Fighting standardized testing in Massachusetts

[Thanks to MamaBear for alerting me to the MCAS and giving me a topic for this post!]

It turns out that Massachusetts also requires that students pass both a math and a language arts standardized test in order to be eligible for a high school diploma. The test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS, must be passed in the 10th grade in order to later graduate. Parts of the MCAS are also taken in several other grades.

There has been a groundswell of opposition to the MCAS. Some examples of protest:

In a testing season marked by dramatic walk-outs, rallies, vigils, and teach-ins, more than 300 students boycotted the high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test in April and May. Hundreds of students and parents attended an after-school rally on the Boston Common near the State House on May 15 to express their opposition to the paper-and-pencil, 18-hour test....

A contingent of students marched to the State House to present the Governor's office with petitions bearing almost 7,000 signatures....

Some two dozen students at Springfield High School of Science and Technology walked out of the test; many were suspended. A far larger walk-out, possibly by hundreds of students, apparently had been planned but was thwarted when administrators got wind of it....

Teachers also began to resist. Jim Bougas of Harwich was suspended for refusing to administer the MCAS, while teachers in some other districts were not penalized for their similar actions.

Since the spring of 1999, parents’ groups have sprung up in many Greater Boston communities, including Cambridge, Boston, Arlington, Brookline, Newton, Wayland, and in cities and towns throughout Western Massachusetts where forums have consistently drawn 150-200 people....

Many students remained firm in their decision to boycott in the face of threats and reprisals from state and local authorities. The business-funded, pro-MCAS group MassInsight issued a memo to local school districts recommending that students’ grades be docked if they refused to take the test. This tactic was used by the headmaster of Brookline High School; he told more than 20 students who boycotted the long composition test that their zeroes would be factored into English grades. Parent and student protests forced him to back down and concede that students could “buy back” their zeroes with a 5-page research paper on civil disobedience.

Twenty-five students in Arlington also bravely persisted with their boycott even when the School Committee imposed three-day suspensions.... In Holyoke, 15 students were suspended for refusing to take the test.

More than 150 students at the high school and elementary schools in Cambridge boycotted the test without reprisals.... In Amherst, 20% of the school’s sophomores boycotted, and town school committee voted to ask the state to cease using MCAS as a graduation requirement. Many students appear to be boycotting quietly, either by being absent (as were 10% of Boston students in 1999) or by not answering the questions.

In November of 2000 an anti-MCAS conference was held by New Democracy, a group that is drawing attention to the corporate interests behind the MCAS:

New Democracy has been trying to expand the debate, showing that high stakes testing is part of a 30-year-long corporate attack on working people, to lower their expectations and to strengthen corporate control of society....

In its story on our conference, the Boston Globe reported: "The Massachusetts Business Roundtable created the pro-MCAS non-profit group MassInsight. Cathy Minehan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is co-chair of MassInsight. FleetBoston, Bell Atlantic, IBM, Intel, and the Boston Private Industry Council are also members."

[...]

Dave Stratman, former Washington Director of the National PTA and editor of New Democracy, showed that education reform is part of a corporate strategy to force students to accept their place in a more unequal, less democratic society and to strengthen corporate control of society.

As another article describes the argument:

According to groups like Boston's New Democracy, the primary corporate goal is not to make money off private education but to lower expectations about what education can provide. In this view, corporations are out to dim the hopes of students whose teachers might otherwise teach them they can get somewhere in life if they work hard and graduate.

The corporate problem is that educated people expect to get somewhere good. And despite all those high-tech job openings, there's even more of a need for low-tech service workers. Cooks. Domestics. Cashiers. Assemblers. Delivery drivers. This is the real new economy, but it's not what today's students envision for their middle-class futures.

There's nothing more dissatisfied, even revolutionary, than an educated work force that can only find low-paid jobs requiring low-level skills. People tend to accept poverty when they think there's no alternative, but not when they've followed the rules and still can't get ahead.

The corporate solution is simple: raise "standards" to arbitrary levels, assign impossible tasks and impossible tests, increase competition and stress, and make our kids think they're too stupid for anything better.

It might seem extreme to some to suggest that standardized testing is a way to oppress the masses. Of course, if your opinion of the Bush administration is anything like mine, you may readily buy the idea that NCLB is an insidious weapon of class warfare, meant to deny the poorest schools funding and discourage students who are already disadvantaged. I believe that when Bush laments about our failing schools and our failing students, he does it in order to repeat one message: you are failing, you are being failed. No wonder, then, that your work choices are fast food or Baghdad. It's the school's fault.

In any case, this excerpt from John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education is quite relevant today:

Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about "the perfect organization of the hive." He said standardized testing was a way to make lower classes recognize their own inferiority. Like wearing a dunce cap, it would discourage them from breeding and having ambition. Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton, so imagine the effect he had on the minds of the doctoral candidates he coached, and there were hundreds.

Personally, the clincher to the argument that the MCAS is harmful is that it is discriminatory against already traditionally disadvantaged groups such as ethnic minorities and those in poorer districts. From the FairTest website:

As of September 2002, 12,000 seniors, nearly one in five in the state’s public schools, had not passed both tests. Students of color are over-represented in this pool, with half of Latino seniors and 44% of African Americans in the “failing/needs improvement” category compared with 13% of White and 17% of Asian students. Yet statewide for the class of 2000, 69% of African American and 62% of Latino students were accepted to college. This means that roughly 12-15% of African American and Latino students who would have traditionally been accepted to college may not be eligible to attend solely because of their MCAS scores.

So 12-15% of African American and Latino students who would otherwise have gone to college could be prevented from going, based on a test pushed by FleetBoston, Bell Atlantic, IBM, Intel, and other big corporations.

Nothing like keeping the people down.

I wish the opponents of the MCAS all the best, and hope they continue to boycott the test in larger and larger numbers.