WITH HIS PROPOSAL TO PUMP as much as $1 billion a year more into school programs, Gov. Deval Patrick says he wants to make good on the promise of providing all young people in the state with an education foundation to succeed in life. The ambitious spending plan, which Patrick unveiled this week, would dramatically increase state funding for early childhood education, allow for a longer school day for middle school students in low-income communities, and boost spending for higher education to make the state’s public colleges and universities more affordable.
The announcement comes on the heels of the departure of Patrick’s longtime education secretary, Paul Reville, who left office last week to accept a position at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Reville served in the administration, in one capacity or another, starting with the governor’s education transition team in 2006 before Patrick even took office. He won’t be around for the battle for new revenue or implementation of the education expansion, if some or all of Patrick’s plans go through. But he played a pivotal role during his four-and-half year tenure in crafting the education vision that Patrick now hopes to see built out.
“I think we’ve kept the flame alive during difficult times and added dimensions and features to our education system that build in good ways on the education reform of 1993, which created the platform for Massachusetts to lead the nation,” Reville said in an interview last Friday, his final full day in state government.
Reville was the founding executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, the organization that led the push for the 1993 reform law. He says it’s crucial to maintain the state’s commitment to the standards-based curriculum and accountability measurements like MCAS that ed reform introduced. But Reville says the Patrick administration has tried to expand the conception of what it will to take to get all students to proficiency, as envisioned by reforms like the 1993 state law or the federal No Child Left Behind Law that followed it. “I think what was more radical in what we’ve envisioned – and we’ve stuck with it – is the idea that we’ve got to mitigate those factors in the lives of children outside of school that get in the way of them being successful in school,” said Reville.
Twenty years after the introduction of new standards and accountability, educational attainment still correlates with socioeconomic status, Reville said. “The richer you are, the better you do, on average,” he said. “If we just do the schooling piece alone, it’s not enough, on average, to overcome the disadvantages of poverty.”
The solution, he says, is to ensure that students growing up in poverty have access to the full range of social services needed to address issues that impede their ability to succeed in school. It means greater access to early childhood education, since mounting evidence shows there are already big gaps in language acquisition between children when they arrive in kindergarten, and that those gaps persist or even widen over time. It also means access to arts, music, and the other enrichment activities that students from middle-class families get during after-school hours.
“We’re arguing for a broader conception of what it takes to close the achievement gap, and for a broader conception of schooling,” said Reville.
Reville’s comments echo many of those heard in a debate that has drawn educators nationally into two big camps. One, which Reville more closely aligns with, has emphasized the impact of poverty and out-of-school factors on learning and the need for a broader array of “wrap-around” services for poor children in order for them to succeed in school. The other camp argues that a muscular set of school-based reforms can go a long way toward closing achievement gaps. Its adherents have emphasized strong support for high-performing charter schools, test-based accountability, greater hiring flexibility, and more rigorous teacher evaluation policies.
“We can’t wait to improve schools until we eliminate poverty – I get that,” said Reville. “But we can’t ignore the ways poverty gets in the way of our noblest intentions as educators.” He suggested that the clash of views between the two big camps presents something of a false choice. “It’s not, do we have standards, or do we think holistically about children,” said Reville. “We do both.”
Reville has, in many ways, tried to straddle the divide in education thinking. He was an early leader of the standards-and-accountability movement, but he has been increasingly emphatic about the need to address children’s needs more broadly.
He says criticism that test-based accountability has forced a narrowing of the public school curriculum is well placed. But Reville maintains the solution isn’t to abandon those accountability measures but instead to expand the school day. We’re trying to “cram” more schooling into the same-size box, he said. “What we’ve been saying is, we need a bigger box. And if we can’t do that all at once. Start expanding the box for the kids who need it most,” he said last week, hinting at the proposal Patrick rolled out on Tuesday to expand the school day for all middle school students in the state’s 24 Gateway Cities.
Patrick is also proposing a big increase in early childhood education funding, including more money to subsidize early education slots for low-income families and providing Chapter 70 school reimbursement funding to districts based on the number of public school seats they have for four-year-olds. The current funding formula only reimburses districts for four-year-olds in special education classrooms.
Without full access to early childhood education, said Reville, “in some sense the struggle to solve the achievement gap is over before we even begin.”
A centerpiece of Reville’s time in office was the 2010 passage of a sweeping new education reform law, the biggest effort to revamp education policy since the 1993 reform law. The 2010 law doubled the number of charter school slots in low-performing districts and it authorized communities to form “innovation schools,” within-district schools that have many of the same autonomies as charter schools over staffing, scheduling, and budgeting. To date, 44 innovation schools have opened, with another dozen or so in the pipeline.
It was in dealing with the often controversial issue of charter schools that Reville’s tenure had its nadir. Patrick has been lukewarm in his support for charter schools. In 2009, state education commissioner Mitchell Chester urged approval by the state board of education of an arts-focused charter school in Gloucester, despite a recommendation against authorizing the school from the state charter school office that vets such proposals. It was later reported that Reville had sent Chester an email urging him to approve the school’s application in order to avoid being “permanently labeled as hostile” to charter schools by key “moderate allies” of the administration such as the Boston Globe and Boston Foundation.
The email revelation created an uproar, with critics lambasting Reville for inserting political considerations into the review of charter applications. “At one level, obviously, I have some regrets about that incident,” said Reville. “On the other hand, I think the incident itself was blown way out of proportion.” Reville said in every charter application review the state is judging the applicant’s capacity to fulfill its intentions. “I thought at the time it was a reasonable bet” to think the Gloucester school would succeed, “and it would be advantageous to us from a political standpoint, which I probably shouldn’t have said out loud. But to pretend these discussions don’t happen all the time would be hypocritical.”
The state board of education voted in December to close the Gloucester charter school, citing poor academic performance and fiscal instability.
The charter school issue is another one on which Reville has sought out middle ground. School districts have opposed charter expansion because students migrating from district schools to charters take state funding with them – though districts continue to receive some funding for six years for students who have left for charters. Supporters have said the state’s high-performing charters have been one of the best educational innovations for children in low-income communities. Reville has said a primary focus of reform efforts must be on district schools, which educate the overwhelming majority of high-need students. But he also touted the growth of charters the state approved in the 2010 law through a “smart cap” that allows charters with a proven track record of success to expand in communities with low-performing district schools.
The battle over charter schools is not going away, however. Advocates filed legislation this week to remove the cap entirely on charters in low-performing districts, arguing that several communities are already bumping up against the higher cap set by the 2010 law and that thousands of children are on waiting lists for charter slots.
