The leaders of the Massachusetts Teachers Association Zoomed into the Globe editorial board recently to argue for Question 2, their ballot initiative to nix the MCAS graduation test, and oh what an, um, enlightening session it was.
If one is sometimes skeptical of the MTA, it quickly becomes nigh unto impossible to pry information out of the union. Thus I was glad to have the chance to pose a few questions in a setting where the union’s leaders couldn’t simply ignore my queries.
Related: Read the Editorial Board's argument in favor of keeping the MCAS graduation requirement
Those who follow the state’s education debate may recall that as part of its anti-MCAS effort, the MTA used to assert that some 50,000 high school seniors had been denied a high school diploma solely because they had failed to pass the MCAS, which requires a 10th-grade level of knowledge. That would amount to about 2,500 seniors a year. In fact, the real figure is about 700 students a year.
So why was the MTA using the erroneous higher number? Not, one hopes, as a way to muddy the factual waters.
“If there are 700 students, we think that is 700 too many,” responded MTA president Max Page. Yes, but how did the MTA come to push its highly exaggerated 50,000 figure into the public realm?
“We used data from another group that made a mistake,” Page said. That would be Citizens for Public Schools, whose budget the MTA supports. A small, resolutely anti-MCAS organization, CPS obviously lacks both a sophisticated research capacity and any sort of objective inclination when it comes to the MCAS.
The MTA, however, is a big organization, with ample ability to pay for detailed data analysis. Noting that, I asked Page whether the MTA had made any attempt to double-check CPS’s work.
Whereupon MTA vice president Deb McCarthy interrupted to say that the matter up for discussion was the ballot question.
As it happened, I had a question for her on that very matter. Discussing Question 2 on Sept. 5 on WBZ’s NightSide (on a night when, unfortunately for the facts, well-informed host Dan Rea wasn’t manning the mic), McCarthy repeatedly referred to the MCAS as a “one-time test” or a “one-time event.” She said the same thing on GBH radio on Sept. 24. In both cases, her message was that a student’s future shouldn’t be decided by a “one-time” test or event.
An example, from her GBH appearance: “I was a fifth-grade educator for 25 years, and I believe that it is critical to eliminate this one-time event so that students are allowed to get a diploma based upon their academic performance in grades nine through 12.”
Now, a student who fails the MCAS during their sophomore year can take the test four more times during high school. (Almost all clear the MCAS bar during high school.) So why did McCarthy repeatedly describe the MCAS as a “one-time” test or event?
“It is a one-time event,” she answered.
I tried several times to get McCarthy to explain what she meant by that and how she could justify telling a radio audience that a test students are able to take five times is a one-time event.
“Because the requirement of passing the 10th-grade ELA is a one-time event,” McCarthy offered as one answer.
“Because it’s the truth. It is a one-time event,” she said as another. “Tying the passage of the MCAS ELA [English Language Arts] and science is a one-time event.”
Page interrupted, seemingly in an effort to rescue his flailing VP. I asked if he, like McCarthy, considered the MCAS a one-time event.
“It is a 10th-grade test that students have to take to get a high school diploma,” he eventually replied. That’s accurate — and if he’d added that if they fail, they get four chances to retake the test during high school and can also try again after they finish school, why, he’d have hit the factual nail squarely on the head.
I still couldn’t figure out what McCarthy was trying to say. Thus I emailed the MTA press specialists to see if they knew. No reply.
I suppose it’s possible that the MTA vice president simply doesn’t understand how the MCAS high school graduation test actually works but that seems unlikely.
But the only way I can see that one can properly call the MCAS graduation exam a one-time event is if a student passes the first time, as the overwhelming majority do, and so has no need of taking it again. But that hardly constitutes an unfair aspect of the test or something that makes it an onerous bar to clear.
As should be obvious to anyone paying attention, the MTA leaders haven’t been and still aren’t particularly concerned with factual accuracy in their ballot quest.
The union clearly doesn’t like the fact that MCAS scores function as an accountability measure for schools. Unable to persuade their Democratic allies on Beacon Hill to nix the graduation test and hobble the state’s ability to intervene in failing schools, they are now attempting to pass a ballot question that will sharply reduce the relevance of the 10th-grade exam. Because one can’t constitutionally do two separate things with a ballot question, their effort to eliminate any MCAS-related accountability will require another bite at the ballot-question apple.
To date, the MTA has dedicated upward of $7 million in union cash and in-kind contributions to their standards-eroding case. According to their last campaign finance report, no one outside the union has contributed a single dime
All this should tell voters something important about the MTA’s full-throttle, damn-the-factual torpedoes approach to deep-sixing the state’s graduation exam.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.