MCAS data helps evaluate health of education

There are different ways to peel an onion. The New Bedford MCAS scores, rather than a cloud, are stars that could guide our future and the improvement of our educational system.

Education, like medicine, should rely on the scientific approach. The hypothetical, deductive model is at the core of science.

In medicine, we use subjective data — the patient complains of chest pain which leads us to formulate the hypothesis that the patient could be having a myocardial infarction, and objective data — an EKG that leads us to the deduction of the diagnosis of a heart attack, which is confirmed, or not, by the EKG.

The MCAS is to the teacher as the EKG is to the internist. The differential results found in our MCAS data will allow us to analytically discriminate between good schools, good teachers and best practices and those not as good. By doing this, we could select the best teachers and their best practices to help their peers who are not performing as well.

This is the most powerful tool that we could use to guide our corrective action that will lead us to improve and, at least, be at par with the state results.

As early as this fall, the new regulations for teachers' evaluation will be in place for Level 4 New Bedford School District. The MCAS results will be at the center of the rubric of the teacher evaluation.

It is encouraging to hear teachers, headmasters and principals praise the usefulness of objective measurement to guide our actions. This is the time for change. We need to discard the prevailing negative attitude toward objective data and testing.

Guillermo Gonzalez M.D.

New Bedford