State House Testimony in Support of S253 introduced by Senator
Creem Supporting Local Determination of Educational Competency and Multiple
forms of Academic Competency
Submitted
by Mary Jo Hetzel, Ph.D., Faculty Member, Springfield College, School of Human
Services, Boston Campus, on September 9, 2003
I am here to support Senator Creem’s Senate
Bill 253, which will end the MCAS as a requirement for graduation, and replace
it with a more comprehensive and authentic system of assessment, for the
following reasons:
·
As an educator for over thirty years, I oppose the MCAS as a
high stakes exam requirement for graduation because it is bad educational
practice. Students are individuals with
their own unique capabilities, gifts, interests and purposes that need to be
nurtured and cultivated within supportive learning communities. We need to
engage our young people in a holistic learning process that enables them to
contribute their gifts in manifold ways to enhance the quality of life of the
broader community and meet the challenges of the 21st century.
These challenges include their own collective survival in the inner city,
environmental crisis, global inequality and warfare, underemployment and
rising rates of preventable disease. High stakes standardized tests such as
the MCAS undermine quality education based upon active processes of critical
and creative inquiry and replace them with shallow exercises in rote
memorization of disconnected bits of information. Rather than learning to
think critically about key issues, to care for others, collaborate
effectively, and take creative initiative, we are producing anxious automatons
who are primarily concerned with test scores.
High-stakes testing such as the MCAS is
destroying the heart and soul of education and driving away our best teachers.
They and families with the means to do so are seeking out private schools
where the MCAS is not a requirement for graduation precisely because it is
clear that such test driven education is poorer quality education. Quality
education would involve students in active learning through research projects,
scientific experiments, collaborative problem-solving and conflict resolution,
writing in all genres, architectural design and building, panels, debates and
oral presentations, community service, apprenticeships in all fields, small
business or cooperative ventures, communications or cultural arts programs.
Student learning could be assessed through a portfolio of such work and
ongoing feedback from teachers, community members, peers and student
self-assessment. A list of core competencies could be checked off as students
naturally become more capable in particular areas. In this manner all students
can be engaged in the learning process, grow and excel, while many fewer
students would become disheartened, alienated and drop out.
·
Secondly, I oppose the MCAS because it is unjust.
It punishes students for the failure of the schools, further exacerbates and
legitimizes a society of winners and losers; and consigns the majority of
urban students to the scrap heap of society. The MCAS has become a very
effective sorting device to validate systemic processes of social and economic
inequality. Tests such as these have always functioned to separate the haves
from the have-nots and exclude certain groups of people from access to higher
education, jobs, even the political process itself. The old literacy tests
imposed after the Civil war in the South were meant to disenfranchise black
people. Intelligence tests that were used to track students by ability
actually reflected their socio-economic status. SAT exams have been a barrier
to college for those not blessed with the best educational opportunities at an
early age and have not been found to be good predictors of college success.
Such tests only mirror forms of social and
political inequality rather than reducing them, and the MCAS is no exception.
Prior to a single student sitting for the very first exam, everyone knew which
districts in Massachusetts would perform well and which would not simply by
looking at the family income and the value of housing stock in these
communities. Now it is low-income students and their families, schools and
communities who are suffering the most as a result of the MCAS. By holding the
MCAS sledgehammer over the state’s superintendents, principals, teachers,
parents and children, a few state bureaucrats have effectively turned each
educational constituency against the other--administrators against teachers,
teachers against students and administrators, parents against the schools, and
students against everyone. All of these constituencies have become
disempowered due to fear of failing the MCAS, even as the MCAS fails them in
every way imaginable. Schools that should be oases of hope, support and
encouragement, have become intensely stressful and full of dispair.
Youngsters who repeatedly fail the MCAS from the fourth grade on and are
retained in grade, lose self-esteem and confidence, and add to the soaring
dropout rate. Such dropouts become society’s rejects, the underemployed who
become homeless, often addicted and court-involved, eventually ending up in
prison. Such regressive social and educational policy needs to be changed or
we will all pay with our lives.
·
Thirdly, I oppose the MCAS because it is illegal and has
effectively derailed the whole purpose of the Education Reform Act of 1993.
The original education act called for a whole array of reform measures to
improve education particularly in low income urban and rural areas by:
increasing resources, stimulating a participatory process of curriculum
development and reform of outmoded teaching practices, instituting structures
for democratic governance and processes to ensure active parent and community
involvement in the schools, and developing comprehensive local systems of
assessment, not a single high-stakes test. Instead, the MCAS has become the
sole focus of reform, the be-all and end-all of education policy in
Massachusetts, while all the other much more crucial areas of reform have died
on the vine. What began in 1993 as an exciting and promising process of
curricular reform and collaborative professional development that involved
thousands of teachers, parents, administrators, students, educators and
advocates, was brought to a sudden halt in 1996 with a change of political
adminstration. A much more conservative state board of education was
philosophically opposed to public education, and favored a business-driven
privatization agenda. All the creative work on curriculum, teaching and
alternative assessment was ended and a small handful of people chosen by
conservative board members undid all of the positive gains of the previous
three years. The new curriculum frameworks were more narrow and rigid,
teaching and assessment more circumscribed, and parental/community involvement
in the schools strongly discouraged. Democratic participation was out and rule
from above by a handful of bureaucrats was in. An all-consuming focus on the
MCAS became the chief tool to force compliance with a mind-numbing,
reactionary approach to education that also served to distract the state from
the all-important issue of actually ensuring adequacy of resources.
·
It is time for the legislature to speak and restore democratic
control of the schools across the Commonwealth
and fulfill the promise of the state reform law.
The schools have been taken away from us by
bureaucratic fiat. Locally elected school committees have been denied their
time-honored role of determining graduation criteria. Every major professional
education organization, parent and teacher association, student group, even
the testing industry itself, as well as the majority of school committees
across the state-- all oppose the MCAS as a requirement for graduation. It is
time that we replace test-driven education that creates a stressful and
hostile school environment with an adequately financed, mutually supportive,
democratic system of education capable of meeting the human challenges of the
twenty first century. The Creem Bill #S253 is an important step in this
direction.
