Business group: Switching out of MCAS will better prepare future workers
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For years, MCAS was the assessment test that ruled Massachusetts schools. But when it comes to real-world skills, it's not measuring up, said a recent report from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE).
Those real-world skills — talents that can represent genuine excellence and verve such as critical thinking, effective communication and problem solving — can translate into all kinds of success in the years after one's schooling. But they don't necessarily lend themselves to the testing focus of the MCAS, as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is more widely known.
The report supports the adoption of a new test: the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.
Businesses and colleges have long been sounding concerns.
They say too many high school graduates — young people who passed the MCAS — are not ready to face the demands of the workplace or higher education.
Some of those demands are quite basic, as basic as workers' understanding that they're expected to show up as scheduled, said Andre Mayer, a senior adviser at Associated Industries of Massachusetts.
Beyond that, he said, employees need as part of a strong foundation a “general intellectual understanding of the concepts that people have to know if they're working in the kind of workplace we have now.” That workplace is not one of production lines anymore but of working often independently or one on one with others, he said. Employers look for people who can communicate effectively with customers and co-workers, who see the larger picture, and who can readily adapt to changes and learn new skills.
Mayer pointed out that most people work with some kind of computer, as even today's cash registers are computers in disguise. Today's employees, he said, need “critical thinking skills ... that make you more valuable than the machine — really. There should be enough grasp of mathematics, for example, to at least understand how to think about a problem that may confront you.”
As the state's largest employer association, AIM has a direct interest in what's being taught in the public schools, Mayer said.
Employers, he said, “certainly agree that skills are increasingly critical, and preparation all too often is not really what we need in today's workplace.” (Read Mayer's Viewpoint on this topic.)
Teaching to the test is OK, but is the test OK?
What's taught tends to be closely influenced by the assessment system that gauges student progress. “And that's not a bad thing — if the test is a good one,” Linda Noonan, executive director of the MBAE, said.
Her organization's report — “Educating students for success: A comparison of the MCAS and PARCC assessments as indicators of college- and career-readiness” — points to PARCC as the next good test in Massachusetts.
MCAS, part of Massachusetts' sweeping education reforms of the 1990s, once played that role well, Noonan said. But “MCAS is outdated,” she said. “It hasn't kept up with changes in testing and is a 20th-century test. We need a 21st-century test for our students.”
Because the test is still under development, the report gives it a cautious nod. PARCC, tied to the national Common Core curriculum frameworks, will be given to some Bay State schoolchildren this spring, launching a process that, later this year, will have education officials deciding whether it's time to let the MCAS go.
“Massachusetts, like states across the country, is engaged in a new era of education reform where the focus is on success after high school …,” the report states, citing critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as keys to that post-school success.
The study conducted for the MBAE, by the National Center for the Improvement of Education in Dover, N.H., compared the two assessments with three questions:
• Does the test identify students who are college- and career-ready?
• Does the test contain the right content to measure college and career readiness? and
• Do the elementary and middle school tests provide good information about student progress toward college and career readiness?
On all three, MCAS scored “no”; PARCC, “yes.”
The report says the newer test requires students to produce a variety of writing; features multi-step mathematical problems requiring students to apply skills, concepts and understandings; and has a consistent design across grade levels.
The study found that more than a third of Massachusetts students who passed MCAS and enrolled in a state college or university needed remedial training. “These statistics are particularly disturbing in a state where 72 percent of all jobs are expected to require a secondary degree by 2020,” the MBAE said in a statement about the report.
Survey cites skills gap
As for the workplace, the report said that in a recent MBAE survey, 69 percent of employers reported difficulty finding people with the right competencies to fill positions, with many citing a lack of applied, real-world skills.
Noonan, of MBAE, said, “The idea of MCAS was for everyone to graduate at least 'proficient'” in what had been taught in different subjects. “Fast forward to 2015,” she said, and “the whole question we asked (for the report) was for a comparison of the two tests in measuring college and career readiness.”
That's a different — and more up-to-date — emphasis than what was built into the MCAS assessment. And it calls for a different test, the report concludes.
In a nutshell, Noonan said, MCAS tends to measure recall while PARCC aims to test higher-order thinking. “Based on everything we know now,” she said, “we like the PARCC because we believe PARCC will be a good measure of students' readiness” for their endeavors after high school.
“The business community has a lot at stake,” she added. “They care, as parents, that their children are getting what they need in the schools, and they care as employers. Our students become part of the workforce.”
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