Massachusetts Considers De-emphasizing High Stakes
Test
Massachusetts Governor
Deval Patrick, the first Democratic Governor of
Massachusetts in recent memory, has called for an
improvement of the state's MCAS (High-Stakes Tests)
scores and adding new assessments as well, according
to the June 6, 2007, Boston
Globe. This new
idea--expanding the ways in which high-school
students may prove they are worthy of graduation--has
led to a proposal and hearings before the state
legislature's Joint Committee on Education. Patrick
was criticized for this in an editorial in the
Boston
Herald, the city's conservative
inflammatory tabloid-style newspaper, who predictably
called it "backsliding" and, ironically, a
"concession to mediocrity."
The MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment
System, was passed in the mid-90's and became the
state's make or break testing system, as required by
the NCLB. In 2003, the MCAS became the state's
graduation requirement.
From my experience as an educator in Massachusetts
colleges for thirty years, I can testify that in the
past five years or so there has been a noticeable
shift in freshman students' writing skill: where once
there was a wide range of skills--ranging from a
percentage of students of extraordinary creativity
and imagination and writing abilities to, yes, a
percentage of extremely weak students. Now things are
much more level--the weak students aren't appearing
in the same frequencies as before, and that's good
(although it's been documented how weak students are
simply forced out of high schools before graduation
in order not to bring down aggregate test scores, and
thus never even get to apply to a college, so forced
attrition may be as much a cause as improved
educational practices). But the really exceptional
writers are also gone, for the most part, beaten down
by school systems teaching to the test and
promulgating a mindless essay format known as the
"five-paragraph-essay" which guarantees, if mastered,
passing the test and never having a creative or
useful thought to express. Thanks to the MCAS and
other high-stakes test, mediocrity is rampant.
Many critics of the NCLB have been asking for relief
from the mindlessness of high-stakes testing.
Educators know that all a child is and knows cannot
be summed up in a few true/false and multiple-choice
tests (to its credit, the MCAS does allow for a
student to actually write an essay as part of the
test). And requiring students to pass this one test
before graduating is harmful to the country. There is
no evidence, one way or the other, on how these tests
correlate with later success in life. Do those
students who pass these tests turn out to be better
citizens, better parents, better workers, better
soldiers, than those who don't pass them? "Unless we
can link scores to some measure of success after
leaving school," George Wood has written in
Many Children Left Behind, "they should not be
given."