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Guest Essays are opinion pieces, often solicited by The Newton Beacon for specific topics, from people in positions of authority or experience related to those subjects. Guest Essays are fact-checked for accuracy, and they reflect the views of the writers and are not endorsed by The Newton Beacon staff or Board.
The following was written by Ryan Normandin, a math teacher at Newton South High School who serves as chair of the Newton Teachers Association’s Legislative Committee, in favor of Ballot Question 2, which proposes eliminating the MCAS exam from high school graduation requirements in Massachusetts.
A rebuttal to Normandin’s guest essay can be found here.
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Each year in freshman physics, sophomore math, and sophomore English Language Arts, teaching and learning come to a screeching halt well before the 180th day of school is reached. Instead of furthering their learning with labs, discussions, or problem-solving, students sit in dark classrooms and stare at projections of MCAS questions from previous years.
Student curiosity and engagement are banished, replaced with questions about how to maximize point earning on open-response questions. Rather than seeking to inspire a love of learning or enthusiasm for the subject, teachers preach test-taking tips on how to make an educated guess when students don’t know the answer to a multiple-choice question.
For students who pass the MCAS, the test derails their freshman physics class and their sophomore ELA and math classes, eating anywhere from weeks to a month of class time. For those who fail, the MCAS threatens much more than that.
Students who fail retake the test up to four times. The graduation requirement doesn’t mean that on a random day, the student is pulled from a class and forced to retake the test. At Newton high schools – and we’re not alone – students who’ve failed or, sometimes, are deemed at high risk of failing, are enrolled in a class specifically designed to get them to pass the MCAS. They lose a real class from their schedule and instead take a class that exists only to get them to pass a test. The ripples of that are substantial – that’s one less elective, one less study period, or one less block to receive needed support for their actual classes.
The Boston Globe’s editorial in opposition to Question 2 – which claims that MCAS graduation requirement must be preserved to maintain the Commonwealth’s academic success, while providing no evidence that the requirement has contributed to that success in any way – suggests that students who fail can simply “complete a portfolio of work.” This easy-sounding task is actually a substantial drain on school resources. The portfolio requirements are extensive, and require hours of student and teacher time over the year – time that the student could be learning in class, and the teacher could be teaching or prepping for their classes.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these failing students, who are disproportionately students with disabilities, English language learners, and students who are Black or Latino and low-income. You’ve failed the MCAS, been forced to remove classes from your schedule – likely elective classes that motivate you to continue engaging in school – and then lost more class time to being summoned multiple times a year to retake this test. As you continue to fail, your schedule continues to be commandeered, not for learning, staying engaged, or growing, but for the sole purpose of passing the MCAS. Another elective is removed as you are forced to spend all year working through each state standard and producing exactly the correct number of problems in exactly the correct format so that you can submit a portfolio and maybe get approved for a diploma this way.
Do you think that after this, these students are going to want to continue coming to high school? Continue engaging in class? Continue on to higher education afterward? Even if they do want to engage in that one class that means something to them – woodshop, music, theater – they’ve now spent years having that class cut so they can do test prep.
In addition to the wasted time, what impact does this have? After all, the Globe’s editorial suggests that in 2019, only 700 students failed to graduate high school because they did not pass the MCAS. That number is incredibly misleading, as it does not include students who dropped out of high school after failing the MCAS. A review by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that nationwide, high school graduation tests have raised the dropout rate while doing nothing to lift student achievement.
The problems outlined above are not with the MCAS itself – they stem from the coupling of MCAS with a high school diploma. If the MCAS were used solely as a data collection tool, to ensure that high standards are maintained across the Commonwealth, teachers would get to teach, and students would get to learn, for more of the school year.
Voting Yes on Question 2 preserves the MCAS as a diagnostic tool to compare districts and ensure there is accountability in our Commonwealth’s schools. As we’ve done for decades, Massachusetts will continue to lead the nation in education. A Yes vote will remove the harmful graduation requirement that shuts down teaching and learning for weeks every year and, rather than providing the support that our most vulnerable students need, pushes them out of high schools altogether. Listen to the teachers and students who live this – Vote Yes on 2!
Ryan Normandin