The Berkshire Eagle: Massachusetts ballot question endorsements
by The Editorial Board 17 October 2024
Every two years, all Bay Staters temporarily become legislators for a day when facing a handful of ballot questions seeking to shape state law via direct democracy. Our assessment of every ballot question slate is guided by a constant guiding principle: We have a Legislature, which we the people staff via elections and fund with our taxes, where the critical and often complex work of crafting state law and policy should be localized. That is representative democracy — a system we should not upend wantonly.
We understand why the mechanism of ballot referendum exists as a crucial exception to that rule, allowing the public to directly petition for solutions to pressing issues that nevertheless face unique political barriers for consideration in the Statehouse. This ought to provide a backstop, not an end-run, to the normative legislative process, because there are downsides to this more haphazard approach to lawmaking. It squeezes multifaceted issues into simplistic yes-or-no formulations, relies on voters to be well-informed on those issues and their often hidden nuances, and increases special interest influence. We therefore apply a high burden of proof for a ballot question effort to demonstrate that it’s necessary to forgo the typical legislative process and shape state law via a simple up-and-down statewide plebiscite.
We underscore this not only to give readers context for the frame through which we view ballot measures but to highlight what we view as a concerning trend in the practice of state lawmaking.
We’re worried that ballot questions are seemingly becoming less exceptional as the number of policy-crafting decisions put directly to Massachusetts voters has risen of late. In 2020, there were two. In 2022, there were four. This year, voters face five — the most in more than two decades. A question we consistently ask ballot measure proponents is why they haven’t lobbied their issue to lawmakers. A consistent answer across the myriad campaigns has been that those efforts have run up against a do-nothing Legislature — an answer that unfortunately carries considerable weight amid swelling sclerosis and waning productivity on Beacon Hill. The big batch of ballot questions facing voters this election season is only more evidence of that.
The constituents most affected by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System aren’t yet old enough to vote on this question, which behooves us to carefully consider the impact of this ballot measure — and the status quo — on behalf of public school students. Here’s what we know about the status quo: It results in several hundred Bay State teenagers who meet their school district’s graduation standards still being denied a diploma each year because they failed a high-stakes standardized test. That’s a relatively small fraction of the state’s students. Still, it’s worth asking for what purpose those kids (disproportionately English-language learners and differently abled students) are being hamstrung.
It’s also worth weighing what other effects this paradigm carries for classrooms across the commonwealth. What about the teachers who are forced to teach to the test, which soaks up critical class time and bandwidth? What about the students who not only face the anxiety of that high-stakes test that can make or break their graduation prospects but are forced into targeted remedial programs for that test if they don’t pass it on first try, thereby limiting elective and vocational opportunities?
It’s important to note that this question does not ask whether to do away with the MCAS; standardized testing in Massachusetts is not going anywhere anytime soon. That’s good, because it can be a powerful diagnostic tool for assessing the state’s students and school districts. Defenders of the MCAS graduation requirement go a bit further in claiming that specific mechanism is causally linked to Massachusetts’ public education success. Yet they don’t seem to have an answer as to why that decades-old status quo has not resulted in any meaningful closing of the performance gaps between Bay State schools and districts exposed by the test itself. Again, that underscores the importance of the MCAS as a diagnostic tool for what’s working and what’s not in Massachusetts schools, but also highlights the shortcomings of the MCAS grad requirement to fairly effect the sort of positive change that its defenders claim. MCAS and other standardized testing should primarily be aimed at holding accountable our public school system writ large and the comparative performance of various school districts, not individual students’ achievements. The latter is already assessed thoroughly, via testing and other holistic approaches, that are only impinged by the high stakes of the MCAS grad requirement.
The Eagle endorses a “yes” vote on Question 2.
