The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted Tuesday to adopt Commissioner Mitchell Chester’s “door number three” recommendation: a new testto be developed by a contractor using many PARCC questions.
CPS members opposed this recommendation and believe that the board’s decision only strengthens the need for a three-year moratorium on the high stakes uses of standardized tests, whatever name is attached to them.
We agree with the Commissioner on one thing: our students, teachers and schools have reached a point of diminishing returns. But the diminishing returns are from the whole high-stakes testing enterprise, not MCAS itself, as Chester claims.
In voting to continue with a new and untested test, our data-driven education policymakers ignored their own data from a study commissioned by Secretary of Education Peyser. The study compared MCAS and PARCC in terms of their ability to predict college readiness. The results showed that neither test predicts more than 5% to 18% of the variation in college grades in math and English.
Donald Willyard
Mary Ann Stewart
Ed Doherty
However, three board members — Donald Willyard, the student representative; Mary Ann Stewart, the PTA representative; and Ed Doherty, the retired Boston teacher who is the labor representative — voted against the recommendation. They reminded the board about the hundreds of educators, parents, and school committee members who came to the board’s PARCC hearings to describe how high-stakes testing hurts students.
In a sign that these voices were heard by the majority, the board did agree, over the objections of Commissioner Chester and Secretary Peyser, that schools won’t be penalized if their scores are low the very first time the test is given, scheduled for spring of 2017.
This spring, 2016, districts that took the PARCC last year must do it again and will be “held harmless.”
Districts that took the MCAS can switch to PARCC and be held harmless, or stay with MCAS and risk harm.
High schools will keep giving the MCAS through the class of 2019.
But a new standardized test, combined with the old punishments, is not going to improve education. Both the qualitative and quantitative data bears this out.
Citizens for Public Schools supports legislation to hold students, teachers, schools, and districts harmless for three years while we develop a new and better way to assess and improve schools. The tests would still be given during the moratorium, but without ratings and punishments.
