On Monday, I wrote a letter to the Joint Committee on Education regarding S.2814, An Act responding to the COVID-19 emergency by instituting a moratorium of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. The moratorium would pause use of MCAS as a graduation requirement and a part of school assessments, and respond to both the disruption of schooling due to the pandemic and to the demand for eliminating structures that reflect and promote racial injustice.
Dear Chair Peisch and Chair Lewis,
I am writing in support of S2814 to pause the use of MCAS exams as a graduation requirement and as part of a school accountability system.
This bill would respond to both the disruption of schooling due to the pandemic and to the demand for eliminating structures that reflect and promote racial injustice.
Our schools are in an unprecedented crisis.
The total disruption of schooling, and the vastly greater disruption for low-income children, caused by the pandemic require that we re-examine all of our education routines and see what actually makes sense in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
S2814 would eliminate the requirement of MCAS passage for graduation.
Does it make sense to deny students their high school diplomas because their teachers were not able to provide them with the usual test prep lessons and practice that have become the norm in the Age of MCAS?
Only 11 states still have a graduation test, and the number was shrinking steadily even before the coronavirus.
More and more colleges no longer require any standardized tests for admission. They rely on high school records, applications, and recommendations.
In a time when the opportunity gap has widened dramatically, and also a time of heightened national awareness of racial inequity, it seems clear that the graduation requirement should at least be paused.
This year, the legislature allowed 12th graders who had passed all course requirements but not the MCAS to graduate. The Higher Education Committee approved, and the Senate recently unanimously engrossed, legislation allowing individuals with severe intellectual disabilities, severe autism spectrum disorders or other severe developmental disabilities students to attend college without graduating. This bill recognizes that students can participate in college courses and activities without passing MCAS.
Second, S2814 would require the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to stop using MCAS as part of the accountability system and to submit a request to the federal Department of Education to waive ESSA requirements for statewide assessment, accountability and reporting.
Racial justice requires changing the accountability system. A 2018 MassINC Gateway Cities is among several reports that attribute increasing segregation and concentration of poverty partially to increased publicity about test scores.
Reported test scores influence home values in the community, especially when schools receive a “failing” label. This has significant fiscal consequences: Gateway Cities depend heavily on residential property to generate revenue, especially in comparison to major cities, which can draw on large commercial tax bases. While many factors are at play, the concentration of poverty in Gateway Cities has accelerated dramatically, as more and more attention has been paid to standardized test scores.
The trend of increased segregation, at least partially resulting from classifying schools as low-performing, is not only harmful in itself. It reduces local revenue and thus money available for education. This is especially de-equalizing until the full implementation of the Student Opportunity Act.
Especially during the pandemic, MCAS scores will yield no useful information. They will continue to correlate highly with income, and this year more than ever will reflect class differences in school and home resources. Administration and test preparation will use up resources of time and money, which are even more limited during the pandemic. Those resources could better be spent on instruction, professional development of remote teaching skills, and support of students struggling with all the problems of remote learning, isolation, and emotional distress.
At the same time, the state has paused the dramatic increase in assistance to schools with low-income students promised by the Student Opportunity Act. The SOA was passed largely because the Foundation Budget Review Commission reported, with extensive documentation, that the state has been short-changing low-income communities, making it impossible for them provide with the quality education to low-income children of color that all Massachusetts students should receive.
Because of the pandemic, the course correction has been paused. The short-changing will continue, even as the short-changed schools must cope with much greater new, pandemic-caused problems.
Even more than before, MCAS scores will document social inequality rather than school quality--and we will require schools to pay for that documentation in both time and effort. S2814 provides a path for at least not making things worse.
Even the leadership of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, strong supporters of MCAS, say they need three years of comparable data to rate school quality. That comparability has vanished.
Rather than simply stopping state evaluation of our schools, S2814 would make use of the next few years, to build a new, broader, more accurate, and more useful system. S2814 is a common sense response to help our schools cope with COVID-19 and I urge your support. Thank you for your careful consideration of this important issue.