Editorial Notebook: The Perils of Teaching to the Test

Protests against Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) have been sprouting out about the state. Most recently, 25 Arlington tenth-graders were suspended this Tuesday for collectively boycotting the standardized test, which will become a graduation requirement for the high-school class of 2003.

Although these students were handed the punishment of delinquents by their local school committee, in many ways they were more mature and sensible than the Massachusetts Board of Education that imposed the test on them in the first place.

While much of the criticism against the MCAS has been aimed at its potential to prevent almost 50 percent of the class of 2003 from receiving their high schools diplomas, its flaws lie even deeper than that.

The worst danger of the MCAS is that it forces teachers to teach to the test and takes away any opportunity they have to bring innovation to their teaching methods. Every high school student suffers from the MCAS in this respect, not just those who lie below the required passing score.

During my senior year at a Massachusetts high school, I had the opportunity to observe the teaching methods in a number of 10th-grade classes. Every single aspect of teaching focused on preparing for the MCAS questions, as opposed to any real learning or methods of thinking.

Based on my observations and my conversations with teachers at my high school, the MCAS-tainted schools will merely succeed in sending students who are capable of doing nothing more than answering MCAS questions out into the real word. Essentially all Massachusetts high schools will sink to the level of an SAT prep course.

Not only are schools forced to sacrifice themselves to MCAS preparation, the actual test-taking itself is an absurdly long 16-hour process, and when the testing schedule is spread out, the MCAS can disrupt school schedules for as long as three weeks.

The long tests might actually be of some value if they produced valid results, but the question themselves are flawed. The typical MCAS question is incredibly open-ended and vague, often focusing on a specific subject matter that a student has not yet covered in class. For schools and teachers to cover all the required material on the MCAS, they must sacrifice any freedom they had in choosing their own curricula. Their only option is a mindless, cramming style of teaching.

The majority of Massachusetts parents have continued to accept this abominable test. Over the years they have grown used to the idea that our schools are failing and that the only way to fix the problem is to turn them into test-taking boot camps. Hopefully sooner or later, they will come to their senses, start listening to students like those in Arlington, and form a collective voice strong enough to bring down the MCAS.