Policy

The Massachusetts charter school law

Steven’s 1992 book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, proposed a new generation of “entrepreneurial” schools: Aspiring school founders could propose new public schools that benefit from a radical bargain: the authority and autonomy to pursue new approaches to elevating academic achievement in exchange for strict accountability for results. Steven and business leader Bill Edgerly drove the passage of the state’s charter school law.

Thanks to excellent authorizing, Massachusetts today has the highest-performing charter schools in the country, according to Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO).

Building Excellent Schools

Shorty after the charter law’s passage, Linda Brown founded the Massachusetts Charter School Resource Center, which then became Building Excellent Schools (BES); Steven later served for a period as board president. Thanks to the extraordinary work of Linda and Chief Academic Officer Sue Walsh, BES fellows have founded 175 independent schools in 45 cities across 21 states and Washington DC, including Freedom Prep in Memphis, STRIVE in Denver, and United School Network in Ohio. Today, BES fellow-founded schools educate 55,000 students.

The Massachusetts 1993 Education Reform Act

Steven advised Massachusetts Governor William Weld on education reform during a period of sweeping changes in the state’s K-12 system. Billions of new dollars in the state’s schools would be conditioned on fundamental change—academically rich content standards, human capital reforms, and charter schools. Steven urged the governor to push back on vapid draft academic standards and insist on rigorous and ambitious expectations. He then recommended to Weld three new members of the state board of education that were fiercely committed to academic rigor.

Thanks to the work of an extraordinary group of leaders, including Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, the Commonwealth’s standards and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) are today regarded as among the nation’s best. Massachusetts students have for years posted the top National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in the country and perform on a par with the highest achieving countries in the world.