October 10, 2026
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.
Salem Public Schools shows what is possible. The district created a dean of innovation position and, with the WPS Institute, launched a pilot to rethink middle school around a simple question: What if students genuinely didn’t want to miss school?
Students learned in the community, tackled hands-on projects, and had greater flexibility in how and where they learned. In its first year, the percentage of participating students who said they loved school doubled, chronic absenteeism declined by more than half, and the cohort outperformed school peers on state assessments.
Importantly, this experiment was not a one-off effort. Salem has been testing new approaches to schooling across its system for years, with each effort helping to inform the next.
This fall, lessons from its middle school work are being applied at the elementary level through the new Sarah Parker Remond School. Its community-embedded learning model brings children as young as kindergarten out into Salem to explore the city, work with community partners, and connect those experiences to what they are learning in the classroom. Salem is adapting an idea first tested with older students for children at a very different stage of their education.
But Salem also exposes the limitation of district-by-district innovation. Salem created dedicated capacity, worked with an outside partner, and found the resources and support to test new ideas. Most communities have no comparable infrastructure, and Massachusetts has no systematic way to connect educators with the partners and expertise they need or to capture and share what one district learns with others. Innovation can succeed in one place without benefiting the larger system.
That is the role a statewide education R&D infrastructure can play. Massachusetts should identify a small number of priority challenges where new approaches are needed and provide funding for districts to develop and test ideas. At the center of this work should be a network of R&D lab schools—not new schools built from scratch, but places where innovative work is already underway and can be taken further with additional resources and flexibility. These schools would open their doors to educators from across the Commonwealth through regular site visits and statewide learning cohorts. Other communities could see the work firsthand and adapt promising practices to their own students and contexts.
Teaching hospitals offer a useful model. They care for patients while training the next generation of health care professionals and developing new treatments in real-world conditions. Research and learning are embedded in their daily operations, allowing new ideas to be tested, refined, and ultimately spread throughout the healthcare system. R&D lab schools could play a similar role in public education. Real schools where students learn every day and educators have the capacity to experiment with how school can work better for them.
Other states are already investing in pieces of this infrastructure. Virginia committed $100 million to Lab Schools. North Carolina created a state office to support district innovation and connect educators with university researchers. In California, major districts formed a collaborative to turn isolated successes into broader improvement.
These efforts point in the right direction, but none represents a complete R&D system rooted in the daily work of schools. With sustained public investment, Massachusetts could create a vibrant R&D ecosystem that generates new knowledge from practice and makes it available to everyone.
The first generation of education reform built the infrastructure for implementing common expectations at scale. The next generation must build the infrastructure for continuous discovery and improvement.
After all, this is what we aspire to for our children: question assumptions, try new things, learn from failure, and adapt. Our education system should be capable of the same.
Massachusetts has reinvented public education before. It is time to do it again.
Chad d’Entremont is executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy.
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
