District/School Administration Administration
Education Reform

First Annual Implementation Report

Introduction

At the core of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 and corresponding federal Goals 2000 legislation is the creation of state-wide educational standards. For the first time, we as a Commonwealth have begun the long task of agreeing on our expectations for four key areas:

• Standards for what all students should know and be able to do;
• Standards for what the state and each municipality should contribute to each schools;
• Standards to evaluate school performance; and
• Standards for the professional performance of teachers and administrators.

These standards are important to the education system of today as well as the future for several reasons. First, the process of developing standards itself is important because it provides an opportunity for all constituencies to come together to discuss and agree on what our common expectations should be. For example, in the nine months that have passed since the Commission on the Common Core of Learning began asking the question: " What should all students know and be able to do?," over 15,000 parents, educators, and community members directly participated in the discussion by meeting with Commission members, testifying at public meetings, or submitting a written statement. An additional 30,000 people participated at the school building and district level.

The second reason why these standards are important is because, once completed, they will provide agreed upon goals to coordinate all state and local programs. For example, before we can put in place a new system of teacher preparation and professional renewal, we must first come to agreement about our expectations for the profession. Whereas past efforts to license teachers focused on "seat time" in classes, the certification requirements of the future will focus more on the ability to teach and on mastery of subject matter.

The final reason why these standards are important, is that they will form the base for a statewide system of accountability. Since the reformed decision-making structure places the authority at the closest possible level to the classroom, the standards are necessary to ensure that practitioners at each level are accountable to specific measurable results. For example, while Education Reform has empowered school-based management by creating school councils to assist principals in managing increased responsibilities, the standards for school performance will allow the school committee and the state to evaluate each school and take action when needed. In many cases this action will be to support and disseminate the progress that the school has made, but in some cases, when a school is not showing improvement towards the standards, the district or the state may take action to change the school's leadership.

The Education Reform Implementation Plan.

In the Fall, the Board of Education approved the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's Implementation Plan for Education Reform and appointed a Board taskforce to oversee the implementation process. Copies of the Plan were distributed to every principal, superintendent, school committee chair, chief municipal officer, Legislator, state agency head and Constitutional Office holder in the state.

The Implementation Plan identified fifty-four distinct activities grouped into five Strategic Goals:

Strategic Goal I: Establish new standards and programs for students that ensure high achievement.

Analysis of Strategic Goal II: Administer a fair and equitable system of school finance.

Analysis of Strategic Goal III: Work with school districts to create a governance structure that encourages innovation and accountability.

Analysis of Strategic Goal IV: Enhance the quality and accountability of all educational personnel.

Analysis of Strategic Goal V: Improve the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's capacity and effectiveness in implementing Education Reform.

As the first year of Education Reform progressed, it became increasingly clear that the state could not devote equal resources to each of the fifty-four activities called for by the Act. The decision was made to focus initial efforts on those activities directly related to the development of standards. Some of the other activities, while still important, were delayed to allow for the standards to be fully developed first.

In each of the first four goals, there are primary activities which relate to development of statewide standards and secondary activities which will become dependent on the standards once they are created (see chart). Since the statute did not always clearly reflect the parallelism of this underlying structure and some of the standards depend on each other, not all of the goals have progressed at a similar pace.

All fifty-four activities that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Executive Office of Education initiating to begin implementing the Education Reform Act are described in detail in the Implementation Plan. The Plan was written as a resource book to assist those involved with Education Reform in participating in its implementation. Each activity in the Plan includes the name and phone number of the activity's staff administrator, a brief description of the administrator's projected approach, and a list of key benchmarks that create a standard to track the activity's progress.

A process was put in place in which every three months the staff of each activity prepared a report on the status of their work. These reports were summarized into Quarterly Implementation Reports which were, in turn, widely distributed to school districts and Legislators. This report serves as the fourth and final quarterly report on the first year Implementation Plan. An end-of-year summary on each of the fifty-four activities is included in Appendix A.

The Structure of this Report.

The First Annual Implementation Report is separated into two sections. The balance of Part One is comprised of five brief analyses of the status of the five strategic goals and a conclusion.

Part Two includes the following information:

Appendix A: An end-of-the-year summary for the 54 implementation activities.

Appendix B: A status report on the 49 statewide groups involved with the implementation

Appendix C: The final draft of the Common Core of Learning approved by the Board of Education on July 14, 1994

Appendix D: A catalogue of all other Education Reform documents

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