In the delivery room of the Mount Desert Island Hospital (MDI) in Bar Harbor, ME, Alisa Nye stopped breathing moments after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl. And then her heart stopped beating.
For six intense minutes the on-duty obstetrics team raced to keep her alive, using chest compressions and a defibrillator. Her pulse returned, only to vanish. The staff did not yield. They used the defibrillator again and got a pulse; they intubated Nye to keep her breathing.
State-mandated tests must by state law be based on a state's official standards. That is why the tests currently given in the Bay State (aka MCAS 2.0) are aligned to Common Core. MCAS 2.0 tests are based on or aligned to the Common Core standards for English language arts and mathematics that were adopted by the state board of education in 2010 and slightly revised by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2016 for the four-year state education plan required by Every Student Succeeds Act.
Despite the similarity in name, the new tests are totally unlike the original Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests. For example, MCAS 2.0 tests have no Open Response test items, which were useful for assessing content-based writing. On the original MCAS tests, there were four Open Response test questions on every test given at every grade level. And, better yet, they were corrected by live teachers, not computers. The state's new four-year plan was submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 for review and approval, in exchange for Title I money to help low-income school districts. Approval by the state legislature and local school committees was not required or obtained for four-year plans that voters in the state also never debated or voted for.
