Next week, Massachusetts voters will vote on a referendum (Question 2), pushed by the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) (a.k.a. the local teacher’s union), which would do away with the long-standing requirement that high-school students in Massachusetts must earn a “pass” on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test of educational achievement in order to graduate from high-school. The debate over the issue has been intense and loaded with emotion and exaggeration (the MTA infamously declared at one point that the MCAS requirement had prevented some 50,000 students from getting high-school diplomas when the real number was closer to 700/year, or about 1% of the enrolled students. The sleight-of-hand was that the MTA was counting not only those who would otherwise have been eligible for diplomas but for the fact that they failed the MCAS, but also the much larger number of students who never actually completed their high-school coursework and would not have graduated for reasons that had nothing to do with the MCAS).
As is appropriate for the major newspaper in the area, The Boston Globe has featured a variety of opinion pieces advocating for both sides of the issue. But, its editorial board came out against the proposition; and the Massachusetts effort also attracted the attention of at least one New York Times columnist, Jessica Grose, who weighed in on October 30th in her column, also in favor of preserving the testing requirement. Obviously, this is not a simple ‘conservative’/’liberal’ divide.
I felt that the conversation was dancing around, but not actually addressing, the fundamental issue. I wrote the following as an OpEd submission for The Boston Globe. I never heard back from them — either positively or negatively — so, it now being more than 10 days since I submitted it and the election rapidly approaching, here it is.
Note that I wrote about the MCAS once before, many years ago, when it was still somewhat new and results were being reported about how effective it might be. For completeness, here is a link to that, as well.
19 October 2024
I have a dirty secret to reveal to you: the debate over MCAS isn’t really about education.
Well, OK, it is about education. Sort of. At least peripherally.
MCAS is nominally a quality control measure, a spot-check to see what our students have learned during their years of schooling. That is, it is intended to verify students coming out of those years of schooling may really be called “educated” (or, perhaps, in some hopefully small number of cases, not).
And, of course, to do that, it also defines and formalizes a minimum standard of what we mean by “educated” in the first place. Perhaps you disagree with that definition and that standard. Fine. We can debate that and update it.
But, really, the current debate over MCAS — not about what it defines as our standard measure of “educated” but about whether it should exist at all or be used to assess students’ ultimate mastery of that standard — is not about education, per se. It is about educational accountability. It is about how we assure ourselves that education is, in fact and not merely in theory, actually happening in our schools.
And, when it comes down to it, that means the debate over MCAS is not a debate about education. It is a debate about trust.
Fundamentally, those educators who oppose the use of MCAS — teachers and their union representatives, principals, district administrators, and school boards — are telling us to trust them. “We are professionals. We know what we are doing. We can tell you whether — actually, we can assure you that — your students are being educated well. Trust us to get it right!”
On the other hand, those citizens and politicians who advocated for the creation of MCAS in the first place, and those who continue to advocate for it now, are, at root, saying, “No! We don’t trust you! We want proof!”
I must ask: is that really irrational?
Consider the recent turmoil in Boston over the quality of education being provided to students in the Boston Public Schools. Consider similar debates and unhappiness in other places.
Consider the history of stories — not many but also not none — of “professional” educators who have been caught gaming the MCAS system (and similar systems in other states) to make their performance look better than it actually was.
Consider the experiences of people like my mother-in-law, at one time a Principal in a large mid-western high school, who found it all but impossible, because of the hidebound rules negotiated into union contracts, to rid her school of substandard teachers who were not actually teaching.
Consider that MCAS, itself, was a product of school reform efforts dating back to President Bill Clinton’s term in office 30 years ago. And that we have been talking about poor educational results and school reform since at least Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 10 years before that, if not before. And that we still haven’t gotten to where we want to be.
Educators have been telling us to trust them for a long time. A very long time. Yet, here we still are.
And, finally, consider that, as citizens and as a matter of public policy, we might perhaps understand and accept that “reform” is a slow process that must play out over time. But, as students and as parents of students, what that slow process of reform may bring us 10 years or 20 years or 30 years down the road — or even 5 years down the road — is largely irrelevant. Our students are in school now, and for a limited amount of time. Reforms that happen later are reforms that they miss entirely. We don’t have time to wait for things to get better!
As for educators who oppose the use of MCAS to assess whether students truly are educated enough to be considered high school graduates: what is stopping you from making all those improvements that we are supposed to trust you with? Does the very existence of MCAS somehow prevent you from teaching in ways that you deem would be effective? Why do you feel you must “teach to the test” and why does that feel to you like a constraint? If your effective alternate teaching methods end up with your students learning all the things we have deemed it important for them to learn, then they will pass the MCAS test. If, instead, they can’t pass the test then perhaps those methods are not really as effective as you want us to believe.
You want us to trust you? Earn our trust by turning out students who can consistently pass the MCAS. Then, perhaps, you can convince us that the test is superfluous.
© Copyright 2024, Augustus P. Lowell