This statement was signed by more than 80% of the Lincoln-Sudbury High School faculty. It was presented to their local School Committee and to the press. They are calling upon their SC to save their school and to take a leadership role in educating parents and the public about what the MCAS really means. This could possibly be a model for other schools across the state.

Jackie King


Here is the Faculty Statement of the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional HS faculty, which was presented to the L-S School Committee on Nov, 9. It has since been sent out to the local press and the Boston Globe.
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Faculty Statement on the State Curriculum Frameworks and the MCAS

To the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School Committee:

We are increasingly concerned about the impact of Education Reform, and specifically the frameworks and MCAS, on our school. As you know, we hold certain principles as central to the culture of the school, including the following:

• high academic standards
• a rich and evolving curriculum that includes an elective program
• respect for students’ and teachers’ individuality
• a dedication to fostering close relationships between students and adults
• the encouragement of a love of learning

While there is a variety of views among the faculty about the validity of the state’s curriculum frameworks and the MCAS, we are in agreement that such core LS principles as these will be seriously compromised by adhering to the frameworks and administering the MCAS.

We consider, first, that a single “high stakes” test that may prevent a student from graduating is both contrary to sound educational practice and unfair. One need go no further than the state’s own statement of educational theory for a rationale for this position:

The new assessment [MCAS] will strive towards a goal of authenticity by incorporating essay, problem solving, and other open ended questions in place of multiple choice. There is, however, a limit to how authentic an assessment can be if it focuses on how a student performs at a single sitting. Other, more authentic, approaches to student assessment will utilize techniques such as interdisciplinary projects and student portfolios to measure the development of students' skills in real life situations over an extended period of time. While this approach is arguably a more accurate measure of higher order thinking skills, it is more difficult to standardize the results.1

We are, in other words, being made to judge our students’ success on the basis of a single set of tests, one appeal of which is that they are easy to grade and useful for ranking students and schools. But much of what we mean by “high academic standards” is those very “higher order thinking skills” that are not being assessed by the MCAS. As is evidenced by changes already instituted in many schools, the imposition of the MCAS is often followed by teaching to the test and distorting curricula in order to do so. In short, pursuing higher MCAS scores may well result in lowering our standards.

The fact that Lincoln-Sudbury has an unusually rich curriculum and elective program puts the school at particular risk. The history department has widely publicized the damage to their curriculum that would result from following the current history framework. The science department would also need to make major adjustments in their program in violation of their own view of what is educationally sound. Adjustments in other departments might be less dramatic, but the entire school stands to lose from the narrowing of the curriculum that would come with the pursuit of MCAS scores. Students benefit from being able to tailor their educations to their individual needs and interests, and parents have many times expressed how impressed they are that this is a school in which it is possible to take, not simply “sophomore English” or “junior history,” but Shakespeare, Asian Cultures, or Environmental Issues, to name a few elective courses.

The Board of Education has been explicit that the administering of the MCAS must not take into account the particular educational profile of any individual student. Students on special education plans, students whose first language is not English, students whom we already know to be struggling for a variety of reasons — all students are required to pass the same test. While this may be seen as a strength in a test, it is also, as educational leader Ted Sizer has said, “the politics of humiliation.”2 We do not believe that it is a sound educational practice to bring a student along academically by first humiliating him or her. Most of the students that the state is intent upon exposing as incapable of passing the MCAS know before they sit down to this fourteen-hour exam that they cannot pass it. The test, in effect, both seriously disrupts and undermines the faculty’s ongoing attempts to show all students that they can learn and even love to learn. The MCAS is a disruption that begins before and extends well beyond the weeks during which the exam is administered, making it more difficult for teachers to maintain any momentum in the last months of school.

It is worth reiterating that we are not against high standards or accountability. Quite the contrary. We are also not against using a test as one tool with which to consider how well our students have done. We do, however, insist on exercising our professional judgment to determine the best ways to assess the success of our students, especially as regards graduation, representing as it does, the final judgment on four years of education.

We trust that the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School Committee appreciates the importance of these educational issues. Further, we are certain that the School Committee sees the specific and historical importance of the issue of local control. We respectfully request that the School Committee publicly state its opposition to the current uses of the MCAS and to those frameworks which threaten the curriculum of our school. We ask that the School Committee take on, with us, the responsibility for educating the local communities about the danger that the state’s reforms represent to their control of their schools and, most important, to the intellectual growth of students.