By The Boston Globe Editorial Board
There’s a reason Governor Maura Healey, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, and other state leaders have come out against Question 2: It’s important to keep the 10th-grade MCAS as our one standard, statewide graduation requirement.
Today, let’s step into the public policy time machine and return to the early years of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS.
A journey back to the turn of the century sheds helpful light as state citizens contemplate Question 2, which would eliminate the requirement that students pass the 10th-grade MCAS to graduate from high school.
Our destination: Oct. 15, 2001, the day the MCAS results for the class of 2003 were publicly released. Why do those particular results matter? Because those tallies were the first from a round of MCAS testing that actually mattered to the students taking them. The MCAS had been given in the three previous years but without the requirement that kids had to pass the math and English language arts exams to graduate.
But first a warning: Get ready for a big mood swing.
After all, back in the early years of MCAS testing, the results had been somewhere between discouraging and dismal. In the first two years of the MCAS, at least 52 percent had failed the math exam. In the last year before that test started to count, the failure rate was 45 percent.
The English scores told a similar story. In the first three years, when the test didn’t matter, the passage rate was never higher than 72 percent. It had actually dipped to 66 percent in 2000.
Thus it was that when the MCAS started to matter, many were bracing for the worst. OK, ready? Here are first few paragraphs from the Globe story about the results released that day.
“The state unveiled 2001 MCAS results yesterday showing that the number of 10th-graders who failed the test has dropped by nearly half — a stunning turnaround that is sure to transform the years-long debate over the standardized exam.”
“Acting Governor Jane M. Swift, flanked by delighted legislators and education officials at the State House, announced that 82 percent of 10th-graders passed English, compared to 66 percent in 2000. The math passing rate was 75 percent, up from 55 percent in 2000.”
Education officials were understandably euphoric. They as well as academic experts in testing credited the large jump in scores to the fact that these test-takers had understood there were consequences attached to the test.
It was a particularly good day for Swift, who had stood firmly behind the graduation exam despite waves of doom and gloom, and for then education commissioner David P. Driscoll, who had predicted that scores would jump once stakes were attached to the test. Driscoll credited increased student effort as “a major factor” in the spiking passing scores.
So what happened? One possible — though highly implausible — explanation for the big jump is that students were just taking the test itself more seriously post-2001 but weren’t actually learning any more.
Far more likely, though, is that more students passed because they studied harder and their schools did more to help them clear a bar that suddenly mattered — in other words, that scores went up because student performance went up.
So with that aspect of the past as prologue, what will happen if Question 2 prevails and students no longer have to pass the the 10th-grade MCAS, which now includes a science exam as well, to earn their high school diploma?
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has spent millions in its effort to eliminate the requirement that students pass the 10th-grade MCAS to graduate, maintains that the exams will remain an effective tool for assessing high school performance without the so-called high stakes and that students won’t learn any less.
That assessment may not reflect an accurate grasp of teenage nature.
As state Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler noted at a recent Harvard forum on Question 2, “High school students will not take it seriously going forward, so it won’t be a useful assessment anymore.”
He’s right. Based on history, we should expect MCAS results to fall off, perhaps sharply.
If and when that happens, does anyone think the MTA will then argue for reinstating the test as a graduation requirement so students will apply themselves more diligently? It seems more likely the union will argue that since many students simply aren’t taking the MCAS seriously, the exam results shouldn’t be considered an accurate measure of their subject mastery.
The situation that ensues would leave the state’s education-improvement efforts slipping back toward the uneven efforts, and significant and enduring pockets of mediocrity, that prevailed before the state’s landmark 1993 education reform law. After all, as Secretary Tutwiler noted to the Harvard Crimson, “All [Question 2] does is deconstruct the current system. It does not propose something as a replacement.”
Attorney General Andrea Campbell underscored that same point in a recent missive to her supporters explaining her opposition to Question 2.
“I have real concerns about Question 2 because it would not just remove our only statewide graduation standard, it would remove the standard and offer no replacement,” she wrote. “This would result in more than 300 different and unequal standards for high school graduation across the Commonwealth and potentially lead to haphazard assessments of student readiness for college and careers, and even wider inequities in student achievement and opportunities.”
Now, the MTA argues that what really brought about the improvement in Massachusetts public education was not the MCAS but rather the large infusion of state dollars that came about because of the 1993 law.
That contention only tells half the story, however. Yes, the new state money was important, but so were enforceable standards. Here’s how we know. The new dollars that came with education reform ramped up steadily, year by year, after the 1993 law took effect. However, the MCAS scores didn’t start increasing in any meaningful way until 2001, when passage became a part of earning a high school diploma.
As Governor Maura Healey noted in an email to her supporters urging them to vote no on Question 2, “In fact, as soon as we established the MCAS as a graduation standard, we saw student performance take off across our state.”
Without the MCAS graduation requirement, Healey added, “we will no longer hold all our schools to the same high standards. Instead it will go back to the way it was — with hundreds of different standards set by hundreds of cities and towns. This will hurt our underperforming schools and poorer school districts the most.”
Healey and Campbell, liberal Democrats both, are exactly right on this. As the state’s recent educational history demonstrates, “no” is the right vote on Question 2.
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