CITIZENS Barbara's
Column The Salem Evening News The Meaning of MCAS MCAS is short for MoreCASh. If the billions of dollars spent on public education aren't enough to guarantee an
educated public, then the solution is MoreCASh. If that doesn't work, then we do MMCAS:
MoreMoreCASh. Pretty soon we will have MMMMMMMMMMMCASh, and will still be wondering Why Johnny
Can't Read. But that won't prevent our politicians, who for some reason have been placed
in charge of education, from adding another M at the front and getting re-elected because
they "care" about education and "did something" called "education
reform." So who is dumb here? The kids who can't read? The teachers who can barely pass
their own competency tests? Or the voters who re-elect the politicians who "did
something," and the taxpayers who keep paying MoreCASh without complaint? All right, I do know that MCAS really stands for the Massachusetts Comprehensive
Assessment System. A few years after one of the last "education reforms", some
people wanted an assessment to determine if all the extra money spent had resulted in any
improvement. No one knew. Because no one had bothered to test the students for whom education
reform was deemed necessary, there were no baseline test scores from which one could
determine progress. So the politicians did another "education reform" law, and
didn't test the baseline students again. However, they did begin devising a test that they could use the next time
someone aske for evidence of improvement. Several years later, test-makers finally
agreed, more or less, on some things that students should know at different grade levels.
They then tested students on these things so that future reformers could either, a) teach
what the students aren't learning or, b) revise the test. The revised test is being taken by students this month and education officials are
predicting that next year scores will improve. All we really need is MCASh. Let me do a Comprehensive Assessment here. Public education in general doesn't
work because it doesn't have to work. No matter how badly it flunks its own tests, no
matter how many children it fails to teach, it will still be funded, it will still get
MoreCASh. Teacher unions will force through payraises for its dues-payers, the good teachers
and the bad. Administrators will keep their jobs or get glowing references for the next
one just to get them out of town. Politicians will send tax dollars along with a publicity
photo of themselves caring about children. Taxpayers will still vote for those politicians
and will sometimes even vote for overrides to send more tax dollars to the failed system. No one will be held accountable, and no one will admit the obvious: a system that
does not suffer from failure -- which in fact gets even more funding from failure -- will
continue to fail. The Comprehensive Solution is this: LessCASh for the existing system. Take the tax dollars away from the politicians and the public school committees
and give them in equal amounts to the parents, guardians or sponsors of the children to do
their own education reform. Let them choose a charter, religious, home or neighborhood
school. Cut their taxes so they can afford transportation or a more expensive school than
the basic model. Let the parents, guardians and sponsors test their own kids at regular intervals.
If they perceive that a child doesn't seem to be learning much, let them choose another
school until they find one that works for that particular student. Stop fighting about sex education, school prayer, school uniforms or political
correctness in the classroom: let there be a varied marketplace from which to choose,
based upon the values of the parents themselves. Stop fighting about teacher testing: let
some schools advertise that they test, and others that their evaluators drop by the
classroom each day instead. And what about the children whose parents don't care? With the new system, these
will be readily identified. Supplement their education vouchers with state human services
dollars. Choose for them schools which specialize in kids whose parents don't care. Staff
them with teachers who hug and nurture as well as teach. My Comprehensive Solution will still be publicly-funded, with the same
Jeffersonian goal of making every child an educated citizen. Because of the magic of
competition and accountability, it should cost taxpayers less. Even if it doesn't, the
restoration of parental responsibility through choice in education will be worth the money
spent, which is more than can be said about MCAS and all the years of failed education
reform. Barbara Anderson is executive
director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. She writes regularly for the Viewpoint page.
Her biweekly syndicated column also appears in other publications around the state. |