By Bedford School Superintendent Jon Sills
Editor’s Note: Shortly after noon today, November 17, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 8-3 in favor of developing MCAS 2.0 by 2017.
Committed, as our district is, to developing our students’ capacities for creative and analytical thinking, I strongly support the Commonwealth’s movement towards a new generation of assessment that will help us gauge student progress and make the relevant improvements in our instruction. I am pleased that the board voted to develop an MCAS 2.0 in lieu of PARCC because this creates at least the possibility of more local control over the content and form of the assessments as well how they will be implemented. In my testimony before the Board of Education yesterday, I emphasize the importance of suspending both accountability ratings and publication of student results until the assessments are fully developed AND until districts have the requisite technology and know-how to make computer-delivered tests beneficial rather than disruptive. While pleased that the Board’s decision to hold districts harmless for the next two years, as opposed to the one year that the Commissioner proposed, reflects their openness to this broadly held concern, I do not think that it goes far enough.
If the purpose of standardized assessment is truly to improve instruction and to ensure equity rather than to use external pressures to hold teachers accountable, then there should be no need to rush the process of developing good assessments or of ensuring that districts have the means to share a level technological playing field. To fear that a multi-year pilot will cause schools to regress in their efforts to close achievement gaps, to engage teachers in collaborative review of student performance data to improve instruction, or to hold ourselves accountable, is to disrespect the thousands of practitioners who champion these practices daily and to severely underestimate the influence of the last twenty years of education reform.
So we will continue to advocate for an implementation process that benefits students and builds districts’ capacities. This includes continuing to voice opposition to the Commissioner’s recently announced decision to require the districts that chose PARCC last year to stick with PARCC this year despite the state’s decision to move to an MCAS 2.0.
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