Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is leaving office next month after eight years. Patrick instituted bold and controversial educational policies in the middle of his term, in part to close what's called the achievement gap between students with different economic and racial backgrounds. Did the governor meet his goals?
It’s Jan. 18, 2010: Martin Luther King Day. Gov. Deval Patrick is at the Boston Children’s Museum. He’s surrounded by students of all races, about to sign a bill called The Achievement Gap Act.
"Today in this Building devoted to exploration, discovery and the power of a child’s imagination, we are standing up for children," Patrick said at the time.
Patrick’s own life story is evidence of what a great education can do. He grew up on welfare, going to large public schools on the South Side of Chicago. When he was 14, he got a break, a scholarship that sent him to Milton Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. He reflected on it at a recent speech to the United Negro College Fund.
"My story is your story," Patrick said. "It’s what education does to lift us, to lift whole families, whole communities."
The bill Patrick signed on Martin Luther King day four years ago was part of a movement nationwide. The Obama administration had committed billions of federal dollars to help turn around failing schools. The Massachusetts bill, like others around the country, increased charter schools in the state’s lowest performing districts. It also granted extraordinary powers to superintendents and principals to overhaul the worst schools by, for example, firing half the staff, or extending the school day.
The goal was to provide as good an education for black, Hispanic or low-income kids as for their white or more affluent counterparts. Patrick, on his way out of office, says the effort's been successful.
"In the past eight years there’s been a 20-point increase in the performance of white students," he said. "That’s really good. And a 28-point increase in the performance of African American students. And I want to point out that’s in math and science."
But, as is often the case with test scores, the big picture is murkier. Look at a test called the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or the NAEPs. The NAEPs are taken by a sample of children across the country every year. Natasha Ushomirsky of the Education Trust in Washington, says the good news is if you’re an African-American student or a poor student, the very best place to be in the U.S. is Massachusetts.
"It’s consistently been one of the highest performers both for students overall and for the better part of the last decade it was also one of the highest performing states for African American students and low income students," Ushomirsky said.
But Ushomirsky says all students aren’t performing at the same level. In fact, looking at NAEP scores, the achievement gap was the same before Patrick took office as it is today. Ushomirsky says in some ways, the situation is worse.
"When you take a look at 2011 and 2013, and compare the two, you see that fourth-grade reading and math results actually dropped quite a bit for African American students, latino students and low income students," she said.
But that’s the state as a whole. Let’s take a look at the schools that instituted these reforms and see if they improved. In the first year of the Massachusetts law, the state identified 34 schools in need of turnaround.
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education commissions a report to see how these schools are doing. And what they found is mixed. Fourteen of the 34 schools improved. But 15 stayed the same. Four schools got worse and one closed.
Chad D’Entremont, of the Rennie Center for Education, says closing the achievement gap is hard work.
"If we really knew how to do it and do it efficiently and effectively, it would have been done already," D'Entremont said. "That there are important examples of individual schools working very effectively to turn around performance and improve, the work needs to be sustained and brought to scale and that hasn’t been done."
D’Entremont gives the governor credit for reframing the conversation from overall academic achievement to academic achieving for all.
And Patrick himself acknowledges the achievement gap remains too wide. It's something he says he wants to keep working on, even after he gives up the corner office.
