Fighting Without Progress Is Losing
“MTA President Merrie Najimy said the influence of the MCAS has allowed white supremacy to flourish in public schools, effectively alienating students who have diverse backgrounds and differentiated learning styles.”
I started teaching in 1993, the year Massachusetts passed Education Reform. Education advocates and educators have been objecting to the state-mandated, standardized testing since the beginning. I remember a meeting in Northampton where a Massachusetts Department of Education representative came to present and listen. I remember a Holyoke teacher standing up and saying how the testing would harm his students. Criticism has waxed and waned since then. Nothing has changed since then, except for more testing. The MTA has turned up the rhetoric, but harsher language doesn’t move the needle. An Act Expanding Opportunities to Demonstrate Academic Achievement (S.293/H.612) was sponsored and sent to committee where it will likely die a natural, legislative death.
MCAS should be changed, but the fact is, the standardized test makes common sense. On a surface level, the testing regime seems logical: students and teachers, most people think, should be held accountable. Our legislators and governors need to be persuaded that things need to change, but so do the minds of the public. To provide the background and take the public through the thought processes necessary to reconsider MCAS, we need an effort commensurate with the work that went into the original education reform.
For most of the 20th century, American education was driven by business ideology. Schools were set up to prepare students for their future lives with programs in the trades, business, and college. The Massachusetts Educational Reform Act (MERA) was no different. The pinnacle of the neo-liberal transformation of education that began in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration’s report A Nation at Risk viewed schools as part of a corporate entity. State standards and standardized testing would provide the data necessary for the managerial state to monitor student and thus teacher performance and set goals for improvement. It took several years before the testing regime was fully enacted and counted as a graduation requirement.
When MCAS began, testing took place in grades 4, 8, and 10 in English and math. When No Child Left Behind, the federal version of education reform, was enacted in the early years of the Bush administration, testing was mandated in grades 3–8. Massachusetts public school students are now tested in grades 3–10. People are used to this regimen. They may express some frustration with the amount of testing, but the depth of that frustration does not run deeply. Changing their minds will require them to see the downsides of MCAS. To do this, we need more than accusations of white supremacy and bills that wither in committee.