By Jessica Grose in The New York Times
On Election Day, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to get rid of the state’s high school exit exam, which involves standards-based tests in math, sciences and English. The ballot measure is known as Question 2, and voting yes “would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in order to graduate from high school but still require students to complete coursework that meets state standards.”
Massachusetts is one of fewer than 10 states that still have exit exam requirements. It is also consistently ranked among the best states for K-12 public education — as are some of the other states with exit exams, like New York and Virginia. The MCAS is not a killer exam. As my newsroom colleague Troy Closson pointed out, “More than 90 percent of sophomores pass the test” on their first try. Furthermore, “Failing students can retake the exams several times or lodge an appeal.”
A summary of the arguments for and against Question 2 from the nonpartisan Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University states that “96 percent manage to eventually pass or otherwise prove their competency via one of the state’s alternate paths.”
I live in New York, and I went through the state’s public school system. We have a set of exams called the Regents — and I took many subject-matter Regents tests on my road to graduation. The Regents are also facing a backlash and may become optional as a result, which is part of a nationwide push against standardized testing that has been growing for a decade.
This despite the fact that, as The Times’s David Leonhardt explained, there is a body of research suggesting that standardized testing predicts success more accurately than grades alone and “test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive.”
Regents exams are not exactly like the MCAS, and exit exams aren’t the reason that New York and Massachusetts have highly ranked public education systems. But I think we lose something when we give in to test anxiety, and the financial and educational costs are highest for students who need educational resources most.
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If voters choose “yes” on Question 2, graduation requirements will be determined hyperlocally. This would be a mistake. If each district is allowed to make its own requirements, colleges and local hiring managers will have less confidence that high school graduates will have basic literacy and math skills.
A Boston Globe editorial arguing for voting “no” on Question 2 noted that before the MCAS was in place, a Massachusetts high school diploma was “virtually ‘meaningless’” because “not only did different school districts set different degree requirements, but even when they offered similarly titled classes, like Algebra I, the material those courses included often varied drastically.” Without the MCAS, Roger Lowenstein pointed out in his newsletter Intrinsic Value, the state has almost no set requirements for graduation.
Even if you trusted that coursework was uniform enough statewide to mean something outside individual high school buildings, you cannot necessarily trust grades at this point. There has been rampant grade inflation in Massachusetts over the past decade, and it worsened during the pandemic. This means that grades might have become increasingly untethered from both test scores and knowledge. This is where a test that requires a minimum score serves as a kind of stress test for students and schools alike.
So what are the arguments for doing away with the testing requirement? The website for supporters of Question 2 claims, “These high stakes testing situations create significant stress for all students — and stack the deck against students of color, English language learners and those with learning disabilities.”
I always find the idea that tests are stressful to be a bad argument for getting rid of them. Which is why I find it disheartening that the Massachusetts Teachers Association — the teachers’ union — wants to do away with the requirement. Life is an endless stream of tests of different kinds, and we do our children a disservice by pretending that it is not. If tests are stressful, we should work on helping children with their anxiety and make sure they are prepared enough for a test so that they feel confident. “Bluntly, there is no way to have any standards at all without causing some level of stress for some students,” as The Boston Globe’s editorial board put it.
Second, as a recent study about the MCAS from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University pointed out, “Nearly all of those who fail are English learners, students with disabilities, and/or students with inadequate course preparation.” People on both sides of this issue agree that these students need extra support from public schools. But graduating these students without ensuring that they meet minimum standards does not help them; it actually can cost them money and time.
Let’s say an immigrant student’s native language is Spanish and her English is not strong enough to pass the MCAS. Wouldn’t it be better for that student to continue to receive help in learning English from a taxpayer-supported public school rather than to graduate into a world where she will have a disadvantage in the job market or have to pay for additional English classes if she wants to continue formal schooling? The same goes for a student with disabilities struggling with, say, math. If you push him out of the public school system without the adequate knowledge and he attends a two-year college, he’s going to have to pay for an additional remedial class, and potentially, it will take him longer to get a degree.
According to the most recent data, only about 34 percent of high school graduates who enrolled in two-year colleges graduated within three years of enrollment across the country. Anything that could get this group of students better prepared for post-high-school coursework should be applauded, not dismantled.
David Driscoll, who was the commissioner of education for Massachusetts from 1998 to 2007, told me in June that he sees the ballot initiative as “a battle of the heart versus the mind.” If you stopped someone on the street and said, “We’re going to institute graduation requirements, kids have to pass a test to get their high school diploma, the initial reaction of a lot of people, most people, is: Oh, my goodness! You’re going to rob these poor kids!” He said that’s the visceral reaction.
But the truth is that before the MCAS requirements were put in place, the business community and community college administrators were telling Driscoll, “Kids were graduating from high school without basic skills,” he said; the joke was that they simply had high school diplomas.
Unfortunately, polling suggests that the heart is winning. “More than half of respondents — 51 percent — said they would vote to scrap the requirement, while 34 percent said they would vote to keep things as they are,” according to a September poll from WBUR. I’m imploring Massachusetts voters to use their heads and keep the requirement.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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