March 29, 2024

Commissioner Wagner telling a half-truth?

Posted

Commissioner Wagner may be calling it a “truth telling moment” but it is a half-truth at best. RICAS may allow us to compare test scores to neighboring Massachusetts but the picture isn’t as complete as a surface analysis may seem.

One notion raised by The Journal is that if Rhode Island were a single school district in Massachusetts, it would be in the bottom 10% of that state. What such a premise leaves out is that Massachusetts has over two decades of indoctrinating their educators into teaching to this test and the same is true of students and parents. Does that mean that a Massachusetts graduate knows more than a Rhode Island one, or simply that they know more about the contents of the MCAS/RICAS?

There’s a cycle with testing, it starts with a test that is supposed to measure the understanding a student has of key parts of the curriculum. But as the pressure to perform is raised and the stakes are increased, curriculum comes to be narrowed to the test, the test becomes the end, no longer a means. What happens when this takes hold is you lose art, music, civic work and other programs that don’t fit the test. Hands on learning also takes a back seat to preparing for the test.

We lose students in this process, students who think they can’t succeed on a test as a graduation requirement drop out. They often do so before taking the test so the district and the state get to keep their pretty numbers. The article ‘MCAS Making the Dropout Crisis Worse’ shows statistically in Massachusetts and other states, graduation requirement testing disproportionately causes poor and minority students to drop out Since then Massachusetts has swung around its graduation rate, supported no doubt by the indoctrination of the MCAS culture from elementary school forward. But again, have they learned more than Rhode Island children or simply learned how to take the MCAS?

Massachusetts noted their own lack of gains in a 1999 report, and found that “One of the consistent findings of this research is that demography explains most of the variation in test scores from district to district. Results from this year's research are similar to results from last year's work: about 84% of the variation in test results is explained by demography. That is why Weston and Wayland have high MCAS scores and why Holyoke and Brockton have low MCAS scores. Thus, though demography is not destiny, it sets a strong tendency.” Without a way of creating educational equity, how can high stakes testing, a call of many since the release of the scores, be done in a way that doesn’t hurt minority and low-income students?

We cannot simply look at Massachusetts as the single, shining model. We must create our own model in Rhode Island, taking best parts from Massachusetts and other states that have something to offer and building something effective for Rhode Island students. Such a model should put testing in its place as one of several benchmarks for student success.

Jason J. Desrosiers

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here

Share!
Truly local news delivered to every home in town