The State's Role in Shaping a Progressive Vision of Public Education.

Is it possible for a state education agency to play a progressive role in shaping public education? And if so, what is that role? Can there be a constructive integration of state influence and democratic diversity of schools? Mr. French explores these questions and outlines an agenda for state education agencies to follow in transforming public education. RECENTLY, a respected teacher wrote me, As a teacher in a project- based public school that holds high standards for the work and character of its students, I was pleased to see the Massachusetts Education Reform Act generate interest in our efforts. The state asked my colleagues and me to share ideas for building a culture of quality with schools statewide. Examples of impressive projects, teacher- crafted curriculum, and striking portfolios of student work were met with excitement. Then, abruptly, it ended, and a new message appeared. Standards have been replaced by standardization, excellence in work replaced by obsession with test scores. Even after having recently spent 13 years in the Massachusetts Department of Education, I couldn't disagree with him. Rethinking and reshaping the roles of state education agencies and school districts is fraught with perils. We have seen many examples of states and districts that, under the banner of reform and the pressure to increase academic performance, have created policies and requirements that increase their control over schools and compound the bureaucracy under which schools have to survive. This movement toward increased authority, uniformity, and bureaucracy is a natural tendency for large organizations that are seeking to influence and leverage change. The result has been a proliferation of practices that cause concern among those many educators who are truly committed to building a vision of public schooling that benefits all students. Is it possible for a state education agency to play a progressive role in shaping public education? And if so, what is that role? Can there be a constructive integration of state influence and democratic diversity of schools? In this article, I explore these questions and outline an agenda for state education agencies to follow in transforming public education. In particular, using Massachusetts as a case study, I examine the recent state movement toward adoption of curriculum frameworks and state assessment tests as vehicles in the search for accountability and increased student achievement. Massachusetts: A Case Study Until 1994 Massachusetts had essentially no statewide curriculum mandates. The premise was that local school districts would make more appropriate decisions than the state about providing high-quality curricula to their diverse student populations. Unfortunately, the lesson learned in Massachusetts was that, in a society that is stratified along racial and economic lines, the absence of standards guarantees that educational opportunities for students will be stratified according to where one lives and what one's background is. Inevitably, if students lived in an urban district or a poor rural district, the curriculum and educational opportunities that they received were inferior to those available to students in more affluent districts. Some of this educational disparity had to do with inequitable state funding of the public schools, which meant that some suburban districts spent more than three times as much per pupil as was spent on students in less affluent rural and urban districts, resulting in large differences in class size, quality of the teaching force, support services, extracurricular activities, and scope of the curricular offerings. However, there were academic inequities that were equally serious and doomed low-income students and students of color to an inferior education. For example, a 1986 report from the Massachusetts Department of Education analyzed course-taking patterns of 3,000 high school graduates from the class of 1984. …