The Power of Culture

Edited by Zeynep F. Beykont

The High Stakes of High-Stakes Testing

MIREN URIARTE

 
When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts embarked on its process of educational reform in 1993, no group in the Commonwealth stood to gain more from changes in the public education system than Latinos.¹ Latino enrollment in the state’s public schools, which had been growing for three decades, had skyrocketed, particularly in the urban districts. At that time, more than 66,000 Latino children were enrolled in Massachusetts schools, a 20 percent increase in just five years. Eight percent of the state’s students were Latino. In some areas, Latinos were more densely present: in Boston, for example, 20 percent of enrolled students were Latinos, but in Lawrence and Holyoke, Latino children made up about 70 percent of students.²

Many of these children came from a well-established Puerto Rican population that had first arrived in the state in the 1960s. This group, whose numbers were constantly renewed with arrivals from the island, accounted for most of the Latino children in the state. Dominicans, who began arriving in the 1970s, were also represented in large numbers, particularly in the eastern area of the state. Besides the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Massachusetts had a growing and increasingly diverse contingent of immigrants from Central and South America. Most Latino students came from homes where the first language was not English; about one-third of the Latino children enrolled in school could not perform classroom work in English³ and were designated as Limited English Proficient (LEP).⁴

Aside from their growing numbers and diversity, perhaps the most salient characteristic of Latino children was the fact that they were not doing well in Massachusetts schools. Since the 1970s, Latino children as a group have had the lowest levels of achievement of any group in the Commonwealth.⁵ The 9.6 percent dropout rate among Latinos in 1992–1993 was three and one-half times that of White students in the state.⁶ About 10 percent of Latino children are retained in grade each year, which is three times the rate of White students.⁷ Language minority students attending bilingual education programs appear to be somewhat protected from both high dropout rates and high rates of retention in grade, but indicators for this group are still extraordinarily high compared with those of White students.⁸

The problem of student achievement had long elicited the attention of parents and leaders in the Latino community. Reports by Latino community agencies as far back as 1976 pointed to high rates of retention in grade and attrition from school.⁹ In 1986, the Education Task Force of the Massachusetts Commission on Hispanic Affairs, a commission sponsored by the Massachusetts legislature, analyzed Latino education statewide and concluded that “the Massachusetts public education system is failing to carry out its mission and its responsibility to the Hispanic community”¹⁰ and its children. This was due, the Task Force argued, to the underfunding of school systems where Latinos predominate and the absence of culturally sensitive curricula and classroom practices.

In 1989 and 1990, protests reached a crescendo in a series of contentious meetings with the leadership of the Boston Public Schools. Annual Latino dropout rates had reached 30 percent in some Boston high schools.¹¹ The newly formed Latino Parents Association forced the leadership of the city’s schools to collaborate in the development of a Hispanic dropout prevention plan. For the first time, the city recognized the system’s failure to address the educational needs of Latino children and proposed a set of prevention, intervention, and remediation strategies.¹²

Therefore, in 1993, when the Massachusetts legislature passed the Educational Reform Law, many Latinos supported the initiative, as did business, educators, politicians, advocacy groups, and other parents in the state. The broad initiative increased spending in education and distributed funding more equitably between urban and suburban districts, bringing new resources to the education of children of color and language minority children, who were largely concentrated in urban districts.¹³ Especially significant was a large increase in funds for early childhood education and for the introduction and use of technology in schools.¹⁴

The initiative proposed to set higher standards for all students and schools: the state was to develop new curriculum standards and requirements in core academic areas, which were to guide the development of local curricula and classroom activities. To implement these higher standards, the reform proposed increased time-on-task for students and established tougher standards for new teacher certification and teacher education, and retraining for established teachers. The objective of the retraining was to support the development of local curricula and their implementation in classrooms. For example, teachers in districts with large populations of language minority students had to meet special training requirements in multicultural education and teaching strategies with language minority children. This was a welcome step toward alleviating the devastating results of the clash of cultural backgrounds between minority children and the mostly White teaching force. Higher expectations, equity in access to curriculum, and improved quality of instruction and school climate have been common demands on the part of Latinos and other communities of color.

The Educational Reform Law also highlighted the responsibility of all stakeholders for student learning. One aspect of this responsibility was a process of decentralization, which placed increased responsibility on school committees and superintendents and, ultimately, on principals and school councils.¹⁵ For example, the councils, made up of the principal, parents, teachers, and community partners, as well as students at the high school level, were meant to provide a context for decisionmaking at the school level in areas that contribute to school improvement, such as professional development, student learning time, safety, and parental involvement. Schools were encouraged to seek support from their communities and develop partnerships with businesses and other institutions in their communities.

The reform also introduced measures to hold districts accountable for school performance and student achievement. The aim was to identify students, schools, and districts in need of assistance with the promise that they would get the necessary support to reach the new standards. Multiple measures of student achievement were to be integrated into the process of aligning local curricula to the statewide “frameworks” as a way of establishing student competence in those areas. The law further proposed that high school graduation be contingent on the determination of competence, but the assessment method was left to the board of education. Schools in which students underperformed and did not show improvement over time would be targeted for assistance.

Nirvana, you say? Not for long. A change in leadership of the state government led to changes in the composition of the state’s board of education, and in time to strong shifts in the orientation of reform. Most notable and controversial was the board’s decision to adopt a series of standardized tests administered in several grades as the primary measure of student achievement and to require that students pass the tenth-grade version of the standardized test in order to graduate. With the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), as it is called, Massachusetts began the implementation of a high-stakes test as the sole measure for graduation.

Truthfully, Latinos paid little attention to these events. The next time many became aware of the process of educational reform was in December 1998, when their fourth, eighth, or tenth grader appeared with the results of his or her test. Most likely the child had failed, as most Latino children did. Starting from the point at which the MCAS test results were revealed, this chapter examines the outcomes for Latino students and other children of color in the assessments being carried out as part of the reform process, presents some perspectives on these dismal outcomes, and offers several thoughts on the meaning of the high stakes of high-stakes testing.

Taking the Test

Massachusetts’s educational reform showcased the MCAS as the primary measure of student achievement; its use has been highly controversial. There has been a great deal of debate about the merits of standardized testing and its validity in testing student achievement. There has also been significant debate about the technical merits of the test itself and its capacity to validly reflect diversity in the range of knowledge tested. What makes the MCAS most controversial by far, however, is the use that will be made of its scores. Beginning in 2003, current state educational policy requires tenth graders to obtain a passing score in math and in English language arts in order to graduate from high school. No other single measure of achievement, not grades, portfolios, or teachers’ recommendations, will determine a student’s eligibility for graduation.¹⁶

The MCAS tests have been administered to students in grades four, eight, and ten.¹⁷ Children from all school districts must take the tests in English language arts, mathematics, and science and technology. Eighth graders are also tested in history and social sciences. Only public school children are tested; the MCAS tests are not given to private or parochial school students. Test-takers include students in regular education, vocational education, and special education, as well as LEP students.

In 1999, 26 percent of the Latino children in the state’s public schools were determined to be limited in their English proficiency,¹⁸ accounting for 60 percent of the children in the state’s bilingual education program.¹⁹ Because of their high representation among LEP students, special attention was given to the testing of LEP students whose first language is Spanish. Native Spanish speakers who had been enrolled in schools for less than three years were required to take the Spanish version of the mathematics and the science and technology tests if they met the following requirements:

• they were enrolled in the Transitional Bilingual Education Program or received English as a Second Language support;
• they did not have reading and writing skills sufficient to take the English-language test and they were able to read and write in Spanish.²⁰

The MCAS test is not available in any other language. Other language minority children are required to take all sections of the test in English if they have been in U.S. schools for more than three years or if they will be placed into mainstream classrooms the following school year, regardless of the time spent in U.S. schools.²¹ This requirement relies on the expectation that (a) curricula in the bilingual program are closely aligned with the learning standards of the curriculum frameworks developed for statewide application and that (b) immigrant children can attain enough proficiency in English in three years to score successfully on the MCAS. These expectations have been the source of a great deal of controversy.

Every year since 1998, more than 200,000 children in the fourth, eighth, and tenth grades have taken the MCAS tests.²² In 2000, test-takers accounted for about 94 percent of the children enrolled in those grades;²³ absences and lower levels of participation by special education and LEP students account for the remainder. Although most of the test-takers were White, as are most students enrolled in the state’s public schools, in 2000, approximately 37 percent were children of color. Specifically, Asian, Black, Latino, and mixed-race children make up the groups of color; of these, Latinos account for the largest proportion (see Figure 1). Some 4,400 of the MCAS test-takers were LEP children.²⁴ Among LEP test-takers, the proportion of children of color is much larger, with Asians, Latinos, and Blacks accounting for about 85 percent of these test-takers. Among LEP students, Latinos were by far the largest group, accounting for 49 percent of all LEP test-takers in 1999.²⁵

Test Results

The Department of Education categorizes student performance into one of four levels in each area of knowledge for each grade: advanced, proficient, needs improvement, and failing. The criteria for each level were the following:

• Advanced: The student demonstrates a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of rigorous subject matter and provides sophisticated solutions to complex problems.
• Proficient: The student demonstrates a solid understanding of challenging subject matter and solves a wide variety of problems.
• Needs Improvement: The student demonstrates partial understanding of subject matter and solves simple problems.
• Failing: The student demonstrates minimal understanding of subject matter and does not solve even simple problems.

The first three administrations of the MCAS test resulted in very low scores across all groups. Statewide average scaled scores for all subjects and at all grade levels only reached the level of “needs improvement,” except fourth-grade science and technology in 1999 and 2000 and eighth-grade English language arts in 2000. In 2000, 45 percent of tenth graders had a failing score in math, which was in fact an improvement over the 53 percent that had failed the year before. Fewer than 15 percent of students at any level achieved an “advanced” rating in any subject (grade-10 math also had the largest percentage of advanced students).²⁶

Black and Latino children did by far the worst. Figures 2, 3, and 4 show the failure rates for students from different racial groups. Across all grades and all areas tested, the rates of failure for Black and Latino children were the highest. In general, all children in the fourth grade did better than those in the higher grades, but even at this level, Black and Latino failure rates were several times higher than those of Asian and White children. In all grades, all children, including Black and Latino children, did better in English language arts than in math and in science and technology.²⁷ This pattern was particularly pronounced in the eighth grade. In the areas of math and science, however, the difference between the rates of Black and Latino students and those of Asian and White students was most salient. In the fourth grade, the rates of failure for Black and Latino children were three and four times those of Asian and White children, respectively. This pattern remained across the grades. In sum, across all grades and across all areas of knowledge tested, the three administrations of the MCAS have shown that the outcomes of Latino students are the worst in the state, followed closely by those of Blacks.

Because of the relevance of the MCAS outcomes to the graduation of tenth graders, it is important to look at these scores more closely. Since failing only one section of the test means that the student cannot graduate, a look at the percentage of failures in math, the section of the test in which students of all groups did worst, provides an indication of the maximum number of students in each group who would potentially not graduate from high school.²⁸ Figure 5 shows the tenth-grade math failure rates by race for the three administrations of the MCAS. In 2000, 79 percent of Latino and 77 percent of Black tenth graders failed the math section of the test — almost double the rates for Asian and White students.

Math outcomes in the year 2000 represent a slight improvement over outcomes of the two previous test administrations. Nevertheless, for all children of color, except Asians, even the 2000 outcomes represent very high rates of failure. The outcomes for Black and Latino children in the Massachusetts high-stakes environment mean that these groups are the most likely to experience the most negative outcomes that derive from the use of high-stakes standardized tests.

When we consider the implications of the results for LEP students, the prognosis is equally bleak. Outcomes for LEP students were first reported by the Department of Education for the spring 2000 test. A comparison of the outcomes for tenth graders listed as “regular” students and LEP students is shown in Figure 6. LEP tenth-grade students did much worse than “regular” students; the rate of failure in all three subjects was more than twice that of “regular” students.²⁹ Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University analyzed 1998 and 1999 MCAS scores attained by LEP students and found similar patterns. These differences were statistically significant even when controlling for poverty among students. Although among both groups higher percentages of students who are poor (defined as on free or reduced lunch) fail the test, “in most instances the regular education students who are classified as poor performed better than the LEP students who were not classified as poor.”³⁰

Magic Bullets and Dropouts

When the Massachusetts Department of Education released the first MCAS results in the late fall of 1998, the failure rates fueled an already heated debate about the testing program. Advocates of the MCAS test emphasize that it is a tool necessary to guarantee accountability for student learning on the part of teachers and schools.³¹ It is the “magic bullet” of educational reform, these advocates argue, because “revealing the truth” about student outcomes will force the schools to implement initiatives that will lead to increased student achievement. Holding schools accountable to a high standard will expedite the implementation of improvements in the curriculum and spur the development of advanced placement classes, which will provide increased access to more challenging curricula in math and science. In order to get all students to work at this higher standard, summer school remediation and tutoring programs would be implemented for the weaker students. With high-stakes testing, schools would also have a stake in finding new ways to increase the achievement of all students; schools that show consistent failure over a period of time can easily be identified, placed in receivership, and reorganized.

Opponents of MCAS testing focus on the fact that a “high-stakes” environment creates a climate in schools that does not necessarily lead to improved learning. In the case of school districts where students already excel, a high-stakes environment could affect school culture by forcing teachers to teach to the test and forgo more creative forms of instruction. In many ways, opponents argue, a high-stakes environment undermines good teaching and learning practices that are in place in successful schools.³²

A powerful argument against the high-stakes test is its impact in school districts already producing lower levels of student achievement. Opponents of MCAS testing argue that a high-stakes environment, rather than improving conditions, may make matters worse, not only by focusing instruction on the test almost exclusively, but also by introducing promotion practices that push children out of school. Holding back weaker students to avoid having them tested is a common practice in a high-stakes environment. It has been documented that retaining weak students in grade without changing the conditions that led to their failure pushes students to drop out of school.³³ Labeling children as failures early in their educational careers may lead them to give up and drop out if they fail the test the first or second time. For all these reasons, the most direct consequence of a high-stakes environment in these weaker school systems seems to be a rapid rise in the dropout rates.

The data in Figure 7 show that there is reason to believe that dropout rates will be a growing concern in Massachusetts. The table shows annual dropout rates for the period between 1992 and 1999, encompassing the whole process of educational reform and the start of the high-stakes environment in Massachusetts schools. Data are presented for each racial or ethnic group so that the differential effect can be discerned. The overall dropout rate began to increase in 1999 after a steady decline over the previous three years. In 1999, the overall drop-out rate was somewhat higher (3.6%) than at the start of the process of reform (3.5%) in 1993.

What shows as almost imperceptible change for the overall population hides some larger changes taking place among specific groups. In the case of Blacks, after a slow start, dropout rates fell from a high of 7.3 percent in 1994–1995 to a low of 5.6 percent in 1996–1997, but began to rise again by 1997–1998. At that point, dropout rates were almost as high as they were at the start of the reform process in 1993. The pattern for Latinos has been similar, the difference being that the latter rise in dropout rates has been sharper. In 1999, Latino dropout rates were slightly higher than they were at the start of the period of observation. Asian dropout rates in 1999, on the other hand, were almost a full point higher than they were in 1992–1993, after Asians achieved the lowest rates of any group (including Whites) in the middle of the period. Only the dropout rates for White children were lower in 1999 than they were at the start of the process of reform. All children of color, including Asians, have experienced increased dropout rates as the reform process has gone forward. Among Latino children, these rates have reached almost 10 percent per year.

Where Children Go to School

Some argue that the MCAS is an artificially high standard being held against school systems that by and large are doing well in educating children and that Massachusetts school systems are among the best in the United States.³⁴ They say that the MCAS is too high a standard to hold against an economically and ethnically diverse population of normal children. The fact is that some systems in the state, all wealthier suburban districts, are doing quite well in educating their children to the MCAS standard. What works in the middle-class suburban districts is that the needs of the children are well matched to the resources and methods used to educate them.

This matching of children’s needs to educational resources does not appear to take place in the large, multiracial, multicultural urban districts; in these urban districts, children of color and language minority children are performing the worst. Problems with student achievement in these districts are not new. In fact, the process of educational reform began as a way to address the disparities that led to the dysfunction of these systems by bringing equity and fairness to the process of educational funding. The infusion of additional funding, particularly to the poorest districts, was meant to reverse the trend of “benign neglect” of many years.

Conditions in these districts remain fragile. First, the condition of school buildings is often a problem, which affects student performance.³⁵ Access to books and materials is also unreliable, as evidenced by recent newspaper reports that point out that midway through the year, Boston schoolchildren had not yet received textbooks.³⁶ Some schools in Massachusetts do not have libraries or may not have appropriate library programs to maximize the use of these resources, according to a recent report.³⁷ This report also found that MCAS scores are related to student access to a library and a functioning library program.

Another difficulty, as research on local education for the last thirty years has pointed out, is that Latino children are not being taught in ways appropriate to them. Barriers relate to the relevance of curricula and the appropriateness of school practices to the needs of students of color, including Latino students.³⁸ In the process of educational reform, local participation in the development of curricula that would complement the statewide frameworks was meant to make curricula more relevant to diverse populations. The process of redesigning local curricula, however, is still largely incomplete across the state. Since the new curriculum frameworks have only recently been put in place, teachers are just preparing themselves to address them. It will take some time for teachers to implement these frameworks with uniformity and with the creativity required to make them relevant to different populations. It will surely take even longer for teachers to build the bridges necessary between the knowledge that students have and the expectations set by the new curriculum frameworks and achievement measures. In general, curricula today still reflect either very low expectations of students or standards that are beyond what students can accomplish with their educational background.

In many schools, children do not yet have access to the content necessary to pass the test. In Boston, for example, a well-documented pattern of tracking of Black and Latino students into the lowest levels of courses³⁹ leads these students to arrive in tenth grade without either Algebra I or Geometry, which are both essential to passing the tenth-grade math MCAS test. This systematic lack of access to curriculum in math was documented by a 1992 study of Boston high schools, which found that fewer than 20 percent of Black and Latino students in non-exam schools were enrolled in grade-level courses.⁴⁰ The study was repeated in 2001, this time focusing on high school students in four Massachusetts districts — Boston, Framingham, Worcester, and Springfield. In Boston, for example, only 16.1 percent of Latino and 38.7 percent of Black students were enrolled in a grade-level math curriculum or above when they took their MCAS test in the tenth grade.⁴¹ The study also indicated that in all districts, in all grades, and in both math and science, the differences in grade enrollments between White students and Black and Latino students were statistically significant.

Finally, although some funding has been made available, remedial programs are not yet in place to the extent necessary to help vulnerable students achieve at the level required to pass the MCAS. The state has begun a well-publicized initiative to remedy the achievement gap by using college students to tutor failing or almost failing K–12 students. This program has been controversial, however, because it places very unrealistic expectations on the tutoring relationship.

No clear plans exist for children who reach the end of twelfth grade without passing the MCAS. The Board of Higher Education has already said that the state university system will not accept students who have not passed the test.⁴² There is nothing yet in place to link these students to jobs or to educational alternatives beyond high school. The transition from school to work, long an unresolved problem for minority youth, will most likely be a problem in this case as well.

Concluding Thoughts

Many observers of the educational situation in Massachusetts refer to 2003 as the year of the “train wreck”:⁴³ this is the year in which the high stakes of the MCAS will become a reality. Students who did not pass the MCAS test either as tenth graders in April 2001 or in subsequent chances to retake the test during their junior and senior years will not be graduating in June 2003. If current conditions prevail, almost one-half of Massachusetts tenth graders will fail the first round of the MCAS and, unless they are offered increased support and instruction, they will likely not be eligible to graduate in 2003. An overwhelming majority (75–80%) of racial and language minority students in Massachusetts will not be able to graduate high school in 2003.

Following the 1998 release of test results, political debate and media attention to MCAS results has grown, focusing primarily on the wisdom and appropriateness of testing. Teachers unions, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, individual school committees and systems, and even the Boston City Council have issued statements against different aspects of the policy as currently implemented. For advocates, the image of the train wreck alludes to the political impact that the high failure rates will have on the process of educational reform. The fear of many stakeholders is that along with the increasingly politically charged testing, politicians will abandon educational reform and, with that, any hope of transforming the educational system.

The highly publicized testing has made evident to all what many parents and educators already knew — that children of some racial and linguistic minorities from low socioeconomic status are receiving an education that is not on a par with that of majority children. Although in general all students have high failure rates, these rates are highest among Black, Latino, and language minority students. As the state’s own data reveal, in 2000, 77 percent of Black tenth graders, 79 percent of Latino tenth graders, and 78 percent of LEP students failed the test, whereas only 38 percent of White students failed. These are staggering indicators that schools are not teaching to the standards required by the MCAS, particularly in the case of Black, Latino, and language minority students.

The most obvious consequence of MCAS testing may be the results of policies that for a very long time abandoned and underfunded urban systems and systematically underserved urban students, particularly Latinos and Blacks. High-stakes testing ignores the fact that children in urban schools are clustered in systems that have not yet undergone substantial transformation to guarantee access to the knowledge being tested. This unfairness is due to the fact that, at this point, only the students — not teachers, not principals or superintendents, not schools of education or state regulators — bear the burden of the gap. Although in time schools whose children consistently show high failure rates on the MCAS will be identified and labeled as “failing schools,” at this point the MCAS represents a diagnostic tool rather than a sanction for schools and districts. The consequences for schools, school personnel, districts, and district personnel are neither as clearly specified nor as critical as the consequences borne by students. This means that, come 2003, students alone will bear the consequences of the failure of adults to develop the structures necessary for all children to learn.

Without a doubt, the high-stakes environment in Massachusetts blames the victim. The current testing policy in Massachusetts is inequitable and unjust, and the dire consequences of failing the test are particularly injurious to the most vulnerable students. Clearly, there must be some guarantee that children will have more than one measure of their educational achievement. It is also clear that those who propose standardized tests as the measure of system accountability must be responsible for guaranteeing that all children have access to the material on which they are being tested and that the testing situation be fair. Until these conditions are met, there is no accountability argument that outweighs the damage that is done to the lives of the most vulnerable children. Educational policy should, at the very least, do no harm.

The truth is that the problems with Black and Latino education did not start with MCAS testing. The story of Black and Latino education in Massachusetts is the story of the resistance of school systems’ resistance to the changing demographics and demands of an increasingly diverse population of children. The history of segregated and unequally funded schools and the battle for desegregation; the practice of tracking in the lower grades and low expectations throughout; curricula that have no connection to the life of urban minority children; the teachers who, unprepared to deal with children different from themselves, are scared of their students; parents who are alienated from the educational process and, often, from their own children — all are revealed in the light of the sobering evidence brought out by MCAS testing.

The task so often mentioned in any discussion of the education of minority children is constructing public systems that respond to the needs of a diverse population of children. We know many of the ingredients that will promote school success for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Children must be well fed and drug free if they are to focus on learning. Parents, teachers, and schools must have high expectations and provide strong support for children’s achievement of these goals. Curricula must offer multiple points of entry that are relevant to the diverse experience of learners. Professional development for teachers must enhance mastery of subject areas, good teaching strategies, and improved abilities to teach across linguistic and cultural difference. School-based, community-inclusive programs must support the achievement of the most vulnerable students and encourage them to remain in school. After-school programs that address homework completion must be available, particularly for children from families whose educational background or English skills do not permit them to assist their children with homework. Schools must build bridges to parents and connections to communities. Parents need to recognize the importance of education and communicate its value to their children. Families and communities must nurture their children and expect excellent performance of them, despite schools that might not do so. Clearly, schools, teachers, parents, communities, and children themselves are all vital actors in the process of constructing school success.

True educational reform is in the best interests of racial and language minority children. But for them, the priority of the reform should be the creation of an academically rigorous environment that is also responsive to their needs. Educational reform in Massachusetts mobilized positive energy that may have led eventually to positive educational experience for all children. This momentum toward building better schools, however, appears to have been lost as the focus has shifted to the test and the debate surrounding the test.

The image of the train wreck alludes not only to the students who will fail, but also to the political impact that high rates of failure will have on the process of educational reform. Many stakeholders fear that, in the stark light of the increasingly political debate about testing, politicians will abandon educational reform and thus lose the opportunity to initiate the fundamental changes necessary to transform the educational system. The condition of the system revealed by MCAS testing is only one harsh reality. An equally great tragedy would be squandering the opportunity that educational reform initially presented to transform our schools into ones that support the academic achievement of all our students.

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Notes

1. Throughout this chapter I use the terms Latino, Asian, and Black in their aggregate form because finer, more disaggregated categories are not available in educational data. There may be differences among subgroups encompassed globally in these categories that, unfortunately, are not reflected here.

2. Massachusetts Department of Education (1992).

3. See Wheelock (1990, p. 11) for data from the late 1980s.

4. I use the terms Limited English Proficient and LEP because these are the technical terms used by school systems to refer to children who live in the United States and whose first language is a language other than English. I acknowledge here as valid the position of those who criticize the use of these terms because they define children in terms of the characteristics that they lack rather than those they possess.

5. See Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation (1978b) for attendance, dropout, and retention rates in the late 1970s; Wheelock (1990) for dropout and truancy rates through the 1980s; and Uriarte and Chavez (2000) for dropout rates through the 1990s.

6. Massachusetts Department of Education (1995b).

7. \Massachusetts Department of Education, “Structuring Schools for Student Success: A Focus on Grade Retention,” cited in Wheelock (1990, p. 14).

8. These findings are from Boston and are reported in Dentzer and Wheelock (1990, pp. 78–79).

9. Among the most salient examples are the report of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1976) and reports by the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation (1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1985).

10. Massachusetts Commission on Hispanic Affairs (1986, p. 5).

11. Boston Public Schools (1989a), Exhibit 2.

12. Boston Public Schools (1989b); see also Ribadeniera (1989, p. 45).

13. See the Massachusetts Department of Education website at http://finance1. doe.mass.edu/chapter70/c70hist.html. The state’s share of funding for education has increased from $1.2 billion in 1993 to $2.6 billion in 1999 and has been distributed using formulas that attempt to address disparities and establish comparable foundation budgets across districts.

14. Massachusetts Department of Education (1997).

15. Massachusetts Department of Education (1995a).

16. Recent proposals for policy change include an appeals process for students who fail. This appeal may take into consideration students’ grades and portfolios.

17. The MCAS was administered at district and regional schools, vocational schools, charter schools, special education schools, and agricultural and technical schools.

18. Massachusetts Department of Education (1999a, Tables 1, 3, 5).

19. Massachusetts Department of Education (1999b, p. 7).

20. Massachusetts Department of Education (2000a, p. 2).

21. Massachusetts Department of Education (2000a, p. 2).

22. Since different numbers of children took the different sections of the test, in this chapter test-takers refers to those children who took the math test, since this test had the largest number of participants.

23. Massachusetts Department of Education (2000b, p. 16).

24. Massachusetts Department of Education (2000b, p. 18).

25. At the time of the writing of this chapter, data on the racial breakdown of LEP test-takers had not yet been made available. Data for 1999 are taken from the Massachusetts Department of Education CD-ROM release of 1999 MCAS results.

26. Massachusetts Department of Education (2000b, pp. 4–5).

27. Recent newspaper reports have focused on the extreme difficulty of the fourth-grade English language arts test (see “Some Educators Say,” 2000).

28. Using the math section of the test for comparison also minimizes the effects of English proficiency as a factor in the high Latino failure rates. Students with limited English proficiency took this section of the test in Spanish.

29. Although these tables report 2000 data, it is important to know that the quality and accuracy of the 1999 data on LEP students reported by the Department of Education have been criticized for their inconsistencies. Many LEP students eligible to take the test did not take it, or the tests were not scored. In the case of students that took the test in Spanish, there is no indication of how many took it in this language and how they scored. See Beals and Pedalino Porter (2000, p. 1).

30. Lachat (2000, p. 6).

31. See, for example, Mass Insight Education (2000, n.d.) and Taylor (2000), among others.

32. See, for example, McNeil (2000); McNeil and Valenzuela (2000); and the following website: http://www.fairtest.org/catalog.htm

33. Dentzer and Wheelock (1990, ch. 2).

34. Marcus (1999, p. 73).

35. See Darder and Upshur (1993, pp. 133–134, 142) for student reaction to the conditions of school buildings in Boston.

36. Vaishnav (2000).

37. Baughman (2000).

38. See Darder and Upshur (1993); Frau-Ramos and Nieto (1993); Montero-Seibruth (1993); and other works about the experience of Latino children in Massachusetts schools.

39. See Dentzer and Wheelock (1990) for a good documentation of this process in Boston’s public schools.

40. Upshur, Freitas, Ahern, Benton, and Carver (1991, pp. 7–15).

41. Upshur et al. (in press).

42. Greenberger (2000a, 2000b).

43. Fair Test and CARE (2000, p. 6).

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References

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Publishing Information

The Power of Culture: Teaching across Language Difference
Edited by Zeynep F. Beykont
© 2002
ISBN 1-891792-03-2 $24.95 paperback, ORDER
286 pp.

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