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School
Committee, don't relinquish your right to grant diplomas
Guest Commentary by Jonathan King
Published in the Cambridge Chronicle on January 30, 2002
At the Feb 5th meeting of the Cambridge School Committee, the
School Department will report the numbers of CRLS high school 11th graders who
are at risk of being denied a diploma next year because of their scores on
either the Math or ELA (English Language Arts) MCAS tests.
The students will be subject to this grave risk to their
further education and career development, regardless of their courses taken,
classroom participation, grades, school citizenship, special projects,
musical, dramatic or athletic contributions. The decision to deny students
their diploma based solely on a set of standardized test scores has been
made by the nine - member State Board of Education appointed by Governors
Weld and Cellucci. This misguided policy represents a State override of the
historic authority of elected School Committees to grant diplomas.
If the policy remains unchallenged, it will represent a radical
departure from the 180-year educational history of democratic oversight
of public high schools in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Cambridge
School Committee members should follow the lead of the Hampshire School
Committee, reject the usurping of their authority, and reaffirm that they
will carry out their elected mandate to decide requirements for a diploma
from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.
Since the founding of the first public high school in the U.S. in
Boston, there have been intense policy debates over the content, emphasis
and goals of secondary education. They included the tension between
classical vs. manual training in the 1870s, "education for college" or
"education for life" at the turn of the century, and education for "social
efficiency" in the 20's and 30's. The Carnegie Foundation in the earlier
part of the century aggressively promoted "Carnegie Units" as a means of
comparing teaching and learning among diverse schools. From the 1900s to the
present there has been increasing emphasis on accreditation by regional
associations, assessment through tests, and other efforts to be sure that a
high school diploma was meaningful. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in
1957, we witnessed an intense focus on improving the teaching of science,
math, and foreign languages.
During all those debates over standards, content, and criteria, the
authority to grant high school diplomas has remained vested in local school
committees, school superintendents and high school principals. This model
was established in 1837 when the Massachusetts legislature wisely refused
to vest degree-granting authority in the State Dept of Education. It has
continued to the present time. The almost universal support for this policy
among educators is based on the recognition that only people who know a
student and their school performance and experience can assess their
development, accomplishments and contributions over the four years of high
school.
Given the complex character of human intelligence and performance,
no set of standardized tests can properly assess a student's performance,
competence or contribution, to determine whether they qualify for their
high school diploma.
With the imposition of the high-stakes MCAS tests we have for the first
time the forcible imposition of a one-size-fits-all straitjacket on our
local schools. The tests, sold to the Board of Education by a Texas-based
company, are deeply flawed and discriminatory, and are doing serious damage
to our students, teachers, and classrooms. They undermine lively teaching,
push out inquiry-based curriculum, and return our children's education to
the turn of the century rote-learning mode. Your child may be a creative
writer, talented musician, superb athlete, designer of computer games, club
president or community leader; if they do not pass the 10th grade MCAS in both
Math and English, they will not graduate.
The Cambridge School Committee should not abrogate its
responsibility to decide on school diplomas in the face of the
one-size-fits-all MCAS tests. Passing or failing the MCAS should not
determine whether a student receives a high school diploma. The
multifaceted criteria developed over the past decades - courses taken,
academic performance, extracurricular achievements, and school citizenship
- should remain in place. This is particularly true in the light of the
multiple flaws and inequities and of the MCAS tests.
Even in cases where an educational institution is chartered by the
State, such as the U/Mass College and University campuses, degree-granting
authority remains with the leadership of the institution, and not in the
State Board of Higher Education. Though the Dept. of Education claims that
its override mandate derives from the 1993 Education Reform Act, their
interpretation is lacking legal or legislative precedent.
The vesting of diploma granting authority in the school itself, not
in some distant bureaucracy, represents some of the deepest wisdom gleaned
from 175 years of postsecondary public education: Teaching and learning
depends on the relationship of students to their teachers, their peers and
their local communities. Neither scores on standardized tests, lists of
credit hours or courses, nor even a collection of projects can properly
assess it. This is the proper business of school principals, teachers and
instructional staff, under the oversight of elected School Committees.
[Jonathan King is the
parent of a CRLS student and a Graham and Parks student;
member of the steering committee of Cambridge Massparents for Education
not MCAS/Cambridge CARE (Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education); and a
Professor of Molecular Biology at MIT] |
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