STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, APRIL 23, 2019 (State House News Service) – State education officials plan to bring in outside researchers to analyze this year’s MCAS test results for any “unintended consequences” of a question on the 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” that sparked student concerns and calls for the test as a whole to be disregarded.
Five groups — the Mass. Teachers Association, the Boston Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP — this month called on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to invalidate this year’s English language arts exam, saying students were shaken by a question that asked them to write a journal entry from the perspective of a character the groups said is “openly racist and betrays slaves trying to escape.”
The teachers’ unions and advocacy groups issued their press release on April 3, and state education officials later that day publicly released a letter from Riley that he had sent three days earlier suggesting that educators no longer administer the question.