Conventional wisdom and popular perception hold that American students are falling farther and farther behind in science and math achievement. The statistics from this state tell a different story.
If Massachusetts were a country, its eighth-graders would rank second in the world in science, behind only Singapore, according to TIMSS — the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which surveys knowledge and skills of fourth- and eighth-graders around the world. (The most recent version, in 2011, tested more than 600,000 students in 63 nations.)
Massachusetts eighth-graders also did well in mathematics, coming in sixth, behind Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The United States as a whole came in 10th in science and 9th in math, with scores that were above the international average.
Of course, TIMSS is only one test, and achievement tests are incomplete indicators of educational prowess. But behind Massachusetts’ raw numbers are two decades of sustained efforts to lift science and mathematics education. Educators and officials chose a course and held to it, even when the early results were deeply disappointing.
While Massachusetts has a richer and better-educated population than most states, it is not uniformly wealthy. The gains reflected improvement across the state, including poorer districts.
I think we are a proof point of what’s possible,” said Mitchell D. Chester, the state education commissioner.
On a sunny day in May, fifth-graders at Donald E. Ross Elementary School here were gathered at an outdoor gazebo, learning about fulcrums by using a ruler set up like a seesaw and balancing weights at both ends.
At South Middle School, seventh-graders in a science class worked in small groups to brainstorm how a box of items – a plastic jar, beaker, water, and a mix of sand, soil, clay and pebbles – could help answer a question posed by the teacher: How do sediments carried in water get deposited? They devised small experiments and wrote down their observations, and at the end of class each group presented its findings.
None of the topics were novel, but they were consistent in their hands-on approach, inviting students to explore and explain. “Much more hands-on than what we ever used to do,” said Dianne D. Rees, the district’s science director. “Hands-on as much as possible.”
Braintree, a town of about 35,000 south of Boston, is neither an inner-city area nor a wealthy suburb. “We’re sort of, we used to say, a blue-collar area,” said William Kendall, the director of mathematics and technology for the Braintree schools.
When Kendall arrived in 1973 as a math teacher, the standard approach was talking at the front of the classroom and writing on the blackboard.“Some children learned well from lectures. Others did not.
“And it was OK those people don’t get it, because only we, the math elite, get it,” Kendall said.
Back then, one could graduate from high school without ever taking algebra. “Then came ed reform,” Kendall said, “and now everybody had to learn math.”
Ed reform” was the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, passed by a Democratic Legislature and signed by a Republican governor, William F. Weld.
The three core components were more money (mostly to the urban schools), ambitious academic standards and a high-stakes test that students had to pass before collecting their high school diplomas. All students were expected to learn algebra before high school.
It was a combination of carrots and sticks,” said David P. Driscoll, deputy education commissioner at the time.
Also noteworthy was what the reforms did not include. Parents were not offered vouchers for private schools. The state did not close poorly performing schools, eliminate tenure for teachers or add merit pay. The reforms did allow for some charter schools, but not many.
Then the state, by and large, stayed the course.
The new achievement test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS for short), was given to 10th-graders for the first time in 1998. (The graduation requirement of obtaining an acceptable score on the 10th-grade MCAS did not take effect until 2003.) The troubled urban schools performed terribly.
In the small city of Chelsea, which borders Boston, almost 90 percent of the students come from low-income families and most did not speak English as their first language. On the first MCAS, two-thirds of Chelsea 10th-graders failed math. The science scores were nearly as dismal.
Two years later, scores in the urban districts showed only glacial improvement. A report from the University of Massachusetts at Boston concluded that the reforms were not delivering on the promises.
Critics worried that when the use of MCAS as a graduation requirement kicked in, thousands of students would be deprived of their diplomas and would drop out in despair. Driscoll, who was elevated to education commissioner in 1998, kept the MCAS.
“People were expecting it to go away,” Robert D. Gaudet, the lead UMass researcher, recalled in a recent interview.
New York Times Service