Middleboro Review 2: Massachusetts needs to rethink how it improves schools. Here is a blueprint for doing it.

Sunday, October 11, 2026

Massachusetts needs to rethink how it improves schools. Here is a blueprint for doing it.

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Massachusetts needs to rethink how it improves schools. Here is a bluerprint for doing it.

October 11, 2026

By Chad d’Entremont

Massachusetts has done this before. It's time to do it again.

In 1993, when the Commonwealth confronted an economy reshaped by globalization and information technology, it did something remarkably ambitious. It did not respond with another program or grant. It redesigned public education. The Education Reform Act established new standards, new ways to measure learning, and a new commitment to educational opportunity. Massachusetts became a national leader in student achievement.

Success, however, has a way of obscuring its own expiration date.

Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work and learn, while the skills required to succeed continue to change. Yet our schools remain largely organized around structures and assumptions designed for a different era.

The results speak for themselves. Only 43 percent of Massachusetts third graders are proficient readers. Just 42 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math. When students enter high school, one in five fails at least one ninth-grade course. For Black and Latino students, the figure is roughly one in three. These critical milestones help predict future success and, taken together, provide evidence of systemic failure.

The Education Reform Act reflected a theory of improvement built for its time: establish common expectations, identify the right policies, and implement them consistently across every school. It embodied the industrial era’s central insight—that quality comes from designing systems that can be reliably replicated at scale. But both the world and what we have learned about how students learn have changed.

We now know that learning is not simply a matter of delivering the same content to every student on the same schedule. Students need strong foundations, opportunities to develop mastery through practice and feedback, and authentic work that builds durable skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity.
The implications go beyond choosing a better curriculum or timely intervention, although these things matter. They challenge basic assumptions about how we organize classrooms, use educators’ time, structure the school year, and responsibly integrate new technology.

Perhaps the loudest call for something different is coming from students themselves. And they are not waiting for solutions; they are voting with their feet. Student attendance remains below pre-pandemic levels, following a period when many young people began to question the value of going to school at all. Nearly one in five Massachusetts students is now chronically absent, with rates above 30 percent in some urban districts. For too many, the connection between succeeding in school and reaching their goals has become difficult to see.

So what does the next era of education reform look like? It starts by recognizing there is no single policy or approach that will work for every student, and no fixed reform plan can keep pace with a world changing this quickly. The challenge, then, is not to identify the next set of solutions and prescribe them across every school. It is to build an education system capable of finding better solutions over time: developing new approaches, testing them in real schools, learning what works and under what conditions, and continually refining and spreading what we learn.

That requires something common in other sectors but largely absent from public education: research and development. Health care and technology routinely develop and test new approaches. For more than a century, American agriculture has connected research and experimentation directly to what happens in the field. In education, experimentation remains the exception, not the rule.