Kids who have seemingly spent the better part of the last month sledding through snow days will almost certainly grumble when they find themselves in class during late June. But teachers and school administrators have cause for concern much earlier. The MCAS standardized tests are right around the corner, and the snow has cut into students’ preparation time.
Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell D. Chester has announced that the state will be offering schools the opportunity to postpone upcoming test dates. School administrators should recognize that snow days may be putting some students at a disadvantage and take Chester up on his offer.
The amount of school lost due to the winter weather has been nearly unprecedented. Boston has lost a total of eight school days so far, seven of which have been attributed to the snow. Many other districts in the state are not far behind — the majority have lost at least five days. To compensate, teachers have scrambled to find ways to snow-proof their lessons, from blizzard bags of work that students can do at home to the online library that Boston Public Schools created.
But none of those solutions can replace the in-person teaching required for effective test preparation, and it’s unfair to judge students based on tests that they weren’t given time to study for. The same goes for teachers and principals. MCAS scores are a key metric in determining a school’s effectiveness — and giving educators less time to work with their students will only skew the data, especially when it is compared to previous years with much milder winters.
Schools need to contact the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by the end of February if they want to push back the test dates for the upcoming MCAS and PARCC tests. Rearranging the schedule this far into the school year will undoubtedly cause headaches, but all districts should seriously consider doing so. A mild disruption now is far better than the havoc that artificially low test scores will have on both school rankings and student graduation requirements.
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