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With more than 25 years experience as an education researcher and economist, Thompson Professor Richard Murnane has devoted his career to understanding how economic trends transform the work of schools. After all, his book, Teaching the New Basic Skills, coauthored with Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, details the ways in which new forces in the U.S. economy have changed the skills that high-school students must master in order to compete in the job market after graduation.
Still, much time had passed since the former math teacher had immersed himself in the day-to-day realities of a school district. So last year, Murnane went to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) superintendent’s office and asked for a job. “It has been a strong, long-standing desire of mine not just to study but to do public service work,” he says. “I wanted to understand—firsthand—the challenges that schools in the inner city face. That knowledge is the foundation of all my work as an education researcher.” In the wake of recent budget cutbacks at BPS, which eliminated nearly 10 percent of its central staff, the school district could not afford to offer Murnane a paid position. Thanks to the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and HGSE Visiting Committee member William F. Thompson and his wife Juliana W. Thompson, Murnane took a one-year leave of absence from HGSE and entered the trenches. Evaluating the MCAS Murnane’s course of action soon emerged: to help school leaders and teachers use assessment data to raise achievement. Stakes to boost students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a statewide achievement test, are rising rapidly. Beginning this June, students who fail the MCAS will not receive a high-school diploma. More than 12,000 high-school seniors in Massachusetts still have not passed the exam. Teachers and school leaders told Murnane they wanted to mine students’ previous MCAS scores for knowledge gaps and instructional oversights; however, they lacked software that would allow them to easily access and summarize student performance data. Some schools maintained their own databases, but teachers and principals could not track test data for students who transferred from school to school. This posed a significant problem in a school system with a highly mobile student population.
“District administrators had long known that this was problematic,” says Murnane. The central office had devised an ambitious technology plan addressing these shortcomings; however, resource constraints and the pressure of other priorities slowed its implementation. “I knew that helping the central office provide schools with tools to analyze assessment results could lead to positive, palpable change for teachers and students.” Murnane took the lead, convening information technology experts and administrators to develop a new districtwide data management system. Now, 12 months later, the system offers teachers and principals immediate access to their current students’ test data—down to finding out exactly which questions an individual student missed on a particular exam. The first version of the new system’s software went online in November, and improvements have followed throughout this school year. Continuing Research Donning his researcher’s cap once again, Murnane plans to explore strategies for helping teachers and principals use test results to diagnose students’ learning problems and plan instructional interventions. Down the line, he hopes to evaluate the most promising strategies by assigning them randomly to different schools. “If indeed we find that scores have improved,” says Murnane, “then we will share our practices with urban districts across the country that are struggling with how to use the high-stakes tests to their advantage—rather than their undoing.” For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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