Bill to halt MCAS for four years, seek permanent alternative earns wide support on Beacon Hill

A bill that would place a four-year moratorium on MCAS as schools struggle to recover from the coronavirus pandemic is earning widespread support on Beacon Hill, a sign that momentum to permanently do away with the standardized exam could be building.

“Standardized tests have always been narrow and severely flawed measures,” wrote Beth Kontos, president of the American Teacher Federation in her testimony to the Joint Committee on Education this week. “Such tests in a time of a global pandemic cannot possibly measure student learning or school quality with any validity or reliability. If MCAS is administered in the coming years, the results would be essentially meaningless.”

The committee is considering twin bills by Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, and Rep. Jim Hawkins, D-Attleboro, that would institute a four-year moratorium on the use of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System as a graduation requirement.

“The upheaval, trauma, and learning loss of the past five months and the irregularities and complexities of returning to school remotely this fall will have a long-standing impact,” Sen. Joanne Comerford wrote in her testimony to the committee, speaking of students’ “uneven access to on-line learning.”

If passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Charlie Baker, the bill would extend a waiver granted this spring as the pandemic abruptly shuttered schools across the state.

The bill also would create a commission to study alternatives to the standardized test, which was developed with the state’s landmark 1993 education reform law.

More than 200 students, teachers, unions, parents, lawmakers, administrators and advocates submitted testimony — overwhelmingly in support.

Opponents of the legislation argue MCAS is the state’s best tool to identify and measure learning gaps — something Education Reform Now Advocacy Director Liam Kerr said is more important now than ever.

“Eliminating MCAS tests during the course of COVID-19 and for years after it ends would amount to throwing away the most powerful tool we have to understand how learning has been affected,” Kerr said.

Public schools have relied on MCAS since 1998 as a metric to measure student achievement. Students are required to pass MCAS in order to graduate.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3kI5Lkn