Blue Mass Group

Think about it. Biden gets sworn in. The Democrats keep the house and win the senate. All Hell breaks loose when they align the courts imbalance with two judges. This infuriates the hard core right wing base. Gun control measures, no matter how small, are passed. The gun nuts get even nuttier. Fox News runs story after story about a police officer getting shot, a woman who has second thoughts after an abortion, schools not allowing a religious symbol on the playground….you know the rest.

Trump takes to social media and rallies shouting “I told you so. You abandoned me and now Hell is here!!!!…..Elect Me In 2024 or this will get worse.

It is in Trump’s personal best interest if the Republican Party loses the Senate.

And we all know that Trump only cares about Trump.

Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you’ve forgotten your aim.

–George Santayana

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Ars gratia artis, the motto of MGM Studios, is the Latin translation of “art for art’s sake.” The movies, MGM implied, were their own excuse for being. 

The same could be said for MCAS this year.

With little or no rationale, Education Commissioner Jeff Riley and Secretary of Education James Peyser want this year’s tenth and eleventh graders to take the MCAS test. 

Yes, we may be in the middle of a pandemic. We may have lost three months of effective learning last year and lost two weeks this year. We may be at the beginning of a bold, year-long experiment with remote and hybrid learning. 

Our most at-risk students and their families are suffering disproportionately from the effects of the disease. The achievement gap is almost certainly widening. 

But no worries. MCAS will go on. 

If there was a rationale for administering MCAS tests to our now long-suffering high school students, it was missing at the September meeting of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). 

Riley, in his housekeeping remarks to the Board, stated that the Trump Administration had told states not to expect a waiver on high-stakes testing this year. Of course, they will no longer be in office in January. And other states, now in the throes of COVID, will likely want a hiatus in testing requirements.

Nonetheless, BESE Member Matt Hills said, “From a policy standpoint, I think it would be ‘horrible, terrible policy if we’re not going to have MCAS regardless of the situation.” 

There is no way to predict educational conditions this spring, he means, but MCAS must go on.

We may not be in a lockdown like last spring, but MCAS makes no sense this year either. As its full name states, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) is more than a test and its scores. It’s a system, and it is predicated on the assumption that students receive 990 hours of in-person education. With the exception of the tony suburb of Carlisle, every public school student in the Commonwealth is receiving some, if not all, of their instruction remotely. The Massachusetts public schools are currently in what is likely to be a year-long instructional experiment in learning. MCAS was simply not designed to assess it.

BESE’s work, however, apparently depends on MCAS. 

“It’s just inconceivable to me that we could consider this year to be anything other than a failed year, as a board, if we go to a second year without our common assessment tool, MCAS,” Hills said. 

If Hill was preoccupied with what a year without MCAS would mean to BESE, Secretary of Education James Peyser had public school students on his mind. 

“In the name of equity and justice,” Peyser said, “we must do everything we can to provide students with meaningful instruction this year, and that includes MCAS.”

Perhaps Secretary Peyser needs a reminder of the fact that assessment is not instruction, and equity and justice are products of a fair and equitable educational system, not a standardized test and its scores. And the tragic flaw of our public education system is that the prerequisites are distributed unjustly and inequitably. MCAS not only fails to correct this flaw, but the entire assessment system also exacerbates it.

This year, most, if not all, underserved students are being taught remotely. Many lack the infrastructure and resources necessary to make the most of the situation. To make matters worse, their communities are suffering the worst health effects of the pandemic. Expecting them to take the test under these conditions is grotesquely unfair.

Contrary to Peyser’s words, MCAS would not only be unjust and inequitable, it would be meaningless. Even with psychometric calisthenics, scores 2021 can’t be meaningfully compared to those of previous years when a pandemic wasn’t raging across the world. In the last 12 months, sophomores and juniors lost more than one-third of their in-person learning time. The effect of the lockdown in terms of learning and adjustment to life was profound. Even now, education differs widely across the Commonwealth. If students fail, will the state allow them to graduate? Will the state blame students for learning losses caused by the pandemic? 

MCAS scores are intended to imbue student learning with measurable value and provide policy-makers with data to guide educational policy. For better or worse, the pandemic would introduce a confounding variable that could not be isolated into the test results. For our students, education is at least partly remote this year, but MCAS isn’t equipped to tell us anything of use about their learning. There is no way to tell whether student performance is tied to an addressable weakness in instruction or curriculum or merely the educational effects of COVID-19.

The philosopher George Santayana once said, “fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you’ve forgotten your aim.” I don’t believe Secretary Peyser and BESE are fanatics. In fact, I believe they are well-meaning. But in doubling down on MCAS, they’ve forgotten the aim of school is education, not testing.

 

Mark L. Bail has been teaching English for 28 years at East Longmeadow High School. The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or viewpoints of the East Longmeadow Public Schools or Massachusetts Teachers Association.

An excerpt from another must read Tom Edsall election post-Mortem in the inherent instability in the Democratic coalition.

Tufts Professor Eitan Hersh has some harsh and accurate words for our own state:

 

Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts and the author of the book “Politics is for Power,” is not persuaded of the good faith and ultimate commitment of the affluent left. In addition to arguing that “moderate Democrats don’t want their brand tied to progressive policy priorities,” Hersh questioned the depth of conviction of the so-called progressive elite:

Many of the supporters who say they want big liberal policies at the national level don’t really mean it. For example, well-to-do liberals in fancy suburbs who say they prioritize racial equality but do not want to actually level the playing field in educational opportunities between their districts and majority-minority districts.

He cited his own state, Massachusetts:

Here there’s tons of liberal energy and money to support taking big progressive fights to Washington. Meanwhile, our schools are segregated, our transit system is broken, our housing is unaffordable, our police force is a mess of corruption and there’s little pressure being put on the state legislature and governor to fix any of it.

Our biggest divide is between an affluent left that is far more rhetorically woke than the general electorate on major social and cultural issues (inventing gender neutral terms for minorities like Latinx for example, supporting defunding police which actual communities of color facing real violence don’t want, etc.) while being as Phil Ochs once charged several degrees to the right of center if it effects them personally. Like with increased taxes or changing their own communities zoning laws to be more permissible for affordable dense housing. Actually paying for transit and actually integrating schools and communities. This is the hard work. It will be forcing the affluent left to get out of their comfort zones and figure out what the working class people of color who voted for Trump this time in Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, and New Bedford want. And putting their substantial money where their equally substantial mouths are.

There has been a lot of talk about a few things that have bothered me in the past week. The first is the ongoing progressive vs. moderate bloodletting about Congressional loses and falling short in the Senate. First off, Republicans never look at a partial victory and start asking what they did wrong. They take any shred of a mandate, no matter how actually unpopular it may be, and run with it. Democrats should do the same.

This was a big victory. 306 electoral votes is no small feat. Biden won two states Barack Obama never did and Bill Clinton only once a piece (GA and AZ). He restored the blue wall and was very competitive in OH, NC, FL, and even TX. The fact remains, had Trump not generated unprecedented turnout of his own, the downballot GOP would have been drowned in a blue wave. Their life raft is increasingly an unstable albatross dragging their party further and further away from the center and the norms which have governed our nation for over a half century. Without a charismatic reality tv star at the top of the ticket, they got nothing. Cruz, Hawley, and Cotton can run as the Trump heirs all they want, but these Harvard graduates can’t possibly connect with the MAGA hatters like Trump can.

Secondly, I’m bothered by the talk of how little Biden can get done with a Republican Senate. First off, there are still two races to go in Georgia and the Democrats have a 25% chance of getting both of those seats and a 50% shot at getting one of them. That’s about the same odds the GOP has in a state that nearly went against Hillary by a ten point margin. Georgia is gonna be lit blue on that electoral map, and I trust Stacy Abrams to deliver more votes for our excellent nominees than either of the losers the GOP has nominated.

Even if those two Democrats do lose, talk of a stalled agenda or a McConnell veto is premature and absurdly self defeating. There’s a lot Biden can do via executive order as Sen. Warren pointed out in a recent Op-Ed. Beyond that, Biden should pick the cabinet he wants. If he really wants to secure the Senate he should advance Bernie and Warren as nominees now. Sure, they probably can’t get confirmed if McConnell retains his majority, but putting that majority on the line will excite progressives and get them to donate,  volunteer, and flip those seats. If the GOP has to tip toe around the reality of the results for their basement, surely we can use a little hope on our side too. Warren and Sanders will be confirmed and Sen. Warnock and Sen. Ossoff will be the deciding votes. Say it enough times and it can happen.

If they fall short? Biden is still the guy who convinced Arlen Spector to switch parties. Make Toomey, Burr, or even the deeply troubled Collins an offer they can’t refuse. Ambassador to the country of their choice or free reigns over a minor department. Doing so let’s their Democratic governors make the replacement and can shore up or cause a Democratic majority. Or convince Murkowski or Romney to vote for Schumer. Or all of the above. At the end of the day Biden is a politician who likes winning, hates losing, and loves the game of politics. Time for him to play ball.

At tonight’s meeting of the Democratic State Committee incumbent Gus Bickford was re-elected with 63% of the vote (including mine) with 24% going to Mike Lake and 13% to Bob Massie.  I was impressed with how much thought and effort the two challengers put into their candidacies and am honestly a bit surprised by the result.  I would not have predicted a winner, but I might have predicted that nobody would get a first-ballot majority.  There seemed to be a bit of an organized effort from outside the DSC to promote Bob Massie’s candidacy the likes of which I had not seen for previous chair races.  Gus did spend part of his campaign speech apologizing for his role in the CD1 matter and committed to implementing the Jacques report recommendations, but those will take some time.

The other interesting thing we did tonight was taking the historic step of ratifying a collective bargaining agreement with IBEW to represent party staff.  I believe this has become a bit of a trend among Democratic entities.