Should vocational students who fail the MCAS nevertheless be allowed to graduate? Some advocates think so and, along with groups such as the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrator, have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts:
Even as vocational schools improve their scores and reduce failures to the single digits, advocates hope to change the law through the courts so that tech students are evaluated as much or more on their trade skills than on MCAS.
"There are other kinds of talents we want to celebrate," said Charles Lyons, superintendent of Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in Billerica which, like Nashoba Tech, dramatically cut its failure rates. "A lot of our kids learn by application rather than memorization. That's why many are turned off to chalkboard education."
Lyons supports a class-action lawsuit that would allow schools to graduate vocational students who fail MCAS provided they demonstrate proficiency in their trade. Such students would be presented with a "certificate of occupational proficiency."
On the one hand, the vocational schools claim that their students are learning a trade, and thus deserve an exemption. To me, that claim carries more weight than their second reason, which is that the MCAS is "unfair" to votech schools because such schools have more "low-income and special-needs students." The lower-income students, at least, are the ones who are most in need of education and were the students in mind when NCLB was implemented. Wouldn't the MCAS serve at least as a reminder to vocational schools that, in this day and age, a student with a shoddy education in math and English is going to be at a disadvantage even if the student is good with his hands, or has learned a specific trade?
Some schools seem to have taken up the challenge and devote more time to academics (and to MCAS prep):
At Shawsheen, 300 students took the test last spring, 88 of whom are considered of special needs. Yet their proficiency in English language arts jumped since last year from 34 to 54 percent while math proficiency more than doubled from 14 to 35. Meanwhile, failures declined from 13 to 4 percent in English and from 41 to 18 in math...
Voke students across the state improved in English and math and saw failure rates drop.
Posted by kswygert at September 29, 2003 02:40 PM