MCAS Exam A Competent Tool in Building Our Kids' Futures
The Boston Herald
November 10, 2002
By Michael Goldstein
If a teenager knows no math and there's no MCAS around to hear him fail, do we still make a sound?
In May 2000, Tiffany Shavers finished her career at a Boston middle school by failing the eighth-grade MCAS test in math. The test scale runs 200 to 280. She scored 204. Four months later, she started at the small public high school where I work, and 20 months after that, she took the 10th-grade MCAS. "I was scared, but prepared," Tiffany said at the time. "All I can say is: I tried. I really, really tried."
She did more than try. She scored 260 out of a possible 280 - or "Advanced," the highest of four score groups. In fact, at our small school, 40 of 50 students (80 percent) passed math, making ours the highest-scoring African-American-majority school in Massachusetts.
The statewide pass rate is 69 percent; among African-Americans it's 40 percent.This shouldn't surprise anyone. Chaos theory suggests that out of seeming randomness, patterns emerge.
While Boston children fared poorly on the MCAS math tests, a closer look reveals that the 13 small Boston public high schools (both pilot and charter schools) dramatically outperformed the 11 large ones. The retort among the status quo gang is "small schools take the best kids." That's belied by the facts.
For example, only 18 percent of those same 50 students had passed their eighth-grade math MCAS before arriving at our school, and their collective poverty rate is actually slightly higher than that of Boston schools as a whole. Sure, Tiffany had advantages. Small public schools attract terrific teachers (who love the culture of knowing each student). Parents appreciate that their children are known as individuals, therefore they support teachers, leaning on their sons and daughters to buck up and bolster their efforts when necessary. Our school is small enough to know that Tiffany is interested in a law career, allowing her to be paired with a mentor; last year they analyzed various judicial rulings every Tuesday afternoon. Separately, a volunteer tutor met with her on weekends; they'd study math for a while at the Boston Public Library, then retreat to the Starbucks across the street, latte for him and hot chocolate for her.
All this for less public money per student than large public schools. We need to work in the trenches to help every Tiffany, every child who fails the eighth-grade exams, pass the 10th-grade MCAS. The goal here is not passing a test, it's to graduate teenagers who are truly prepared for college - not to dead-end community colleges, not as charity cases with the "disadvantaged" tag, but honestly ready to write the essays and solve the calculus problems needed to get A's and B's at four-year universities, the same ones that Newton and Brookline parents want for their own children.
The MCAS is just a beginning. How do we get there? Shutter some of the big, anonymous high schools and roll out more small ones, where the culture is positive enough to at least give the teachers a fighting chance.
The Gates Foundation is making this - small schools, not small class sizes - the centerpiece of its national education reform strategy, and for good reason. Of the 24 non-exam public schools in Boston, the top nine schools on MCAS were all small.
Hold teachers and administrators accountable, too. That was the original deal, back in 1989 when the nation's governors dreamed up this more-dollars-for-more-accountability deal that has been the centerpiece of education reform.
And not just sticks; carrots, too. New York City business leaders are doling out $40,000 bonuses to leaders of high performing urban schools. Boston has as many teachers as New York has administrators - how about Paul Gaston and the Yawkey Trust use their post-Celtics and post-Red Sox coffers to throw out five-figure bonuses to inner-city teachers whose students pass MCAS in overwhelming numbers? I know Tiffany's teachers wouldn't mind.
Tutoring, tutoring, tutoring. Boston has about 4,000 10th-graders slated to take the math MCAS in 2003; colleges in the Boston area have almost 200,000 students. Is it really an impossible dream to imagine that every Boston 10th-grader could get five to 10 hours of math tutoring a week and master algebra?
Michael Goldstein is the founder of www.matchschool.org
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