Dive Brief:
- The Massachusetts Board of Education is debating the role of test prep in the state's schools after its new chairwoman, Margaret McKenna, raised concerns about how much time students spend in test mode.
- According to McKenna, Massachusetts students spend 20 to 25 days "testing," which includes practice tests, pretests, and the real deal.
- Massachusetts is currently in the midst of a two-year trial run of the Common Core-aligned Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam, which it will make a final decision on in 2015.
Dive Insight:
McKenna indicated that there was a disconnect over who was forcing all of this testing to happen. "What I keep hearing is the districts keep saying it’s the state; the state keeps saying it’s the districts,” the Boston Globe reported McKenna saying at a board meeting. One source she didn't mention: The White House.
The federal government has played a large role in the push for Common Core, teacher evaluations based on assessments, and, by proxy, high-stakes testing. Interestingly, some on the state board believe the PARCC exam will alleviate some of the testing pressures since, according to Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester, PARCC is “much more about thinking, reasoning, . . . applying mathematics to the real world.” It is important to note that Chester is the chairman of PARCC’s governing board.
Massachusetts' pushback on testing is important since the state is often lauded for its high test scores. How it will fair with less emphasis on tests is interesting, as it would indicate whether or not schools are currently teaching students really deep critical thinking or have merely been teaching to tests all this time.
