This act is related to education reform but is focused most heavily on the students. The state tests implemented by this act are used to gauge student knowledge and if they are up to the standards based on their grade. These state tests aim to gauge student performance whereas the MCAS measured the teacher performance and allowed for much greater involvement of the federal government in local schools. Another focus was on bringing english language learners (ELL) and Special Education students (SP) to the same standards as other students, grades 3-8 and high school were the focus. Another topic this covered is hiring “highly qualified” teachers, which in general means that the teacher not only has a certification for teaching in that state but also a bachelor's degree in the field they are instructing. This section of the Act was heavily contested by teacher unions as they felt this placed too much pressure on schools to hire the small percentage of teachers who also have a degree in that field as there was already a shortage of teachers.

The Act also aimed to have public schools in America reach a certain performance level calculated through the standardized tests by 2014, this ultimately did not happen. Because the deadline passed and many schools were still underperforming, waivers were offered to schools to adapt the goals to better fit their demographics. Finally the law also allowed Title 1 budgets to schools in need which was federally funded. Similar to the foundation budget of the ESSA (1993), this money was set aside specifically to help students that were not proficient based on the state standards.

Before the Massachusetts Education Reform Act there was not much differentiation between a school in an area with a high socioeconomic status versus one in an area with a lower socioeconomic status. This led to great disparities in how students experienced school, middle and upper class students had more supplies, nicer/safer buildings, and most importantly, money! It took us until 1993 to begin addressing the issues of disparity between schools across the country. The reform act aimed to reengineer the United States Education system and began by implementing state standards for all areas of education, previously the state only had standards for physical education and history. These standards gave teachers a framework of topics to include in their yearly lesson plans. This helped streamline the Massachusetts education system to define a set of topics a district must deliver to students in a given year. This not only helped in teacher organization but also aimed to deliver content more equitably amongst public school systems. These standards are backed by a state test titled the MCAS where students are evaluated with questions relating to the standards in any given field. This allowed the state to assess data and identify which districts were struggling the most with content knowledge.

The act also introduced new graduation requirements for students including passing the MCAS test. The MCAS requirement is supplemented with the school’s local graduation requirements. Introducing the test not only gave statistics on student/teacher performance but also standardized a large chunk of the graduation requirement for state schools. To help all schools reach the state standards, the Foundation Budget was developed to give all schools a stronger position financially. Money was distributed based on a multitude of factors including socioeconomic status and school demographics. Although not perfect, this gave most schools at least five hundred and fifty dollars per student, per year, to be used for any necessary education reform. In addition to this monetary benefit, schools were also required to deliver a minimum amount of hours dedicated to education in the core areas. For high school, this requirement was nine hundred and ninety hours and nine hundred for elementary schools.

Finally the Act implemented performance testing of both individual teachers and districts as a whole. This was a method to get to the core of one issue, underprepared teachers. If the teacher does not have sufficient content area knowledge or Pedagogical methods the students are sure to suffer. Implementing these tests gave information on which districts and schools needed to be focused on professional development. The better the teachers work together, the better the district performs. This action held schools responsible for hiring/providing adequate teachers in any given school.