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In The Light’s student essay contest, students from around the South Coast shared their perspectives on this year’s Ballot Question 2. On Election Day, the commonwealth voted decisively to remove the standardized MCAS test as a graduation requirement.
Overwhelmingly, student submissions for The Light’s essay contest favored removal of MCAS as a graduation requirement. Submissions were not judged by the position the essay took, but instead on the quality of the essay, including the use of evidence to support arguments and the clarity and structure of the writing.
The contest winner, D’Leiny Adianez Soto Rodriguez, a junior at New Bedford High School, submitted an essay that stood out for its citation to research and reference to recent history that supported the writer’s arguments. Rodriguez will receive a $100 cash prize. Rodriguez’s essay, which was submitted before the election, is republished below with permission, and the views represented are entirely the author’s and do not represent the opinions of The New Bedford Light or its staff.
By D’Leiny Adianez Soto Rodriguez / New Bedford High School
On November 5th, voters will make a decision which can change our students’ futures, that being whether or not MCAS should be mandatory to graduate. Our schools have seen a rapid regression in student capabilities, yet we have allowed this decline to continue without a major fix to how we run things. If education is truly in our best interests, it’s time we realize that MCAS is not an accurate enough reflection on our students to be mandatory.
Our sophomore curriculum has an over-emphasis on MCAS. It’s understandable that Massachusetts wants to hold up its legacy, our claws deeply tightened onto our Harvard prestige, but this fixation on “being the best” neglects our learning-starved students. In a 2014 research paper titled “Teaching to the Test in the NCLB Era: How Test Predictability Affects Our Understanding of Student Performance” by sociologists Jennifer Jennings and Jonathan Bearak, the authors write, “As a result of this kind of teaching to the test, it is difficult to make inferences about students’ proficiency … that the tests are intended to capture, as students appear to have made more academic progress than they truly have.”
There is a clear mismatch in how we measure academics, and it’s irresponsible of any education department to pass students who may have passed MCAS, yet don’t comprehend the material besides memorizing what the answers to different problems usually look like. With our current failures of schools in our state, we must not provide any more motivation for teachers to continue on with lackluster lessons that don’t provide any useful knowledge. Instead, we need accurate assessments of students’ capabilities which could properly determine if it’s appropriate for a student to graduate.
The problems of MCAS have also led me back to a scandal which shows the tests’ blatant ignorance. In 2019, sophomores taking the English MCAS were rightfully disgusted by a prompt they were fully expected to answer. The exam had taken the award-winning novel, “The Underground Railroad,” and asked students to write in the perspective of a racist white character who had been conflicted on helping a slave. This insensitive question was thankfully dropped after takers refused to answer, but this scandal reflects on a deeper issue with the MCAS. These tests turn a blind eye to our cultures.
Students are not a monolith; we have a diversity of culture and thought. Not only have we seen how racially-blind idiocies have slipped effortlessly past the cracks of testing, but if something as obvious as this can pass through, how much more bias against students can pass through without notice? Students of color could be seriously disadvantaged by partialities, and the questions could force takers to discredit their own lived perspectives in favor of the MCAS’s own opinions.
It’s time for us to make a choice, and if we simply listen to what students have to say, we may realize that the flaws of MCAS go deeper than we thought.
Email The New Bedford Light at info@newbedfordlight.org