The state should support districts in developing their initial proposals by holding a series of design workshops where districts can discuss and share ideas. District proposals should be transparent and publicly available, and a key condition of support for any proposal should be that it has the support of the School Committee and there is evidence that the local community and stakeholders have been consulted. In developing the criteria for judging the proposals, a starting point should be the seven areas which the Center on Reinventing Public Education identified for portfolio districts and which they have been using to assess the progress being made by districts signed up to the portfolio approach across the country15.
There should also be a criterion for population size; this would require small districts to collaborate with others. In addition, we would stipulate that districts that do enter would be required to commit to open enrollment across district boundaries. Proposals could be assessed and judged by a panel consisting of the DESE, business representatives and higher education leaders. Only a small number of proposals from districts might be successful initially, but other districts should learn from the process and continue to share in the learning that emerges during implementation. Over time, this would enable Massachusetts to develop its own alternative models of governance and administration from within the state and thus enable the development of forms fit for the 21st century. Solutions to a problem that has long bedeviled school reform in much of the US might thus be found in Massachusetts.
dialogue with districts we have proposed should be matched by regular communication with other representatives of the field about both system performance and perceptions of the authority’s effectiveness, which should be independently surveyed annually.
There remain a number of critical functions for which the DESE must retain responsibility, and arguably strengthen its capacity.
The state should ensure districts and schools both raise and receive adequate funding in a timely fashion, and the state should strengthen its capacity for ensuring the efficient use of public funds by more closely examining the productivity of district and school spending. We will look at the implementation of the statewide funding system in more detail in Chapter 6.
• The state must maintain the statewide system of accountability for all schools. The state’s role is to ensure high quality assistance is available, but not nec- essarily to provide it itself.
• The state should play a more active and strategic role in the identification and promotion of talent amongst teachers and leaders, as discussed in the next chapter. • The state should ensure the collection, analysis, use and
publication of the ever greater amounts of information on student and school performance that the world of big data is beginning to make possible.
• The state has a key role in scanning the horizon, nationally and globally and, from that, informing the development of strategy and policy.
In short, the state has a responsibility to create the condi- tions for success.
If there is agreement that this is the correct ongoing role for the DESE in a more autonomous and self- improv- ing school system, it raises some questions: What type of staff does the Department need? What level of resources will it require going forward? It is beyond the scope of this study to look at these questions in any detail, but we might reasonably expect the number of staff in compliance and monitoring roles to reduce, thus freeing up more resources to work directly with districts and schools. We recommend DESE should commission an independent study of how its role will change in the coming years – perhaps by experts outside of the education field – to make more detailed recommendations for its future organization and scope of responsibilities. We expect the end result would be a more powerful state agency focused on the future.
Conclusion
We have argued in this chapter that to unleash greatness will require significant reductions in regulation from the state and districts and, at the same time, greater autonomy for schools so that principals and faculty can take respon- sibility for their own improvement. Massachusetts could immediately extend flexibilities and freedoms to all schools and eliminate the Charter Cap. In the longer term, systemic innovation will be provided by the development of new models of school clusters and district governance. These can begin to be developed and incentivized more strongly through a district reform competition, but full implementa- tion will happen in the next phase. A summary of our main recommendations is shown on the next page.
Endnotes
1 OECD, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education – Lessons from PISA 2012 for the United States, 2013
2 For a full list of the freedoms see www.does.mass.edu/apa/sss/turn- around/level4/CH69S1J_summary.pdf
3 For a full list of freedoms available see www.mass.gov/edu/ docs/2010/20101020-autonomy-flexibility.pdf
4 B. Lane, C. Unger and L. Morando Rhim, Emerging and sustaining practices for school turnaround, April 2013
5 CREDO, Charter School Performance in Massachusetts, February 2013 6 James Vaznis, “After years of decline, Trotter School rebounds,” The
Boston Globe, December 2, 2013
7 D. Hargreaves, Creating a Self Improving School System, July 2010 8 See Robert Hill, Achieving More Together: adding value through part-
nerships, 2008 and Richard Dufour and Michael Fullan, Cultures Built to Last, 2013, for example.
9 M. Contompasis, Reimagine, rather than patch, Boston schools, Boston Globe, Opinion 2 November 2013 (http://www.bostonglobe. com/opinion/2013/11/01/don-patch-boston-school-system-reinvent/ APOUfhD6Z1GCApNKJK0u1N/story.html)
10 See www.doe.mass.edu/apa/ucd/plcguidance.pdf for more details of this approach
11 MassInsight Education, Smart Districts: Restructuring Urban Systems from the School Up, Fall 2013
12 See profiles.doe.mass.edu
13 P. Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Characteristics of Portfolio Districts
14 M. Mourshed, C. Chijioke and M. Barber, How the Worlds Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, 2010
15 P. Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Characteristics of Portfolio Districts