Door Number Three
Stacking up winners and losers in the Great Massessment Debate…
*I’ll take door number three, Monty.* Wait—there’s a door number three¿¿¿ I speak, of course, of the remarkable journey that has been the Great Massessment Debate. PARCC vs. MCAS. MCAS vs. PARCC. This week the path to college readiness suddenly reached a fork in the road, by which I mean a trident. But as any young Massessee who has fallen on the wrong side of the cut score can attest, there must be winners and losers in this particular contest. To the doors, reader!
Poly-exam-ory (W)
You know how when you’ve been with someone (or something) for a while
and you wake up one morning and find yourself thinking: *I wonder what’s behind that other door?* Only you don’t want to, like, move in behind the other door, you just want to maybe poke around a bit and identify the best bits, then combine those bits with the best bits of what you’ve currently got until, presto, whammo, you’ve got a hybrid, aka *door number three.* Now you know how Massachusetts Commissioner of College Readiness, Mitchell D. Chester felt this week, when after going steady with PARCC for three years, he announced that he was feeling a little, ahem, poly-exam-orous. Full disclosure: I didn’t come up with this bon motmyself. This guy did.
You know how when you’ve been with someone (or something) for a while
and you wake up one morning and find yourself thinking: *I wonder what’s behind that other door?* Only you don’t want to, like, move in behind the other door, you just want to maybe poke around a bit and identify the best bits, then combine those bits with the best bits of what you’ve currently got until, presto, whammo, you’ve got a hybrid, aka *door number three.* Now you know how Massachusetts Commissioner of College Readiness, Mitchell D. Chester felt this week, when after going steady with PARCC for three years, he announced that he was feeling a little, ahem, poly-exam-orous. Full disclosure: I didn’t come up with this bon motmyself. This guy did.MBAE’s bae (L)
Speaking of going steady, PARCC has been MBAE’s bae since, well, they released that *study* last year declaring that PARCC trounced MCAS in the college readiness sweepstakes, even though no one had actually taken the PARCC test yet or gone to college. But whatevs. MBAE (which, for the acronymically disinclined, stands for the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education) took the news that the state may be seeing other assessments about as well as one would expect. *It sounds like sort of a Door Number Three | EduShyster:
Speaking of going steady, PARCC has been MBAE’s bae since, well, they released that *study* last year declaring that PARCC trounced MCAS in the college readiness sweepstakes, even though no one had actually taken the PARCC test yet or gone to college. But whatevs. MBAE (which, for the acronymically disinclined, stands for the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education) took the news that the state may be seeing other assessments about as well as one would expect. *It sounds like sort of a Door Number Three | EduShyster: