For Immediate Release - October 15, 2001

For more information, contact: 
Jackie Dee King, Karen Hartke 
Larry Ward, Monty Neill (617 864 481`0)

MCAS the Real Failure, Say CARE Members Statewide

Thousands of Massachusetts students will be told in the coming days that they have "failed" the high-stakes 2001 MCAS exam and may be denied a high school diploma. Families across the state will be disrupted as their children face the possible loss of higher education opportunities and job prospects. Some students will become discouraged and will drop out of school. 

"This unreasonable, poorly designed, and discriminatory test is an attack on the children of the Commonwealth," said Steve Backman, a Boston parent and vice-chair of the Massachusetts Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education (CARE). "It must be stopped." 

While the state Department of Education scrambles to paint a positive picture of the MCAS scores, many parents, educators, and students are raising their voices in opposition to the test. They will organize community speak-outs, strategy sessions, local marches, media campaigns, and delegations to schools boards, city councils and state legislators in the coming weeks to raise
awareness of the harmful impact the MCAS is having on students and education. 

"We don¹t accept these scores as valid, one way or the other," said Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes, a Cambridge parent and former Haitian bilingual teacher. "We refuse to have our children¹s future depend on the results of a single, flawed test." 

Since MCAS was first administered in 1998, statistics have consistently shown that students from low income communities, suffering from years of education-funding starvation, fail the test in far higher numbers than those from more affluent communities. Education at these under-resourced schools is being further eroded as they are turned into test-prep programs. The failure rate among minority, bilingual, special needs, and vocational education students is extremely high. These children are being blamed and punished for circumstances beyond their control. 

"The very idea of denying a diploma because a student does not pass one exam has been opposed not only by the National Academy of Sciences but even by standards of the testing profession itself," said Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). "It is an unfair and inaccurate way to measure student and school progress." 

Bill Bumpus, a member of the Somerville CARE chapter, noted, "The test is so flawed that passing it does not mean a student has been well educated and failing it does not mean a student should not receive a high school diploma. We urge the public to take the test and talk with friends and neighbors about whether this exam measures important learning." (The Somerville CARE
chapter, along with local legislators and school board officials, is hosting a Take the Test Day next Saturday Oct. 20.) 

The solution to the massive "failure" rate on the MCAS is not to impose more test preparation, not to narrow the curriculum and instruction to fit the restrictive MCAS, not to force exhausted and humiliated students to take the test over and over again until they drop out, not to allow a handful of students to win a complex appeals procedure and receive a diploma without having passed the test, but to END the graduation requirement and replace MCAS with an educationally helpful assessment and accountability program such as the one proposed by CARE and the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA). 

"The MCAS has been imposed on the children of the Commonwealth by a nine-member, non-elected Board of Education," explained Larry Ward, a Cambridge parent and CARE officer. "Over the past three years, dozens of organizations have voted against the MCAS, including the statewide association of school committees, both major teachers¹ unions, students¹ organizations, civil rights groups, parents¹ groups, and more than 39,000 voters in six urban legislative districts. If the Board will not listen to the people, it should be replaced." 

"The Board may turn a blind eye, the Legislature may for now stick its head in the sand, but increasingly the people of the Commonwealth are uniting to oppose the MCAS testing program," added Brookline parent Lisa Guisbond. "Many more will now join those who are already active. Together, we will overturn the high-stakes MCAS and put the state¹s education program on a
better road."

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