The prospect of thousands of MCAS failures has led to increasingly ludicrous extremes. Now Governor Paul Cellucci, worried that the no-graduation threat hasn't done enough to whip schools into shape, has put Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift in charge and announced a plan for 30,000 volunteers to tutor failing students. Swift's new job immediately brought guffaws. MCAS opponents should be pleased, though, because she's the perfect MCAS proponent. Getting thousands of volunteers to provide cover for the state's failure to properly fund schools is a clever ploy.
Volunteers are important in a decent society.
But volunteers can't substitute for needed institutional change. Although personal attention to individual students is always welcome, the energy and money spent on training and administering tutors would be better directed at cutting down classroom size. Cellucci's latest moves cap other efforts to head off politically disastrous MCAS results. Yet offering tutors and tinkering with MCAS questions and exploring exceptions and accommodations and two-tier diploma alternatives are little more than political and bureaucratic public relations gimmicks designed to dampen and divide the opposition. We need to be wary of efforts to give MCAS a superficial facelift.