Letters: Readers offer range of responses to Globe’s call to vote no on 2

11 October 2024

Students aren’t widgets. Standardized test provides false sense of certainty.

How we love numbers, data, ratings, lists, and rankings. They provide a sense of certainty in our uncertain lives.

But no standardized test, or single assessment of any kind, is good enough to determine whether a child is qualified to graduate from high school. We need to look at the total picture because no student is standard. After all, we aren’t educating widgets.

What the high-stakes MCAS graduation requirement has succeeded in doing is to hold teachers and the curriculum hostage precisely in those school districts that need the most creative approaches to teaching and learning. Unleash the pedagogical imagination and we will begin to see attendance and genuine engagement rise.

Vote yes on Question 2.

Bill Schechter, Brookline

The writer is a retired teacher of history at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.

MCAS does not fairly evaluate students with learning disabilities

Using a high-stakes, one-size-fits-all MCAS test to determine whether special education and learning-disabled students graduate from high school with diplomas discriminates against this class of students, and this situation needs intervention from the Massachusetts Department of Education.

Each and every student deserves to be fairly and individually evaluated in terms of their demonstrated measurable progress. Students with disabilities should not have their lives derailed based on a standardized test score, but they ought to be evaluated on their achievement of goals in their Individual Education Plan.

Teachers and schools can review schoolwork compiled in a portfolio, revealing each student’s growth in proficiency in each stated learning goal, and that way a high school diploma would be properly measurably earned. Special education students would therefore be rewarded fully for their efforts and success.

Otherwise, special education students are being deprived of a right to fair, equitable education opportunities.

Vote yes on Question 2 as a means of offering a quality education to an underserved group of students, indeed to all students.

Bruce C. Ditata, East Wareham

The writer is a retired teacher of moderate special-needs students.

My star student was in tears, asking, ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

Long ago, a student (I’ll call her Olivia) approached me after my sixth-grade English class. Olivia was one of my strongest students, focused and intellectually curious. But at that moment she was in tears, and she was angry. “Why don’t you do something about it?” she asked. We had been reviewing for the upcoming MCAS exam, and I had spent all of class dragging my students through a practice test. Olivia wasn’t simply angry that she had to prepare for and take the MCAS. She was angry at me.

From the start of the year, I had been a steady presence, demanding, always expecting the best from my students, but easygoing, silly, sometimes whimsical. Now I’d turned into a drill sergeant, firing questions at all comers. In short, Mr. Kulick was no longer Mr. Kulick.

Olivia was right to be angry. I was the teacher who had declared over and over that when thinking about literature, asking good questions was more important than supplying the “right” answer. Taking pleasure in ambiguity? That — not a multiple-choice test — is the stuff of a good English class.

Some say that “equity” requires keeping the MCAS graduation requirement. If teachers don’t work hard to ensure that all students pass the tests, aren’t we letting down those who don’t? Yet most students who fail the test have poor grades. Admissions committees or future employers can see these grades if they wish.

Others argue that the MCAS promotes equity by identifying those who are struggling academically, who disproportionately are children of color. Yet MCAS scores are correlated with family income and the educational attainment of the student’s parents. Does equity require that we be reminded of this yearly?

True equity would mean spending whatever money is necessary to help the neediest students. Teachers know who these students are. Many of them struggle in kindergarten and never catch up. Their plight is morally unacceptable.

I’m sorry, Olivia. The MCAS is an enormous disruption of teaching and learning, and I should have tried harder to “do something about it.”

Neil M. Kulick, Newton

The writer, a retired English teacher, taught in the Westwood Public Schools for more than 20 years.