MASSP News Center

The Chair of the House Education Committee has scheduled October 9th as the date to address the end-of-course testing issue in Senate Bill 403.

SB 403 was supposed to be a technical clean-up for transfer students through a personal curriculum plan to get access to a high school diploma with less than the MI Merit Standard. MASSP has supported this portion of the bill from the beginning. However, on the floor of the Senate the section requiring the Department of Education to develop model examinations for the MI High School Benchmarks was eliminated. This in effect removed the foundation to the Merit Standard – equal playing field. Remember, Algebra I would be the same from district to district?

MASSP will be testifying before the committee that this section needs to be put back in place. In a recent editorial in the Detroit News MASSP is quoted to say, “The assumption is, teachers are all equal. They’re not all equal,” says Jim Ballard, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals. “We don’t know if teachers are teaching up to the level of the state benchmarks without these assessments. The teachers don’t even know if they’re on target.”

Read the full article.