Vote no on ballot Question 2. We need the MCAS graduation requirement.
The BBJ Editorial Board
It’s been said that Massachusetts’ most valuable natural resource is our highly educated workforce. It’s why global companies in all sectors seeking an innovative edge are willing to pay top-dollar to set up a Boston-area office. And it’s what’s helped the Bay State’s economy recover from recessions faster than the rest of the country multiple times over the past three decades.
It’s also why, if we want to maintain our economic strength for the next few decades, we need to ensure that our high school graduates achieve a uniform minimum level of education, whether they attend school in Boston or Lexington. The best way to do that is to vote no on ballot Question 2, and support keeping the MCAS as a graduation requirement.
The driving force behind the effort to remove the requirement to pass the 10th-grade MCAS test in order to graduate from any public high school in the state is the Massachusetts Teachers Association. The teachers union argues that the MCAS graduation requirement places a “crushing stress” on students, and that "a standardized test … can’t fully measure whether a student has learned what they need to succeed in life.”We agree that the MCAS test causes students stress, and we also agree that it’s not a complete measure of a student’s readiness for life after school. But neither of those factors are a reason to jettison the only statewide measure of what a Massachusetts public high school student ought to know before graduating.
Despite what the union would have you believe, very few students who complete all the other requirements for graduating high school fail the MCAS exam. And students who do fail it can retake the test several times. For those students who have truly learned the required material but who are not good test-takers, options already exist that allow them to complete other work to demonstrate their educational proficiency. Lastly, there already are processes in place to appeal a failing MCAS grade.
The fact is, we need a statewide standard for graduation. Prior to the 1993 education reform law, which went into effect in 2003, standards varied greatly across the state. The MCAS, while not perfect, addressed that inconsistency, and in the years since the test was created, millions of dollars have been invested to help underperforming school districts improve. Many of those schools have been in low-income or minority-majority neighborhoods, and without the MCAS, you could argue that Massachusetts would have an even wider degree of economic and racial equity.
At a time when the workforce is already facing an extremely high cost of living, long commuting times and unfriendly tax policies, removing the MCAS as a graduation requirement just gives employers one more reason to consider expanding elsewhere. Now is not the time to send the signal that Massachusetts is lowering our educational standards. We simply can’t afford to do that.
Passage of Question 2 will ultimately harm students and school districts and will weaken the state’s greatest economic strength. We urge the business community to get more vocal about this issue, and we recommend that everyone vote no.