Test Prep.

• Author: ALEXAKIS, GEORGIA N.
• Position: Validity and social implications of standardized educational test in Massachusetts

What Bush can learn from a tryout of school reform in Massachusetts

IT'S 9 A.M. ON A HOT AND HUMID JULY morning in Revere, Mass., a blue-collar city six miles north of Boston, and Joe Ciccarello, a math teacher at Revere High School, is winding down the ninth-grade algebra class he started teaching 90 minutes ago.

The topic of the day: adding and subtracting positive and negative integers--a basic concept in high-school math but one with which many of his students have been struggling. As he hands out the next day's assignment, a chorus of complaints arises from students predictably unhappy about spending six weeks of their summer reporting to an un-air-conditioned classroom.

"Why do we have to know this stuff anyway?" whines one student from the back of the room.

The question hangs in the air as Ciccarello, 32, moves to the blackboard, quickly drawing a graph. "You see this?" he asks, pointing to the x-axis. "This represents your income. And the y-axis represents your high school diploma. Down here, you have no high school diploma and no earnings. Up here, with a high school diploma, you have a good-paying job."

"So why do you have to know this stuff?" he asks, as the bell ending the period rings through the hallways. "So you can pass the MCAS, so you can get your high school diploma."

Ciccarello's answer is deceptively simple for a school district as complex as Revere's, a community whose teachers and parents aspire to send every child to college, but whose classrooms are filled with students who qualify for free lunches or whose parents speak limited English. And yet his answer is no simpler than the basic message behind the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a state-mandated exam that starting this school year all 10th graders in public schools must pass before they can graduate in 2003: Study hard, pass the test, earn a high school degree.

The rules and rewards are the same for the nearly 980,000 public school students in Massachusetts, regardless of the school they attend, the kind of community they live in, or the type of home they return to after a day in the classroom. It is a system that places equal expectations on students coming from unequal backgrounds. Which makes Reveres acceptance--and even endorsement of the MCAS--all the more surprising.

In 1993, when the Massachusetts state legislature passed a bill calling for the creation of the MCAS, lawmakers and educators expected the loudest outcry to come from districts like Revere and other urban areas with historically underperforming schools. Those districts were expected to post the test's highest failure rates and to produce the highest number of high school dropouts.

Some of these predictions have borne out. In 2000, 51 percent of Reveres students failed the math portion of the test and 33 percent failed the English portion. Nonetheless, Revere accepted the MCAS early on and teachers like Ciccarello told students that the test was here to stay. The best thing they could do was prepare for it.

Since then, Reveres attitude has shifted from grudging acceptance to a full endorsement of the MCAS and the standards-based movement. Rather than hide behind excuses built around the socioeconomic status of the students they serve, the district has embraced the test, altering school curriculum to match the content of the test and organizing test-prep workshops in an almost maniacal fashion--after-school, on the weekends, and during the summer. In a district tired of wearing the "underperforming" label, teachers and administrators have seized upon the test as their ticket to higher expectations, tougher standards, and better results.

Revere is not alone. In fact, as the MCAS becomes a fixture in the state's educational agenda, a paradox has emerged: The schools most likely to do poorly on the MCAS have also been most likely to embrace it, while those districts whose scores are already quite high are fighting hardest to get rid of it. The latter schools--mostly white, primarily suburban, and always affluent--are leading the charge against the test, arguing that it diverts important resources and time from more advanced learning.

The white, affluent communities' opposition to the MCAS has been as unexpected as the poor schools' acceptance of it. The test, it seems, has reignited a century-old debate between proponents of "progressive" education, which champions intellectual freedom as the cornerstone of democratic society, and those who believe that curriculum should be standardized and students drilled on its content to ensure a basic level of skill.

Underlying the pedagogical debate, though, are deep class divisions that always seem to sabotage attempts to improve poor schools without hurting the rich ones. The MCAS has hit a nerve, in part, because its content is radically egalitarian. It evaluates all students on what they know and how well they think, not on how many Volvos populate their school parking lot or how many test-taking gimmicks they can acquire in pricey Kaplan prep classes, which are of little help on the open-ended MCAS questions.

Deeply offended at being lumped in with poor schools in taking the test--and secretly frightened that the test may expose some deficiencies in their schools and their students--affluent communities have mounted a concerted challenge to the MCAS. Their opposition threatens to stop the gains made in places like Revere dead in their tracks.

The Commonwealth isn't the first in the nation to use a "high-stakes" test. Nearly 30 states currently use some version of it, as legislators and state-level bureaucrats across the country have come to view standards and accountability as a last-ditch attempt to save the public school system. But people in Washington are watching Massachusetts closely as its debate over standardized testing unfolds, in part because many see Massachusetts as a model reform effort, and its opponents are among the nation's most...