BOSTON — On the eve of a Board of Education vote, Gov. Deval Patrick's education commissioner, Mitchell Chester, yesterday dismissed as "nonsense" the suggestion that political considerations weighed on his decision to embrace national education standards which could mean the end of MCAS testing in the state.
Minutes later, a political adversary of the governor, Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei, said that Attorney General Martha Coakley should investigate Chester and other education officials' contacts with the Massachusetts Teachers Association, whose political endorsement the governor won last week, shortly before the embrace of national standards was announced.
Passions on both sides of the debate are running hot, as heavy-hitters from previous generations of education policy development dove in yesterday to defend the state's current education system, others dismissed their concerns as politically motivated, and others still urged the Patrick administration to slow the process down.
"One of the key issues of the last few months has been the process that we're engaged in is one that has had minimal public scrutiny and has been quite accelerated," said James Peyser, chairman of the state Board of Education under Gov. Mitt Romney, in a phone interview.
Peyser said he hasn't reviewed the new set of standards — called Common Core standards — "in detail" but worried that it would be a precursor to stepping back from the state's standardized test, the MCAS, which has been used as a barometer to measure student achievement since passage of education reform legislation in 1993.
"While MCAS shouldn't be sacrosanct, if we end up having to change the assessment significantly, it has the potential to create a pretty significant dislocation in the long-term process we've undertaken here to both assess student performance and hold students accountable," he said.
But Chester, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education, dismissed such criticism during a conference call with reporters, as well as a litany of other charges: that the decision to embrace national standards was aimed at appeasing the MTA, that it could weaken state education standards and that it signaled a move away from the MCAS.
Chester said the effort has been thoroughly vetted for "two full years."
"I can't imagine a more deliberate pace," he said, pointing to internal and independent reviews.
Chester said flexibility built into the Common Core standards would be "more than enough" to supplement any areas in which the national standards are weaker than existing state standards. Should the standards be adopted, he said, panels of experts on English language arts and mathematics would convene to determine which areas of the standards need to be supplemented and would produce recommendations by the fall, followed by "professional development session" to help school districts realign their curricula.
As for whether Massachusetts would keep the MCAS, Chester said Massachusetts was participating in a pair of "consortia" to develop a "common assessment" for states implementing the Common Core standards. He said changes to the MCAS, if they occur, would be "relatively minor." For example, he said, "a particular math skill is currently introduced in fourth grade and under the Common Core might be introduced in third grade."
Asked about the suggestion that the Patrick administration backed Common Core standards to woo the Massachusetts Teachers Association - which endorsed Patrick last week - Chester said the decision was "mine, mine alone."
"It's nonsense," he said of the criticism.
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