Pressure is building for Massachusetts to end its reliance on the high-stakes standardized MCAS exams and adopt broader, democratically crafted frameworks to assess students and schools.
Legislation emerged this year that would end the use of MCAS scores as a graduation requirement and establish a process that allows communities to create multiple pathways for students to demonstrate their subject knowledge.
MTA President Merrie Najimy and MTA Vice President Max Page provided testimony when the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education held a hearing in September on S.293/H.612, An Act Expanding Opportunities to Demonstrate Academic Achievement.
What the MCAS really measures, Najimy explained, is inequality.
"The question of MCAS is one of racial inequality and racial justice," Najimy said. "MCAS scores mostly measure the impact of structural racism in the form of underfunding of public schools and public health, along with housing, food and income insecurity — conditions students bring to their learning environment. The pandemic has caused unprecedented change in our public schools, and its impacts will continue to shape them in the years to come."
Najimy also dismissed the relevance of the MCAS scores released in the fall, saying, "The results — and the false interpretations being put on them by groups favoring privatization and other ways to disrupt public education — disregard the deep crisis in which our students and their families have been living since the pandemic closed school buildings in March 2020."
MTA leaders emphasized that educators are willing to evaluate student work and progress, and they reminded legislators that educators assess their students every day.
But the narrow focus of the MCAS and its high-stakes nature make it a deeply flawed tool. Massachusetts is among few states that use standardized tests with such punitive impacts, among them preventing young people from graduating from high school. Only 11 states use standardized exams as a graduation requirement. Massachusetts also places "failing" labels on schools and school districts based on MCAS scores.
MTA members and leaders have been working with UMass Lowell associate professor Jack Schneider and his team of researchers to create community-driven ways to authentically assess and determine school quality. Schneider and his team have worked with MTA members in Andover, Haverhill and Northampton to develop, through community- and school-based conversations, more assessment tools.
"The results of these community discussions have revealed the richness of what we hope for from our schools and the poverty of the destructive highstakes testing regime," said Page.
The proposed state law that would expand options for assessment "takes us in a new direction," Page said. "It will offer new pathways for providing competency for a diploma. It would implement a plan for a new system that is based on a fuller understanding of what constitutes school quality."
State Representative James Hawkins, a retired Attleboro educator, sponsored the House version of the bill. Hawkins has long argued that the MCAS tests do not produce meaningful results and take too much time away from true learning.
Standardized exams, which are developed by private companies, limit what educators can work on with their students, he said, and lead some students who struggle with them to believe they are "failures."
"My experience as an educator tells me that we have many other ways of getting students to show what they know," Hawkins said. "In Attleboro, there is a lot of enthusiasm when educators, administrators and school committee members collaborate on ways to assess students’ work.
"We end up with something that is much better than anything developed by someone sitting in a cubicle at Pearson," Hawkins added.
