According to a poll conducted by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, about 76 percent of employers in Massachusetts have trouble filling roles because workers lack real world skills. In this interview, Linda Noonan, executive director of the MBAE, shares how education can change to help better prepare workers for these roles.
Welcome to the state of education, a podcast by EdTech Times. Today we’re speaking about the workforce and how education can better prepare students for it with Linda Noonan and Jill Norton.
Jill Norton: Hi, this is Jill Norton. I’m the Director of Education Policy for Abt Associates. Today, I’ll be interviewing Linda Noonan for EdTech Times. Linda, great to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Linda Noonan: Thank you Jill, it’s terrific to be talking with you. I am the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, also known as MBAE, and we are committed to high quality education that prepares every student, no matter where they live or go to school, to be successful in school, in life, and in the workforce.
Jill: Linda, I know you’ve been tracking standards for quite a long time and MBAE has been. Can you tell us a little bit about why standards matter to business?
Linda: Sure. Standards are really a fundamental expectation for business people that everybody needs to know what they’re striving to meet. But 76 percent of Massachusetts employers, on a recent poll that we conducted, reported having trouble filling positions in their companies, and they tell us that job candidates and new hires are really not meeting expectations in real world skills like teamwork, critical thinking, and communications, but also in simple reading, writing, and math.
In order to make sure that we have a ready workforce and an informed citizen rate, we need to start with education, and standards are really making it clear what we expect students to know and be able to do. And it’s important to do that equitably across the state so that every student has a fair shake and a fair chance to graduate high school, prepared for college level work, and to attain every credential they need to secure a good job and to participate fully in our society.
Without standards, teachers and educators don’t have a benchmark to strive for. They can all make different choices, and we end up with some students reaching very high performance standards and doing very well, and other children not covering the material that they have to.
Jill: In light of that, I know MBAE has been doing work for the last several years to support the current learning standards. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that MBAE has been doing?
Linda: Yes. MBAE has a really long history, having introduced the concepts behind the Education Reform Act of 1993, which really was the first time that we established uniform learning standards across that state and we believe that is one of the reasons that Massachusetts ranks toward the top in student performance in the nation and even very competitively with high-performing countries around the world. Our feeling was that standards need to be aligned with what is the expectation when you go on to earn a credential in an apprenticeship program, go to the military, or go on to higher education.
With 72 percent of the jobs in Massachusetts requiring postsecondary training or education, this is important for every child in Massachusetts. So we have been promoting and advocating for the highest standards possible that are really aligned to what the expectations of postsecondary — whether it’s education root or workplace root — what do they need to be able to succeed? It’s really important to emphasize that higher education was involved in the development of the Massachusetts standards because this is really unprecedented. Usually, the standards have been written by K-12 teachers, but this really signifies a recognition of the importance of that transition and the importance of making sure that when students graduate from high school, that diploma means that they can succeed at our public colleges and private colleges.
Jill: So we haven’t yet mentioned Common Core, which anyone, even those who are not tracking education closely, know have dominated the conversations and media coverage of education in recent years. So, can you help us unpack some of the misconceptions about Common Core? First of all, were the Massachusetts 2010 English language arts and math standards — were they Common Core?
Linda: So, let’s take the first question about “let’s unpack what Common Core is and is not,” and then talk about the 2010 standards. Unfortunately, Common Core has become a proxy for a lot of political and ideological disagreements and for anything that somebody wants to criticize in education. But what really occurred was a voluntary collaboration of states, under the leadership of the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, to get the best and brightest minds together, to get the best thinking from across the country, and come up with a common core set of math, English, and language arts standards, again, of what every child, no matter where they live, needs to know in order to succeed after high school.
When those standards were developed in 2008 and 2009, Massachusetts educators were instrumental in writing them. We have regularly revised our standards since they were first introduced in the mid-90s, and we had just gone through that process in Massachusetts, so the standards that Massachusetts had revised and would have been in place to adopt were actually a model for the Common Core. When the state, in 2010, faced a decision about whether or not to adopt the Common Core, they really looked at them and said these are our standards — these are Massachusetts’s standards — and MBAE, as organization devoted to high standards, really was saying “we need some independent evidence that these are good.” We hired a very reputable firm called West Ed to do an analysis — the only one done — of the standards we had revised and the Common Core, and they found them to be almost identical. What differed about the Common Core was additional strategic thinking in math, more persuasive writing and complex nonfiction texts in English and language arts, and from an employer’s standpoint, those are really critical skills that students need. So we, and other business organizations, endorsed the adoption.
Then, what happened was the standards-writing teams that had drafted the Massachusetts standards reconvened. They took the Common Core as a base, made additions and changes to better reflect what Massachusetts felt was important, and out came the 2011 standards. So the answer to your question is a yes and no — the 2010 standards, which were revised and issued and adopted in 2011, do contain a common core, but they are much more a state-specific Massachusetts set of standards that we think and we hear from teachers, when implemented well, are really the right things for our kids to be learning.
Jill: As I know you know, Massachusetts is actually nearing completion on a process to revise the standards, particularly the English language arts and math standards, and I wonder if you have any thoughts about those revisions, both what you hope to see with those revisions as well as things that you’re hoping will remain the same.
Linda: Well, as a business organization, we are not experts in standards and we don’t get into that level of what word is in standards and what word isn’t. What we really expect is that all the standards will be aligned with real world expectations; that they prepare students for what a citizen needs to know and be able to do in order to evaluate and vote, in order to evaluate current issues and read a newspaper and know what it says and what’s accurate. And so, we look for higher ed to say that these standards meet their expectations; that students who learn to these standards will be prepared for admission without the need for remediation, which means without the need for repeating courses that they should’ve mastered and taken in high school. So, that is our primary expectation of the standards.
The second thing we look for is can these standards be assessed in a way that will really give parents and students a sense of whether or not they’re on track for the next step, whether it’s moving up a grade or moving out of high school, and give teachers and educators the information they need to inform their instruction and adapt their curriculum materials if needed.
Jill: Are you tracking the current process of revisions in Massachusetts and do you have any thoughts about the preliminary direction that the standards seem to be going in — and either in English language arts or in math?
Linda: We have followed the process of revision, and it’s very similar to what’s been done in the past. Teams of content experts in English language arts and in math are convened. We have had some concerns about whether or not some of the drafts of the standards were weakening or lowering the bar. Everybody wants to be able to meet it. What we really expect is that the bar is going to be high. It’s going to be aspirational, it’s going to be aligned with what real expectations are, and if that means a lot of work to get to it, that’s work we should be doing. So we’re relying on the advice of people who have better knowledge of how standards should be written, whether or not they are measurable standards, and reasonable standards for the grade levels they’re assigned to. Those are things that we don’t know as employers. But what we will insist is that if students are continuing to graduate from high school having taken a course, having passed an assessment, and are not ready to do college level work, and are not ready for on-the-job training in an entry level job, then we have got to get our standards up to where they will be able to meet those goals.
Jill: Do you think that the incoming administration’s public acknowledgment that they’re not supportive of Common Core standards will have any impact on what states like Massachusetts do with their standards going forward?
Linda: I’m not sure if it will have an impact, because in most of the states that have run into political problems over the words Common Core, they have removed that language and they have, in some cases, instituted what some people refer to as Common Core Light; they have sometimes toned down and backed off the standards. But in most cases, they have understood that their economic future and their students’ futures, as members of a democratic society and a thriving economy, rely upon educating to those standards. So, I think that no matter what happens at the federal level, states have learned their lesson and they’re careful about what they call it but they’re sticking to the substance, and with the Every Student Succeeds Act, states have much more authority to do that and the federal government has much less control over what states do, so I’m optimistic that Massachusetts will be smart enough to reject any kind of effort to hold us back or to turn back the clock.
Jill: So some folks have framed the Common Core as national standards in part because of some of the incentives that were put in place by the Obama administration. Can you say a little bit more about your perspective on that?
Linda: Sure, I think that first of all, it’s very important to emphasize that the federal government cannot dictate standards to states. That has been true before President Obama was in office and it’s true now afterwards. There is no such thing as national standards imposed by the federal government. So, that having been one of the misconceptions, there were incentives, and that is something that the federal government, one should argue, should do: Rather than mandate that states follow a specific directive, give incentives in the form of competitive grants or in the form of letting some relaxing of rules, or whatever else makes sense for states on their own to decide how to structure their education system in a way that is more equitable and effective.
Jill: So Linda, from MBAE’s perspective, what do you think needs to be done next on the standards front?
Linda: What needs to be done next is what needs to be done continuously: Make sure that we keep on top of the latest information that we have about how students learn and what they need to know and be able to do after high school and make sure that our standards are aligned with those expectations. We need to do this not only for English, language Arts, for math, but also for science, social studies, for art, music, history, and particularly, we need to pay attention to computer science, because computer science is becoming a fundamental expectation just like basic math and basic reading. And we need to make sure that every student has access to that course of study, and that we prepare students for life in a knowledge-based economy.
Jill: Thanks so much for speaking with us today, Linda.
Linda: My pleasure, Jill.
