The recent interim report by Governor Healey’s K-12 Statewide Graduation Council (Council) entitled “Vision of a Massachusetts Graduate” may be well-intentioned, but it puts the cart before the horse. The 107-page report focuses on the end result, i.e. graduation. But students don’t just appear in high school, there is roughly a decade of schooling beforehand.

Backwards design is a planning practice used by many teachers when creating a lesson. We start by envisioning what we want our students to be able to achieve. Then we plan the measurable steps needed to enable the students to build the skills necessary to demonstrate the desired mastery. The Council’s plan – at present – does not contain these necessary steps for success.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is credited with saying “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give to you the man.” In simple terms, pre-school and kindergarten are vital for success in high school. The Council’s report makes no mention of pre-school or kindergarten.

The arts, especially music, are known to boost cognitive abilities, improve emotional expression, and improve executive functioning. In August the Cleveland Clinic published an article on its website listing the many benefits of music on the brain. Endovascular neurosurgeon Dr. Farah Fourcand says “Learning an instrument at any age is such a wonderful thing you can do for your brain. Performing music helps optimize your cognitive potential because you’re using and activating so many different parts of your brain.” The Council’s report suggests only one year of the arts in high school.

Foreign language gets a two-year recommendation in high school. However, if we were at all serious about preparing our children to interact in the global marketplace, then we would start foreign language instruction in elementary school.

While teenagers are indeed capable of foreign language acquisition, Anne Trafton of the MIT News Service reported in 2018 that a study “found that it is nearly impossible for people to achieve proficiency similar to that of a native speaker unless they start learning a language by the age of 10.”

Simply focusing on the finish line will leave many urban and rural students at a startling disadvantage. Erik Berg, president of the Boston Teachers Union and a member of the governor’s K-12 Statewide Graduation Council, testified at the Boston School Committee meeting early last month that at the rate the city has been opening new schools – roughly one a year – that “it will take a century for Boston to have new buildings.”

A week after those remarks, the Boston Public Schools learned that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would help with a $700M rebuild of Madison Park, the district’s vocational/technical high school. Recently the town of Lexington passed a $660M Prop 2½ override to build its new high school. The key difference here is that Boston has many, many more schools to rebuild. It may indeed take 100 years for Boston to modernize all 104 of its schools.

Imagine a Venn diagram wherein one circle contains the wealthiest towns in Massachusetts and the other contains the districts with the highest MCAs scores.  How much overlap do you think there is?

Ironically the Council’s report wishes to add financial literacy to the graduation requirements. Well, there is no greater lesson on finances than how we fund schools in Massachusetts.  Wealthy suburbs, with their high real estate taxes, can build and fund billion-dollar schools without having many (if any) impoverished students. On the other end of the spectrum are our urban and rural districts which have a substantially lower tax base and a larger number of underprivileged and non-native English Language speakers.

Care to guess how much ink is spilled in the Council’s report on Special Education and English Language Learners? The answers are four and two mentions respectively.  Mentions, not sections or analysis. Mentions.

The report uses such phrases as “all students” or “all Massachusetts students” or “Massachusetts graduate” nearly 100 times. Yet all does not mean all. I asked Berg at a recent union meeting if private and parochial schools are included in Council’s Vision of a Massachusetts Graduate. He said no.

Private schools must abide by the same fire and building codes as public schools, so why not educational standards? Many might argue that the private schools would do better on the end of year assessments than public school students. Maybe or maybe not. But assuming that the private school students would do better, might it be because those schools have better resources and/or fewer high-needs students or English language learners?

Let’s be honest, private and suburban families more often have the resources to hire tutors and/or provide supplementary educational experiences (such as the arts, travel, counseling, etc.). While some may say “That’s life,” it is incumbent upon the Commonwealth to ensure that all schools run the same course if they all have to cross the same finish line.

The final report from the K-12 Statewide Graduation Council is not due until June. I urge all members of the council – especially my fellow educators – to include not only specific steps from K-12 on how to prepare all students for graduation but also detailed budget line items to ensure that the aforementioned steps can be reached by our less-funded districts.

After all, we teachers are evaluated on how we enact our lessons from beginning to end. Why should the Commonwealth itself be held to a lesser standard?

Michael J. Maguire teaches Latin and Ancient Greek at Boston Latin Academy and is a member of the Boston Teachers Union. The ideas expressed here are his own.