Testimony from Solidarity Lowell member Dee Halzack

Chair Lewis, Chair Garlick, and Members of the Joint Committee on Education:

I am writing today to urge you to give a favorable report to H.495 and S.246: An act empowering students and schools to thrive (“the Thrive Act”). 

Local students, parents, educators, and communities are the ones best able to determine what our local schools need, and how to measure student success.

State takeover of public schools and the graduation requirement based on the MCAS standardized test are both failing students and disrupting their education. These top-down, harmful educational policies are increasing racial inequities in our schools, rather than fixing them. We have seen, both through data and through student experiences, that state takeovers and high-stakes testing do not produce the long-term gains in student performance promised, and instead, they limit voice and narrow curricula.  In many cases poor performance had more to do with lack of resources than with poor administration or teaching. Educators complain about being forced to teach to the tests without regard for individual student needs or the characteristics of the community. Standardized testing does a disservice to students with special needs, including both the disabled and English language learners. 

While I myself am a native speaker of English, with decent writing skills, I have seen the damage done in testing situations to English language learners.  The stress of taking a test that determines whether or not you graduate, regardless of what your grades have been and how well you know what you studied, can make even a fluent English language learner freeze up or go so slow that they can’t finish the test in time. It happened to a friend of mine in COLLEGE. How much worse for younger students with less years of experience with the testing AND the language. 

I used to work for an educational publisher. I am familiar with the writings on inequity in educational testing and how hard it is to completely avoid.  Some students can be smart and yet so test-phobic that it affects their performance on a test negatively. While tests are a tool for assessing students, they are not the only tool and should not be used to make or break a student’s graduation. 

The Thrive Act creates a better system that focuses on supporting the whole child by focusing on the tools and resources schools need to thrive and by re-examining our approach to student assessment so that it can be more equitable, more accurate, and more holistic.  

Thank you for all your work on the hearing. Again, I urge you to swiftly advance H.495 and S.246: An act empowering students and schools to thrive.