Massachusetts Department of
Elementary and Secondary Education
75 Pleasant Street, Malden, Massachusetts 02148-4906 Telephone: (781) 338-3000
TTY: N.E.T. Relay 1-800-439-2370
Mitchell D. Chester, Ed.D.Commissioner
March 7, 2016
The Honorable Sonia Chang-Diaz, Senate Chair
The Honorable Alice Hanlon Peisch, House Chair
Joint Committee on Education
State House
Boston, MA 02133
Re: House Bill No. 3929, “An Act Relative to Ending Common Core Education Standards”
Dear Chair Chang-Diaz and Chair Peisch:
I submit this testimony regarding House Bill No. 3929, “An Act Relative to Ending Common Core Education Standards,” also known as the Initiative Petition for a law Ending Common Core Education Standards. In short, I am concerned that: the bill would disrupt district efforts to upgrade instructional programs; the bill replaces a curriculum review process that is outlined in current law, that has served the Commonwealth well, and that is underway as we speak; the bill will require substantial additional spending by the state and by local school districts; and the bill impedes the development of a valid, high quality assessment program.
1. Current Massachusetts Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics
In July 2010, following review and discussion by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (Board), a period of public comment, a third-party review commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, and analyses by teams of Massachusetts educators, the Board voted to incorporate the Common Core State Standards, contingent upon augmenting and customizing the standards to strengthen them as appropriate. Five months later, in December 2010, after panels of Massachusetts English language arts and mathematics teachers customized and augmented the Common Core State Standards, the Board adopted the final version of the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks for English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics, and disseminated them widely to schools and K–12 educators across the state. The enclosed History of Content and Learning Standards in Massachusetts provides additional details about the review and adoption process.
Adoption of the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks in December 2010 was informed by feedback from employers and higher education about literacy and mathematical skills that our high school graduates often were lacking. In addition, our 2010 Frameworks incorporate our educators’ suggestions for building on and improving our prior frameworks. Today’s standards are now more focused and aligned to the input of these important stakeholders.
2. The Bill Would Disrupt District Efforts to Upgrade Instructional Programs
The work of districts to align their local curricula to the state curriculum frameworks is well underway. Massachusetts schools, educators, and students have been using the 2010 ELA and Mathematics curriculum frameworks for five school years. The bill would require them to revert to the curriculum standards that were in place prior to the Board’s July 2010 vote. This requirement would disrupt district efforts to upgrade their instructional programs – efforts that educators report as having a positive impact on student learning.
A study of a representative sample of Massachusetts teachers recently released by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University found that a majority of teachers have changed their instruction and/or materials since the implementation of the 2010 curriculum frameworks. In mathematics, about three-quarters of teachers have increased emphasis on conceptual understanding and on application of skills and knowledge. In ELA, nearly 90 percent of teachers have increased the use of assigned writing with use of evidence. Feedback from educators in the field who are familiar with the 2010 frameworks has been very positive. They report that the 2010 Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks in ELA and Mathematics are having a positive impact on student learning. Sharply disrupting this work is not in the best interest of Massachusetts students.
3. The Framework Review Process Already is Underway, Per State Law
The bill calls for the convening of “three review committees, one for each discipline of math, science and technology, and English,” and directs who may be on the committees and the process they shall follow. These sections of the bill are redundant in light of current state law and activities already underway.
State law (Mass. General Laws chapter 69, section 1E) lays out the process for developing and periodically reviewing and revising the state curriculum frameworks.[1] In fact, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education just completed a multi-year, comprehensive review and revision of the standards for Science and Technology/Engineering and voted to adopt revised statewide standards on January 26, 2016.
Moreover, with respect to the ELA and Mathematics frameworks, in November 2015, in conjunction with its decision to develop a unique, Massachusetts based assessment system, the State Board launched a thorough review process to draw upon Massachusetts teachers' experiences using the 2010 frameworks over the past five years to identify any standards that are not working as well as they should and any gaps that need to be filled. The review process establishes multiple working groups – comprised of Massachusetts classroom teachers, administrators, content experts, and parents – that are holding meetings to discuss their implementation of the current frameworks, review public comment received by the Department, and update the current frameworks based on this input. In fact, let me take this opportunity to invite anyone here today, or reviewing this testimony at a future date, to visit the Department’s website and offer any specific recommendations to improve the frameworks. We are hoping to get the widest participation possible from educators, policy researchers, parents, and the general public for review and analysis by the working groups.
Ultimately, the State Board will consider the recommendations of the public as well as of the working groups before voting on a final set of revisions to the frameworks. We envision that process concluding sometime in the late fall or early winter. Through the existing process, we will make improvements to the frameworks, without undermining local curricular and instructional efforts. In short, the review process called for in the bill is duplicative and unnecessary.
4. The Bill Would Require Substantial Additional Spending
The bill would entail a high, and unnecessary, financial cost to the public. It would require additional expenditures at the state and local level. With respect to local costs, Massachusetts school districts have invested a significant amount of time and effort in implementing the 2010 standards, including acquisition of curricular and instructional materials and extensive professional development for teachers. Any indiscriminate, wholesale change to the 2010 frameworks would be unnecessarily costly to our schools by necessitating a new round of materials purchases and professional development to ensure alignment to the pre-2010 standards.
Further, Section 4 of the bill relates to the statewide MCAS tests that the Department administers. This provision would require the Commissioner to release all of the test items, including questions, constructed responses and essays, for each grade and each subject, every year. As a result of not being able to reuse items, assessment costs would rise. The cost increase would be exacerbated since full access to existing, lower-cost item banks, which may have confidentiality requirements to allow for reuse of questions, would be precluded by the 100 percent item release requirement.
The Department currently releases approximately 50 percent of test items for grades 3-8, and 100 percent of the 10th grade test items on which student scores are based. We are open to adjusting these percentages, particularly in the early years of a new assessment while we build a store of released items for educators to use to inform their instructional practice, but we need flexibility to balance the costs and benefits of doing so. The current practice provides substantial information about the tests to educators, students, families, and the public while moderating the expense of developing new test questions. If this bill becomes law, the Legislature would likely have to appropriate additional state funds to support the creation of entirely new student assessments every year.
5. The Bill Impedes the Development of a Valid, High Quality Assessment System
The requirement to release all test items each year is not only costly and impractical; it will impede the Commonwealth’s ability to develop and sustain a valid, high quality assessment system. Any high quality assessment system requires that some test items be administered each year that are not released. Specifically, within each assessment are questions that are used and reused to calibrate test results from one year to the next. These questions must be kept confidential to enable valid scoring over time. In addition, each assessment includes test items that are being piloted and evaluated for use in subsequent tests. Similarly, these questions cannot be released without compromising future test validity. The proposed mandate to release all test items for each grade and each subject every year is completely contrary to the Commonwealth’s interest in maintaining a psychometrically valid, high quality assessment system that is both defensible educationally and well positioned to withstand legal challenge.
Conclusion
Over the past two decades, since the enactment of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, we have pursued and implemented a non-partisan agenda of high standards and accountability that has made Massachusetts a national leader in education. The work of refining and improving our standards and assessments, based on thoughtful input and feedback from educators, parents, business leaders, and policy makers, continues today in that same tradition. For the reasons identified in my testimony, I oppose “An Act Relative to Ending Common Core Education Standards.”
Respectfully submitted,
Mitchell D. Chester, Ed.D.
Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education
Enclosure: History of Content and Learning Standards in Massachusetts, September 2015
[1]M.G.L. chapter 69, section 1E: “The board shall direct the commissioner to institute a process for drawing up curriculum frameworks for the core subjects covered by the academic standards provided in section one D. … The process for drawing up and revising the frameworks shall be open and consultative, and may include but need not be limited to classroom teachers, parents, faculty of schools of education, and leading college and university figures in both subject matter disciplines and pedagogy. In drawing up curriculum frameworks, those involved shall look to curriculum frameworks, model curricula, content standards, attainment targets, courses of study and instruction materials in existence or in the process of being developed in the United States and throughout the world, and shall actively explore collaborative development efforts with other projects, including but not limited to the national New Standards Project. …The board shall develop procedures for updating, improving or refining said curriculum frameworks. A copy of said frameworks shall be submitted to the joint committee on education, arts and humanities at least sixty days prior to taking effect,