Fight against MCAS renewed in state suit
The Boston Globe
Anand Vaishnav
January 8, 2003
Five weeks after unsuccessfully using federal courts to launch a legal attack against the MCAS test, six high school seniors yesterday re-filed their lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court, arguing that state education officials illegally enacted the exam as a graduation requirement.
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"There's a lot of egregious evidence in there that shows how the original intent of the education reform law was really changed over the years, and that the Board of Education was no longer concerned about a real, substantive, quality education," said Nadine Cohen, a plaintiffs' lawyer with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association. "They were focused in on just making sure kids pass the two exams."
A Department of Education spokeswoman, Heidi B. Perlman, said state officials will not back off the test, one of the nation's toughest standardized exams, and will file a response in the next few weeks. "We stand by the high standards we've set for students in Massachusetts, and we truly believe what we're doing is what's best for kids," she said.
In September, lawyers filed the federal suit in US District Court in Springfield, which relied heavily on legal precedents. But US District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor declined to hear it, saying the federal courts had limited jurisdiction over a case that centered on alleged violations of Massachusetts law.
A plaintiffs' lawyer, Thomas Frongillo, said the students still might return to federal court if they lose, if the case takes too long to decide, or even if they win. That's because Ponsor retained oversight of the counts that dealt with federal law, specifically that the test discriminated against minorities and limited-English speakers and deprived students of due process because they hadn't been taught the material tested on the MCAS exam. Ponsor urged the parties to return to him if they got bogged down in state court.
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Others say the suit's chief assertions - that the graduation requirement is illegal and that students suffer by not having MCAS tests in other subjects - appear weaker than the sweeping federal lawsuit.
"In their federal case, where they argued along the lines of opportunities to learn having been denied to students, there's probably a stronger case there," said Paul Reville, the executive director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC, a Boston think tank. "But in these areas, the weaknesses of their arguments can be shown."
