We are now a month away from MCAS season, and I urge readers to learn more about the Thrive Act, which would end the MCAS as a graduation requirement, would end district receivership, and would establish a commission to develop an assessment system that actually serves teaching and learning. You can learn more about the Thrive Act here: massteacher.org/current-initiatives/legislative-action/thrive-act.

While most attention has been given to the harm the MCAS causes high school students, the MCAS is offered every year, grades three through eight, and they are doing great harm throughout the system, reducing the meaning and goal of education to scoring well on a test. I want to share a few of my concerns about the harm that this testing focus brings to all of our students, even those who score well.

High-stakes standardized tests are harmful to many children who come away thinking they are failures because they don’t score well on the tests, even if they have done excellent work all year long in their classes. This particularly harms children of color, second language learners, children with special needs, and those who simply do not test well.

Scores on the tests are linked to ZIP codes. On average, children from wealthier neighborhoods and school districts score higher on the tests. The tests reflect wealth and privilege more than teaching and learning.

The tests take away local control: More and more decision-making is done by those who don’t know the children, the communities, or the schools. Those who know the children best have less to say about how to best support them as learners.

There is no evidence that the tests lead to children receiving a better education. None. The government keeps insisting that we need data-based decision–making but ignores its own data that show the testing policy is a failure.

The tests are culturally and racially biased, an outgrowth of the eugenics movement, which claimed that one race was better than all the others and created instruments to prove it.

The MCAS measures one small slice of what we call intelligence and ignores the rest. Consider someone who scores poorly on the tests but who can take an engine apart and put it back together in working condition. Are they less intelligent than someone who scores well on a test and can’t change a light bulb? I scored well on tests and you would not want me working on your car or plumbing.

The curriculum is being narrowed to focus on test preparation, which means that our children are becoming less well educated. They get less social studies, less hands-on science, less art, less of anything that is not tested, which leaves them less prepared than they were before the curriculum was narrowed in favor of test preparation.

It also means that students are getting less of what actually excites and engages them in their education. Fewer electives, fewer arts, fewer hands-on experiences, fewer field trips. We have moved children from a love of learning to a fear of failure, and that actually works against learning.

Our testing obsession is driving many potentially excellent teachers from the field because they are not willing to work in a test- and punishment-driven system.

The state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on testing-related expenses, which means it has less money available to actually serve the needs of their students, so we are paying more to give our students a poorer education, which may be moving us closer to privatizing education, which would make big business very happy.

The tests are a simplistic response to a complex problem. Raising scores sounds good but does nothing to help children become better educated, healthier, and more able to live well in the world. That would take fundamental changes: reducing inequality, and making sure children are fed and clothed and housed, and are coming to school ready and able to learn. An actual solution is complex and involves actually dealing with real issues rather than pretending to do something through this testing obsession.

Massachusetts is one of only eight states still using tests as a graduation requirement, a policy that harms everyone in the system. It is up to us to apply pressure to the Massachusetts Legislature to change this policy. Contact your legislators and urge them to support the Thrive Act.

Doug Selwyn of Greenfield is a retired educator and a member of the education task force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution.