Day 2: Strengthen the objective MCAS test
By Jim StergiosJuly 14th, 2010
When Governor William Weld signed the Education Reform Act, no one thought that within a short few years more than 90 percent of Massachusetts’ students would be passing the MCAS. Nor did anyone then believe that our 4th- and 8th-grade students would soon rank among the top-scoring nations on the Trends in International mathematics and Science Study exams.
Notwithstanding the state’s educational successes, critics of the MCAS—and of other elements of our accountability system such as a district and school audit system—remain. New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang castigates the MCAS for causing kids to drop out—wrongly, as can be seen in the percentage of dropouts [updated: in their senior year] who have already passed the MCAS and for reasons presented by former Senate President Tom Birmingham, a principal architect of the Education Reform Act of 1993.
Then there are the opponents of district and school audits—or at least audits that have teeth. These opponents include the leadership of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Association of School Superintendents, and especially the Urban Superintendents Association, which in early 2007 sketched out the playbook that Governor Patrick has employed on accountability – destroy real accountability and set up a fig-leaf system.
If we are to spend $9 billion a year on education, we need to hold the schools accountable for student achievement. Here are four actions we can take which relate to the MCAS:
- Objective testing must remain the primary way to signal growth in students’ academic achievement. That means maintaining the objectivity of the MCAS test and eschewing highly subjective and ill-defined ‘how-to’ skills in the academic frameworks. If teachers and principals want to utilize project-based teaching and test such matters, we welcome school-level efforts to do so. But the state needs a clear metric of content acquisition, as it is the most effective way to ensure success in college and the work place.
- The state must now reinstate testing of the mastery of United States history as a high school graduation requirement ($2.5 million). This subject area requirement was to go into effect in 2011, but the state mothballed the effort for political reasons (first they needed to postpone it to include “soft skills”, then they cried poor mouth after receiving hundreds of millions of federal stimulus dollars). The fact is that history provides context as students observe how our nation, the world, and its leaders change. Thomas Jefferson noted that mastery of history is elemental to understanding how to learn from the vice and virtue of political leadership and human action, as well as how to navigate toward practical solutions. The late historian Paul Gagnon, a leader in standards-based education reform, wrote of education in history, saying that
“Nothing less than people’s freedom is at stake—freedom to choose their own way in politics, and to choose their own mode of private culture, not to be indoctrinated by the fashions of their moment and milieu.”
Now more than ever, our schools need to promote student mastery of the enduring historical skills knowledge already embedded in the state’s 2003 History and Social Science Curriculum Framework.
- We need to reduce the time it takes to get MCAS results to teachers from the current four and a half months to two months. Ideally the MCAS test would be given in mid-June so we can capture the learning that occurred during a full school year. Changing the timing of the MCAS will require that results can be turned around between the end of June and the start of September.
- We need to fully fund MCAS test remediation ($30 million). In recent years, state education officials have made drastic cuts to the MCAS test remediation program. As a consequence, the state has developed what Education Reform architect and former Senate President Thomas Birmingham has called “a triage system for students.” Money for MCAS test remediation should be restored substantially and directed towards students at risk of not passing the MCAS test and therefore not graduating. That funding should be disbursed starting in the ninth grade, with students selected through an objective risk assessment system.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog.
Entry Filed under: Education, News
7 Comments Add your own
1. fred m | July 14th, 2010 at 8:11 am
Where are the data showing that lots of HS dropouts have already passed the MCAS?
Please give a reference to the study that indicates this.
2. Jim Stergios | July 14th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Fred: Here is a link to the reference: http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=3521. Hope this is helpful.
3. fred m | July 14th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
According to this report, in 2005-2006, 9,910 MA students dropped out of HS. Only 1,742 had passed MCAS.
Overwhelmingly, most drop-outs did not pass MCAS.
Failure to complete HS is a huge problem (particularly in some MA cities) and I submit from this data that MCAS is not helping.
4. Jim Stergios | July 14th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
Fred: Senior year is the year by which high school kids have to pass the MCAS. They have five tries. With 72 percent of them already having passed the MCAS, I think it is a hard argument to make that the MCAS is getting them to drop out. For example, 9th-graders have not even seen the 10th-grade MCAS test. Text corrected – and sorry for the lack of precision on the year in question.
5. fred m | July 15th, 2010 at 1:09 am
OK, of seniors, 2,584 dropped out and 1,742 had already passed MCAS. (By the way, that’s 67%, not 72%.)
Look at districts who are doing badly. They have big fail rates at the middle school level, and then things are much better at the 12th grade level, percentage-wise. Why is this? Because the kids who failed the middle school MCAS have dropped out. The graduating class sizes are smaller by the exact size of the cohort that’s failing on the middle school test.
Why do you think strengthening the MCAS will help these kids? It’s clearly not working for them now.
6. Mr. H | July 23rd, 2010 at 7:44 pm
As a teacher, I completely support shortening the turnaround time in receiving MCAS results. Scheduling is a huge factor in a student’s success; if the DESE does not get MCAS results to us before the end of August (they never do) there is a big chance those students will end up in the wrong classes. This means that students will need to be rescheduled once the year has begun and routines are in place. (In my experience, this happens a lot in my school.) Often the students who are rescheduled are those who are less equipped to tolerate disruptions.
This might seem trivial, but in my opinion it is a big deal. There is so much energy going into those first few weeks of classes, both on the parts of students and teachers, that it is very confusing for struggling students to be moved into a new class a few weeks into the term.
Everybody is so eager to say that teachers are the big problem in education, and it is true there are many things we should do better; but we are not the only partner in the education business who needs to clean up its act.
7. ron leary | October 10th, 2011 at 8:02 am
Jim,
As a retired teacher-coach for over forty years, I
am witnessing an epidemic of teenage drinking and
prescription pill taking. I coach three sports at the
frosh level and I have seen a dramatic increase in stress. Most of their stress eminates from a more
demanding curriculum to pass MCAS. The more the bar is raised, the more stress leads to avenues of
alcohol and drugs. Please read the Surgeon Generals “CALL TO ACTION” http://www.surgeongeneral.gov.
Maybe we can turn this around with a more
balanced approach to education where we learn
more about the intricate systems of the human
body and the wonders of DNA. I believe that if kids
learn the wonders of their body, they will not abuse
it.
The study of Nature and all its beauty would help
them reduce stress as they immerse themselves
with “a love for learning”. We have to bring back
a methodology of “having fun learning” and reduce
the stressful preparations for MCAS.
The more we raise the bar, the more addictions
we create. The Pioneer Institute could be a leader
“a call for action”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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