Lessons from a Leading State: Massachusetts

In the early 1990s, Michigan and Massachusetts performed more similarly on national assessments. Within a few years, their paths began to diverge. Now, Massachusetts consistently leads the country in academic achievement, while Michigan regularly falls below the national average.

In 1993, sixteen students, each living in different areas of the state, sued the state of Massachusetts over its inequitable school funding formula. The court agreed with the lawsuit and Massachusetts’ school funding system was ruled to be unconstitutional due to serious funding disparities.

In response to the ruling, the governor signed the Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) into law. The act established a new funding formula which provided greater funding for the schools that needed it most. Other areas of reform included implementing college- and career-ready expectations and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests for all students, prioritizing effective teaching and school leadership, building support for all teachers, and a charter schools’ grand bargain.

“We noticed the difference right away,” said Dianne Kelly, the superintendent of Revere Public Schools, north of Boston, where nearly 80 percent of students were from low-income families. Additional funding in that district was spent on hiring and retaining effective teachers and supporting them with better training.

MERA required the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to adopt new Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. The first frameworks – including Math – were adopted in 1996.

The governor issued an Executive Order to create the Educational Management Accountability Board. The board was formed to monitor the effectiveness of the MERA reforms, marking a step toward greater transparency and accountability. Duties included the examination of how well districts used additional funding generated through MERA. It was later turned into the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.

In less than a decade, Massachusetts had doubled its school aid funding. At the turn of the century, Massachusetts was one of only a handful of states where school districts with higher concentrations of poverty spent more on their students than wealthier districts. With the additional funding, school districts provided literacy and math interventions, before- and after-school academic support, and online tutoring.

A new school-level evaluation process was introduced, including panel reviews to assess school performance.

The Massachusetts Board of Education 2002 Annual Report stated that through the school-level evaluation process created two years earlier, the Department, “completed a record number of panel reviews in February and March 2002.” This resulted in six schools being labeled as “under-performing.”

School funding had been steadily increasing for about a decade — from 1993 to 2003, by around $5 million a year. “Former Revere superintendent Paul Dakin says those steady funding increases didn’t just support teachers but also new classes and standards,” according to reporting.

By 2005, Massachusetts ranked number one in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Throughout the following years, Black students and students from low-income backgrounds consistently scored in the top five in both subjects. In contrast, Michigan was ranked 30^th in fourth grade reading and 33^rd in eighth grade math in 2005, with its Black students and students from low-income backgrounds scoring in the bottom 20 states for each subject. However, income and race-based achievement gaps persisted in Massachusetts during this time.

Massachusetts joined the Common Core State Standards Initiative, along with 45 other states in an effort to standardize expectations for what students learn across the country.

Massachusetts adopted The Achievement Gap Act of 2010, which successfully positioned the state to receive funding through federal Race to the Top Incentives. This moment in time also brought about better alignment and capacity in Massachusetts’ accountability system with federal requirements.

All school districts had implemented the Common Core standards. The state fully aligned its curriculum frameworks to Common Core for preschools, K-12 school districts and educator preparation programs. Massachusetts also increased professional development for teachers and provided aligned instructional materials. And the state implemented training for thousands of educators on the Common Core standards. Massachusetts joined other states to develop a rubric to help educators determine the quality, rigor, and alignment of their lessons and units to Common Core standards in ELA and math.

State leaders established teacher performance standards, including annual evaluations of teachers and administrators. Educator evaluations were based on student learning growth and achievement scores, observations, and other evidence, such as student surveys.

By 2012, Massachusetts was spending about 30% more per pupil than Michigan, and was also one of the 17 states spending more on districts with higher concentrations of poverty than on wealthier districts.

A report, Building on 20 Years of Massachusetts Education Reform, prepared for the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education highlighted current issues and looked to the future of Massachusetts’ systemic reforms, stating “the journey that Massachusetts began over two decades ago with the adoption of the Education Reform Act of 1993 has not ended.” The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was tasked with aligning and organizing itself “to deliver innovative and effective supports to local schools and districts that commonly don’t have the expertise, administrative capacity, or opportunity to respond effectively to persistent achievement gaps among the students they serve.”

The state Foundation Budget Review Commission found that Massachusetts was underfunding schools due largely to outdated formulas and an incorrect estimation of the costs of healthcare and special education. The commission also made recommendations for funding for English Learners and students from low-income backgrounds. Recommendations for 2016 were estimated to include an increase in spending of $568 million.

Massachusetts began holding teacher preparation programs accountable for the performance of teachers they graduate.

The 2018 Funding Gaps report from The Education Trust found that Massachusetts was only “neutral” in their equitable funding for students from low-income backgrounds. This meant that the state only allocated slightly more funding to these students in the highest poverty districts than students in the wealthiest districts.

Already the top state in the nation for overall academic performance, Massachusetts’ leaders recognized that these average results were hiding deep inequities for students of color and students from lower-income households. To address these stubborn opportunity and achievement gaps state leaders passed the landmark Student Opportunity Act in 2019. The funding model built into this legislation serves as a gold standard for equity in school funding, as it recognizes that the experience of living and learning in poverty is not the same in all locations.

Over six years, Massachusetts planned to phase in weights of 40% – 101% for students who live in concentrated poverty. The weight applied to the wealthiest districts in Massachusetts under the Student Opportunity Act is more than three times the rate that students in the poorest communities receive in Michigan during the same period.

Due to pandemic delays, Massachusetts began implementation of the Student Opportunity Act this year. In the first year of implementation, the Student Opportunity Act accounted for an additional $355 million in the state education budget with the expectation that full funding would require at least an additional $1.5 billion annually.

Massachusetts’ legacy of educational investment withstood the strains of a global pandemic. Despite the significant challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts’ decades-long history of strong support for teachers and students ensured that it retained its position as the number one education state in the country for both reading and math on the 2022 NAEP assessment, while Michigan, with its lackluster investments ranked 42^nd in fourth grade reading and 26th in eighth grade math.