Teacher Union Continues
War Against MCAS
Blames Everyone Else for
Poor Student Performance

By Paul Moreno
December 2000

Who deserves the blame for the disappointing results of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)?

According to the state's largest teacher union, The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), it's not teachers who should take the blame. It's the exam and the state Board of Education that are at fault.

The brouhaha is because the latest results revealed that almost half of Massachusetts tenth-graders failed the math portion of the exam, which is only a slight improvement over 1999.

"The Board of Education has used a lot of rhetoric about holding students accountable," the teachers said in a report. "Yet, they have not held themselves accountable for providing the training, tools and resources needed by teachers, schools and districts to help students succeed on the MCAS math test."

A member of the Board, Roberta Schaefer, responds that the union is trying to evade accountability.

"The Board of Education and the state government have supplied the funds.  Districts determine how to spend it," Schaefer told Massachusetts News. "This is called  local control. If districts choose not to spend it on professional development for math teachers, math curriculum, or the right textbooks, the Board cannot be held responsible.

"The MTA wanted the money, but not the accountability - which is the second part of education reform."

Union Airs TV Ads to Destroy MCAS
The union's report was the latest shot in their campaign to destroy the MCAS, which students in the class of 2003 will be required to pass in order to earn a high school diploma. The union launched a $600,000 television ad campaign attacking the "flawed and unfair" test.

Board of Education chairman James Peyser told the Boston Herald, "I wish the MTA would put its time, energy and money into helping students achieve in the classroom, rather than to try to avoid accountability."

The MTA is being joined by several other organizations who oppose the MCAS. "When forty-five percent of the students are failing the test, then there's something wrong with the test," says Karen Tichnor, a Wayland parent and member of the Coalition for the Authentic Reform of Education (CARE). 

A Cambridge organization called "FairTest" has been fighting all standardized testing. They favor the devices long favored in the "progressive education" tradition, because these can be manipulated to ensure that no student fails, such as a "comprehensive student assessment based on portfolios, projects, presentations, and exhibitions."

The Massachusetts Association of School Committees passed a resolution urging the state to postpone the use of the MCAS as a graduation requirement. But it voted down a resolution to permanently eliminate it.

The Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union also opposes the exam, and may take legal action to stop the graduation requirement. It has promoted a group called "Student Coalition for Alternatives to the MCAS" to encourage student boycotts of the exam.

In November's election, voters in six towns - Cambridge, New Bedford, Somerville, Holyoke, Brookline, and parts of Boston - approved nonbinding resolutions to stop the MCAS requirement.

However, Board members and Governor Paul Cellucci said that we would stay the course. Governor Cellucci noted that the state has spent an additional $7 billion on schools since the 1993 education reform bill was passed. "We asked for one thing in return - accountability. Now that the education bureaucracy has received all that money, they're trying to wriggle out of the agreement."

Wealthy "Progressives" Abandon Inner-City Kids
Board member Roberta Schaefer noted that most of the parent opposition to the MCAS comes from wealthy suburban districts. 

"My take is that parents are worried that if their kids don't do well, they won't make it into the Ivy League," Schaefer told Massachusetts News. But watering down standards will hurt inner-city minority students.

"Urban parents are foursquare behind MCAS," Schaefer said, "because it's the first time they can hold their teachers accountable. Everyone is being held to the same standards.  It really is an equity issue."

Massachusetts' other teacher union, the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers (MFT) has not been very active in this campaign against testing.

The American Federation of Teachers, of which the MFT is a branch, has always had a reputation of being more open to accountability than the National Education Association, the parent organization of the MEA.  But Myron Lieberman, chairman of the Education Policy Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC, says that this is mostly for image reasons.

"The AFT is smarter in public-relations terms," Lieberman told Massachusetts News. "They don't want to appear to be an opponent of standards."

That union also has more affiliates in inner-city areas, where there is more pressure to raise standards for minority children. In this round of the MCAS, over three-quarters of black and Hispanic tenth-graders failed the math section of the exam.

In September, Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll suggested that school districts could give certificates that were less than diplomas to students who fail to meet the MCAS graduation requirement.

This idea was blasted by Boston University chancellor and former Board of Education chairman John Silber.

"What this teaches morally is even worse than what it teaches educationally: This says that the school system in Massachusetts will be a diploma mill."

Silber had already called the low-passing grade that the Board adopted "a mockery."

E. R. Cancell, a former high school teacher and doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, also condemns the lowering of standards as harmful to blacks.

"The basic diploma option, therefore, articulates the expectation that the majority of these students are not capable of receiving an MCAS education. Without the accountability of passing the MCAS to receive a high school diploma, the majority of students will not receive an MCAS education.

"Without external pressure to achieve at high levels, what will push the educators, parents, and students in the non-MCAS track to receive a strong education? Past history indicates that nothing will.