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Education testing in Massachusetts
GUY DARST - WALL STREET JOURNAL
(10/04/07)

BOSTON — Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has produced one surprise after another since taking office nine months ago. He stunned people by spending $12,000 on office curtains, by suggesting that union construction workers be asked to find illegal immigrants at job sites, and by saying that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were partly about “the failure of human beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other.”

But his biggest surprise is the scope of a planned overhaul of what is probably the nation’s best public school system — a reform effort he calls his “Readiness Project.” He has asked for reports on 66 proposals ranging from making school days longer to dropping tuition in  community colleges. The fear is that he’s about to emasculate testing requirements put in place more than a decade ago.

It’s not an irrational fear. The governor is strongly  supported by labor unions that oppose the tests, has appointed a testing critic to the Board of Education, and aims to kill school-district performance audits.

Back in the 1992-93 school year, the Bay State instituted  rigorous testing requirements, including exams 10th-graders must pass in order to graduate from high school. Massachusetts students usually do well on the

exams of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But fourth-graders and eighth-graders in the past two years came in first, or statistically tied for first, in both English and mathematics on the NAEP. No state had ever done that.

Many credit the success to the state’s testing regime, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), and the reforms that came with it, including money (inflation-adjusted state aid to local  education has doubled since 1993). Unlike the dumbed-down standards of some states, the MCAS “proficiency” award tracks well with the same NAEP designation.

A writer for the liberal Washington Monthly said in 2001, when the tests were given for the first time, “The MCAS, and the reforms that have come with it, may be the best thing to happen to poor students in a generation in terms of improving the quality of their education.”

Each student gets five chances to pass English and math exams and may continue to try after leaving school. Eighty-seven percent of the class of 2009 passed both on the first try, an increase from 84% last year and 68% for the class of 2003. More than two-thirds achieved a “proficiency” rating. After five tries, 97% pass. Even a majority of  dropouts have passed. The tests are sophisticated: English requires a brief essay; math requires a showing of the work on some questions for which partial credit is possible.

The anti-testers, however, aren’t happy. “In states throughout the country, student assessment is done with multiple measures including course work, projects, in-depth study and grades, along with standardized test scores,” two of them wrote earlier this year. Gov. Patrick insists he supports MCAS as one measure of achievement. In announcing his “Readiness Project” in June, he said,  “Being ready means public education that is about the whole child, not just success on a single standardized test.” That’s the kind of language that can be code for junking standardized tests.

Former State Senate President Tom Birmingham, a Democrat and Rhodes Scholar, is from Chelsea, Mass., a gritty Boston suburb with schools so bad that they were given to Boston University to run in the 1980s. He worked with three Republican governors to strengthen education.  He found the governor’s appointment of Ruth Kaplan, an activist and founder of the Alliance for the Education of the Whole Child, to the Board of Education “troubling.” And he has said that his “understanding of Ruth is that she’s Janey one-note” against MCAS.

James Peyser, chairman of the Board of Education until last year, also says he “worries” about Ms. Kaplan’s appointment. As does former Board of Education member Roberta Schaefer. She fears the governor “is about to gut” the testing requirement by making it just one of several  measuring sticks schools use.

Gov. Patrick has already demonstrated a willingness to bend to union desires. In January, the state Labor Relations Commission ordered the Boston Teachers Union to back off of a threat to call a strike. Gov. Patrick’s response was to propose a budget that would zero out the commission. The legislature funded it anyway.

The legislature, however, went along with his proposal to get rid of another union bugbear, the Office of Educational Quality and Assessment. The EQA examines the performance of dozens of school districts across the state each year. And according to an analysis of 76 EQA report s by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, 44 of those 76 districts had curricula that did not meet state standards — their students could have been facing MCAS without having been taught some of the material on the tests. The governor this year recommended defunding the  agency and the legislature agreed, giving it just enough funding to wind up its work. Ms. Schaefer, calls the move “a mistake.” Instead, she says, the agency ”should have been strengthened.”

So far, many of the people the governor has turned to help him institute reforms dispute the idea that the governor will water down standards. One of whom is Paul Reville. He’s a lecturer at Harvard and in the early 1990s was instrumental in helping to create MCAS. This year the  governor tapped him to be the new chairman of the state Board of Education. If the governor did want to dilute MCAS, he said recently, “I hardly think he would have chosen me [to be chairman].”

Chris Anderson, executive director of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a member of the Board of Education, says the state needs to do better and not view “the 49 [other] states as competitors.” Instead, Massachusetts educators need to worry about India and China.

But the fact that debates over education center on whether the state will backslide is a bad sign. Massachusetts should be pressing ahead - closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, for  one thing — not resting on its laurels. The governor wants reform. But if he wants better schools, he’ll need good testing.

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The October 2007 Edition of the Valley Patriot
The Valley Patriot is a Monthly Publication.
All Contents (C) 2007, Valley Patriot, Inc.
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