Special Report: Should Massachusetts voters abolish MCAS testing requirement?
by Colin Hogan 9 October 2024
NEW BEDFORD — When Massachusetts voters fill out their ballots, they’ll have direct control over the future of education. Question 2 on November’s statewide ballot asks whether the commonwealth should remove the requirement that students achieve a certain test score before they graduate.
Voting ‘yes’ means that Massachusetts will join most other states and remove standardized tests as a graduation requirement. But it also means there won’t be any statewide graduation requirements left, and that every one of Massachusetts’ 351 districts will have to set and abide by its own graduation standards.
Voting “no” means that the common, baseline standard for measuring achievement in Massachusetts will remain relevant for students. The MCAS tests aren’t going anywhere, no matter what happens, but a “no” vote ensures the current testing system plays a role in how students earn a diploma.
New Bedford has found itself a hotbed of debate over Question 2. The city was among the most active in gathering signatures for the ballot proposal, local organizers said. Both the City Council and School Committee supported resolutions calling for the end of the MCAS requirement.
More than 40% of New Bedford students needed to retake the 10th-grade MCAS, required for graduation, in a recent year. State data also shows that the MCAS testing requirements were an obstacle to graduation for many students in New Bedford, especially for English learners and students with disabilities.
Statewide, the respective campaigns behind these initiatives have been fierce and expensive. The issue isn’t clearly divided between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, or even within education activist circles. Parents groups, teachers groups, and their usually-aligned legislators don’t all fall in the same camps — which leaves voters to make up their own minds.
And some confusion has persisted. Voters are not deciding whether to fully eliminate MCAS tests. The standardized tests have been around since 1998 and will continue to be an important part of how the state oversees its schools and affirms that students from all geographic, ethnic, and ability backgrounds are learning — the same way it uses the tests in grades three through eight. The question is whether passing the 10th grade tests is necessary for graduation.
Leaders on both sides of the question have made sweeping appeals about the nature of education — whether a society should hold to a common standard, and whether multiple-choice tests deserve to be that standard — while also acknowledging that, in reality, the question most pertinently affects those students for whom graduation is not assured. This year, more than 16,000 Massachusetts students failed to pass their 10th grade MCAS tests, out of roughly 70,000 10th-graders, according to the Boston Globe.
In Massachusetts, the statewide graduation rate has hovered at about 90% for several years. In some tony suburbs, well-off seaside towns, and even vocational schools, the graduation rates are as much as 100%. Yet for students who recently arrived as immigrants or for those with learning or other disabilities, graduation rates are much lower — 76% for students with disabilities and 67% for English learners.
For these reasons, the Question 2 debate is important for New Bedford. Compared to the rest of the state, the old fishing port has more than double the rate of English learners and 15% more students with disabilities.
The city’s recently rising graduation rate has been the subject of both praise and scrutiny.
“This has been one of the most dramatic improvements in a major urban high school anywhere in America,” said Mayor Jon Mitchell referencing the graduation rate bump in a 2022 State of the City address. Former superintendent Thomas Anderson called rising graduation rates his signature New Bedford achievement.
But the dropout rates in New Bedford have remained doggedly high. In 2023, New Bedford’s dropout rate was 4.2%, or double the state average. In 2022, Fall River and New Bedford had the highest and second-highest dropout rates among Massachusetts’ 25 largest school districts, respectively — both roughly triple the state average.
Digging into New Bedford’s data about graduation, dropouts, and test scores can pressure-test many claims surrounding Question 2. Do the “no” advocates — who want to keep the MCAS requirement — have evidence that common expectations have helped vulnerable students prepare for life after graduation? Are the “yes” advocates — who want the MCAS requirement gone — correct when they say that testing unfairly keeps those same kids from a diploma they would otherwise earn?
The answers are urgent in New Bedford, where the failure rates on this year’s MCAS exams were higher than in years past — including a 42% failure rate on the 10th-grade science test that was among the highest in the state.
Or, does this referendum pose the right question at all?
‘Yes on 2’ campaign says some students suffer more under MCAS
The driving force behind the ballot question has been Massachusetts’ largest teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, known as the MTA. When the Legislature failed to pass a bill known as the Thrive Act that would have eliminated the MCAS requirement, the MTA put its extensive machinery to work: gathering more than 170,000 signatures so that voters could decide the issue for themselves.
“We’ve been working hard for years on this; we just decided that we need to get our message out to the people,” said Max Page, president of the MTA. “This really hits home for a lot of parents and community members.”
Already the MTA’s “Yes on 2” initiative has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce and air 30-second advertisements featuring its member teachers. Their message is ultimately that tests are not good for kids, and that incentives to teach to the test are bad for teachers, students, and schools alike.
Educators say that the tests have made all Massachusetts students and classrooms overemphasize testing. Cindy Roy, an active MTA member who also runs the New Bedford Committee to Save Our Schools, described the effects of MCAS as “rippl[ing] through every grade level, affecting what was taught, how it was taught, and how students needed to demonstrate that they understood what was being taught,” in an essay published in the Boston Globe.
The “Yes on 2” website adds that the tests have “stack[ed] the deck against students of color, English language learners, and those with learning disabilities.”
The focus on these groups of minority students comes because “nearly all of those who fail [the MCAS tests] are English learners, students with disabilities, and/or students with inadequate course preparation,” according to a report from Brown University’s Annenberg Center earlier this year. On the 10th-grade English tests included in 15 years of analyzed data, the report found 84% of failing students belonged to one of these categories.
New Bedford feels these trends acutely. State data shows that the MCAS testing requirement is an obstacle to graduation for students here.
More than 40% of New Bedford students needed to retake the 10th-grade MCAS at least once in the 2019 school year, according to data The New Bedford Light has obtained from the state department of education. (2019 data is the most recent that the state provided.) For English learners and students with disabilities, retake rates were much higher.
Nearly 80% of English learners, for example, could not pass the MCAS test on their first attempt. For students with disabilities, it was almost 90%. Altogether, these students constituted the vast majority of the New Bedford population who could not pass the MCAS test in multiple attempts or on appeal — representing 89% of New Bedford’s non-passers that year.
MCAS could play a role for New Bedford students who decide to drop out. Data from the 2022 school year — the same year Mayor Mitchell praised the graduation turnaround — showed that dropout rates were spiking in 11th grade. That’s the year when students who failed the MCAS would have to sit again for their retakes, and could be discouraging to many students. But, a competing explanation may be that many students elect to start working when they turn 16, which happens for many students during their junior year. Many young people in New Bedford, especially children of immigrants, work to help support their families.
The rise in New Bedford’s graduation rate can’t be distilled to a single cause, but the peak of the trend occurred in 2020, when MCAS tests were canceled due to the pandemic and the four-year graduation rate jumped to 81% (as recently as 2018, the graduation rate was 58%). Over the same time period as that increase, New Bedford also received historic funding from a new state education formula that distributes benefits more progressively, which gave the district more resources to support students both inside and outside the classroom.
Concerns about testing have also been cited when discussing the abnormally high rate of homeschooling in New Bedford — another way that students were leaving the district to potentially avoid the test.
While each individual student’s journey is complex, the data does show that the MCAS testing requirement is an obstacle to graduation for students in New Bedford, and disproportionately so for those students who are English learners or students with disabilities.
Counterargument: “No on 2” says a common standard helps ensure equality
Supporters of the “No on 2” campaign — while also including teachers, parents, and education officials — tend to include many more business groups and chambers of commerce, who say that students need high standards to ensure competitiveness in the workplace.
It also has the support of the highest education brass in the state, including Gov. Maura Healey, Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, and the president of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, Armand Pires. From their perspective, Pires said, removing MCAS “would undermine the high standards that are the cornerstone of Massachusetts’ successful work in education reform over the past 30 years.” Indeed, Massachusetts still lays claim to having the best schools in the country, and Pires said, “We believe it is critical for the commonwealth to have a statewide standard for earning a high school diploma.”
Gov. Healey has not been as vocal on the subject, but she told WBUR’s Radio Boston: “I’m just going to call it as I see it … in my judgment, I think it’s very important that we retain MCAS.”
Supporters say a statewide graduation requirement is critical to ensuring fairness, so that all students get the resources and attention they deserve. “Removing a common, high standard is unfair to children, families, and educators,” wrote Will Austin, a former charter school teacher who now leads the Boston Schools Fund, a research and advocacy group. Removing the statewide requirement, Austin said, “will result in different expectations across districts and schools and no reliable data to ensure all children are prepared for college and career. That is a recipe for inequity.”
Research does show that MCAS tests provide solid information about students’ preparedness for college and career. The same report from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that “MCAS scores predict longer-term educational attainments and labor market success, above and beyond typical markers of student advantage or other measures of student performance like high-school grades.” The study found this was true for students of all demographics — including those from different race and poverty backgrounds.
Noteworthy is that the Annenberg Center report, like “No on 2” advocates, says that learning is the goal, not teaching to the tests: “We should be clear — higher MCAS scores are not the goal; real gains in students’ underlying capacities and skills are.” Their report found that these statewide assessments are, in fact, a good way to measure that learning.
On the contrary, grades and GPA are not as strong a measure. Since 2011, the authors found, grade inflation has increased in Massachusetts schools. During the pandemic, grades increased even faster while attendance and test scores went down. This led to a stark proclamation: “If families interpret a high-school diploma as a signal of college readiness, they may be mistaken,” the report said.
In New Bedford, the implication may be that special education students, or other groups who have trouble passing MCAS tests, need more academic support.
In other words, the low MCAS scores and graduation rates for New Bedford’s special education students might not indicate a problem with the test — but a need to revamp the education these students receive.
A New Bedford Light analysis of graduation rates of special education students across Massachusetts found that some districts with similarly sized or bigger special education populations — like Lowell, Worcester and Boston — achieve better graduation rates than New Bedford among these students.
“We need to make sure that [cities like] Fall River and New Bedford get much more state help,” said Ed Lambert, former Fall River mayor and a “No on 2” advocate with the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “The solution is not to get rid of the test.”
Some advocates for keeping the MCAS test have pointed out that to “pass” does not even require students to master the majority of concepts — receiving 15 out of 60 possible points on the 10th grade math test, for example, could be enough to satisfy the graduation requirement. Students have multiple opportunities to reach this standard, and can even appeal to demonstrate content mastery through a portfolio of work. This led Austin, of the Boston Schools Fund, to tell the Boston Globe that, “There is a bit of a misnomer in framing the MCAS as a high-stakes test.”
The future of education
The nature of the ballot question is absolute: you either want the MCAS tests to continue to play a role in students’ graduations or you don’t. “Yes” advocates champion swift reform; “no” proponents say they’re standing firm on values.
But educating a child is complex, and “politics is flattening nuance and driving polarization” on the MCAS question, wrote Jack Schneider, a UMass Amherst professor, in an essay for WBUR. Schneider suggested that perhaps “none of us have it completely right” — that maybe this ballot question wasn’t the right reform to be chasing at all.
Schneider has been a leader for school accountability reform, merging research and public advocacy as the co-chair of the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), a group of professors and public school districts who say that education, tests, and school accountability could look different.
While Massachusetts is one of the few remaining states with a test required for graduation (something often pointed out by detractors of MCAS), the commonwealth is an even further outlier as one of only three states with no requirement to earn course credits for graduation. The only other two states without these requirements, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have extensive “menus” that detail the several pathways students can take to graduation, including career courses, AP exams, state tests, or SAT/ACT exams.
Most European countries, which Massachusetts might see as peers more than some American states, have tests at the end of high school too, though some are specifically designed as college entrance or placement exams. Almost all European nations have credit or curriculum requirements for graduation.
In Massachusetts, the state has a recommendation for curriculum and credit requirements, called MassCore, but no power to enforce that districts follow it.
The MCIEA, which UMass Amherst’s Schneider now co-chairs, has advocated for updating the commonwealth’s school accountability and graduation requirements since 2016. Their vision essentially includes more data points. On MCAS, Schneider and the MCIEA are open to seeing if the test can be changed, rather than scrapped, he wrote. Ultimately, Schneider said he would be in favor of eliminating the MCAS requirement if schools adopted common curriculums like the one proposed in MassCore.
And some key voices have agreed on the need to look forward, past the narrowness of the ballot question.
State Sen. Jason Lewis, who serves as chair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, made news when he endorsed the “Yes on 2” campaign. But his vote to end the MCAS requirement came with a condition: “I also intend to file legislation in January (at the start of the new legislative session) to implement an alternative, non test-based, consistent and rigorous statewide graduation standard,” Lewis said in a written statement.
Polling on the ballot question from WBUR showed that voters have started leaning toward repealing MCAS as a graduation requirement — with 51% indicating they would vote “yes.” An earlier result from the University of New Hampshire found the MCAS question was the only one with more “no” votes. Suffice to say: it will be close.
If the ballot question passes, Massachusetts will be more like the rest of the country in ending the reign of standardized tests. It will also become the only state in the country without either a statewide test or credit-based graduation standard.
Leading proponents from both campaigns on this ballot question will join the New Bedford Light on Oct. 22, for a panel discussion at the Kilburn Mill Event Center in New Bedford’s South End, at 6 p.m.
