Lessons from a Successful State

Recently, we observed that despite having similar demographics to Connecticut - Massachusetts has both a narrower achievement gap and a low-income population that outperforms Connecticut’s on some key national assessments. Furthermore, Massachusetts’ non low-income students rank first in the nation on many national assessments. So, how has Massachusetts managed to achieve these enviable gains in student performance for both low-income and non low-income students?

What Massachusetts Has Been Doing Right:

In 1993, Massachusetts passed an Education Reform Act, a major reform package, the implementation of which focused on (amongst other things):

• improving educator quality by developing professional expectations for teachers and school leaders, and linking these expectations to recertification;
• increasing state assistance in turning around “underperforming schools”, and increased intervention authority for “chronically underperforming schools”; and
• increasing funding for the neediest schools by creating a “foundation budget”, which defined adequate funding for districts based on standards about how a school should function; this budget rose and fell with changes in the student population, and with percentages of low-income students. The foundation budget was also gradually increased over time, and had almost doubled by 2007.