Massachusetts voters to consider ditching high school graduation requirements

It’s not often that voters get to weigh in on the standardized tests that have become a mainstay of American public schools this century, but Massachusetts residents will get that chance in this November’s elections.

Specifically, they will decide whether passing the standardized tests should be a graduation requirement for high school students. If Question 2 is approved, high schools would still administer the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, tests to comply with federal law for evaluation of teachers and schools. But kids would no longer have to pass the tests in order to receive a diploma.

Every year, roughly 700 students—about 1% of Massachusetts public school seniors—do not graduate from high school because they failed the tests. In 2019, for example, 702 did not get a diploma; 281 of them were English language learners and 402 were students with disabilities.

The ballot measure pits teachers unions trying to curb the use of high stakes testing against Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, other state officials and business groups who say the MCAS is the best way to hold schools and kids accountable to the same standards across the commonwealth.

“This will be a temperature check on the degree to which there is a divide between policy elites and the public” on standardized testing, said Jack Schneider, an education professor and director of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “My sense is that the public has grown weary of the central role of standardized tests and test-based accountability for the education system.”

The ballot measure comes more than two decades after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated regular testing for most students beyond third grade. Federal lawmakers scaled back some of the more controversial elements of that law in 2015, but standardized testing remains a common feature in classrooms across the country.

The tide, though, has turned against exit exams for high school students. Massachusetts is one of only eight states that currently requires students to pass a test to get a diploma. Just 10 years ago, more than half of states had a test requirement.

The fact that Massachusetts requires a standardized test for graduation gives teachers unions a unique chance to come after the ubiquitous exams that they wouldn’t have in other states, said Schneider, who is a critic of standardized testing. “You couldn’t launch an assault against standardized testing in other states because it’s required by federal law, and the conversation ends there,” he said. “Whereas here, … you can mount an assault on it as a graduation requirement that undermines MCAS more broadly and sets the stage for a bigger fight of the role of standardized testing in schools.”

Supporters of the Massachusetts test mandate say high school graduation rates have increased and dropout rates have decreased since Massachusetts first instituted the test-based graduation requirement in 2003. That’s the opposite of what critics predicted would happen at the time.

“Massachusetts has the best public schools in the country because of our high standards, not in spite of them,” Healey told reporters recently. “Question 2, in our view, would eliminate a tool that we know works, in terms of our ability to assess how our young people are doing.”

Striking a Balance

The testing requirement for graduation was part of a bipartisan compromise struck by Massachusetts lawmakers in 1993. Legislators developed goals and standards for schools to follow, while also increasing per-student spending. For the first time, the law required students to pass a statewide test showing they met 10th grade standards. Eventually, state officials decided that the MCAS would be that test.

But the deal still left Massachusetts’ 300 school districts in charge of major policy decisions, including graduation requirements beyond passing the test and completing four years of gym class.

There are statewide recommendations, but “each district can adopt some or all of those guidelines,” said Dominic Slowey, a spokesperson for the Protect Our Kids’ Future: Vote No on 2 campaign. “That’s why you wind up with such an uneven, imbalanced set of standards across the state.”

Slowey pointed to an analysis from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that showed the disparity. To graduate, one school district the department looked at requires an overall number of credits or the equivalent of four years’ worth of courses, including passing four years of English, two years of U.S. history and physical education. Another district requires four years of English, four years of math, three years of Spanish, three years of science, two and a half years of computer science, three years of history, an arts class, 80 hours of extracurricular activities and 40 hours of community service.

Deb McCarthy, vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and a spokesperson for the Yes on 2 campaign, said the state still has a huge impact on what gets taught in Massachusetts schools.

“That is such a false narrative,” said McCarthy, who taught fifth graders in the small town of Hull for 25 years. “As an educator, I have no agency or autonomy. I have to teach to the standards. My lesson plans need to be created to the standards. We purchase the curriculum that has the Massachusetts standards embedded in these textbooks. When you write your lesson plan, it says, ‘This is Standard. 5.2’ which is math and dividing fractions. We have standard-based report cards.”

Administrators also conduct unannounced walk-throughs of classes for every teacher every year to make sure their lessons adhere to their standards, she said.

“There seems to be a real disconnect between what actually happens in our classroom with these highly educated professionals and what folks on Beacon Hill [in the state legislature] think we do,” she said.

McCarthy said she opposes the use of MCAS, particularly as a graduation requirement, because the people who struggle to pass it are disproportionately English language learners, people with disabilities and people in under-resourced schools. That amounts to a “repetitive harm to a certain learning style,” she said.

McCarthy also worries that test scores reflect the demographics of the communities where people live rather than their ability as students.

“The MCAS score is simply a measure of the ZIP code,” she said. “There’s a direct correlation. Some under-resourced communities have 50% turnover [of teachers]. They don’t have positions filled. They don’t have the rich, rigorous coursework. They don’t have interpreters. They don’t have the foreign language classes. And yet, we want to hold [students] accountable for the metrics of this one-time test score.”

The standardized tests also puts public schools at a disadvantage to private and parochial schools, McCarthy said, because students in private schools don’t have to pass the test to graduate.

“The business community will say we have to have the MCAS because we need to know that these are teaching the basic skills that students need,” she said. “But I know of not one business, when a student graduates from Boston College High School, that says, ‘I’m not going to hire you. Your parents have spent $250,000 over for years for the No. 1 prep school in the country, but I’m not going to hire you because you don’t have an MCAS score.’”

Slowey, from the Vote No on 2 campaign, acknowledged that people using private schools is “one of the built-in inequities in society.”

“That’s why we think that we need to make the public schools as good as they can be,” he said, “because the parents who can afford it will just send their kids to private schools.”

But Slowey also said that students who initially fail the MCAS can retake the test up to four times. They can use “alternative pathways” with their district to show they have mastered the subject of the MCAS in different ways. And they can appeal their scores to the state.

Meanwhile, the state has rolled out math and science exams in Spanish and plans to add more languages, although the English portion of the test remains in English, he said.

Waning Popularity of Exit Exams

Harry Feder, the executive director of FairTest, a group funded in part by teachers unions that seeks to eliminate bias in standardized tests, said states started to opt out of high school exit exams about a decade ago.

The shift came both as a backlash to the testing regime required by No Child Left Behind and growing concern about the impact of such requirements on English language learners. California lawmakers passed legislation in 2015 eliminating the state’s exit exam, and many other states quickly followed suit.

The only states that still require exit exams to get a high school diploma are Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. But that list could soon grow shorter as officials in both New York and New Jersey have started reconsidering their policies, Feder said.

Meanwhile, other states are creating different “pathways to graduation” that students can choose between. In Ohio, students can earn “badges” or certificates that show they are proficient in different skills that would make them ready for life after high school. New Mexico is letting school districts create capstone projects for kids, Feder said.

“There are lots of better ways to determine whether a kid is so-called ‘college and career ready’ than just relying on tests they take for two hours or that don’t even cover most of the material that they’ve either allegedly learned or are supposed to know, right?” Feder said. “It’s very much a snapshot in time.”

If the MCAS goes away as a graduation requirement, “that doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly the Wild West” with no requirements for students other than to take gym class, he said.

“If you go to a poor, working-class town like Lowell and then you go to a Boston suburb like Lexington or Brookline, those schools are different, even though they all take the MCAS,” Feder added. “It’s a false argument to say that MCAS at least holds the worst districts to a minimum standard, because maybe those districts would actually do something better than trying to get their kids to pass the MCAS. They could try to, let’s say, make sure their kids are not absent from school.”

Schneider of the Center for Education Policy said it was “disingenuous” for supporters of the standardized test to cite equity as their goal, when the resources available to students across the state vary so widely.

“What would be humane would be to say, ‘OK, we used standardized tests as a diagnostic to identify your trajectory, and we see that you are on a trajectory that might prevent you from having the knowledge and skills that we want everybody to have before they graduate. We’re going to provide intensive resources,’” he said.

“The high school diploma is the basic entry level in our economy,” Schneider said. It’s one thing for standardized tests to be used to evaluate schools, he continued, “but it’s another thing to say, ‘If your school doesn’t meet the state’s definition of adequacy as measured by these test scores, then students will be denied diplomas and may God have mercy on their souls.’”