Bay State misses the mark with MCAS

This week, most Massachusetts fourth, eighth and 10th graders will sit down to tackle the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. For the first time, this year’s 10th graders will have to pass the test as a requirement for graduation. As a result, many students who feel the exam is unfair are boycotting the testing. Yet because this is the first year that the test scores are required, fewer students are walking out of the test than did last year.

While the few brave students who dare to walk out of the test are silly to compromise their diplomas for the cause, their concerns are well founded. Although the MCAS can be used as a diagnostic tool to focus attention on poorly performing public schools, its use as a graduation requirement is an unfair punishment, which hurts students even more profoundly.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Education report on last year’s MCAS results, 45 percent of high school sophomores failed the mathematics portion of the test. An equal number of eighth graders failed the history/social science requirement and nearly as many failed the math and science/technology sections.

The MCAS is simply too broad an exam to be used as a determinant of minimum competency for high school graduation. Its breadth results in hours of “teaching to the test” and its administration is also time-consuming. Perhaps “teaching to the test” would be an improvement in some failing schools, but as nearly half of 10th graders continue to fail a significant section of the exam, it’s clear that schools fail even at this unenviable goal.

Furthermore, the use of the MCAS as a graduation requirement discriminates against poor and minority students who consistently fare worse than their wealthier peers on standardized tests. Again, the MCAS may be a good diagnostic tool to reveal which schools need the most help, but to prevent students in these schools from earning their diplomas is unnecessary and cruel punishment that will be distributed most heavily among the highly disadvantaged.

The MCAS also promises to increase the dropout rate among the students who perform poorly. The psychological effects of test performance are enormous. A student who sees in 10th grade that he cannot achieve the minimum competency requirements of the state will have significantly lower academic expectations for himself in the first place. While this should not be a reason to ignore weak students, it should be cause to discourage administrators from requiring a demoralizing exam to be part of graduation requirements.

While the state must still find a way to measure a school’s overall academic performance, alternatives to the use of the MCAS in its current form do exist. Locally developed tests would provide a community with the flexibility to set its own standards. The MCAS could even remain in a more narrow form but could be phased in as a graduation requirement once it became clearer that its implementation would not hurt such an enormous number of students.

Our own Chancellor John Silber persists as one of the leading proponents of the MCAS. In a Boston Herald editorial from last July 6, Silber claimed that MCAS opponents were trying to “blame the messenger” as they highlighted the exam’s shortcomings by boycotting the test. “Such gestures,” he wrote, “do not, of course, address the undeniable fact that our schools are failing to provide students with basic literacy, basic competence in mathematics and a basic understanding of history and science.”

But such gestures do address the fact that the MCAS serves as yet another obstacle for students in the state’s failing public schools, and the use of the test does nothing to change these realities.

Silber also charges that school boards’ objection to the test indicates a “conflict of interest.” Yet it is the state that is setting up just this conflict for the schools — instead of allowing education to focus on the needs of individual students, the use of the MCAS makes education high-stakes for everyone involved.

“The full extent of their betrayal of their students will be made starkly clear,” Silber writes of the day when the MCAS is used as a graduation requirement. But should students be the ones who have to pay for this betrayal? Must they be punished even more just to highlight the problem?

And when the Board of Education recognized its obligation to be more lenient by allowing students up to four chances to pass the test, Silber opposed the move on the grounds that it simply gives students more chances to fail. In a Feb. 2 piece in the Boston Herald (“Ed board goes off course”), Silber predicts that students will have no incentive to do well on the exam if they are given a reprieve.

This claim is just more evidence of Silber’s uncompassionate and intolerant attitude toward students that we see so often in his handling of Boston University’s guest policy and anti-discrimination clause. Take the hard line no matter what, even when it hurts students.

Silber writes that the Board would serve the public better by repealing the MCAS as a requirement. “If it is going to cave into pressure from teachers’ unions, school committees and short-sighted parents, it should do it openly and honestly,” he writes. God forbid the Board listen to parents, teachers and school committees.

While public schools obviously need to undergo standard-driven reform, students should not be penalized in the process. Use the MCAS as a diagnostic test, but don’t make it another punishment for students who are already shortchanged.