Making the Grade; Infusion of money sparked a revival
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
By Clive McFarlane
May 18, 2003
All students can learn.
This has been the rallying cry of education reformers over the past decade, and no one believed it more fervently than former Worcester Superintendent of Schools James L. Garvey.
''We have many young people who are coming to school with excess baggage, and we have young people coming here who are defying us to teach them,'' Mr. Garvey said in a June 1993 interview, shortly after he was appointed superintendent.
''It is our job to put things in place in our school system to bring those students up to a level playing field with all other children,'' he said.
That same month the state Legislature passed the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which, in addition to raising teaching and learning standards, pumped billions of dollars into state education.
For the Worcester public schools, the extra money could not have come at a better time.
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Bringing equity to education expenditures across the state was a primary goal of the education reform law. As a result, urban school districts received the bulk of the state's additional spending on education.
Between 1993 and 2003, for example, the Worcester public schools' budget rose from $87.8 million to $219.2 million, $10.2 million of which was earmarked for the city's two charter schools.
The new wealth provided Mr. Garvey and his successor, James A. Caradonio, with the money and the political will to not only reverse the devastation of the 1980s, but to transform the school system into a near full-service institution.
From full-day preschool services, to comprehensive after-school programs; from school breakfast programs to in-school medical clinics; from in-house probation officers to special programs for pregnant teenagers, few stones were left unturned in the system's effort to help pupils.
Two primary forces drove the system's priorities in using its education reform funding: the pressure from businesses that were demanding a better-educated work force, and the changing demographics of the city's student population.
It was the business community, working through the Massachusetts Business Alliance For Education, that prepared the first blueprint for education reform in the state, publishing its ideas in a report called ''Every Child A Winner.''
''The requirements for success in employment and higher education had dramatically increased, and schools had not acknowledged or embraced those requirements,'' said S. Paul Reville, who at the time was deeply involved with the MBAE.
''School systems were unclear about their goals and had minimal accountability,'' he said, ''and we had to hold them responsible for their roles in producing improved learning.''
New curriculum frameworks with rigorous standards in the major core subjects, yearly testing of students, and an exit exam were among the requirements of the new law.
The law also called for mandatory testing of new teachers, annual recertification for all teachers, and the bumping of principals from union representation.
At the same time, it was understood that if schools were expected to perform at a higher level, they would need more resources, said Mr. Reville, currently the executive director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
''We knew we had to give them the resources to improve teacher/student ratio and help under-performing schools make the grade.''
While Worcester school administrators embraced the new standards and accountability guidelines with unparalleled commitment, the challenge of the task was not lost on them.
School officials were beginning to see an increasing number of young people who were poor, victims of abuse, and mentally and behaviorally unprepared for the structure of the school day.
Meanwhile, the ethnic diversity of the school population was changing rapidly, with the system providing English as a Second Language tutorial programs to students from 60 different language groups.
The number of minority students in the system jumped from 20.2 percent of the total student population in 1983 to 40.2 percent in 1993.
As the minority pupil population rose, so, too, did concerns by minority parents that the system was not meeting the needs of their children.
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The net result of all these efforts, according to Mr. Mills, was that the system was providing top quality education, which he believes most city residents appreciated, given that 89 percent of them continue to enroll their children in the school system.
''We have been able to convince people that we have a high-quality product,'' Mr. Mills said.
''There is no question that large urban communities like Worcester did very well financially under education reform over the past 10 years, and consistently over those years attendance rate went up, dropout rate decreased, and academic achievement steadily rose.''
