The National Standards come with No Guarantee
As the principal architect of education reform in Massachusetts, former State Senate president Tom Birmingham, has noted, no one was sure that what was set forth in 1993 would work. And while the state has a long way to go before we can say that all students are achieving at the level we would hope for, no one today can argue with the historic success that ensued for all students in Massachusetts, topping the nation in the last three cycles (2005, 2007, 2009) of the national assessments, ranking among the top six countrieson math and science, and strong performance on the SAT and ACT exams.
It's taken hard work, tens of billions of dollars, and diligent focus across a decade and a half. It took difficult and even rancorous debate about what we teach in our schools. When