School Committee, don't relinquish your right to grant diplomas

Guest Commentary by Jonathan King
Published in the Cambridge Chronicle on January 30, 2002

At the Feb 5th meeting of the Cambridge School Committee, the School Department will report the numbers of CRLS high school 11th graders who are at risk of being denied a diploma next year because of their scores on either the Math or ELA (English Language Arts) MCAS tests.

The students will be subject to this grave risk to their further education and career development,
regardless of their courses taken, classroom participation, grades, school citizenship, special projects, musical, dramatic or athletic contributions. The decision to deny students their diploma based solely on a set of standardized test scores has been made by the nine - member State Board of Education appointed by Governors Weld and Cellucci. This misguided policy represents a State override of the historic authority of elected School Committees to grant diplomas.

If the policy remains unchallenged, it will represent a radical departure from the 180-year educational history of democratic oversight of public high schools in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Cambridge School Committee members should follow the lead of the Hampshire School Committee, reject the usurping of their authority, and reaffirm that they will carry out their elected mandate to decide requirements for a diploma from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.

Since the founding of the first public high school in the U.S. in Boston, there have been intense policy debates over the content, emphasis and goals of secondary education. They included the tension between classical vs. manual training in the 1870s, "education for college" or "education for life" at the turn of the century, and education for "social efficiency" in the 20's and 30's. The Carnegie Foundation in the earlier part of the century aggressively promoted "Carnegie Units" as a means of comparing teaching and learning among diverse schools. From the 1900s to the present there has been increasing emphasis on accreditation by regional associations, assessment through tests, and other efforts to be sure that a high school diploma was meaningful. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we witnessed an intense focus on improving the teaching of science, math, and foreign languages.

During all those debates over standards, content, and criteria, the authority to grant high school diplomas has remained vested in local school committees, school superintendents and high school principals. This model was established in 1837 when the Massachusetts legislature wisely refused to vest degree-granting authority in the State Dept of Education. It has continued to the present time. The almost universal support for this policy among educators is based on the recognition that only people who know a student and their school performance and experience can assess their development, accomplishments and contributions over the four years of high
school.

Given the complex character of human intelligence and performance, no set of standardized tests can properly assess a student's performance, competence or contribution, to determine whether they qualify for their high school diploma.

With the imposition of the high-stakes MCAS tests we have for the first time the forcible imposition of a one-size-fits-all straitjacket on our local schools. The tests, sold to the Board of Education by a
Texas-based company, are deeply flawed and discriminatory, and are doing serious damage to our students, teachers, and classrooms. They undermine lively teaching, push out inquiry-based curriculum, and return our children's education to the turn of the century rote-learning mode. Your child may be a creative writer, talented musician, superb athlete, designer of computer games, club president or community leader; if they do not pass the 10th grade MCAS in both Math and English, they will not graduate.

The Cambridge School Committee should not abrogate its responsibility to decide on school diplomas in the face of the one-size-fits-all MCAS tests. Passing or failing the MCAS should not determine whether a student receives a high school diploma. The multifaceted criteria developed over the past decades - courses taken, academic performance, extracurricular achievements, and school citizenship - should remain in place. This is particularly true in the light of the multiple flaws and inequities and of the MCAS tests.

Even in cases where an educational institution is chartered by the State, such as the U/Mass College and University campuses, degree-granting authority remains with the leadership of the institution, and not in the State Board of Higher Education. Though the Dept. of Education claims that its override mandate derives from the 1993 Education Reform Act, their interpretation is lacking legal or legislative precedent.

The vesting of diploma granting authority in the school itself, not in some distant bureaucracy, represents some of the deepest wisdom gleaned from 175 years of postsecondary public education: Teaching and learning depends on the relationship of students to their teachers, their peers and their local communities. Neither scores on standardized tests, lists of credit hours or courses, nor even a collection of projects can properly assess it. This is the proper business of school principals, teachers and instructional staff, under the oversight of elected School Committees.

[Jonathan King is the parent of a CRLS student and a Graham and Parks student; member of the steering committee of Cambridge Massparents for Education not MCAS/Cambridge CARE (Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education); and a Professor of Molecular Biology at MIT]