Testing the limits of MCAS

By Joan Vennochi, 4/2/2002

THIS WEEK the season opens for more than baseball. It is MCAS season for all the children in the Commonwealth’s public schools.

The acronym may have tripped up the newly minted Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney, but the kids know exactly what it means: the need to score as high as possible on one very specific series of tests, at one very particular moment in time.

To parents, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is partly about teacher accountability and partly about property values. High scores validate a child’s intelligence and a family’s address.

To public school students, it is an all-consuming journey that begins in September and ends in April or May, depending on their grade level. In elementary school it can reduce many of their classroom lessons and much of their homework to one common denominator: worksheets.

The practice worksheets, which ape the MCAS format, are supposed to get the children ready for the big day. On any given day, pages of them come pouring out of backpacks. From September on, teachers train the students to scan the questions quickly so they know what answers they are looking for. And the teachers also stress that all-important criterion for successful test taking, the complete filling in of the answer circle or “bubble.”

As the date for the MCAS tests draws closer, the stress builds. To offset it, teachers plan spaghetti lunches and special breakfasts. They tell the children to relax, get plenty of sleep, and stay calm. But inevitably, everything they do to offset the pressure builds it up. Even the third-graders understand that this is high-stakes learning.

These observations do not make me an MCAS opponent, just an MCAS realist.

A state cannot embrace a rigid testing system like this and then try to pretend that it does not suck some equally precious elements out of education in its public schools. You cannot teach to a test and still have time and energy to teach to a muse.

And parents who are sticking with the public schools, for reasons of philosophy or finance, can be forgiven for wanting both. Why should joyful learning become the birthright of only the privileged? The zeal to measure progress by test takes so much zest out of education.

A recent visit to the Mission Hill School, a Boston public Pilot school in Roxbury, reminded me of the value of zestful learning and the fact that it does not always have to come with a $20,000-a-year tuition bill. This school’s statement of purpose defines the task of public education as one “to help parents raise youngsters who will maintain and nurture the best habits of a democratic society - be smart, caring, strong, resilient, imaginative, and thoughtful.”

You could hear the devotion to that mission in every utterance by principal Deborah Meier. You could feel it it every classroom, filled with busy, happy students, working on interesting, thought-provoking projects.

The school, in its fifth year, is small - about 165 students in grades K2 (all-day kindergarten) through 8. Each classroom has a teacher and an assistant. Graduation is based on performance - what Meier describes as “demonstrated ability to handle high school and on being in the habit of using their minds well.” The assessment of students is built around observing them and their work in multiple settings, not primarily standardized testing.

Meier feels strongly that the current test mania in the United States “is doing more and more harm.” In a recent newsletter to her school’s parents, she wrote that standardized tests “miss everything that matters: reading with a critical mind, not getting fooled by nonsense, and knowing how to persuade, work well with others, take leadership, stick to a task, meet deadlines, be reliable in a crunch, or take initiative.”

To Meier, the tests are good for one thing: ranking people, schools, and districts. To that end, she writes, “they have always done a good job of making sure the winners in the rest of life’s stakes stay ahead and the losers stay behind.”

Like it or not, with MCAS, that is the value system Massachusetts now buys into. But remember, the state tells teachers what to teach and when to teach it. It doesn’t tell teachers how to teach it. That is an important distinction.

Teachers can teach outside of the box as long as the kids can still “bubble in” - or fill in - the right answer. Why must one preclude the other? There must be some way to teach to the test with zest.

Joan Vennochi’s e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.
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This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 4/2/2002.
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