IN 1848, Horace Mann, the first Massachusetts secretary of education, famously proclaimed education to be “the great equalizer of the conditions of men,” a powerful declaration of the belief that schools could help erase the economic and social disparities of birth and social class. More than 170 years later, voters are facing sharply conflicting arguments over whether a central pillar of state education policy is working to advance or undermine that lofty goal.
When the Massachusetts Education Reform Act was passed 31 years ago, it set in motion the biggest changes to public education in the state in a century. The law established a set of curriculum goals and standards for meeting them, backed by a new system of accountability that would measure student achievement using a set of standardized, statewide assessments, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. The exams included a 10th grade test in math and English that students must pass to receive a high school diploma. Along with the new standards and accountability came a huge infusion of new state funding to school districts, much of it directed to lower-income communities that long struggled to fund their classrooms and schools adequately.
While the goal was to improve education for all students across the Commonwealth, it was widely understood that the driving force behind the 1993 law was the recognition that too many students from marginalized backgrounds were being left behind in a public education system that tolerated vast disparities in achievement, with lots of low-income students and students of color allowed to graduate without gaining the skills needed for college or career success.
Three decades later, as voters face a statewide ballot question on Tuesday asking whether Massachusetts should scrap the MCAS graduation requirement at the heart of that accountability system, both sides agree that the state’s most vulnerable students remain at the center of the debate. But they could not be more at odds in framing what the graduation test means for those students and the effort to ensure that all students are prepared for post-secondary success.
“Today I speak to you not only from a pulpit of faith but also from the platform of education, equity, and justice,” Rev. Willie Bodrick II, senior pastor at the 12th Baptist Church in Roxbury, told state lawmakers at a hearing in March on the proposed ballot question. “We must confront an enduring barrier in our education system – the MCAS exam tied to the high school graduation requirement,” said Bodrick, who also serves as president of the Boston Network for Black Student Achievement and is a member of the Boston Public Schools Opportunity and Achievement Gap Task Force. “This single high-stakes test has become a gatekeeper, one that too often locks out our most vulnerable students, those who are Black and brown, and low-income students, those who are grappling with language barriers, and those who are dealing with disabilities.”
Following Bodrick’s testimony, the committee heard from Jeff Howard, a Black social psychologist who has worked in K-12 education for 40 years and served on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2008 to 2012. His message could not have been more different.
“A rigorous graduation requirement is a powerful expression of our belief in their capabilities,” Howard said of the signal the test sends to students. “Lowering the standard or diluting it, or removing the force of it by saying that it’s no longer a high-stakes assessment is also a communication of expectations to children. It can be taken as an expression of our doubts in their capabilities – or at least doubts in the capabilities of some of them.” Maintaining the graduation test, he said, is “a means for promoting social and economic equality – contrary to what we’ve heard in some of the previous testimony.”
MCAS will not go away if Question 2 passes. Federal law requires testing in third through eighth grade and once in high school, so students will continue to take the tests, but passing the 10th grade exam in math, English, and science (which was later added) will no longer be required to graduate from high school.
The state’s 1993 reform law, which ushered in the MCAS era, came after a decade of growing attention to the vast disparities in student outcomes and expectations of those from different backgrounds. Paul Reville, who was part of the push in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Massachusetts to address what had been termed a national crisis in public education, said there had been little sense of urgency over the status quo.
“We had basic skills tests in Massachusetts,” Reville, who later served as education secretary under Gov. Deval Patrick, told the legislative hearing in March. “And when results came out that had communities and subgroups performing at different levels, people just shrugged their shoulders. Performance didn’t actually matter.”
The new accountability system created under the education reform law, which paired curriculum frameworks and standards with the MCAS testing system, was aimed at making performance matter and shining a spotlight on gaps in performance among districts and among various student subgroups.
Supporters say it has driven big gains across the board in student achievement, as Massachusetts moved from just above the national average in the ranking of states to at or near the top in math and reading scores. If the graduation requirement is eliminated, they say, students will no longer have the same incentive to master the skills and knowledge needed to pass it and teachers won’t have the same pressure to ensure that they do so.
What’s more, since there are no specific high school course requirements mandated by the state, scrapping the graduation test would leave Massachusetts one of only two states in the country with no state-established graduation requirements. Critics say that would mean different standards for receiving a diploma across the state’s more than 300 school districts.
Critics of the testing regime and high-stakes graduation requirement credit the state’s achievement gains to the millions of dollars in new funding the reform law also brought to previously under-resourced schools. Meanwhile, they say the focus on MCAS testing and the high-stakes graduation requirement has diminished students’ classroom experience.
“We know the harms of MCAS,” said Bodrick, the Roxbury minister, at the legislative hearing earlier this year. “It detracts from the richness of education. It actually narrows the curriculum, and it fosters an environment where teaching to the test prevails over nurturing critical thinking and creativity that education should provide. It’s not an accurate reflection of a student’s journey, and it’s definitely not an accurate reflection of their potential,” he said of the test scores.
Research from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute suggests MCAS scores, in fact, do predict student potential – as measured by college completion rates and long-term earnings. Students earning higher scores on the test go on to complete four-year college degrees at higher rates and have higher labor market earnings at age 30 than do those with lower scores.
While MCAS critics argue that test scores mainly reflect student ZIP codes – and their socioeconomic background – the Brown researchers sought to account for that by comparing the long-term earnings of students who had the same 8th grade scores and demographic characteristics, but different 10th grades scores. Those who went on to get higher 10th grade scores had significantly higher earnings at age 30, suggesting a meaningful long-term impact from the learning gains they made in their early high school years.
For all the debate over the graduation requirement, nearly all high school students of all backgrounds ultimately pass the test, which they can take up to five times. However, roughly 700 students a year, or about 1 percent of the approximately 65,000 high school seniors each year, are denied a diploma after meeting all local requirements of their district but failing to pass MCAS. About 85 percent of these students are English language learners or students with disabilities, according to the Brown researchers.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the force and funding behind the ballot question, has focused on the harmful effects the union says the graduation test is having on students and classroom instruction. But the effort to end the use of MCAS as a high-stakes graduation requirement is part of a broader pushback the union has been waging over the last decade against education reform initiatives.
Deb McCarthy, the MTA vice president, taught 5th grade in Hull for 25 years before leaving the classroom to take on a leadership role in the union. In her early years at the Lillian M. Jacobs School in the mid-1990s, McCarthy said, she embraced the role standardized testing could play. “I was known as the MCAS guru,” she said. “I really believed in the promise and intent of it. But that is not the impact.”
McCarthy said her view shifted as she saw the impact of testing on English learners and students with learning disabilities that made it difficult for them to do well on the exam, despite having strong academic skills. But she said the backlash against testing has also been prompted by efforts to tie teacher evaluations to test scores and a 2010 state law that allowed districts to put into state receivership based on chronically low achievement scores.
Before deciding to take the MCAS question to the ballot, the MTA had been pushing legislation on Beacon Hill that would not only end the graduation requirement but also remove the state authority to put districts into receivership and create a commission to revamp the state assessment system.
“This is part of a larger agenda,” said Ed Lambert, the executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and a strong supporter of maintaining the graduation test. “From our perspective, this is about unraveling all the progress that we’ve made over the last 30 years.”
The business organization played a central role in shaping and generating support for the 1993 reform law. At the time, Lambert was a state representative from Fall River and sat on the Legislature’s education committee that hammered out the bill. He said the MTA’s effort to end the graduation requirement and – the backlash against testing and the accountability system more generally – has benefitted from the long stretch of time since the pre-1993 days when there was little focus on student achievement disparities. “They’re trying to take advantage of some form of collective amnesia that has us forget what the situation was 30 years ago,” said Lambert.
The education reform movement initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support. The 1993 reform law had the backing of Republican Gov. Bill Weld and Democratic leaders of the Legislature. Ted Kennedy worked closely with President George W. Bush to pass the federal No Child Left Behind law in 2001. And some of the more ambitious subsequent reforms were championed by Democrats – notably, Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, and Gov. Patrick who signed the 2010 Massachusetts giving the state authority to take control of low-performing districts.
In more recent years, however, Democrats have become divided, with many losing faith in the standards and accountability effort. Both of the state’s Democratic US senators have come out in favor of Question 2, as have four of the state’s nine US House members.
But on Beacon Hill, where a succession of governors and legislative leaders have maintained support over the years for the key elements of the state’s 1993 education law, Gov. Maura Healey, Senate President Karen Spilka, and House Speaker Ron Mariano have all said the graduation test is vital to state education policy and declared their opposition to the ballot question.
The state’s school superintendents have tried to stake out a middle ground in a debate that has come down to a binary choice. In a September letter to state leaders, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents said it opposed the ballot question. “If Question 2 were to pass, there would be no standard by which every student in Massachusetts demonstrates readiness to graduate, which will inevitably exacerbate inequity among marginalized student groups,” the letter said. At the same time, the group reiterated in a statement that it has long called for the state to “move beyond MCAS as the sole measure of student learning.” The group called for “a public process to identify a broader set of statewide graduation standards – regardless of the outcome of Question 2.”
“Unfortunately, Question 2 presents only two options – the current statewide graduation requirement, or no statewide standard at all,” said the group’s executive director, Mary Bourque, a former superintendent in Chelsea. “Given those choices, we advocate for the former.”
The most recent polls show Question 2 with majority support. If it passes, however, that may not be the end of the decades of debate over graduation standards. The Legislature is free to tinker with laws passed by voters, or repeal them altogether. If the yes side prevails, Spilka and Marino have both suggested they may initiate discussions aimed at crafting some kind of new statewide assessment to use in place of the 10th grade test.
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