Bureaucrap, MCAS Edition

It's that time of year again: fourth through tenth graders in public schools across the state just finished the first round of our version of high-stakes, no-child-left-unstressed testing, fondly known as the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). The alleged goals of the MCAS are to evaluate schools (a school with too many failing students can lose funding) and end social promotion.

The MCAS doesn't really bother Miss B: she does reasonably well in English and very well in math and science (this year she is being tested in history for the first time), and during MCAS week she has no homework, which of course floats her boat on a sea of bliss. And, although preparing for it takes a certain amount of joy and spontaneity out of the learning process, the MCAS does test for knowledge that a well-educated person should have, and it gives all of us a good idea of Miss B's relative strengths and weaknesses.

Taz is a whole different story. If you gave him a test booklet he would demonstrate a core skill by flinging it as far as possible, so he is tested instead by the so-called alternate MCAS, for which his teacher prepares a "portfolio" of his work. As best I can make out, this is supposed to show what progress he has made in the curriculum on his particular learning curve. The rub lies in the word curriculum. His teacher, aides and therapists (his classroom has five students, one teacher and two aides who are there all the time, and assorted therapists coming and going) work very hard with him and his classmates on things like eating, answering simple social questions (how are you? would you like an apple or a banana?), behaving appropriately in public, identifying basic colors, and sorting simple objects. This last is Taz's vocational training, and he does quite well with it until he gets bored and starts flinging again. None of this, however, is what the state considers to be curriculum, even though all of it is in his education plan (IEP), and we've all signed off on it. Instead his teacher must map whatever she can to the traditional subject areas of English (or, as the state insists on calling it, language arts), math, science and history. If she doesn't use their precise format, forgets to dot a single i or cross a single t, he gets an "incomplete," and she gets a black mark.

I do appreciate that if the state doesn't subject absolutely everyone to MCAS requirements, schools will try to game the system by letting anyone who might flunk it skip it instead. I'm also informed that the alternate MCAS was devised in response to complaints from parents of special-needs students who felt that their kids were being left out of the process. But in Taz's case the whole routine is, to use a highly technical term, silly. Cognitively Taz is two years old and always will be, and we are kept minutely informed of his progress by quarterly reports from the special-ed office as well as by his daily notebook. Having his teacher spend 15 hours (that she is therefore not spending in the classroom) demonstrating his progress in a one-size-fits-all "curriculum" that is entirely unrelated to his educational needs, so that some pencil-pusher can evaluate his portfolio and flunk him anyway, is a vapid exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping.

I write some variant of the previous sentence every year in the "parent comment" space of the MCAS acknowledgement I am required to sign. So far the state education commissioner doesn't seem to have taken any notice.

Any bets on what will happen this year?