Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S.
The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Barbara Madeloni, standing left, who has spoken out against high-stakes tests, at a campaign house party this month. She is seeking re-election.
Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
BOSTON — It has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: With 50 states, 50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what American students were learning, or how well?
At a dinner with colleagues in 2009, Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts’s commissioner of education, hatched what seemed like an obvious answer — a national test based on the Common Core standards that almost every state had recently adopted.
Now Dr. Chester finds himself in the awkward position of walking away from the very test he helped create.
On his recommendation, the State Board of Education decided last week that Massachusetts would go it alone and abandon the multistate test in favor of one to be developed for just this state. The move will cost an extra year and unknown millions of dollars.
Across the country, what was once bipartisan consensus around national standards has collapsed into acrimony about the Common Core, with states dropping out of the two national tests tied to it that had been the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s education strategy.
But no about-face has resonated more than the one in Massachusetts, for years a leader in education reform. This state embraced uniform standards and tests with consequences more than two decades before the Common Core, and by 2005, its children led all states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, and rose above all other countries, save Singapore, in science.
The state’s participation was seen as validation of the Common Core and the multistate test; Dr. Chester became the chairman of the board that oversees the test Massachusetts joined. The state’s rejection of that test sounded the bell on common assessments, signaling that the future will now look much like the past — with more tests, but almost no ability to compare the difference between one state and another.
“It’s hugely symbolic because Massachusetts is widely seen as kind of the gold standard in successful education reform,” said Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, who is leading an evaluation of the national tests. “It opens the door for a lot of other states that are under a lot of pressure to repeal Common Core. Getting rid of these tests is a nice bone to throw.”
The fight in Massachusetts has been dizzying, with a strange alliance between the teachers’ union and a conservative think tank that years before had been a chief proponent of the state’s earlier drive for standards and high-stakes tests. As in other states, conservatives complained of federal overreach into local schooling, while the union objected to tying the tests to teacher evaluations. The debate drew money from national political players like the billionaire David Koch and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Amid the noise, many parents had trouble understanding what the Common Core was, or argued that the nation’s public schoolchildren took Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S. - The New York Times: