Steve Backman

Thank you for providing this hearing for testimony in support of the many solid proposals to limit and adjust the use of MCAS. My name is Steve Backman. I’m the parent of two Boston Public School children, one of them now graduated. I’m vice chair of the CARE Council and a board member of Boston’s Citywide Parents Council.

Coming here now brings many parents like myself back full circle. Ten years ago, I began to involve myself in long-standing efforts to deal with the every day needs of school reform in Boston. When the first rumblings to statewide education reform reached us, so many Boston parents welcomed the news and searched out contacts for information and a voice in the process.

I recall organizing parents to testify at community-based hearings on what would become the 1993 Ed Reform Act. We supported the state weighing in for higher educational standards; Boston certainly needed them. We expressed interest in comprehensive assessment systems that would serve as levers for change.

Yet many of us also expressed our wariness that once the legislation passed, we might find those standards and evaluation methods imposed on us without the full involvement of parents.

I participated in these things as part of the Citywide Parents Council. As board member and then co-chair of CPC, I worked with many thoughtful, concerned parents on so many issues of equity and fairness, quality public school education, innovative teaching methods. During all this time, once the state legislative hearings ended, ed reform faded to a distant and largely irrelevant factor on key issues of the day.

In recent years, however, here in Boston, parents watched with growing alarm as the reform process cranked up and then steadily inched toward funneling the entire collection of hopes and goals through this one narrow channel called MCAS.

As I think of the many parents who went to those hearings, its hard to imagine many at all would come forward and say, thanks Department of Education, we got what we need.

· MCAS will not fund smaller class sizes in Boston. It blames students, parents and teachers for their problems and dismisses funding.

· MCAS will not bring inspired, well-paid, culturally aware teaching to Boston. It encourages rote, one-size-fits all teaching
· MCAS will not bring full support for bi-lingual and special education to Boston. It marginalizes all those outside the mainstream, regular education circuit.
· MCAS will not recreate enrichment programs such as art and music as basics. It reduces them to untestable extras.
· MCAS will not gain us guidance and professional staff who provide life’s encouragement and support at the same level as the suburbs. It will instead encourage more children of color to drop out entirely of a hostile, white bread, commercialized business-driven system.

So with many of the same concerns as ten years ago, we have indeed come full circle and back to the legislature, looking for some relief. Tp start with, we need the MCAS removed as a graduation requirement, and then we need a full, flexible, forward-looking assessment system adopted in its place.

I sincerely hope you will not stick with the reported stance of waiting to see how the results turn out, once so-called high stakes kick in. How unfortunate such a policy this would be. It would waste more of our time, both as parents and as Mass residents who share your concern for education in this state. It will keep us from the real issues and will exhaust and drive our more of our children and encourage their cynicism.

So much thought has gone into so many proposals. I call on you to hear our concerns and act on them in this session. We need the legislature to exercise its oversight and rein in this harmful mechanism now.


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Steven Backman
8 Bardwell St
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130