Testimony for public hearing on MCAS legislation, September 9, 2003

Deborah Meier, co-principal of Boston's Mission Hill K-8th grade school, author of The Power of Their Ideas, and In Schools We Trust, recipient of MacArthur Award, and former kindergarten teacher and high school principal in New York City.

That even one child, much less thousands, fails to get an essential high school diploma even though he or she did everything else right in high school is doing irreparable harm.  One test--no matter how many times given--should not overrule 13 years of schooling and the judgment of all those who know him or her best.

But the harm, in fact, is falling on all the kids who pass. It's hardly a surprise that relentlessly giving the same test over and over--and relentlessly organizing schooling around testing--should produce a lift in scores.  But it does not indicate whether we have more well-educated graduates.

It doesn't measure any of the qualities that are uppermost in my mind when I hire an employee or when I worry about the quality of citizenship. It's at best a rough measure of so-called academics, but it's no measure at all of one's ability to write or speak effectively, to produce carefully crafted written work--based on continued effort, hard work and feedback. It doesn't measure the ability to do research and weigh conflicting evidence.  It tells us nothing about whether the student is in the habit of looking for connections and patterns. It doesn't tell us if the student can handle criticism, and persevere until a task is truly well done--sets his own high standards for his work.  It doesn't measure the ability to work well with others, as leader or follower.  It doesn't pretend to tell us if the student meets deadlines, much less gets at that all important reliability under stress, or respect for viewpoints one has never before considered.  And of course, it tells us nothing about whether a student is in the habit of being a good citizen--not just knowing the facts of citizenship.  I know it doesn't because I know in detail the data on the hundreds of kids who graduated the high school I ran in NYC-and know what test scores do and do not tell us about what became of them.

What it tells our schools, their teachers, parents and youngsters is a lot about what counts.  None of the above. It distorts what and how we teach, focusing us on how to learn in ways that match testing procedures, not life procedures.  Of my own two sons, one was a poor test-taker and one a whiz. The latter never lost the chance to take a multiple-choice standardized test.  It said nothing about the qualities that have made them successful adults. Some great ball players do their best under pressure, we keep that in mind when we organize the line-up.  But we don't toss out the ones who need extra support under pressure.  And the MCAS--despite claims--is in fact a timed test (ask teachers and kids), and thus penalizes also those who work steadily and slowly, qualities that may save them in the real world. There's a knack to the kind of fast thinking that is rewarded in a test, and some of this can be taught. At a price  It's a price only some kids have to pay, a price associated with social class and race.

We have kids with us for a mere 1/6th of their waking lives; what we choose to spend that time on matters.  As we spend more and more on test-taking skills we lose time for something else, at the very least the subjects we haven't yet decided to test for! Think  also of what 11th and 12th grade look like for a kid who failed MCAS in 10th grade.  One long two-year stretch of test preparation.

The worst thing of all is the distortion of our understanding of what it means to be a well-educated human being, above all in a  complex democratic society. One can even be unschooled and well-educated, like my grandmother. We lose a lot when we turn the institutions devoted to celebrating the well-educated mind into test prep centers.

Beware.