Remarks of former State Representative and retired Trial Court Judge
Sumner Z. Kaplan before the Committee on Education

September 9, 2003

I appear before you as co-convener of the Alliance for High Standards NOT High Stakes, a coalition consisting of over fifty organizations including the AFL-CIO,  in favor of those bills which eliminate, postpone or delay the requirement that passage of the MCAS test as outlined in the Department of Education regulation 30.03 is necessary for graduation. The regulation is invalid for several reasons. It does not comport with the clear intent of the statute which was enacted a few days after and in consequence of the Supreme Judicial Court's decision in the McDuffy case which constitutionally mandated an adequate education for every child in the Commonwealth. The Board's regulation completely ignores this mandate and ignores the carefully crafted conforming legislative mandate requiring multiple assessments of at least six subjects. The Board's action amounts to defiance of you, the Legislature, by substituting ,as unelected officials, its own views and ideas of what's best for our children. This is democracy at its worst, and if you allow it to continue you abandon your functions and duties as legislators.

You are the lawmakers, not the unaccountable bureaucrats. The current assessment system of public education in this Commonwealth, as defined by the Board, is a miserable failure due, in part, to your failure to confine the Executive branch acting through its administrative agencies, in this case the Department of Education, to its proper role and to your failure to prevent the Board from performing your function as legislators. It is of interest to note in the Appellant's brief in the lawsuit challenging MCAS, now pending before the Supreme Judicial Court, a statement of David Driscoll, the Commissioner of Education, that legislation was needed if the test did not include the other core subjects. Yet the Board went ahead and enacted its own legislation -regulation 30.03.

We elected you, not an appointed board, to represent us and we urge you to do so.