A Brief Response to Jessica Grose

Or Vote Yes on Question 2

On the day before Halloween, New York Times columnist Jessica Grose tried to scare my fellow citizens of the Commonwealth with a column called Massachusetts Is Making Its High School Diplomas Meaningless (gift link).

Sounds bad!

She’s writing about Question 2, a ballot measure that “would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in order to graduate from high school but still require students to complete coursework that meets state standards.”

That pretty much explains it. The measure does not eliminate the test itself, but removes it as a high school graduation requirement.

In her column, Grose — whose work I often admire — laments what she sees as a lowering of standards, but she’s conflating credentialism with education. This is a mistake particularly common to the sorts of high-achievers who secure positions at the New York Times. I have been one of these people: a good SAT score is proof of your general competence (your “aptitude,” as its original name had it) and is a gateway to further achievement.

And indeed, Grose points to a defense of the SAT published earlier this year by her colleague David Leonhardt, to argue “that standardized testing predicts success more accurately than grades alone and ‘test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive.’”

But is the purpose of the MCAS to “predict success”? Not according to the state’s Department of Education: “Statewide testing gives families an objective measure of their child's and school's progress and is one way for taxpayers to see the results of their investment in schools.”

I had hoped, for my argument’s sake, to make a point about the letter “A” in the respective acronyms of SAT and MCAS. The SAT’s “A” stood for “aptitude” — its job was explicitly to identify students “who will thrive.” The “A” in MCAS stands for “Assessment” — which we have come to think of as a rating of an individual’s ability but, observed neutrally, we might think of as a check-in, a “how’m I doin’?”

And MCAS, it seems, is a check-in, but it’s more of a report to the investors rather than a way for teachers to get a sense of where their students are.

For that, my kids and others in their school district periodically take a series of tests known as “i-Ready.” Despite the silly name, these tests purport to perform the function one might have wished for a required statewide test. These tests are diagnostic. As such, teachers don’t spend classroom time preparing students to take them. They wait for the results which then help them figure out where and how students might need help. Perhaps, if the MCAS’s stakes were lower, it might be reimagined as a diagnostic tool, and then our individual districts wouldn’t have to contract out to the Texas-based Curriculum Associates.

But, Grose writes, if there’s not a statewide standard, and “each district is allowed to make its own requirements, colleges and local hiring managers will have less confidence that high school graduates will have basic literacy and math skills.”

Two points here:

1. If the issue is that “local hiring managers” can no longer rely on a taxpayer-funded sorting mechanism and will have to do some type of minimal screening for their lowest-wage jobs … My pearls, they’re clutched.

2. Colleges that require only a high school diploma for admission are rather used to variance in aptitude. This may be because … almost everyone passes the MCAS anyway!

That’s right, in her lamentation for this lowering of standards, Grose acknowledges that “[t]he MCAS is not a killer exam. … 96 percent [of students] manage to eventually pass or otherwise prove their competency via one of the state’s alternate paths.”

So, what are we even talking about here?

For a big chunk of students the test is a minor annoyance, while for others it’s a significant source of stress. For teachers, meanwhile, preparation for this high-stakes test can eat up a significant chunk of curriculum and class time, time that might be spent — oh, I don’t know — engaging students’ interest.

Grose is further worried that Massachusetts’ rampant grade inflation “means that grades might have become increasingly untethered from both test scores and knowledge.”

My colleagues in the Writing Program know what I’m about to say: Grades are pedagogically useless. This is especially true in my area (writing instruction), perhaps less so in others, but the idea that grades were ever “tethered” to knowledge is laughable — ask anyone who aced high school geometry but could not begin to tell you what a “cosecant” is.¹

Finally, Grose says that just because something is a source of stress is not a sufficient reason for its elimination. Fair enough!

It’s also true that “[l]ife is an endless stream of tests of different kinds, and we do our children a disservice by pretending that it is not.”

To these two points: I’ll say that performance on standardized tests broadly correlates to socioeconomic status, and I’ll ask, how many of your life’s “endless stream of tests” have been multiple choice?

Vote Yes on Question 2!

1. It’s me, I’m the dummy.