WHEN THE FORMAL announcement came at last week’s state board of education meeting that the Holyoke public schools were being released from receivership after 10 years of state oversight, board member Michael Moriarty said the quiet part out loud.
“Academic outcomes are not the reason we’re coming out of receivership,” Moriarty said. “We all acknowledge it, we all know that’s the work we’re going to be working very hard at doing.”
The press release from the state education department announcing the exit from receivership touted Holyoke’s improved graduation rates, greater high school enrollment in advanced coursework, and other outcomes. But it steered clear of any mention of core academic outcomes.
That may be because driving achievement gains was a central argument for the 2010 law that gave the state authority to take over chronically underperforming districts. The legislation, dubbed The Achievement Gap Act, was seen as a way to charge through the thicket of local in-fighting, poor management, and restrictions imposed by teachers’ contracts in order to get schools and students on track in the most troubled districts. Under the law, a state-appointed receiver is given broad power to make changes in the district, including reconfiguring schools, making curriculum changes, and overriding provisions of union contracts.
State takeovers have been employed during the recent era of education reform aimed at closing the achievement gap separating lower-income students and students of color from their better-off, white peers. But the evidence supporting the moves has been decidedly underwhelming.
In Holyoke, on the most recent MCAS, just 8 percent of its students in grades 3-8 met or exceeded expectations in English language arts and only 6 percent did so in math.
One of the most comprehensive reviews of the state takeover strategy, carried out by Beth Schueler, an associate professor of education at the University of Virginia, and Joshua Bleiberg of the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform at Brown University, looked at 35 districts, spanning 14 states, that were taken over by state authorities between 2011 and 2016. The analysis included two Massachusetts districts, Lawrence and Holyoke, that were under state control at the time. “Overall, we find no evidence that state takeover improves academic achievement,” they wrote in a 2021 paper.
While state takeovers did not, overall, lead to clear gains in student achievement, some districts did see improvement, while achievement in others was flat, and some saw a dip in performance. That prompted Schueler to explore whether there might be common features of districts that saw positive outcomes under state receivership.
In a new paper, Schueler suggests that state takeovers that provide some role for decision-making at the local level may produce better results. She looked at the three Massachusetts districts that have been put in state receivership under the 2010 law – Lawrence, Holyoke, and Southbridge – as well as a cohort of Springfield schools operating under a state-district partnership that was formed in 2014 as an alternative to full state takeover.
Schueler found little evidence of improvement in Holyoke and Southbridge but found gains in the early years of the Lawrence takeover, especially in math, that have largely been sustained and “generally positive to neutral effects on student academic outcomes” in the Springfield Empowerment Zone. In both Lawrence and Springfield, the takeover models allowed for more school-level decision-making as well as some local say in the governing oversight boards directing the turnaround.
That kind of “multilevel governance,” Schueler said, might be a model that uses state authority to make necessary changes in things like school schedules and curriculum while avoiding the “potentially more negative effects of takeovers” that might come from cutting out any local voice in decision-making.
Paul Reville, who authored the 2010 reform law as state education secretary under Gov. Deval Patrick, called it a “reasonable hypothesis” that including some local voice in state takeovers could make them more effective.
Critics, including the state’s two main teachers unions, have called for stripping the state of authority to take control of underperforming districts. But even as he welcomed the return of the school system to local control, Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia said the takeover made sense at the time, with the district mired in dysfunction.
“The temporary pivot was necessary,” Garcia said last Monday at the Holyoke School Committee’s weekly meeting. Garcia, who, as mayor, chairs the school committee, was an elected school committee member at the time of the 2015 takeover, and said he was “frustrated about what was going on in our district and happy that receivership came in to help blow things up a little bit.”
Reville still thinks the takeover authority is an important tool for the state to use when districts are struggling to gain traction or suffering from persistently poor local management, but he said it’s increasingly clear that school-focused reforms alone – including receivership – can’t overcome the impact of entrenched poverty and disadvantage present in districts targeted for state intervention. It’s “insufficient to remedy the achievement gap in places like Holyoke,” said Reville. Of the district’s 4,800 students, 84 percent live in low-income households and almost 20 percent are English learners.
“I think it’s a good step in the right direction,” said Reville of the measures taken under receivership, such as expansion of Holyoke’s dual language programs, addition of pre-K seats, and redesign of the city’s high school. “But a schools-only solution isn’t going to do it,” Reville said, pointing to broader factors such as stable housing for the city’s high-poverty population and adequate health care as out-of-school variables that can play a huge role in student success.
Reville, now a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, directs a project there called the EdRedesign Lab, focused on identifying ways to promote that kind of holistic approach to student learning. If society is serious about closing yawning achievement gaps, he said, it must be willing to tackle things like housing insecurity and lack of access to extracurricular enrichment activities that put lower-income students at such disadvantage.
“It just takes more to educate kids who have significant challenges associated with poverty to a level we recognize as sufficient,” he said. “We don’t want to reckon with it because of the cost.”