If there’s one thing that strikes fear into the heart of nearly every student, it’s a standardized test. For decades, state assessments have terrorized the average student. On Tuesday, the people of Massachusetts will have a say in their educational futures, when the state’s MCAS test is brought to a vote.
Standardized tests have long taken criticism not only from bored, stressed students, but also from parents, who worry about their children’s mental health, and wonder about the value of the tests, and the quality of education their children receive when preparing for it.
Massachusetts students take the MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, from third to tenth grade. The current state law requires that students meet the Competency Determination standard to graduate high school, which is usually done by passing the MCAS. But that might all change following Tuesday’s vote.
Question 2 on the Massachusetts ballot proposes the elimination of MCAS as a graduation requirement. While students would still have to take the assessment, and meet other qualifying standards, the MCAS will no longer be a determining factor for graduation, should the “yes” vote prevail.
The ballot measure is a controversial one. The Boston Globe and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey have endorsed keeping the test as a requirement, pointing to the state’s high ranking schools, while Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said she was “torn” on the issue, citing its “all or nothing” approach to dropping the requirement.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Teacher Association President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy endorsed the elimination of MCAS as a graduation requirement, writing that “the high-stakes MCAS … has sent over 50,000 students out into the world without a high school diploma.”
I grew up with the MCAS, and as a student, I certainly wasn’t a fan. But also, I always did pretty well. Every year, students would whisper the same threat, “Do you know that if you fail, you won’t graduate?” But, year by year, even in my small school where everyone knew everyone’s business, I never heard rumors of anyone actually failing.
Ultimately, not many do. The Boston Globe reported that the statistic that 50,000 students fail to graduate due to the MCAS was inaccurate because it counted students that both failed the MCAS and did not complete additional or alternative graduation requirements. According to the Globe, “Only 1 percent of seniors, or about 700 students each year, completed the local district requirements but failed to pass the MCAS.”
However, a majority of those students were found to be English learners or students with disabilities, creating concerns surrounding the fairness of the test.
Scary Mommy spoke with a retired elementary school principal who said that any number of students who aren’t graduating due to an assessment should be a cause for concern. Student’s educational success, she explains, is currently confined to a narrow definition.
“[Students who fail the MCAS] get to retake the test several times… But then at the same time, this kid can’t write whatever essay it is they need to write, so what do you think the teachers are working on with that kid? Maybe this kid could enjoy Shakespeare or enjoy something else, instead of having to have this hammered in their head,” the former principal said.
Scary Mommy also spoke with a third grade teacher with 23 years of experience teaching in Massachusetts. While her students aren’t yet impacted by the graduation requirement, which is based only on the high school assessments, she noted that teaching to the test limits her ability to engage her students in topics they find interesting.
“For example, this year with the Olympics, my class was really interested in it, and that would have been a really cool thing to do with our nonfiction reading,” she said. “But you don’t always have that freedom to do that anymore. We have curriculum that says, ‘These are the books that you use.’ I believe it comes from trying to have everyone teach similar line items.”
The third grade teacher also expressed concern that her young students had to take time to prepare for the online format of the test, which was introduced in 2019.
“That’s a whole other dimension to teaching and learning, is for them to be able to access the technology piece,” she said. “We have kids that on the day of the MCAS end up taking it until dismissal because their typing skills are so slow and they want to do well… Third grade is the first year they’re getting on a Chromebook to do their work, so we’ve had to change our curriculum.”
In spite of frustrations teachers have with the process, the MCAS has been upheld as a necessity to preserving the state’s highly ranked educational standards. Proponents of the MCAS have made the claim that getting rid of the test would not only fail to hold individual students to this standard, but also school districts and teachers.
“That question, if it passes, would deliver us to a place of no standard — essentially 351 different standards for high school graduation,” Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler told WBZ.
The former principal disagreed with this sentiment, arguing that flexibility was important to maintaining high quality education.
“There’s no depth. It’s all width. It’s just huge amounts of standards that they have to cover,” she said.
“It’s good to be accountable,” she continued. “But I also think that we need to teach the teachers how to be accountable to the kids, which is more beneficial because it’s more immediate. Teachers can change that lesson on a dime because they know they didn’t understand exponents or they didn’t understand the theme, and that’s where it’s so hard [to teach according to MCAS standards].
Should the ballot measure fail, things in Massachusetts schools will remain the same as they’ve been since the introduction of the MCAS over two decades ago. But, should it pass (and polling shows nearly 60 percent of voters favor this outcome), Massachusetts teachers and students may have a whole new educational landscape to explore. We’ll just have to wait and see.
