Christy Mihos has unequivocally declared his opposition to MCAS as a graduation requirement, and has said the test should be discontinued. From his press release:
Independent gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos attended a Massachusetts Teachers Association gubernatorial forum at Williams College earlier this month and called for the elimination of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam.
“During the course of my campaign, it has become increasingly obvious to me that teachers are angry and frustrated about the impacts to their lesson plans that have resulted from the MCAS testing requirements,” Mihos said. “Students are already facing too many challenges from their academic demands and we are seeing the outcome of those demands in the high drop out rates of high school students. By adding the additional burden of the MCAS to the requirements for graduation we have made it more difficult for our children to succeed in school and to develop the necessary confidence and self esteem to prepare them for adulthood.” …
Our schools have become constrained in their teaching practices in order to teach children the required test taking skills to successfully pass the MCAS. The MCAS is more reflective of a student’s test taking abilities than it is to their understanding of curriculum and their acquisition and retention of academic skills. “As a result, there is little creativity or critical thinking taking place in the classroom. We need to institute change whenever the methods utilized do not achieve their intended purpose,” Mihos said. “The MCAS is an example of a test with its rigorous demands overshadowing its purpose of ensuring that children are learning the necessary skills to prepare them for the future, that is something this standardized test score does not measure or achieve.”
Interesting. Any chance of Mihos peeling off some MCAS-hatin’ lefties from Patrick or Gabrieli with this position, which AFAIK is the strongest announced so far?
HT: Keller.
No Child Left Behind is the disease. What makes me think this isn’t a serious promise is that he stops at announcing the death of MCAS.
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The MCAS is so widespread because the federal law No Child Left Behind requires heavy standardized testing of students. So, either Governor Mihos
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So what’s part two, Christy?
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(I am probably the only one, but when I think of “Christy Mihos”, I picture the little old lady hunched over a shopping cart that used to be the logo of Christy’s markets. Not a great image to have connected to a candidate…)
he does talk about the NCLB issue (though not with any real specifics) in the full version of the press release, which I didn’t reprint here. It’s all at the link in the post.
Mm…that’s what I thought.
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Option number 3 — campaign bluster. We need standardized tests to comply with NCLB, and they must be graduation requirements. So in the end we’ll need the MCAS, or the MCAS with different initials. As for “lobbying to change NCLB”, I’ve heard that from every Democratic candidate.
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I actually agree with requiring passage of MCAS for graduation, but it needs to be much more flexible to account ofr different students’ circumstances (special needs and socioeconomic situations).
Mihos appeared at a candidate’s forum in Great Barrington last week sponsored by the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce.
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The setting was the newly restored and beautiful rococo Mahaiwe Theater — oops — sorry, Performing Arts Center. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see how many people were in the balcony, but I’d guess there were nearly 400 people in the theater.
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Alongside Mr. Mihos were Mr. Patrick, Ms. Ross, and a stand-in (Mr. Rooke) for Mr. Gabrieli.
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I can tell you that the applause line of the night was when Christy announced his stance on the MCAS. Unfortunately for him, the rest of his pronouncements were more along the lines of comic relief than positions the audience could relate to.
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I asked several people afterwards if they thought he was a viable candidate, and most just laughed. The frustration with the MCAS is real, but people know it isn’t the test per se that’s the problem, and eliminating it (desirable as that may be) isn’t going to solve the very real problems of our school systems.
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So, as to “peeling off some MCAS-hatin’ lefties” — I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it ain’t just lefties who are frustrated, of course. I don’t know a single educator who thinks the MCAS structure, as it currently exists, is a good idea.
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Standardized tests like MCAS actually poll decently among educators nationwide. You should get out more….meet some new folks.
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I think the basic idea – by the way, this traces back to the 60s and the Kennedys – is to show that black, Hispanic, and/or poor children are way, way, way behind white, Asian, and middle class kids in academic skills.
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That’s the reality. Any possible, plausible test you can devise will show this Gap. MCAS and the frameworks were actually designed in the 1990s by MA teachers.
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Schools didn’t create these Gaps. But individual schools tend to either close the Gap or exacerbate it. MCAS helps sort out which ones do which.
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By the way, when Connecticut tried to pull out of NCLB because of the standardized tests and consequences attached, the libs like you were shocked when an enraged NAACP filed a lawsuit to keep it!
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White moonbats are increasingly finding that civil rights groups WANT the healthy pressure of these laws to close these gaps.
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2. Sabutai makes a good point above. MCAS-like tests are part of federal law. Cut MCAS, lose all federal funds.
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I hope that Mihos named which thousand teachers he’d fire in Boston when it loses $100 million a year in federal funding.
What do NEA/MTA advocate? Then, do the opposite.
Does that account for the savings from not conducting these extensive testing regimes? I’ve seen figures that indicate that the losses are much lower than that…
If you don’t comply with NCLB, all districts in the state lose their federal funding.
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Title 1 alone for all districts is $200 million.
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The state spends $29 million on testing. So you’d save that. Of course, that savings is assuming you think it would be a good idea not to just eliminate MCAS but ANY sort of statewide testing and analysis.
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HIgh school kids get 4,000 hours of instruction during their 4 years. Grade 10 MCAS – for math, science, writing, and reading comprehension – takes about 18 hours. Not sure you’d save any actual cash. Kids would have normal classes.
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In elementary and middle school, kids just take a few hours per year in Grade 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I.e., math one year, English the next, etc.
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I suppose you could also try to strip out all math and English tutoring funds. I.e., the failing kids get a lot more tutoring now – because MCAS clearly identifies them – than failing kids did pre-MCAS. That would generate add’l savings.
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You have to understand that the scores needed to pass are very, very low. While no test, including MCAS, can be perfect, anyone who fails is VERY likely to have some MAJOR issues, and would benefit from targeted help, in my opinion.
…I administer them every year đŸ™‚ And 50-95% of students should pass it easily, depending on the district. (I know of a school that has 120% student turnover during the year. How are they going to learn anything, even if you eliminate teacher’s unions? (ahem))
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I agree entirely that “anyone who fails is VERY likely to have some MAJOR issues, and would benefit from targeted help, in my opinion” but MCAS prevents that. These are the administrative costs, time costs, enforcement costs, etc. I can see the savings in the neighborhood of $50 million, thereabouts. Not only is that money spent, but those people are doing drill n kill rather than guidance or social work, the type of help needed by a kid whose parents get wasted every night. Heck, the kids learn how to beat the test, not the concepts supposedly being tested
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I don’t think you can easily unwind the deal in parts – keeping what you want, dismissing the others.
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However, I’m curious if you’d like to unwind the WHOLE deal. For example, you could say “I’d like to end MCAS and force the 2% of public school kids in charters back into the traditional schools, and I’m willing to accept pre-1993 funding levels for that….we’ll give back the $2 billion per year.”
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Would you take that offer?
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2. MCAS prevents getting help?
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Pre-MCAS, it was MUCH more acceptable for districts to graduate illiterate kids. I don’t see how it’s debatable. You cannot graduate as an illiterate now, virtue of MCAS. Not only could you before, but we have a clearly defined population of MA adult illiterates who also have high school diplomas.
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Now those are much more likely to get help. We probably agree that often the help is low quality, but sometimes it is high quality….
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3. …Also, there’s good and bad tutoring – which you call “drill and kill.” I.e., you seem to believe that tutoring a kid in math is inherently worthless. There’s plenty of stupid counselors out there who produce zero therapeutic value, and plenty of good ones. Same hold true of the teachers who do the bulk of the tutoring.
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Our school’s kids arrive having been “taught” fractions and decimals – ie, by that I mean they have sat through approximate 900 classes covering these concepts spread from Grade 4 to Grade 8, classes where at any given moment, very few kids were actually paying attention – without mastery.
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So they arrive: What’s 1/3 plus 2/4? No idea.
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So they get tutored – painstakingly practice things. Let’s do one problem. Okay, now another. Okay, now another. Then they actually learn it…very different from “having been taught it.” Then they master algebra and geometry, then many do calc.
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Swimming, piano, math, flying – repetition is not the only component of learning, but it is a key component.
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I dunno, to your point, I think it’s less likely that they’ll grow up to get wasted every night like their parents if they learn enough to get high school and college diplomas, and therefore escape poverty.
I welcome your questions, and am happy to provide you with answers. So, as you see, it is unnecessary to put words in my mouth.
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First of all: if you take the NAEP scores of Massachusetts independent of the rest of the country, we have the second or third best preK-12 education system in the world. If you’ve done any investigation into the systems of the leaders such as Singapore and Japan, you’ll understand why I don’t want to emulate them. If 2nd or 3rd in the world isn’t good enough to keep you from swingin a wrecking ball into the system, than nothing will.
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We have a system that is successful on the world scale and is still improving. And it’s not due to MCAS — it’s due to good teaching. And I believe the top things that keep it from being even better are independent of more standardized testing. It’s not like the MCAS is so superior to every other state’s standardized test…it’s the fact that how we teach is better. Imagine the even greater improvement if 10% of my instructional time is spent in standardized testing (we don’t need four rounds a year to measure 10 year olds).
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Ideally, I’d like to see change on the home end, where the biggest impact could be had. But I don’t control that. However, I will say that is a big problem, and all the “reform” in the world doesn’t make that go away, and dismissing it is foolish. I’m not saying everything is the family’s fault, but it is a huge factor. Gigantic.
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To answer your questions…
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Where did $2 billion come from? I’m not sure what you’re asking, but I’m for improving the school system, not deciding between two bad options. Conflating Ed Reform with Bush’s attempts to score domestic political points pre-9/11 is baffling and represents two different trends. I could just as easily ask “Would you be willing to erase the Iraq war and bring back the thousands killed, and also accept the re-institution of the Cold War as it was in 1988?” One has little to do with another.
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Oh, yes you can. Easily. As you said, the test is easy and
it’s easy to learn how to beat the test. Memorize/regugitate/forget. Pattern recognition on questions, deconstruction of the prompts. Kids are now illiterate, and instead of being ambivalent about literacy, the drill and kill has taught them to hate it.
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I never even approached saying that.
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In every district I’ve ever seen, each grade and school dumps on the one below. That’s the way it is, and the way it always, always has been. I can take your students to another school, and sure enough hear complaints about what you did wrong. Is it necessarily your fault?
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I have no problem with repetition, but rather its quality. A student must be exposed to a math problem 28 times before s/he knows the answer — we all know that. But too much “remedial” math is the drill-n-kill in the mode of flash cards and drills. Here is what I’ve seen happen.
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No MCAS: Student never learns math, graduates, remains ambivalent about math.
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MCAS: Student doesn’t learn math, gets drilled, learns to beat the test, pass the MCAS, graduates, and hates math.
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Same outcome, except now the student is actively opposed to someday learning what they didn’t know.
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I’ll end by asking you a question: is it worth instilling in students a hatred of learning, so we have numbers that “prove” that they learned?
the MCAS is the issue as much as the graduation requirement…
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The MCAS was initially developed to measure Schools, not students.
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Guys like John Silber got carried away.
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Think of the smartest people you know or the most influential people you know… republican or democrat, rich, poor, professors, politicians, plumbers, engineers, artists
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Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Richard Feynman, Jimmy Carter, Mitt Romney, Andy Warhol, john silber…
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How many of these world and opinion leaders had to pass a “standardized” test
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I’m all for measuring the schools, but don’t punish the students for the schools problems.
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(and lets not forget the role of family in a kids education – how do you test the parents and guardians – PAGCAS?)
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Perhaps it was Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett Packard Fame) that said, “What gets measured gets done” and Marv Patterson (also an ex HP sr executive) who said be careful what you measure, you might get it…
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Both of these people knew that measurement drives behavior. Patterson, in his book “Accelerating Innovation” is quite cautious about metrics because the bad behaviors they might drive.
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He cites an example from the old days of typing pools (room full of women who typed for a living). An organization instituted a new metric for the typists, “Number of Key strokes.” The new behavior? At lunch, the typists would sit at the typewriter and hold their thumb on a key (electric typewriters). Great, the company got its keystrokes up but no productivity.
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MCAS is so new that we are only starting to see what bad behaviors will be driven by the new metric.
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Longer school days/years,
School starting before labor day
Whole chunks of valuble curricula being tossed because teachers don’t have time to cover it
fill in your observations here…
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Patterson recommended piloting metrics and evaluating their impact before rolling them out as standard…. Massachusetts could learn a lot from guys like Patterson
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MD
If student A can’t pass it, that is primarily Student A’s problem. If Student A can’t pass it, then Student A should not graduate. Pretty simple.
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Measuring schools is a nice thought, but can’t be done unless something is ast stake. If I had to take a standardized test anonymously, with zero consequences, I would have been done as soon as my pencil could fill in “C” for every answer.
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And any of those people who grew up in NYS took the Regents exam, or they didn’t get a diploma.
You assume that a “test” is the only way to measure a school’s performance. That is a lousy assumption.
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How often are you “tested” at work yet you get (or don’t) get raises.
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If teachers judge students, why can’t outside evaluators do the same to the teachers and the administrators?
let me guess. The outside evaluators are chosen by the school committee with significant input and/or approval of the union, right?
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Meanwhile, you still need some way to tell if Teacher A is letting Johnny skate by even though he flunked.
like the way the state BOE approves the MCAS tests? Seems they figured out a way to keep the foxes from guarding the hen house with regards to the test so why not with evaluations?
Why am I not surprised?
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Being aware of “the gap” is a good thing. Doing something about it is even better. Punishing students who are the victims of it is a bad idea.
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So, I take it you think students should be held accountable for the failure of their school systems?
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What’s a “white moonbat”?
Quick comments as I have to go work in my classroom. đŸ˜‰
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While I have no problem with the skill-based English MCAS, the content-based math and science MCAS need some work. How we test special needs students, too, needs work. In general, I’m not opposed to a standardized assessment, but I prefer a normed national test (such as MAT 8) versus our MCAS for a variety of reasons.
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That said, I’m not for scrapping the system completely as it’s about the only measure we have providing any semblance of accountability. How the scores are ultimately used, however, is the problem, in my view, as I’ve commented upon here and here.
“If you can’t read this, thank a teacher’s union.”