Massachusettes Comprehensive Assesment System
(Most of you don’t know what I’m talking about, no surprise)
So, I’m sitting here in school, having taken part 4 of what was supposed to be an 8 hour test. So far. It’ll take four more hours. In all, I’ve spent 2 hours working. I’ve gotta ask, why does anyone bother making these tests? If the point of these is to learn which school districts are doing well, and which need improvement, it fails in both areas- we already know that, obviously, rich school areas do fine, whereas poorer areas need improvement. But that’s another huge flaw in the system. There is no plan to improve school systems as a whole- yes, there are individual tutors, but they can’t help everyone. So, does anyone want to support this system? I hear they have something like it in New York…
Whoops!
I thought this was going to be about Marine Corps Air Stations…
“I’m MCA, I got a license to kill, I went to the party, that party was ill.” - MCA (AKA Adam Yauch) of the Beastie Boys
While I graduated from the Massachusetts public school system before MCAS, I have heard a lot about it. Mostly negative. Tuesday I happened to be in downtown Boston and kinda wandered into a big anti-MCAS rally. I stuck around just because it was a new experience for me and they were going to have Ralph Nader speak.
For some reason Nader decided to focus his speech on the evils of corporations, which struck me as odd since the debate was over something the government had done with its own public schools. The main point of contention was that this passing this test (and you can imagine the problems with getting students with ADD to pass a twelve hour test) is required to graduate from high school. Which the critics say turns the public schools into test prep centers and discriminates against vocational schools.