Getting Local: The MCAS and Expectations

I read an article in The Boston Globe this morning that set me off into a bit of a lather.

It seems that the state's Higher Education Commissioner, David P. Driscoll, is reluctant to raise the standards for graduation when it comes to student scoring on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System because it would mean that fewer students graduated every year. As it stands now, a perfect score on the MCAS is a 280, and a minimum of 220 is needed for graduation. To achieve a standard considered 'proficient, a student must score a minimum of 240. A student scoring 220 and, therefore, qualifying for a diploma, is only considered to have 'partial' command of the material on the test (which, at this point, is limited to math and english).

What Driscoll is implying is that it's better to graduate more underprepared students than it is to keep them in school until they can be considered 'proficient'. So, as a philosophy of our public education, we are now expected to be more concerned with allowing as many people to graduate as possible, rather than ensuring that in order to qualify for graduation, our students are as prepared as possible - at least as far as the standards of a flawed test are concerned.

There is the issue of minority students, and the fact that many more of them would not qualify for graduation should the bar be raised. But the problem here is really more fundamental with where we set the bar. The problem is that our public education is clearly failing our kids, no matter what their race, or their economic situation. We should not be required to lower, or keep low, our standards of education in order to keep pushing students through the system. The debate over the standards for graduation under the MCAS system is merely a fight over recognition of the larger problems that loom in public education.

It seems to me that whole point of the MCAS is to provide a standard of education across the board (albeit one that ignores the hard and social sciences in its evaluation). If the state is going to set such a standard, shouldn't the standard be one of general proficiency? And if such a standard is set, shouldn't the schools be provided with the resources that they need to bring every one of their students, regardless of socio-economic status, up to those standards?

We shouldn't be having a debate over whether to raise the standards for our kids' education to the level of proficient. We should be demanding that our public school systems meet those standards and surpass them with every student in the system. By passing and graduation students with less than a general proficiency in not only math and english, but also the sciences, we are shortchanging both the students themselves, and also the health of our own future. Well educated people create more jobs, earn better wages, and keep our country at the forefront of innovation. By demanding less than proficient skills from our students, and not funding the development of those proficiencies in our students, we are mortgaging our own future as a strong society, and theirs as productive parts of that society.

Until face the real issues here, and stop debating ways to artificially boost graduation rates by lowering standards, our kids, and the future of our economy and society, will suffer.