Massachusetts Leads the Nation

If you rely on the Lowell Sun and its constant drumbeat of negativism for your education news, you’ll find this startling. According to the just released results of the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (which, according to an October 19, 2005 Associated Press article, is “a federal test considered the best measure of how students in every state perform on core subjects”), Massachusetts 4th- and 8th-graders had the highest average math and reading scores in the nation, and Massachusetts also led the country in the percentage of higher-scoring students. To see the particulars regarding these test results, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/. But how can this be? Isn’t our system of public education is shambles? Here’s how I see it: the MCAS is a very difficult test. You can be quite confident that a student who scores well on MCAS is well educated. But because the bar is set so high (and rightly so), it’s very difficult for many to attain its standards. Yet rather than acknowledging the difficulty of MCAS and searching for more effective ways of educating children, ideologues in political office and the media glom onto low test scores as Exhibit A in their quest to dismantle our system of public education. Most of the critics have no interest in improving the system: their goal is to undo it. Take the state department of education; despite all its talk of non-performing schools and threats of state takeovers, it hasn’t actually taken over a school or a district thus far. And why not? Because it wouldn’t have any more success than those currently running the school districts. It’s a lot easier (and if you’re pursuing a political agenda) a lot more effective to stand off and be a critic than it is to take real responsibility for getting results.