Question 2, which asked voters if the state-wide requirement to pass the MCAS exams should be abolished, passed with about 59 percent of Massachusetts voters’ support. 

The measure, which was created by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, does not get rid of MCAS testing. But beginning with the class of 2025, students who attend public high schools in Massachusetts will no longer have to pass the exams to graduate, the Boston Globe reported. 

“This is an opportunity and a relief for a lot of students,” Shelley Scruggs, Lexington resident and advocate for voting “yes” on Question 2, said. 

Now, students will only need to complete their district’s required coursework to demonstrate competencies in math, science and technology, and English to receive a diploma. 

“It’s too soon to tell” how Question 2 passing will affect course curriculum in Lexington, Julie Hackett, superintendent of Lexington Public Schools, said. She told LexObserver she is awaiting guidance from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The overhaul of MCAS comes just over 30 years after Massachusetts adopted the Education Reform Act, which introduced statewide standardized testing, in the summer of 1993. Before that law passed, graduation rates across the state were lower. 

“We had very little transparency into student learning, we had very little transparency into the achievement gap, who is being left behind, who is getting hurt the most,” Michael Horn, Lexington resident and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said about measuring students’ learning before the Education Reform Act. “We take data for granted in today’s world — we’re going to be flying much blinder.”

Without requiring students to meet a standardized graduation benchmark, there is no longer a  “common measure” to determine what passing a grade means in Massachusetts, Horn said. By leaving those decisions up to districts, Horn worries the quality of education in marginalized communities will worsen. 

“We know grade inflation is already rampant across the state and the country and increasingly decoupled from what objective measures tell us,” Horn, who has published several books on the future of education, said. “How much wider does that gulf get in years ahead?” 

Before the MTA’s ballot initiative, Scruggs filed the first ballot initiative, 23-01, calling to abolish MCAS as a graduation requirement. Her initiative is similar to the MTA’s but also includes mailing diplomas to all students who failed the MCAS in the past. Accomplishing that is Scruggs’ “next step,” she told LexObserver. 

“A lot of students out there with Certificates of Attainment should be able to trade it in for a high school diploma,” Scruggs told LexObserver, referring to the document that Massachusetts high schools give students who complete district requirements but fail the MCAS. “As of now you’ve done everything you were supposed to do, you should be able to put that on an application to school or to an employer because you just can’t leave them hanging, that’s just not fair.”

Scruggs also thinks the state should reform the MCAS by making it shorter and holding it at the beginning of the school year so educators can tailor course curriculum to students’ needs. 

“Make it smaller, make it a little more focused, and understand that what you’re going to do is look for what the students need to work on because you can’t use it against them anymore,” she said. 

Now that passing the exams is no longer a graduation requirement, Horn argues MCAS scores won’t be effective measures of learning because students will find the exams “meaningless” and subsequently won’t “try that hard” on them. 

“Already kids have disengaged in school because of the pandemic, and I’m not saying tests are the way to bring them back in, I don’t think that’s true, but I think they’re an important check just to help us understand what’s going on,” he said. 

Asked if passing MCAS should have remained a graduation requirement, Esme Baldo, a senior at Lexington High School, said yes. Baldo told LexObserver students in lower-income communities already fall behind academically and “getting rid of MCAS’s graduation requirement makes it easier to kind of sweep those inequalities under the rug.”

“If everybody just graduates, but they’re at a lower academic level than they would have been before, it’s not like it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “They’re just going to be at a disadvantage in college or the job market.”

Asked the same question, Owen Jiang, a senior at LHS, told LexObserver his thoughts are “a little more complicated” because while more students will be able to graduate, he is unsure if they will be college-ready without having to pass the standardized exam. 

“Whether they’ll be ready for college, that’s still a big question mark,” he said. “We’ll have to see how that will turn out.”

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2 Comments

  1. I agree with professor Horn. Without the graduation requirement, the test is meaningless to a majority of the children. 150 million down the drain.

  2. Pingback: A look back at 2024 in Lexington - The Lexington Observer
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