Sam Drysdale, State House News Service
The campaign opposing a ballot initiative to eliminate the use of statewide tests as a graduation requirement is rolling out an advertising blitz, hitting airwaves with the slogan "Protect Our Kids' Future."
"Standards are especially different for my son," says Concord mother Jill Norton in one of the TV ads. "He has learning differences. Reducing the expectations for him is harmful. And now an effort to undermine those standards is threatening what worked for my son."
The Massachusetts Teachers Association is backing an initiative petition -- Question 2 on this November's ballot -- to eliminate the use of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, as a graduation requirement for all public school students. The union says the test takes away from classroom time, overly stresses students, and prevents about 700 students every year from graduating.
Under Question 2, students would still take the statewide exams throughout their school careers, but the test taken in 10th grade would not be used as a requirement to graduate. Instead, individual districts would come up with their own standards for graduation.
Opponents of the ballot question say it would deplete the value of a Massachusetts diploma, and create an environment where districts would have different standards, potentially furthering the divide between high- and low-income districts.
In an interview with State House News Service, Norton said that MCAS data helped her identify that her son had learning differences that needed to be addressed.
"We were in close contact with my son's teachers, and monitoring, but we didn't have a sense of where he was compared with grade-level peers," she said. "We knew his teachers loved him and had a great relationship with him, so the MCAS score was one of the only objective measures that we had."
In addition to a 15- and 30-second ad spot with Norton, the opposition campaign is also running two ads featuring a Revere teacher. The ads cost the Protect Our Kids' Future: Vote No On 2 campaign $250,000. Key contributors include Analog Devices-founder Raymond Stata and nonprofit Education Reform Now.
The other ad features James Conway, a history teacher at Revere High School and member of the MTA, who says the graduation requirement is necessary to ensure all kids are held to the same high standards.
"We get judged as teachers on whether we're holding all of our kids to high expectations, whether we're meeting the needs of diverse learners," he said in an interview. "This is assessing what they already know. What we should have already taught, right? So this is sort of our way of being held accountable as teachers, but also sort of a measure of where there's gaps with our students."
Brian Wynne, president of Opinion Diagnostics and one of the campaign managers, said the two ads are meant to target voters who could be persuaded to vote "yes."
"We want them to hear our very simple argument," Wynne said. "It would drop key educational standards... We want to take head-on those individuals that the MTA believes will be a yes, and we want to make sure they understand the full implication."
The MTA and other groups that support replacing the MCAS graduation requirement standard with district-level standards have begun onboarding nearly 85 educators to canvass, organize events and knock on doors for their statewide campaign.
“We are one step closer to replacing the punitive graduation requirement with a renewed focus on our best-in-the-nation state standards and academic frameworks,” MTA President Max Page said this month when state officials certified the union had enough signatures to get the question on the ballot. “This certification reflects the power of collective action; union educators, parents and community allies united to gather 170,000 signatures -- more than any other ballot initiative this cycle and far exceeding the requirements to get on the ballot.”
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