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The Human Face of the High-Stakes Testing Story

Schools like the Boston Arts Academy are desperately trying to keep the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System from destroying their very fabric, Ms. Nathan says. She intends to make it through the MCAS mania by continuing to fight for a rich and rigorous arts and academic curriculum, taught by highly qualified and committed teachers in an atmosphere of respect and high expectations. THE NEWS stories, editorials, and academic debates about high-stakes tests deal mostly in ideologies, generalizations, and statistics. What's easily lost in the palaver is the reality of school for the people who have the most to gain or lose -- the students. In Massachusetts, the reality that faces students now includes the imminent threat that they will not receive a high school diploma unless they pass the 10th-grade exams in the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). The numbers are grim, even with this year's much-heralded improvement in scores: close to half of the students in urban high schools are still failing the test; among black and Latino students, the failure rate is between 60% and 70%. But who are these students, really? What do they know and not know? What are their strengths and weaknesses, and what are their possible futures? I know some of these young people very well. They are students at my school, the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a three-year-old public high school of visual and performing arts. They are products of the Boston Public Schools. They are typical, yet each one is unique. And their stories shed a different light on high-stakes testing. Let me introduce you to two of them. Tony's Story Tony first caught my attention by standing over me in the school cafeteria one day as I ate lunch with some students and teachers. He glared at me, put his hands on his hips, and stomped his foot a little. I turned to him. "This school isn't teaching real science, Ms. Nathan," he said. "You need to do something about it." The other students looked up from their tater tots and turkey nuggets, glancing back and forth from me to Tony. The teachers stopped eating too. This was during the fall of the Boston Arts Academy's first year. We'd been open for all of two months, and no one had challenged me in quite this way before. I was acutely aware that my response would have long-lasting significance. "What is it you object to, Tony?" I asked, trying to stay calm. "First of all," he said, "there are no textbooks. The teachers give us these readings -- novels and stuff. What is that? And I'm in a class with freshmen and sophomores. I've already done my freshman year. I don't get why I'm in a class with freshmen. Don't I know more science than them? Anyway, we're just not doing science. I mean, how is building an energy-efficient house science? And then there's this humanities stuff. What is that? Where's English? Where's history? My friends at Central High aren't studying China like we are. And the math. Come on, Ms. Nathan. Where are the problems? It's all reading! I used to be an honor-roll student and get 90s or 100s on all the tests. I haven't even had a test here!" Tony paused for breath, and I took a deep one, too. "Wow, you have a lot of issues," I said, with a voice as steady as I could muster. I asked Tony to sit with me. Then I asked him a little about the classes at his previous high school. He described them pretty much the way I thought he would. Each week the teacher would assign a new chapter from the textbook, and the students would answer the questions at the end. The technique was the same for all subjects. Tony had never experienced what might be called active, hands-on, or open-ended learning. He had certainly never had to read primary-source documents as he was now doing in his humanities class (English and history) at the Arts Academy. He had probably never heard anything about ancient China before. …