MCAS testing requirement imposes constraints, not standards
7 October 2024
It is difficult to imagine a more condescending and erroneous take on Question 2 than the one Ed Lambert of the Boston-based pro-business group Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education attempts to articulate in his Oct. 5 letter [“Weakening academic standards will result in fewer job opportunities for Mass. students”].
First, the writer’s assertion that eliminating the test-to-graduate requirement of the MCAS will somehow “lower … educational standards” implies that without this requirement teachers will suddenly stop trying to give our children the best possible education.
Like the MCAS specifically and standardized testing in general, this is a deeply troubling view rooted in a legacy of misogyny that assumes that teachers — historically a profession occupied by women but “managed” by male-dominated bodies such as administrations, school committees, and other elected bodies — need to be overseen and controlled or else they just can’t be trusted to do their jobs.
It’s a view of teachers not as the highly trained and credentialed experts they are, not as motivated educators and mentors, but as mere cogs in a machine, and it’s a view of an educational system based fundamentally on policing, punishing, and restricting rather than teaching and learning.
The premise of the letter writer’s defense sees students as well as no more than cogs — units of productive labor — and the purpose of education as merely to manufacture more “qualified” members to serve in the “workforce.” Notably, the population most concerned about in the letter are not students, teachers, parents, or even our communities: it’s employers.
In the service of advancing the unique needs of that particular group, the writer conveniently ignores the truly detrimental effects of standardized testing, how it provokes profound emotional and social anxiety in our children, how it disadvantages and penalizes at-risk students, students from marginalized populations and underfunded communities, students with learning differences, and students who are not native English-language speakers, and how it eliminates from the curriculum creativity, critical thinking, originality, and student-centered learning by making homogenized “measurable” content the only valued content.
It presumes, fallaciously and even dangerously, that everything that counts can be counted. The test-to-graduate requirement of the MCAS, and indeed the MCAS itself, has not resulted in the creation of “standards” — it has resulted in the imposition of constraints that do more harm than good. But even if we set aside both of these historical and educational reasons to oppose the use of a single test score to determine whether a child graduates after 12 years in school, there is another compelling reason to reject the testing requirement and even the MCAS itself: We are not currently fully funding our schools.
Even the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education concedes this, noting that the state needs to do more to ensure it “provides an adequate level of resources to each school district.”
This past year alone, Massachusetts undermined our children’s education to the tune of $215 million. How can we, in good conscience, demand a particular score while at the same time withholding the resources necessary to ensure students get that score?
And yet this is the broken logic of the MCAS. We chronically — systemically — underfund our public schools and then we impose test-based constraints that pretend as if that underfunding simply does not exist.
And while the entirety of the standardized testing system is broken in this way, the test-to-graduate requirement is particularly insidious because it penalizes students specifically. In fact, for this very reason the requirement flies in the face of (or perhaps we should say, reveals the truth behind) the claim made by pro-test advocates that testing is about “equity” and “accountability” for schools and districts, to ensure that state resources (those that exist) are directed where needed. The graduation requirement itself has nothing to do with advancing either of these professed motives. It is, in the end, only about punishing children.
Telling a high school kid who has worked hard for 12 years, who has done everything they were supposed to, who has even performed exceptionally on all of their other evaluated work, including previous MCAS tests, but who, for whatever reason, drops the ball on the one day of the final MCAS test that they can’t graduate is humiliating, counter to the professed aims of our educational system, and fundamentally unfair.
For the future of the teaching profession in Massachusetts, for the sake of our communities and, yes, our economy — and, most importantly, for the learning and well-being of our children — we need to vote “yes” on Question 2 and do away with the ill-conceived MCAS graduation requirement.
Matteo Pangallo lives in Shutesbury.
