Election Day is a week away, and the MCAS question looms: The ballot initiative would repeal the state law requiring students to pass their 10th grade MCAS exams to graduate. At this point, even Matt Damon has weighed in.
Last week, I talked to Jennifer Amento, a 23-year general and special elementary educator in Mashpee, with the No on 2 Coalition. This week, I talked to Massachusetts Teachers Association vice president Deb McCarthy, formerly a Hull educator for 25 years, about why to vote yes to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement.
In the interest of fairness, I edited each interview, with salient points, to roughly the same number of words.
School comes easily to my second-grader. My older one is dyslexic, so I've also navigated the IEP process. Maybe he's not the best test-taker. I see the issue from both sides.
Thank you for sharing that. It represents a lot of the reason why I left the classroom.
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When ed reform came out, I was a big champion, and I really believed in the promise. I was known as the MCAS guru in my building.
We hear so frequently that there'll be no standards, and that's just simply not true. The standards are a big piece of ed reform. The investment in fiscal resources was a big piece of it, and then this assessment piece. We can't pretend that these standards are not an integral part of it.
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As an educator, those standards drive everything that I have to do. My lesson plans have to be created toward these standards. We purchase curriculum [because] the Massachusetts standards are embedded right in it. You literally write your lesson plan using the curriculums the district has purchased with the standard from the Massachusetts frameworks in it. We have standards-based report cards. When I get evaluated, every year -- even after 25 years, every year, and it's a real rigorous evaluation process -- it is done based upon these standards.
When I meet with my administrators, I have to show them how my lesson plans and my assessments are aligned with the standards.
You're not currently teaching.
I left the classroom to become the vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers' Association. I'd been using my voice for over a decade because I really believed in this. Over time, what happened was high stakes -- basically a rank-and-shame accountability system off the back of students. I started to see too much harm.
I had parents [with] 10-year-olds coming up to me expressing anxiety, concerns. Parents didn't want their kids to take the test. I had a really tough situation where a student had lost his parent. He was an A student. Mom didn't want him to take the test, but because he was an A student, admin was trying to counsel him into taking the test.
I had another student on the spectrum. Mom didn't want him taking the test. He was counseled right back in. I remember the day like it was yesterday, even though it was 12 years ago, when the proctor said, "He hasn't moved on from this question for two hours."
And I'm like, "I know. And there's probably something wrong with the question. You don't understand his learning style, and you are creating harm."
The more I was seeing the harm to learners and the more parents were expressing this harm, that's when we began to talk about: Why are we putting a test before these learners, specifically the dyslexic learners?
It's designed with the next-best answer on multiple choice questions. My dyslexic learners would miss the word "not." What they do is they make that the first selection. And so when people say, "we don't teach to the test," that's not true, because you have to teach them these strategies.
Your dyslexic learner gets so excited. They know the content, they see that answer, they bubble it in, and then you find out they didn't see the word "not."
I have students who are natural mathematicians. They manipulate the data. They construct the data. Then the question tells them to write three to four paragraphs on how they got their answer. They're scored on a rubric about having a topic sentence, three talking points, and the wrap-up. They lose points because they're not the strongest writer, but they're the strongest math student in your classroom.
One last thing about this, and I promise I'll stop: We don't get the MCAS scores until the students are in the next grade. The data about the learner is no good.
They're docked points for how they respond if they're not the strongest writer -- but most kids do pass, right?
It's not that hard unless you're the student learning a second or a third language. You're a student who's on an IEP. You're a student in a community where the schools aren't fully funded and fully resourced, or are a dyslexic learner. We know this ... While most who initially fail will go on to retake and pass it, 85% who never pass are English learners and students with disabilities. As an educator, I have to differentiate my assessment and my instruction, and we're not differentiating this metric.
Many people say there's no other statewide standard, though.
Remember, the standards aren't going anywhere. Last year, a student in Hull got accepted into Harvard. Somebody from Weymouth got accepted into Harvard. Somebody from Wellesley got accepted into Harvard -- not because of the MCAS score, because they don't ask for them, but based upon their GPA, which was based upon their rigorous course pathway.
People are saying that there won't be alignment. There is alignment. We have the alignment of these rigorous courses because they're aligned to standards. The reason [Massachusetts schools are] number one has nothing to do with a snapshot in time, a one-time assessment. It has to do with the fact that educators in Massachusetts not only have to get licensed. They have to get their master's. They have to get recertified every five years and get 120 professional development points. They get evaluated annually. There's consistency across the board.
We hear that teachers feel they're teaching to a test, causing distraction and anxiety, taking time from being able to teach effectively. If you're already teaching aligned to standards, and the MCAS reflects this, what changes?
As educators, we want to educate the whole child. What's being assessed really aren't the indicators that are important in the 21st century. However, when we blame it on teachers -- once again, I'm going to say: It's not the teachers. We are not the ones who are demanding that the focus be on the results of the score. It's also kind of not fair because in some of these districts when they go into receivership . . .
A parent might not know what that means.
It means that the school committee has no control over their schools; the state appoints a receiver to come in and take control.
Districts get put in receivership based upon MCAS scores. If you could hear the teachers who leave these districts talk about the students they're leaving behind: But they can't function in a district that's all about teaching to a test because they're trying to get out of receivership.
All that MCAS measures is a zip code. It's just heart-wrenching: the student who is denied the diploma, and especially with the newcomers. Can you imagine learning a second or third language, and you've been an A student, and now the test is put in front of you in a language that you're just trying to learn, and you have a year under your belt here? These are the students we're harming.
What's the solution? The biggest pushback I hear is: There's no uniform measurement without MCAS. No cohesion. What other academic standards are there, easily accessible to parents? Without MCAS, what can we look at?
A one-time metric is just a one-time metric. You look at what's going on in the school. You've got the framework; you've got the course selections. Parents nowadays can go right into the portal and see the lesson plan. They can get grades within a week that have to be posted. There's so much accountability.
I guess that's the thing: Where's the accountability?
It's all right there. But I will say this. I cannot believe, when I left the classroom, how much vitriol there is around some parents in particular toward educators.
Everybody believes that I'm competent enough to be the first line of defense when there's an intruder in the building. Nobody challenged my competency when it came to teaching in a classroom with mold. Nobody challenged whether I was professional or competent enough to return into a building in the middle of a pandemic when we didn't have proper ventilation systems.
But, for some reason, when I'm saying in coalition with 117,000 other educators that we know better and we need to be doing better for all learners, we're getting challenged.
It's emotional, too. How do you feel about the fact that Massachusetts is one of few states that do not require specific coursework for graduation? We're an outlier. Why isn't MassCore required?
So many districts do require it. In the districts that don't have MassCore, it's an equity issue. They can't afford the foreign language teacher. I've listened to superintendents who say they don't have it in their budget, so it's an unfunded mandate, and it's the students in under-resourced communities who are denied.
Hopefully, once this passes, or when it does pass on November 5, people are going to start to look at this unfunded mandate and provide the equity of rigorous course opportunities for all learners.
Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @kcbaskin.