MCAS ballot initiative removing test as diploma requirement surpasses signature requirement

By Sam Drysdale, State House News Service 7 December 2023

BOSTON  — The ballot initiative campaign to remove a standardized test graduation requirement has received well over the number of required signatures to move on to the next phase of getting the question before voters next fall, according to the teachers' union leading the effort.

Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page said Wednesday that in eight weeks the campaign collected 135,000 signatures from parents, educators and former Massachusetts public school students. As of a few days ago, 103,000 of those signatures have been certified by local town clerks, he said, and they are expecting that number to grow.

Ballot campaigns need to file 74,574 certified signatures, or 3 percent of the number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election, to put their policy ideas in front of the Legislature this spring, and potentially before voters in November 2024.

The MTA says they received signatures from residents of each of Massachusetts 351 towns.

"What this shows is that the public, the parents, students, educators and the general public wants to end this punitive high stakes test, and they've shown that by literally lining up at Market Basket, at Stop and Shop, and in our schools, to sign these ballot sheets," Page said. He later added "Truly, people were at Market Basket saying 'Give me that! I need to sign it.'"

Signatures are certified at the local level and Secretary of State William Galvin must validate the totals before any measure advances to the next phase, but clearing the initial signature-gathering threshold is a challenge that is too much for many prospective ballot questions.

Page, MTA Vice President Deb McCarthy, Citizens for Public Schools Executive Director Lisa Guisbond, Somerville Educators Union President Dayshawn Simmons, and two parents who joined the campaign, Lexington mom Shelley Scruggs and Hanover mom Adriana Mason, delivered the last 1,000 signatures to the Secretary of State's office on Wednesday.

The initiative would eliminate the requirement that a student pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) to graduate high school and instead would require that students complete coursework certified by their district "as demonstrating mastery of the competencies contained in the state academic standards in mathematics, science and technology, and English, as well as any additional areas determined by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education," according to Attorney General Andrea Campbell's office's summary of the proposal.

"To be crystal clear, the ballot initiative eliminates the use of MCAS as a high stakes test," Page said. "In other words, students like the 700 or more students every year who are denied a diploma simply because they did not meet the cutoff score on one of the MCAS tests -- that will be gone. Students who have fulfilled all the requirements, their teachers have given them passing grades, they will now get a diploma."

The initiative does not seek to get rid of the test altogether, just its tie to whether a student can earn a diploma.

Mason, a mother of two children in the state's public schools, worked with a coalition of other South Shore parents to collect 1,300 signatures. She said that her 12-year-old son is on the autism spectrum, and does well in school but struggles on tests.

In third grade, the first grade that takes the MCAS test, Mason said the school put him on a path to take the MCAS-Alt, an alternative assessment.

"I wasn't told that if I put my child on a path for MCAS-Alt that I was also putting him on a path for a certificate of completion," Mason said. "So regardless of the fact that he would attend school 180 days every year that his neurotypical peers would attend, he would walk across the stage and receive a certificate of completion and somebody else would walk across the stage and receive a diploma."

The MTA and its supporters said they would also visit lawmakers' offices on Wednesday, encouraging them to pass legislation to remove the graduation requirement, as the initiative now goes before the Legislature. That way, lawmakers could choose to tackle the issue themselves before it gets to voters in the fall.

Scruggs, who filed her own ballot question to remove the testing graduation requirement and joined her efforts to the MTA, said her version also sought to retroactively grant diplomas to students who already graduated without the degree because they failed the MCAS.

"California had the same idea, apparently, and is thinking about doing the same thing. So maybe the state Legislature might consider that little gem," Scruggs said.

Mary Tamer, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, who has opposed efforts to change the MCAS graduation requirement, said doing so would "[reduce] the value of a high school diploma."

"Diplomas based on varying standards and expectations set by more than 300 individual school districts would lead to lower academic standards and fuel inequalities in student achievement and opportunities," Tamer said in a statement Wednesday.

Tamer said that the 10th grade MCAS requirement is meant to "ensure that students mastered the basics before they are given a high school diploma and sent off to college and career," and that studies have shown that success on the test is a predictor of college and career success.

The union says that it is not the test that determines future success but the resources a school and student has available to them. Black, low-income, English second language and students with disabilities are the most likely to fail the test, even as some have fulfilled all other graduation requirements.

"Abandoning a successful educational strategy is counterintuitive. Eliminating a statewide graduation requirement will revert Massachusetts back to a time when we had different expectations for students depending on where they lived," Tamer said. "Maintaining a single statewide standard will ensure that high school students across Massachusetts have hit certain benchmarks in their educational journey, and that their diplomas hold weight, whether they are earned in Concord or Fall River."