Picture of Deborah Meier:

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

BOSTON - The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) has been shrouded in controversy since its inception. In May of 1998, students from grades 4, 8 and 10 were first given the MCAS test (which was implemented in response to the 1993 Education Reform Act), and the examination was repeated in 1999. Failure rates have been disappointingly high. Opposition to the standardized testing program has come from both MCAS administrators and participants; students have protested, boycotted and rallied against the test as educators continue to publicly voice their objections to this mode of testing.

46 bills aiming to revise current MCAS standards were presented at a boisterous, 12 hour hearing this past Wednesday at the State House, including one which would make MCAS merely part of an overall student portfolio. A state plan which would require MCAS scores for admission to the University of Massachusetts and nine state colleges was dropped this month amid controversy.

Board of Higher Education Chairman Stephen Tocco backs MCAS as becoming an SAT-type admission standard, an alternative entry vehicle. But other state education leaders have opposed this idea, citing disparities among minority scores which could curtail student progress in these groups.

An ardent opponent of MCAS is Deborah Meier, a nationally-known educator who has worked as a teacher, principal, writer and advocate for over three decades, and is currently principal of the Mission Hill Pilot School in Boston. She has been active in the New York area, founding and directing a system of East Harlem elementary schools and serving as the principal of Central Park East Secondary School. She spearheaded an effort to transform several poorly-performing high schools into smaller, age-diverse schools comprised of mainly low-income students of color; these schools became national standards of reform. Meier has served on myriad educational committees and was a recipient of the 1987 Catherine D. and John D. MacArthur fellowship.

"Meier is one of the best-known and most celebrated educators in the country," proclaims Jennifer McNulty of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She cites the success of Meier's Central Park East Secondary School effort, which, due to Meier's work, graduates 90 percent of its students, 90 percent of whom go on to college. Meier, who has served as president of the Center for Collaborative Education in New York and was a part-time fellow at the Annenberg National Institute for School Reform at Brown University, is attempting to establish fifty additional innovative NYC public schools.

Meier, who holds honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Columbia's Teachers College, began her educational career as a kindergarten teacher in Chicago. She has written for the Nation, Dissent, and many other publications, and has authored three books on education, the most recent (May 2000) being Will Standards Save Public Education? Her other books are The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (September 1996) and The Passionate Teacher: A Practical Guide (with Robert L. Fried, September 1996).

"Deborah Meier is a champion of innovative public education," says Ellen Moir, director of teacher education at UCSC. "Her work is fueled by creativity and dedication, and she is a powerful role model for anyone involved in education."

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

BOSTON - At a recent Harvard University Graduate School of Education talk, Meier explained that standardized testing, while not a total effort to replace public education with privatized education, "is being used, and is easily used, to discourage people regarding the effectiveness of public education."

She suggested that some proponents believe in free enterprise as a panacea for everything, others have personal reasoning, and still others, such as testing companies and corporate programs, wish to reap financial gain from privatization.

Advocates often promote highly centralized, uniform coercion as the ideal manner with which to achieve change, she went on to state. "With high and rigid standards, we can eventually force the majority of people in this country into the right framework."

This week, she continued this thought: "There are even good folks who think tests will force lazy and complacent people (kids, teachers, systems, bureaucracies) to change. Unfortunately the changes that it is likely to create, by its unremitting pressure, are precisely the ones we should be most concerned about. Our major educational crisis - insofar as there is one - is not that kids (rich, poor, black or white) don't get enough 'basics', but that too many of them get little else."

"It takes breaking some eggs to make an omelet," she reminded the audience at Harvard. Humans are 'very messy animals' who can not, and should not, be corralled into complicity…I find it encouraging that we are an ornery species."

"Teachers are resistant because they are humans. And kids' way of seeing the world is never quite our way."

A doctor, she contrasted, knew the actual patient. He/she would not go by a single test's results but would examine a comprehensive portrait of the individual. Thus, medicine is actually a more precise science than education. "There is no one instrument that by itself speaks for us," she asserted.

She read examples from MCAS tests: "Can anyone state the difference between rational and irrational numbers, or read a page from Jack London on the San Francisco earthquake and compare it to a 15th century essayist writing in archaic English?" "Would you hire someone who can't do this?" Her facetiousness (few actual hirees would know this info, of course) got the point across.

"There is something scary," she maintained, "about a country that could withhold 80% of diplomas on the basis of knowledge that no one else in society respects or desires."

"What is it that is driving us to be so tough on our kids?"

This week, she speaks of economic disparity as well. "The big difference between schools for the rich and poor, demonstrated over and over again, is that the poor get almost nothing else but drilling to the basics, test prep, and a narrowed definition of what it means to be well-educated. The kids who are better-off also suffer, if far

less, from schools that allow kids to think they are successful simply on the basis of their comparative standing on test-like instruments - SATs, Regents, etc. - rather than their capacity to really think deeply and well about novel problems. It's the latter that will pay off for our future, individually and collectively.

"Tests are, by their nature, intended to differentiate, rank-order - and as such will always be a short-cut way to separate the haves from the have-nots."

Back at Harvard, she sounded the call for creative pursuits. "Kids might want to focus on becoming artists and musicians or following whatever natural interests they possess."

Richard Ortner, Boston Conservatory President, concurs. "...the reason we study the arts is not to insure better scores on standardized tests. We study art, music, dance, and theater for the same reasons our Athenian ancestors did: to cement the links

in our common humanity, to connect to each other, express wonder at the mysteries of the universe and multiple difficulties, ironies, and ambiguities of civilized life."

Tests, according to Meier, should yield "interesting information," much like polling questions. She recalled Neil Rudenstine’s telling her that he didn't get into officers’ candidate school because of low test scores.

"I don't want that five people read something and have the same response", she said, adding that people who saw movies and ate at restaurants invariably had differing opinions.

Furthermore, testing "de-powered the grownups in children's lives." Kids need to be affected and influenced by adults who are individuals. We need accountability exposure and enough power in the grownups around them."

"Have the people behind this forgotten what kids are?" asked Meier. "Education may be rocket science," she continued, "but after two hours, children's handwriting will confound the best of essays."

"We cannot utilize a single instrument to make high stakes decisions, and we must protect the judgment of children in our schools."