By Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe Columnist
Passage of Question 2 would eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement, not replace it.
Sometimes real-world developments cut through foggy rhetoric and bring needed clarity to much-muddled matters.
That just happened with the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, better known as the MCAS. Those are the exams Massachusetts students take regularly as they progress through school. High school students must demonstrate a basic competence in 10th-grade math, English language arts, and a branch of science in order to graduate.
The latest MCAS results, released Tuesday, are a mixed bag. Some 78 percent of the high school class of 2026 cleared the MCAS threshold on their first try, compared to 82 percent in 2023. About 16,000 students failed at least one subject area.
That’s not the progress one would hope for but neither is it a devastating setback, particularly when you consider that the score required to pass has increased. Failing 10th-grade students will have four more opportunities to take the test during high school. If past experience is any indication, with work and application almost all will eventually clear the hurdle.
Further, these scores show the results-improving importance of uniform statewide standards high school students must meet to graduate: The percentage who achieved or exceeded expectations climbed notably on the 10th-grade tests compared to the eighth-grade exams, which carry no student consequences.
But sadly, the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s reaction to the results demonstrated yet again the dodgy approach the MTA is taking as it pushes a ballot question to end the requirement that students must pass the 10th-grade test to graduate high school.
Consider the statement MTA president Max Page and vice president Deb McCarthy released about the scores. It began this way: “We have long been concerned about the harm caused by the MCAS. That is why educators and public education advocates across the state are fighting to replace the MCAS graduation requirement associated with these tests.”
Reacting to the lackluster scores by faulting the test is akin to blaming your doctor’s blood pressure cuff for your hypertension. But there is a larger problem here. The union is pretending it has a credible replacement for the MCAS. Thus an MTA-financed TV ad that began running this week asserts that Question 2 “replaces the high-stakes MCAS graduation requirement.”
Um, no. Not in any meaningful sense of the word. It eliminates the graduation requirement. Or to put it another way, it abolishes the state’s only uniform graduation standard. There is no replacement instrument or system. Rather, if Question 2 passes, it will be left solely to individual districts and schools to decide whether their students are educationally competent.
That should worry everyone. Back before the state’s landmark 1993 education reform law offered a large new infusion of state dollars in exchange for higher standards and a statewide system of accountability, high school students were regularly awarded diplomas without having the skills necessary to succeed in the economy. That failing did them a profound disservice.
Sadly, however, work readiness doesn’t seem to matter to today’s MTA. Recall that in August 2022, a disdainful Page told Board of Elementary and Secondary Education members that the MTA and they “have a fundamental difference of views of what schools are for” and declared that the board’s “focus on income, on college and career readiness, speaks to a system … tied to the capitalist class and its needs for profit.”
But outside the far-left precincts of academia, work readiness is, and should be, vitally important.
In their statement, Page and McCarthy also declared that, “The fact that MCAS scores from the spring are just now being released demonstrates how the exam is not designed to allow educators and districts to take immediate action to support students.”
That’s nonsense.
“Principals, school districts, and teachers have access to MCAS results well before the school year starts, sometimes as early as June,” said Will Austin, a former teacher and principal who is now CEO of the Boston Schools Fund. “They want educators to have that data so they can prepare for the next school year.”
According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, preliminary results from the 10th-grade English language arts MCAS start to be available to districts in late April. This year, it was on April 24. Over the spring and summer, additional subjects and scores follow, in considerable detail, including individual, student-level results.
Austin, an opponent of Question 2, frames the MTA’s false narrative this way: “Anyone who said this information wasn’t available till Tuesday either is not telling the truth or doesn’t actually know how schools work.”
Either way, it underscores this point: Voters simply can’t trust the truth-trampling MTA as it spends millions to buy at the ballot a policy change it has been unable to secure from usually union-friendly policy makers on Beacon Hill.