Not Everything that Counts Can be Counted
By Lisa Guisbond
Assessing the Damage to Public Education from
the MCAS Tests
Saturday, March 23, 2002
I was asked to do a short
presentation on the impact of MCAS on students with disabilities. As the
mother of a child with a learning disability, my concerns about the disparate
and potentially negative impact of the MCAS on my son and many other children
like him are what led me to begin questioning and then actively fighting
against the MCAS graduation requirement.
Many parents and teachers
of special needs children have expressed grave concerns about the impact of
MCAS on this population of students, and I think it has to be said that
education policymakers and administrators in Massachusetts have done little to
assuage their concerns in their public statements and explanations of the
relationship between standardized instruction and assessment and students with
disabilities.
For me, perhaps the most
telling moment came when Department of Education Director of Assessment Jeff
Nelhaus was quoted in a Boston Globe article reporting that 699 out of 700 10th
grade special needs students failed the alternate version of MCAS in 2001.
Nelhaus said this was not evidence of a problem with the system. If a failure
rate of 699 out of 700 is not evidence of a problem with the system, I'm not
sure what else it could be, other than verification of the second-class status
of these students. I took Nelhaus's quote as a tacit acknowledgment that MCAS
is intended as a sorting mechanism for a system that is willing to accept the
failure of an entire segment of the student population and their resulting
ineligibility for higher education and many forms of employment.
Perhaps Mr. Nelhaus is
not alone in finding it natural and acceptable that virtually all of the most
severely disabled students in public schools are not deserving of high school
diplomas, although Mass Advocacy Center Attorney Julia Landau pointed out in
the same Boston Globe article that many of these kids have been doing
grade-level work in school. But the statistics for less severely disabled
students on education plans are also dire, with 61% of special needs students
who took the regular MCAS failing to reach a competency determination in 2001.
(Ironically, the DOE report reversed color code to make it appear that only
30% of disabled students had not reached competency determination, as opposed
to 61% of regular ed students.)
This report, which
presented the disaggregated 2001 MCAS results for minority and special needs
students, included an introduction written by Commissioner of Education David
Driscoll with an upbeat assessment of the improvement in minority students'
scores. However, while the memo spoke encouragingly about the possibility of
continued improvement in minority students' MCAS scores (themselves still
quite dismal), he failed to even mention special needs students. He said, "In
past years, minority and urban students have trailed behind the statewide
average, as well as the performance of white students. This year the same
thing has happened, but significantly improved minority results are an
important first step in closing the racial gap." Does his failure to include
special ed students in his positive spin signal that there is little or no
optimism for improved special ed scores and passing rates? Perhaps.
But the numbers don't
tell the whole story. As everyone's favorite learning disabled student, Albert
Einstein, put it: "Not everything that counts can be counted and not
everything that can be counted counts." Regardless of whether our public
school system is to move ahead with an assessment system that seems to
virtually guarantee failure for a large proportion of students with
disabilities, there is already a psychological impact with far-reaching
implications for their experience as students, their ability to reach their
maximum potential and their future life prospects.
The rationale for
high-stakes testing, as explained to me by one of its most passionate
political proponents, Senate President Thomas Birmingham, is that the high
stakes are essential to motivate high academic performance by students and
teachers. After listening intently to a presentation by parents and teachers
on the many negative consequences for students, particularly learning disabled
students, Birmingham expressed sympathy for this vulnerable population but
insisted that without the high stakes, we would lose an essential ingredient
in the so-called progress he has seen. With the pressure of high stakes off,
students and teachers would again begin to slack off, the pace of improvement
would falter, we'd be back where we started, he believed.
It seems puzzling to me
that, with all this concern for the purely psychological ingredient of
motivation, MCAS proponents haven't enlisted any psychologists to press their
case. Maybe that's because legions of reputable and world-renowned
psychologists have already weighed in with a withering indictment of the
psychological effects of high-stakes testing on children, particularly young
children and children with disabilities. The Alliance for Childhood, a group
of psychologists and educators that includes Harvard University's Howard
Gardner, Alvin Poussaint and child psychiatrist, autism expert and author
Stanley Greenspan among its members, has released a statement on high stakes
testing that includes the following:
"There is growing
evidence that the pressure and anxiety associated with high-stakes testing is
unhealthy for children--especially young children--and may undermine the
development of positive social relationships and attitudes towards school and
learning. A resolution adopted by the National Council of Teachers of English
in November 2000 states that "high-stakes testing often harms students' daily
experience of learning, displaces more thoughtful and creative curriculum,
diminishes the emotional well-being of educators and children, and unfairly
damages the life-chances of members of vulnerable groups."
Parents, teachers, school
nurses and psychologists, and child psychiatrists report that the stress of
high-stakes testing is literally making children sick. Kathy Vannini, the
elementary school nurse in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, says she dreads the
springtime weeks when children must take the MCAS… "My office is filled with
children with headaches and stomachaches every day," she reports. "One
third-grader was beside himself on the morning of the test--he could not stop
sobbing. I've been a school nurse for twenty years, and the stresses on
children have worsened in that time. But this testing has greatly increased
their anxiety level."
Roy Applegate, president
of the California Association of School Psychologists, describes
"nerve-racked" students, parents, and even principals suffering excessive
anxiety related to high-stakes tests with unrealistically high goals. "I
observed a group of low-performing students being given a pep talk by the
principal," he said in a recent speech. "As I looked at the faces of the
seventh- and eighth-grade students, most appeared terrified, depressed, or
disinterested in the principal's words. I think the principal was terrified as
well." The school's counselor, he added, reports more and more students with
anxiety-related symptoms, sleep problems, drug use, avoidance behaviors,
attendance problems, acting out, and the like.
"As psychologists," says
Dr. Applegate, "we all learned in Psychology 1A about the inverse relationship
between anxiety and performance: small and even moderate levels of anxiety can
be profitable, while excess anxiety degrades performance. Are we creating
excess anxiety for some in our efforts to create accountability for all?"
I myself have a growing
list of anecdotal support for their contention. A 10th grade LD
student whose mother I know began his school year already filled with anxiety
and dread about having to take the math MCAS in the spring. His psychiatrist
asked this mother if she was aware that he was feeling so much stress and
having difficulty sleeping. Since her son had already expressed suicidal
thoughts, the added anxiety was of great concern.
A mother from Worcester
recently phoned me and described the ludicrous exercise of her severely
disabled autistic son being "alternately assessed." She asked me if he really
had to go through this useless exercise or was there a way for him to skip it
and spend his time more usefully. She has already pulled her other son, who
has dyslexia, out of school and is home-schooling him largely because of her
fears about how the MCAS will affect him and his education.
A post to the CARE
listserve from a special ed teacher reads: As a special education teacher I am
always telling my kids to just do the best you possibly can -- you will be
rewarded for good effort.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. These kids did not finish quickly because they
all tried so hard. They poured their hearts and souls into these ridiculous
tests. They would ask me to read and reread questions because they didn't
understand the language, or they didn't understand the concept because they
are two years below "grade level" in reading and math. The open ended
questions nearly did us all in, no matter that I could read and scribe. Many
of them are just not at this level. One of my kids had headaches (from
stress) all week and her parents had to bribe her to come to school each day
so that she didn't miss the almighty MCAS."
The LD 10th grader who started his school year full of anxiety and
stress about the math MCAS happens to be an honors English student who scored
so high on the English Iowas that he was invited to a special summer program
at Johns Hopkins for gifted students. The problem with the MCAS for him and
even many others is that the MCAS does not offer students opportunities to
demonstrate their real abilities and knowledge and challenge false views of
sped kids as incompetent and unworthy of the status conferred by a high school
diploma. The MCAS appears, instead, to be functioning to reinforce stereotypes
and exacerbate the stigma of disability.
Dr. Laurence Liberman, an
independent special ed consultant and former chair of the doctoral program in
sped at Boston College, sees the MCAS and other high-stakes testing systems as
fundamentally at odds with the premise of special education. He believes that
the idea that all students, even disabled students, can meet the standard
represented by MCAS seems to assume that either severely disabled students are
faking their disabilities or that teachers will be able to wave a magic wand
and make their disabilities vanish.
Lieberman believes that
by emphasizing accommodating special ed kids to the standard curriculum rather
than accommodating the standard curriculum to sped kids, public schools are
depriving these students of the opportunity to receive intensive remediation
of their disabilities. He says the trends in public education are making it
impossible to offer what he calls a "disability curriculum," with a focus on
developing social skills, attentional skills, organizational skills and other
life skills that are critical for many students to lead independent and
productive lives. Ironically, he says, when sped kids are forced to prepare
for standardized exams, they may as a result move through school and emerge
having passed the tests but lacking true literacy and numeracy. "A student
witih a disability may be able to "make it" through school, but go on to a
diminished quality of life resulting from numerous handicaps. The school might
have been able to enhance the student's life in school, but what about his
life? What is required for the truly disabled is an individualized life plan,
not an individualized educational plan."
One thing I've learned as
the mom of a child with a learning disability is how many strategies and
techniques that have been developed to help LD kids in school are also highly
effective with typically developing kids. Conversely, a philosophy and
approach that is severely damaging to sped kids can be assumed to have
similarly negative consequences for some proportion of typical kids. Lieberman
decries the premise on which high-stakes testing seems to be based: that is,
that if a child fails the test, he will try harder next time. And if he keeps
failing, he will continue to try harder till he passes. In other words,
failure breeds success. Lieberman says this turns everything he has learned as
an educator on its head. "Whatever happened," he asks, "to the idea that
success breeds success." For special ed kids and others, he says, the process
of education should be a process of "Enabling students to overcome their
disabilities, through the employment of a continuous, can-do approach integral
to the doctrine that success breeds success." Thank you.
