You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to pass the MCAS science exam, which, in large part, explains the angst associated with the news that 6,000 high school seniors still haven’t passed the thing. At the very least, this suggests that MIT and several thousand biotech/high-tech/health-science kinds of places are going to be recruiting in South Dakota and Singapore.
At a superficial level, the notion that the best and the brightest, or, in the alternative, the average and the mediocre, spent four years absorbing Moby Dick and learning long division and getting at least a C- in deportment, yet could be barred from graduation because of a science exam, is enough to prompt the local PTAs to storm the palace gates and chop off the head of the principal.
But on a more macro basis, the blip prompted by the science test scores reinforces the peculiarity of a public-school testing environment in desperate need of a market environment.
While all of us would like to be Cohen-like Renaissance Men, writing about bankers and tradesmen and why a nice Jewish boy like Marc Chagall painted so many pictures of Jesus and whether Bix Beiderbeche was the best white jazzman ever, it’s usually good enough to be talented in one or two areas. Out there in the real world, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker can do quite well, whether or not they flubbed the MCAS questions about theoretical physics.
What a stimulating public education environment it would be if the kids could negotiate their strengths and weaknesses; if the kids could say, “I’ll give you a 25-page report on the Matisse years in Venice, in return for a pass on the hideous chemistry portion of the MCAS science test, because my daddy is rich and I’m going into art history.”
The sticking point in the testing regime is not the testing itself. The No Child Left Behind notion that schools should be required to produce data, whether or not they produce scholars, is valid. The testing is worthwhile, if for no other reason than families and snobby schools are alerted to the academic strengths and weaknesses of the herd. If you fail the MCAS math or science, perhaps MIT and Cal Tech are not for you.
What Will Be…
While states that set their standards on the low side invite scorn from the snobby and the “Decline and Fall of the West” types, there is a case to be made for the education factories to promise shabby mediocrity, with the understanding that many Cohen the Columnists will also emerge from the rubble.
The successful bank loan officer can be a good “people person,” without being poised to lecture on derivative trading. A wealthy real estate agent can have a photographic memory for 15 different balcony views of the Charles River, without being able to bundle 5,000 mortgages and sell them like sacks of flour.
And so it is with our high school kids. Great in English, good in math, shaky in science, questionable on American history? Or is it the other way around? That looks like almost all of us, in some ways.
As far back as 1995, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 57 percent of high school seniors lacked any credible knowledge or understanding of American history.
Going back to 1946, the old Collier’s magazine reported that “a third of all school children are illiterate.” An ACT study in 2005 warned that only a quarter of high school seniors were prepared to take college-level biology (must have been over-weighted with Massachusetts students) and less than half could handle algebra.
In the aggregate, going back decades, the studies and scare-tactics sound nightmarish, but America continued, and continues, to be an economic juggernaut. We specialize, we drift toward what our skill-sets and the market suggests is best for us.
As a laboratory for nightmare experiments in education, the union-dominated, monopolistic, smug, unaccountable Boston public school system could use a market-oriented slap and a major dose of credible charter schools and “school choice” vouchers. State tests that focus our attention on whether Johnny knows his hydrogen from his oxygen are probably a distraction from more important business.
