Mass Insight performs extensive research, but we are not a think tank. We inform education policymaking at all levels, but we are not simply an advocacy group. What makes us unique is the way we stake our research and policy work to our direct involvement with educators and schools at the ground level.

Our very first step, in 1997, was the formation of a network of reform-minded Massachusetts superintendents. That network became the Great Schools Coalition, which is currently helping to implement the $13 million Advanced Placement grant awarded to Mass Insight and our Massachusetts partners in September 2007.

Across the intervening decade, Mass Insight has conducted extensive development programs for school and district leadership teams; an intensive, integrated math initiative that aligned reform work in curriculum, assessment, content training, and coaching for teachers; and a range of other field services. Our Standards Maps have been used by more than a hundred Massachusetts districts as the basis for their own guidelines to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. All of these initiatives have influenced everything we do, and they continue to “ground” our research and policy work in the place where school reform matters most.