Here’s a fascinating forum on MCAS and what it really means on the ground level, inside our schools.
Last fall, Adam Sweeting, who was running for School Committee in Ward 3, got together with Alex Pirie and the Welcome Project to organize this forum.
We’ve posted the audio file and transcribed some of the most interesting excerpts.
Listen to the entire forum link
Listen to Stephanie Tejada, a junior at Somerville High School (includes welcome at the beginning) link We haven’t transcribed this piece. The first person you hear is Adam, moderating.
Next, SHS teacher Kate Bunker-Neto explains how she tries to help kids pass the language test even if they can’t speak English. link Again, the first voice is Adam.
Kate Bunker-Neto has been teaching ESL at Somerville High School for over 20 years and last year she taught two one-semester ESL MCAS Prep courses there. Here’s a transcript, very slightly edited, of what she said:
First, I want to say that I’m just speaking for myself. I’m not representing the STA, the MTA, or Somerville Public Schools, just myself and how I’ve been working with MCAS, teaching and preparing the foreign students to pass the MCAS.
And I want to say first of all, is MCAS really bad? Well, I personally feel that it’s good to have some kind of an exit exam. I don’t really like that it’s high-stakes, and that it’s very, very hard for the foreign students.
Today the foreign students were taking the MEPA [Massachusetts English Proficiency Assessment], which was originally designed to be the foreign students’ MCAS exam. Except, that the powers that be decided that would be unfair to the mainstream students. So the foreign students must take MCAS.
MCAS is also not the only reason that our foreign students drop out. There are other reasons. They drop out because they really need to make money, and they drop out because in some countries they only go to school till noon—they go from 7 till noon. They just don’t like studying from 7:30 till 2:30. Otherwise, they study in their country from noon until 5 pm—they get a choice. They just don’t like studying—certain kids. And others will drop out because of MCAS—some have heard their scores, left, and never come back, because they were just too discouraged. I think it was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The foreign students, when they first arrive, don’t know what a multiple-choice test is, don’t know words like multiple choice, don’t know words like “prompt” (we give “prompts,” not questions), and they don’t know what we mean by “short-answer question,” which is really one or two paragraphs, so my take was to teach them all this terminology throughout my—what?—four-month course, because I think they need just to have a grasp of all the language going on.
Another thing we had to work on was the numbering system, and trying to encourage them and make them really believe that they could pass, and actually helping them to pass, by showing them how it works.
So I got in one set of answers. This is all online from the DOE, from the November, 2006 retest. The first eight questions—this is too small for you to see—but the first eight questions are multiple choice.
For mainstream students, probably multiple choice would be where they could succeed, because it’s kind of fun and easy. You read and kind of take a good guess. But foreign students don’t know enough vocabulary. And there’s no way in four months to teach them the vocabulary to pass these really, really tough readings—some of them are 10th grade, 11th grade, and my students read at a second grade, third grade level—at this point. That’s when I teach them.
If they can answer the open response questions, which is one or two paragraphs, they’ll get four points. (Here’s another four-pointer, another four-pointer, another four-pointer.) It’s clear we have more multiple choice. (They’ll get one point, one point, one point.)
So we actually focused more, at least the person who helped me prepare the class and I focused more on the writing, even though writing is very painful, because that’s under their control. So it’s brutal but we have them writing constantly.
We tell them, there are four points. If you have an opening sentence—that’s one point. If you have a closing sentence, that’s a point. If you draw out some quotes, and use quotation marks. (This is really a killer. It’s very hard to get my kids to use quotation marks.) If they’ll do that, they might get another point.
So they can accrue enough points to pass, without getting too many multiple choice correct. And this is probably killing people who love fine literature, to hear this, but this test wasn’t made to help foreign students pass or appreciate literature.
The long composition is scored like this: The long composition is about a novel of their choice, or a piece of literature that they have read previously, that they cannot bring to the test with them. I try and encourage the kids to, you know, out of a possible 20, maybe you can get 14. Maybe you can get a 10. But you get more points here. So that they don’t give up. Because a lot of kids will just give up, faced with the fact that they have to write a few paragraphs about a novel. It is really pretty tough.
The multiple choice questions in November, 2006, would give you 36 points. Open response, that would give you 12 points. The long comp could give you 20. [But] you only need 36 to pass, or in certain years it might be 40. This would translate into the magic 220 points.
So we try to encourage them that they only have to get half this number right. So it’s sort of cheer leading for them, in a way. We give a lot of encouragement: don’t give up, you only have to get half way through.
Of course, that could change. In two more years, they’ll go up to 240, and I don’t know how people are going to work harder than we are already. I don’t know what’s going to happen but we’re going to have to work much harder, maybe find some new techniques.
Now, I don’t want to imply that we work at a very low level, but some students come to my class on MCAS, or last year they did, not knowing the past tense, barely knowing English, and they had to take the exam in November.
Well, they read this little book called Tinker’s Farm [only 15 pages long and entirely written in the present tense], and this was their piece of literature. And two or three actually passed, using this as their long composition. So I’m very proud of that.
Of course, other kids wrote about Huckleberry Finn because they were doing that in their 10th grade English class.
Sorry, I didn’t teach 10th graders. I teach 11th graders or 10th graders who failed the year before and are repeating, but they were in B level ESL, they were reading Huckleberry Finn in an abridged version. Some of them were able to pass with that, too.
My students, some of them, use this book, some use The Secret Garden, and some use Forest Gump, which I found in Spanish. Because there is no rule you have to read the book in English. You just have to read the book and remember enough details to be able to write a composition from scratch. So I was very pleased. [short interchange/break]
That was basically all that we did. I had other things I could have said but those were the main successes, the main strategies that I worked with.
Oh, I forgot one thing, which was changing the prompt into an introductory sentence, and then reusing it as a conclusion.
It was a killer, but we went for weeks and weeks crossing out the part of the question that was a prompt, and then highlighting in yellow the words that they would reuse. I don’t know—I don’t know, does that sound crazy?—and they got it.
For example, “From a piece of literature you have read, in or out of school, select…” We crossed that all out. “…a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.” And we crossed out all the rest. And then we would say, “Forest Gump, from the book Forest Gump, was a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.”
This is primitive! It may sound very shocking, but I got the kids who barely knew any English to be able to do that—to recognize what was a prompt and what was content, and then rework it to make a closing sentence. So this is the level that I was dealing on. [interruption and short exchange]
Well, they have five shots. That’s what we keep telling them. If they do it in 10th grade once, twice in 11th and twice in 12th, that’s five chances, and I really tell them at the beginning, don’t worry, don’t get stressed out, don’t get stressed out. Don’t quit school! You may not pass till your fourth or fifth try. And many do pass earlier than that if they were really educated in their country.
Listen to State Rep. Carl Sciortino’s presentation link (Ditto: Adam introduces him. No transcript.)
Carl has filed a bill to change the Department of Education’s edict that students must pass MCAS to get a high school diploma.
Listen to Ward 7 School Committee member Mary Jo Rossetti link (No transcript of this.)
Posted in Schools and Youth
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I hope there’s more serious discussion about the MCAS. I am personally completely biased against the test (see below), but like some of the participants, I think there are some legitimate and well-intentioned reasoning behind it. I did my student teaching at Dorchester High School and saw first-hand that there are teachers and school systems willing to pass students from grade to grade and to graduation regardless of ability to read, write, or reason. George Bush’s speechwriters did come up with one wonderful line when they had him speak of the “bigotry of soft expectations”–I certainly saw that a Dorchester, where teachers acted as if children were incapable of learning. Whatever else it’s done, NCLB has made it impossible to ignore struggling students. And that is the baby that I think we want to keep as we chuck aside the bath water. I also think that a high school diploma should be more than a reward for mere attendance–but for all the reasons below, I’m not sure how to measure whatever it is we think people should know to graduate from high school.
In addition to all the social-justice questions raised by the MCAS, I think there are terrible implications for education for all students–even the most gifted or privileged. That has to do with the confusion between the test and and what it purports to measure.
As Linda Vitello points out, there are lots of ways of learning, and many of them are hard to measure–especially by a machine. And that leads to the inherent problem with testing: we test the things that are easy to measure (multiple choice questions, e.g.) and then we get stuck in the trap of thinking the test (because it’s measurable) is the most important thing. The problem isn’t “teaching to the test” but rather “teaching to the testing.” Because of the nature of these high-stakes tests, our teachers are spending hours and hours teaching test-taking skills, though those aren’t the skills our students will need after graduation (I for one have taken 1 multiple-choice test in the past 24 years).
Here’s an example of how it affects our classrooms. A discouraging percentage of things my daughter is given to read in school end with multiple choice rather than open-ended questions. I can only assume that is because the school (or, more likely, educational publishing companies) view reading as another time to practice test-taking skills. Multiple-choice tests do make sense when thousands of tests are being graded by a machine, but I see no place for them in a classroom where a teacher is doing the grading. First of all, they’re less accurate in measuring knowledge than requiring children to produce the answer, and second of all, they give the false impression that there is a single right answer in reading literature. But we seem to have them to give children more time to practice that test-taking skill–which is tantamount to replacing education with Kaplan test-prep.
How educated a person is (or how creative, logical, eloquent) is not always easy to measure, as we can see from the very fact that people are always disagreeing in politics, art, academia, and even science. On my bleaker days I feel that focusing on what is easy to measure rather than on what really matters is destroying American education.
One more elitist but heartfelt example. At my (private) high school, we had no AP classes, because they assumed a well-educated person would be able to ace any test on the subject. It wasn’t actually true. In 11th grade however, I had a new Latin teacher who came in from a prep school, and he prepped us for the test using all the tricks. We only read books 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the Aenied, because those were the only books ever tested; we focused on the passages most likely to be on the test; we practiced using previous year’s versions. It was the easiest test I ever took, and yet it was the least meaningful class I had that year. Here we were with that great poem (and it is a GREAT poem), treating it like the Cliff Notes, never seeing the glorious whole of it, and for what? Only where education is viewed as a commodity and not for its intrinsic value is the 5 I earned on the AP worth more than an actual knowledge of the Aenied. (Of course, none of it mattered, as I never took Latin again. Except that it does matter, to me.) Last summer I sat on the interviews for the assistant superintendent position. One of the candidates commented that it doesn’t seem that Shakespeare was the on the MCAS anymore, and that if he wasn’t on the 2008 test, perhaps he could be dropped from the curriculum. I almost barfed. I can imagine serious debate about whether or not Shakespeare is appropriate for the modern child but to decide it based on whether or not it is tested is yet another indication of how the proxy (i.e. the test) is treated as more important than the thing it is supposed to measure (i.e., education).