooks Baehr: Intervention is needed. It was mentioned that every child counts. The next decade has to get focused on individual children and value added. If I need to relocate a program from one school to another and it's for gifted youngsters, 19 schools will volunteer. If it's a newcomers program or a development delay program, I won't have many takers. A better measure of accountability is what does a school do about where youngsters begin and end up. MCAS does not let us do that. It's a fundamental flaw. We have some standardized testing of reading and math, looking one year to the next at the same kids. At our middle schools, students made more than a year progress in a year. Now we can go deeper into the data to fund schools and grades where that didn't happen. The accountability has to get shifted in this second stage of education reform to build on every kid counts. [Applause]

Paul Reville: Education reform has always been about improvement. The No Child Left Behind Act is a big factor. It will call for more testing and generate more data. How does this massive federal intervention affect the work we have ten years upstream?

Michael Sentance: Massachusetts is very well prepared and aligned with the act. This will enhance a variety of initiatives. More testing, as contemplated, will allow districts to figure out how to make determinations about teachers and children. In any value-added scheme, you can have children make gains but not reach a proficient level. The federal law will serve to enhance what we are doing and accelerate it in a variety of ways.
Mara Aspinall: We have to start early. All the research says the lack of early stimulation creates a permanent deficit in children. To maximize the effect of all the good thought and money in K through 12, we need to incorporate that system to make sure that 3, 4 and 5 year olds have a good start. Scores increase and students improve.

Paul Reville: As you look forward to the next decade, what do you see as your top priority legislatively and the major political challenge?

Speaker Finneran: The top priority would be early education, trying to expand it. At the end of the third year of budget problems, there is an ambitious proposal that lies ahead of us. The fiscal ambition is not an intimidation as long as we keep our eye on the magnitude of the promise. It should prompt us all forward on that front. My biggest concern is the blend between a bigger federal role with all the tension that already exists between the state and the local.

James Peyser: Overall, our biggest challenge is mastering and tackling reforms put into place. There has been not as much change as the system can stand. Most of the major policy initiatives have been put into place, but in terms of implementation, we have a long way to go. When it comes to intervention, the next great challenge, we need to be opening up the box in terms of the way larger districts are structured.