This is just plain ridiculous. A Massachusetts Teacher’s Association is up in arms and is making the radical claim that tests are racist. There is nothing remotely racist about tests. Tests are a clear sign that the students are understanding the material and that the teachers are properly doing their jobs. But I guess there must be a lot of teachers in Massachusetts that aren’t doing their jobs. So they are calling standardized testing racist to save their job, even if they are failing students in the process.
“A teachers union in Massachusetts claim the state’s standardized testing has “allowed white supremacy to flourish.”
“The implementation of the MCAS and other standardized tests has had the exact opposite effect of what was supposed to occur when the system was introduced more than 20 years ago,” said MTA President Merrie Najimy in a statement.
The union is backing a bill to give students “multiple pathways” to show their educational competency apart from the MCAS standardized testing.
“Public schools in predominantly Black and brown communities have been taken over by state bureaucrats who have been using standardized testing as a tool not to improve opportunities for students,” continued Najimy, “but instead as one to pry public education from the hands of the families and educators who know best what their students need.”
But not all teachers agree with this sentiment.
“It’s both preposterous and despicable that MTA would seek to wrap its anti-accountability campaign in the mantle of racial justice,” said Paul Reville, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who served as secretary of education under Governor Deval Patrick and has been an instrumental figure in the state’s quarter-century education-improvement effort. “The primary purpose of education reform in Massachusetts was and is equity. MCAS shines a light on how much students are learning. It highlights those Black, brown, and other students who are being failed by our education system. It calls attention to their challenges and provides a rationale for giving teachers support they deserve to help their students meet high standards.”
We need good teachers. They teach the next generation of our country the basics while most parents are at work. Teachers need to be held accountable, if we lower our standards we not only fail the youth of our nation, we also doom our country.