Lack of clarity in letter from Department of Education leads to confusion

Emma Pederson, Staff Writer

Students who opted out of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) last year recently received a letter from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) saying they weren’t on track to graduate. Although it may be true that the student did not fulfill graduation requirements through the MCA, the MDE left out an important part about graduation assessment requirements: alternative tests.

In late October, the MDE sent a letter to students that said if a student opted out of the MCA, they were ineligible to graduate. “When [MDE] sent out the information about testing, they didn’t send out the next page,…the different ways your student can graduate,” explained Elizabeth McMillen, South High’s testing coordinator.

According to MDE’s Parent Information webpage, seniors this year have to, “Meet graduation assessment requirements through Graduation-Required Assessments for Diploma (GRAD) in reading, mathematics and written composition…OR Students can take the ACT assessment for college admission, the WorkKeys job skills assessment, the Compass college placement test, or the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (or ASVAB) to meet graduation assessment requirements in reading, mathematics, and/or writing.”

For this year’s seniors and juniors, if you took the MCA writing test in 9th grade and the ACT in 11th grade or an alternative test, you have the graduation assessment requirements completed.

“Going forward, the way it’s set up, to graduate in 2017, [students] would have had to take the Explore test in the 8th grade, they have to take the Plan test this year, and then next year the ACT with writing. Then they’re done,” explained McMillen, who also added that they still do offer the MCA’s.

“We probably had close to 250 kids opt out,” continued McMillen. “Last year, there was a big push through the Open program to get their ninth graders to opt out. We had a lot of ninth graders opt out of the MAP test. It usually takes two days, that’s like two hours of missed class time. And there’s so many problems getting MAP up and running, it usually takes four days. So I understand why teachers were like, we’re done.”

“It comes at education from a direction that is essentially the opposite of what Open Education is all about, which is starting with the students, and where they are, and where they want to go and need to go,” Robert Panning-Miller, the Open program’s World History explained, “Standardized tests don’t concern themselves with those details. They expect all students to jump over the same bar, regardless of what they’re doing at any given moment. And, the way the tests are being used, really has nothing to do with the students.”

According to the MDE’s website MCAs and other alternative tests, “help districts measure student progress toward Minnesota’s academic standards and meet the requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).”

But as written in an article by the Star Tribune, “…MCA scores also showed that another challenge endures. The achievement gap between white and minority students continues, despite some recent strong showings on other standardized tests by elementary-age black students…In math, for example, black students tested in grades 3 through 8 were 35 percent proficient, compared to 71 percent for white students. In reading, the disparity was just as stark — 33 percent proficiency for black students and 67 percent for white students.”

Not only do standardized tests prove troublesome for students of color, the tests are extremely to inequitable to students with disabilities.

“Requiring all students with disabilities, regardless of where they are at and their skill levels, to take some of these standardized tests, in my mind, is tantamount to child abuse. It’s almost abusive. They’re confronted with tests that are extremely difficult and extremely frustrating and nobody comes away from that feeling good,” said James Barnhill, a Special Educator teacher at South High School.

“What value is that test? What does it show?” Barnhill continued, “It surely doesn’t show how a student’s growing. It surely doesn’t show that they’re making progress on the skills that we all believe that they need to be working on.”