SUBMITTED BY MTA VICE-PRESIDENT ANNE WASS TO THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION, ARTS AND HUMANITIES 

September 9, 2003 

Madame Chair, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify on behalf of Senate Bill 257.

The MTA supports high standards and heightened state commitment to education as embodied in the 1993 Education Reform Act. The state has made great strides forward in providing schools with more resources to help students achieve high standards, but we still have a long way to go. The MTA has consistently argued for critically important resources, including funds for smaller class size, alternative programs for disruptive students and more early childhood education. These resources are needed to ensure that students have the opportunity to learn the material on which they are being assessed.

Now that we have had six years of experience with MCAS, it is time for this legislature to make an honest evaluation of the testing program. Our members have made it very clear to us that the system needs some serious reforms.

Let me be clear:

Teachers are not opposed to testing. We administer tests in our classrooms everyday.

Teachers are not opposed to accountability. Senate bill 257 calls for a very extensive and rigorous accountability system.

What we oppose is the current over-reliance on a flawed testing system. I will summarize our objections briefly.

First, no single test is ever good enough, accurate enough or comprehensive enough to give a true measure of what a student knows and is able to do. This view is shared not only by the majority of parents, educators and assessment experts, but by the test-makers themselves. Even the head of Harcourt Educational Measurement, which makes the MCAS tests, has publicly stated he does not believe these tests should be used to determine which students may graduate from high school.

Second, over-reliance on a single test leads to a narrowing of curriculum and instruction in some classrooms. There is an old maxim in education: What you test is what you teach. MCAS cannot measure a child’s creativity, ability to work well in groups, speaking ability, facility with a foreign language, ability to repair a car engine or leadership skills – just to name a few. If MCAS is all that really “counts” toward graduation, these and many other important qualities and skills will be given short shrift.

Our proposals do not roll the clock back to pre-1993, but instead restore the original letter and spirit of Education Reform.

Under S. 257, a limited number of standardized tests would be administered, but high-stakes decisions would be based on multiple measures of achievement at the school and district levels. These measures could include exhibitions, portfolios, school-based tests and research projects, as described in the Education Reform Act.

To ensure that schools and districts hold students to high standards and assess them accurately, all schools would have to become accredited, a process mainly confined to high schools and colleges right now.

Schools that failed to meet accreditation standards would be helped. If they continued to fail, they would be subject to state sanctions and possible take over.

This accreditation requirement is far more meaningful than anything yet adopted by the Board of Education. The biggest drawback from a political perspective is that the results cannot be reduced to a single number that can be used to rank students, schools or districts. But this political drawback is an educational gain, because ranking leads to labeling and labeling leads to sorting and sorting leads to winners and losers – and that’s precisely what we do not want for our students or our schools in Massachusetts.  Rather, as Jack Rennie always told us was the goal of Education Reform, we need to ensure that “Every Child is a Winner.”

 Thank you for your attention to the views of classroom teachers on this critically important educational issue.