El día 25 de junio el Gobernador del Estado de Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, anunció la Education Action Agenda, plan de reformas de la educación de su Estado con metas que apuntan al año 2020 y foco en un incremento de las oportunidades para acceder a la educación superior y en una reorganización del sistema público escolar del Estado, asunto este último que debiera ser de interés para el debate chileno también. De hecho, el Plan propuesto lleva el subtítulo: una nueva promesa para la educación pública.

Ver la propuesta aquí 1,35 MB

La Agenda de reformas del Gobernador Patrick contempla cuatro objetivos principales:

— First, we must raise the achievement of all students. That involves not only improvements in teaching and curriculum, but also addressing the external factors that impede success, teaching 21st century skills, and introducing learning opportunities and a heightened attention to quality care beginning in the earliest years of life.

— Second, fulfilling the new promise of public education demands that we genuinely and deliberately elevate teaching to a recognized profession capable of attracting the most highly qualified candidates to the field. Teachers deserve the opportunity to build their own content knowledge and skills. They, along with administrators, need high-quality mentoring, professional development, supervision and evaluation.

— Third, we must broaden and deepen our commitment to public education so that every student is prepared to take advantage of higher education, employment and lifelong learning opportunities. That means extending our definition of a basic public education to include at least two years of postsecondary learning. And it means aligning the curriculum with 21st century knowledge and skills.

— Finally, we must unleash innovation broadly, allowing the power of new ideas and new approaches to transform the system. We have to muster the collective courage to ask provocative questions and answer them honestly. Do our students and teachers have enough time during the day and during the year to meet the necessarily high expectations that we have set? Does our system of district governance allow us to maximize resources and generate the best possible results? How can we improve our record of recruiting, hiring and retaining educators? Are we maximizing the use of our vocational and technical infrastructure and facilities? Are we leveraging technology well? What best practices from successful charter and other schools here in the Commonwealth and across the country and the world can we bring to all Massachusetts schools?

Algunas de las medidas contempladas en el corto, mediano o largo plazo son:

— Continue support for high-quality early education and care by establishing a schedule of incremental increases in annual funding to achieve universal prekindergarten, beginning with the fiscal year 2010 budget.

— Place one or more Student Support Coordinators in every low-income school to assist teachers; connect students and their families to appropriate, noneducational, state and community-based services, including those related to health, mental health, housing and social services; and to provide ongoing guidance and assistance with coordinating and integrating those services.

— Reduce class size in K–2 classrooms in high-needs school districts.

— Establish differentiated pay for qualifying teachers in high-needs districts and schools, in high-demand disciplines, and for those who possess highly needed, extraordinary skills and knowledge, or who volunteer for particularly challenging responsibilities.

— Launch a competitive grant program with funding for qualified districts (as determined by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) to pilot intensive, systemic induction and mentoring in the first three years of teacher service.

— The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will accelerate efforts to make available to teachers an online, formative assessment system that will provide “real-time” data on student performance as measured against state standards. This data-driven instruction system will help teachers to analyze current student performance and continuously modify teaching practice to meet evolving student learning needs.

— Partner with the state’s teacher colleges to develop a statewide teacher residency program similar to medical residency programs that would combine rigorous coursework, practical training in diverse settings, and certification and licensure.

— Launch a Statewide Master Teacher Contract Initiative that would start a critical conversation about transforming the educator compensation and benefit structure to attract top talent into teaching by, for example, offering flexibility for teachers to receive different pay and benefit packages at different stages of their careers. In this kind of scenario, new teachers might have the option of choosing higher compensation in lieu of longer-term benefits. Such a contract might also provide for more equitable distribution of teachers throughout the state while creating the possibility of various cost savings. For example, the Master Teacher Contract would provide a vehicle for addressing escalating health care costs, disparities in pay across regions of the state, pension portability and other issues. Such a contract would achieve the efficiency of eliminating contract negotiations in more than 300 separate school districts.

— Launch a new high-autonomy, in-district school model — the Readiness School — to facilitate teacher ownership, innovation, choice and responsiveness to student and family needs.

— Establish incentives to encourage expansion of the school year and launch a competitive grant program to support high-impact summer programming, tutoring and mentoring opportunities in high-needs communities.

— Ensure access to high-quality after-school and out-of-school time programming in every high-needs community by streamlining responsibility, funding, authority and accountability of all state after-school and out-of-school-time programs.

Ver más abajo comentario de prensa del Boston Globe.

Patrick unveils extensive education plan for next decade
By Tania deLuzuriaga
Globe Staff / June 26, 2008

Governor Deval Patrick unveiled his sweeping education initiative yesterday, a 55-point plan he hopes will act as a blueprint for legislative and administrative action for the next decade.

With far-reaching proposals that seek reforms from early-childhood education to the state’s universities, the 40-page report says the state’s education system must change dramatically to prepare students for a global economy.

But even as Patrick talked about “a new day” for Massachusetts students, some raised questions about the state’s ability to fund the plan in a nose-diving economy and about the roadblocks it could face from powerful teachers unions and lawmakers with sharply differing views.

“A lot of the proposals are going to be controversial, and there are going to be extremes in the discussion,” said Representative Patricia A. Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who cochairs the Joint Committee on Education.

“The governor has to sell this on a grand scale to people in the communities,” she said. “They have to endorse this.”

Senate President Therese Murray and Representative Robert A. DeLeo, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, declined to comment on the governor’s proposal. Murray’s office said the senator had not yet been briefed on it, while aides in DeLeo’s office said they didn’t have enough information.

Several lawmakers, including House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, lauded Patrick yesterday for coming up with a roadmap for the next decade.

“The governor’s office has said they want to work with the Legislature to develop a timeline on this,” said David Guarino, a spokesman for DiMasi. “No doubt there are some hot-button issues in here, but the speaker agrees they are worth taking on.”

But some of the governor’s proposals, like lengthening the school day and year, consolidating school districts, and implementing a statewide teacher contract, could face resistance from influential special interest groups such as teachers unions and charter school advocates.

Several lawmakers interviewed yesterday said that taking on the unions and implementing a statewide teacher contract will be one of Patrick’s toughest political fights.

“The idea that local communities will give up control of those issues, I think will be a big battle,” said Senator Edward M. Augustus Jr., outgoing vice chairman of the Education Committee.

In a speech yesterday at the John F. Kennedy Library, Patrick said potential opponents need to keep in mind what’s in the best interest of children.

“You must accept the challenge that every child is your responsibility, even when he or she is not your child,” he said. “An achievement gap matters, even when it’s not your community; an opportunity gap matters, even when it’s not your chance; a skills gap matters, even when your own kids are all grown up and fully employed. We all have a stake in a better future.”

Many of the governor’s proposals for prekindergarten to 12th grade, such as those aimed at closing achievement gaps, better preparing teachers, and reducing the number of school districts in the state, were unveiled earlier this week.

But the report issued yesterday provides fresh details and outlines a few new initiatives. For example, the plan contains a host of recommendations for higher education. They include: closing the pay gap between faculty at Massachusetts colleges and universities and those at peer institutions in other states; increasing needs-based financial aid in the 2010 budget; guaranteeing that credits will be transferable between the state’s public higher-education institutions; and supporting legislation that would allow children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state rates at public colleges and universities.

The report also lists a series of goals for the state to meet by 2020.

The goals include having a high-quality education and care system for children, beginning at birth, that will enable a smooth transition to school; reducing the high school dropout rate to less than 10 percent; and having 90 percent of high school graduates ready for college without needing to take remedial classes.

Slightly more than 80 percent of Massachusetts students finished high school in four years last year, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Thirty-seven percent of students who graduated from high school in 2005 and went on to a state college or university required at least one remedial class, according to a government report issued earlier this year.

Over the next six months, a grass-roots effort the governor’s office launched will promote the changes to local school committees and city councils, a Patrick spokesman said. And Patrick will hold public forums on the topic around the state.

“We need people to go out to communities to make the case that if you want prosperity for your children, then don’t continue to think we can get there with yesterday’s tools,” Paul Reville, the state’s incoming secretary of education, said yesterday. “We have to create a sense that this is urgent.”

Tania deLuzuriaga can be reached at [email protected].

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.