Chapter 6: The Role of Accountability in Middle Level Schools

Three years ago, my youngest daughter, at the time an eighth grade student, wrote an essay for her school about the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Test (MCAS), our state’s high stakes test. She wrote:

This is one of the many reasons why Scott Thompson, assistant director of the Panasonic Foundation, wrote that the high stakes testing movement is the “evil twin of the standards-based movement, becoming its own worst enemy” (2001, pp. 358–362).

Thompson goes on to quote Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who observed, “When tests are allowed to become the be-all and end-all, they deform, not reform, education” (as cited in Thompson, 2001, p. 359).