Letter from a Student in Cambridge, Massachusettes

Welcome to the 311 Club. Welcome to Cambridge.

On June 9th, Harvard University will graduate. Later that day Cambridge Rindge and Latin will graduate. At no point during that day will I graduate. If you attend public school in Massachusetts there are two requirements that must be met in order to receive a diploma. The first is that you must meet all of the requirements of your local high school; some of those are determined by the state, others are school specific. The second is that you must pass the MCAS. I don’t meet that requirement; I never took, and thus never passed the MCAS.

Whenever I tell people that I didn’t take the MCAS I am almost invariably met with the same perplexed question, “why?” They tell me that it wasn’t hard, that I’m being stupid. Some even try and tell me how important it is that we have a test like MCAS. Sometimes I try and answer them, but recently it has become more of a hassle to do so, so I just let it slide. I didn’t boycott the MCAS because I thought it would be hard or because I’m stupid. I boycotted the test because I am fundamentally opposed to high stakes testing. I believe in high standards but not in high stakes. In Massachusetts and other states they go hand in hand; this is a dangerous and terrible combination.

A high stakes test is one that is used as a graduation requirement, like MCAS, or as a tool for promotion from one grade to another as the TAAS is used in Texas. By pinning graduation or promotion on one test, the entire system of education is grossly devalued. This one test is made equal to four years of school; it can negate everything a student has achieved if the score received is deemed “needs improvement.” High stakes tests test only one kind of knowledge. In a school like Rindge, in a city like Cambridge, which, to some teachers’ chagrin, readily embraces Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences”, it is preposterous to believe that this one test can accurately assess one’s knowledge. There are so many ways of learning, so many ways of knowing, but this test allows for only one kind.

Before you preach to me about how tests like the MCAS are necessary because they force students to be held to standards, let me clarify. As a diagnostic tool, MCAS is effective. It shows which students need help, which schools aren’t doing the best job. MCAS and standardized tests are useful as a measure of achievement, but when they are tied to advancement, they become a tool for penalizing students and do nothing to help them. The students who fail the MCAS are the students most in need of academic support, not the ones who need to be punished by refusing them a diploma. Failing districts, as classified by their test scores, are punished under No Child Left Behind legislation, facing state takeovers and budget cuts. How can this be seen as fixing the problem of low standards? If anything it makes standards harder to achieve.

I am told that we need MCAS because it helps prevent teachers and schools from just passing and graduating students who don’t deserve it. While this may be true, it’s a sad way to look at education. If we don’t trust teachers enough to teach, what’s the point of school at all? Let the people who know students best do the ranking, let the teachers decide who can graduate. You can show far more in a classroom than you can on a multiple-choice test. So while Cambridge may rank 311th out of 373, make sure you understand who does the counting.