April showers may bring May flowers, but it also brings a new wave of MCAS for students across Massachusetts. The MCAS has been administered in Cambridge Public Schools since 1998. Within the months anticipating the original implementation of the exam, students at CRLS captured statewide attention in communicating concerns with the standardized test. As students this year engage in training to take the test on an electronic device, CRLS again responds to a changing way of assessing education.

President George H.W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, mandated state standardized testing in order to assess students’ learning and schools’ success in order to distinguish which states would receive need-based funding. President Barack Obama implemented the Race to the Top Grant, which attacked similar issues with similar goals to Bush’s legislation.

When Massachusetts first instituted the test, the state saw mass walkouts and boycotts of all eleven days of testing. Students demonstrated with a teach-in led by members of the American Civil Liberties Union and FairTest, a local advocacy group, and joined arms outside of City Hall. At CRLS alone, 100 students didn’t take the MCAS in 2000 despite it being required by the school. The protest was cited as the largest in the state. In response, CRLS did not impose any consequences for the students who refused to participate in the new testing system so long as students used the time in a productive manner.

History teacher Benjamin Cohen reflects on being a 4th grader in the Cambridge Public Schools during the MCAS season at the turn of the century. He, along with several other students, boycotted the exams; families created a system similar to a freedom school model, where they alternated taking classes in each respective home of the families. During the two weeks that the test occurred, these students were taught from home, making major news headlines. On the high school level, Cohen’s brother, Samuel Cohen ’05, also boycotted the exam. As a result, he was referred to psychologists and sacrificed his diploma and high school degree.

Today, Cohen reflects: “Not only are we wasting students’ time for a test that only says how they are doing for that test on that specific day, but we are also disrupting teachers’ time.” He continues, “The tests are the symptom rather than the cause.”

Current CRLS students echo the opinions of those who graduated decades ago. Martino Boni-Beadle ’19 states, “I think that like a lot of standardized testing, the MCAS is not a very good measure of a student’s learning ability. They put a lot of emphasis on it from elementary school all the way through high school, but it doesn’t really predict or affect students’ success in the real world.”

Aleahna Lartey ’21 just prepared for the new online version of the MCAS. She believes, “For the 10th grade MCAS, if you do really well on it, you can receive a scholarship for an undergraduate education at a Massachusetts state college or university, which is a huge opportunity. But those who are not good at taking the MCAS are sadly denied that.”

When looking at statistics of students who meet the requirement to receive said scholarship, there is a clear pattern. With the majority of test makers being white and with the exams catering to a eurocentric curriculum, students who do well are often those who also progressed because of their socioeconomic status and race, and therefore benefitted in an education system that remains to have an opportunity gap.

What could districts and governments use as a measure of student learning and school success instead of standardized tests? Rather than MCAS, Cohen suggests looking at “consistency in attendance, graduation rate, college acceptance and completion, and professional [outcomes immediately following high school graduation].”

This piece also appears in our March 2019 print edition.