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Brookline Newcomer 

MCAS opposition: Another year 

Published in the Brookline TAB

September 7, 2000






Despite mounting evidence that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is bad for kids, state and local school authorities are beginning another year of dumb-downed preparation for an educationally unjustifiable test. This year, high school sophomores who fail the English or Math portion will be told they won't graduate in 2003 unless they take the test again and pass. MCAS opponents are already mobilizing to stop the political and pedagogical bullies from doing further harm.

The prospect of thousands of MCAS failures has led to increasingly ludicrous extremes. Now Governor Paul Cellucci, worried that the no-graduation threat hasn't done enough to whip schools into shape, has put Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift in charge and announced a plan for 30,000 volunteers to tutor failing students.

Swift's new job immediately brought guffaws. MCAS opponents should be pleased, though, because she's the perfect MCAS proponent. Who could better highlight MCAS's educational vacuousness and politically regressive aims than an ethically obtuse big-business flunky whose only teaching experience bears zero resemblance to the circumstances faced by teachers who actually earn their credentials?

Getting thousands of volunteers to provide cover for the state's failure to properly fund schools is a clever ploy. Volunteers are important in a decent society. But volunteers can't substitute for needed institutional change. Although personal attention to individual students is always welcome, the energy and money spent on training and administering tutors would be better directed at cutting down classroom size.

Cellucci's latest moves cap other efforts to head off politically disastrous MCAS results. Yet offering tutors and tinkering with MCAS questions and exploring exceptions and accommodations and two-tier diploma alternatives are little more than political and bureaucratic public relations gimmicks designed to dampen and divide the opposition. We need to be wary of efforts to give MCAS a superficial facelift.

That's as true here in Brookline as it is across the state. Let's keep in mind that MCAS is bad policy for the state as a whole as well as for Brookline, bad for special education and bad for regular education, bad for excellent students and bad for struggling students, bad for wealthy students and bad for poor students.

Recognizing this, the primary goal of CARE (the statewide Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education) is modest and reasonable: getting the legislature to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement while strengthening support for public education in poorly served urban and rural districts.

At BrooklineCARE's summertime Coolidge Corner table, hundreds of passersby indicated their support, bought buttons, and signed petitions. This fall, the group will seek stronger anti-MCAS statements from our embarrassingly cautious School Committee and Selectmen; a similar statement will be on the November Town Meeting Warrant. (To subscribe to the BrooklineCARE email discussion list, send a blank email to brooklinecare-subscribe@egroups.com; to join the statewide group's list, send to care-subscribe@egroups.com.)

In addition to BrooklineCARE, I also belong to the separate Brookline Boycott Support Group, which aids students who boycott MCAS as well as parents who don't let their fourth-graders take the exam. The boycott continues this year despite the higher stakes; after all, if the state doesn't cancel the no-diploma threat, boycotting sophomores can always take the test later, and some determined sophomores will boycott regardless of consequences. For eighth- and fourth-graders, the stakes are no higher than last year.

Unfortunately, Brookline's School Councils and PTOs have been noticeably missing from the public MCAS debate. Brookline parents should ask their children's principal how MCAS affects their school and what consequences there are for refusing to take the test or to participate in year-long test-prep activities. We should pin them down about the MCAS curriculum impact: what's been added, what's been simplified, what's been lost?

Some School Committee members claim Brookline's curriculum is not altered just to meet MCAS demands, but our own children and teachers recognize the lie. This kind of falsity would be more understandable coming from the new Education Czar than from those we elect to oversee our schools.


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