Comments on MCAS before the Joint Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Legislature,
Gardner Auditorium, State House,
Boston, September 9, 2003
 

 My name is Tom Crowder.  I am the father and grandfather of children now in the Massachusetts  Public Schools.

 On September 3rd the Department of Education announced the "extremely impressive" results of the 10th-grade MCAS tests this spring.  These results: only 25% of students of the class of 2003æ17,400 students failed the tests; only 48% of Blacks failed the tests (1,700 students), and only 56% of Latinos failed the tests (2,900 students). (We now learn that the figures for Blacks and Latinos are greatly understated.  The DOE has not reported the results for vocational students, Limited English Proficient students, Special Education students, or disabled students.)  If these results are "extremely impressive" it is difficult to imagine what figures would be less than impressive.  While the DOE is clear on what constitutes student failure, it seems somewhat less clear on what would constitute failure of the MCAS program, or of the DOE.

Some 17,400 members of the class of 2005 have been condemned to spend the last two years of their high-school career making repeated attempts to pass a 10th-grade examination in order to graduate in place of completing their high-school education.  If they succeed, all they can say is that they can pass a flawed 10th-grade examination.  This is what Education Reform consists of after ten years of administration by the DOE.

The DOE has settled on a theory of education by intimidation of students by the threat of non-graduation; intimidation of teachers by the threat of firing if their classes don't measure up on the MCAS; intimidation of administrators by the explicit threat of decertification if they question the DOE party line.

The stated purpose of these standardized tests was to hold schools accountable for their academic performance, and to provide information which would allow them to improve their performance.  In practice, it is the students who are held accountable rather than the schools.  As to using the results of the tests to improve schools' (and students') performance, this is rendered impossible since by time the results are received the students have gone on to different classes and teachers (and even different schools); and who knows where the teachers are?  GED results are available within days of taking the GED test.  MCAS results, graded in Texas by machine, take four months or more.  Why?  Because the DOE doesn't trust the teachers or administrators of its own system.

Of course, they have good reason for this; the whole system encourages cheatingæcheating by students, cheating by teachers, cheating by administrators, all of whom risk serious penalties if the results do not come up to expectations.  (The DOE has made no attempt to find out the extent of cheating.)  Cheating, in fact, is the only rational response to such a system, which is rigged against students, teachers, and administrators.  The DOE implicitly recognizes this, since test-prep, which is financed by the DOE ($50,000,000 in 2002-2003, $10,000,000 in 2003-2004), substitutes lessons in how to guess the "right" answer to multiple-choice questions for teaching the underlying subject matter.

 But the principal cheater in all this is the DOE itself, which designs the MCAS tests to produce a specified number of "failures" among the tested students, and then, if this target is not met, adjusts the "passing" score after the tests have been scored. When public pressure insists that scores rise, mysteriously, they rise.

But the DOE has an agenda in all this which has nothing to do with reform or improvement of the quality of education in the Massachusetts Public School system, and its interests are in keeping MCAS scores low: the failure rate must be high enough to satisfy the business community that the DOE is doing a satisfactory job of doing their job of screening entry-level employees for them (although almost none of the businesses which have pressed for this in fact hire high-school graduates, and the ones who do have little or no use for the abilities tested by MCAS) and to justify the continued proliferation of charter schools, which cost the State up to $16,000 per pupil-year (in addition to millions in start-up costs).  (Charter-schools have also not been subject to the budget cuts that public schools have in the present straitened condition of State finances.) Curiously, Massachusetts charter schools consistently occupy the lower rungs of MCAS results.

One would not think that before Education Reform Massachusetts had, perhaps, the most highly educated workforce in the country.  No more.  Ten per cent or more of each classæand most of its Blacks and Latinosæwill be uncertified and unemployable; the rest will have an inadequate education, consisting of a narrow range of non-standard English and Mathematics, both largely unusable in the job marketplace.

 But all this is common knowledge.  In its administration of Education Reform the DOE has been abetted by a supine Legislature, which has exercised no discernable oversight over what the DOE has been doing to subvert the letter and spirit of its Education Reform legislation as well as to the Massachusetts Public Education system itself.

 Thomas R. Crowder Newton thomasrcrowder@yahoo.com