It was election day. Usually, for many high school students, the only interesting vote is the presidential election. However, this year, one question on the ballot that especially caught the eyes of many high school students: Question 2.
Question 2, one of the five binding statewide ballot questions appearing in 2024’s state election, decided whether to repeal the requirement of passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam to graduate high school and earn a diploma. It passed with 59.1 percent of the vote in Massachusetts despite only earning 48 percent of the vote in Brookline.
Justin Brown, president of the Brookline Educators Union, campaigned to persuade people to vote yes on Question 2 in hopes of removing the MCAS requirement. Brown said he believes that even though every student in Massachusetts should have an understanding of how much they have learned compared to their school district, the MCAS exam is not the right tool to assess that.
“A single high-stakes test is not a useful tool for assessing what students know and can do. There are groups of students who are disproportionately impacted by this for whom taking and successfully passing the test is difficult,” Brown said.
According to Brown, the MCAS often covers material that not every student learns in their time in high school. Additionally, he said that the intellectual disabilities of some students can make it difficult to succeed on the test.
As a former 4th grade teacher at Lawrence school, Brown brought up some concerns that arose during MCAS testing times. Identifying MCAS tests as a program that is built outside of the classroom, Brown said the exam created a sense of uncertainty for both students and teachers, since the test is different from the tests students do in school.
“It’s something that came from the outside, wasn’t part of what we were doing day in and day out,” Brown said. “It felt very disruptive. It made students anxious. It took a lot of time and it took a lot of resources.”
According to social studies teacher Patrick McGee, who voted no on Question 2, the “healthy pressure” of standardized testing can guide school districts to academic success and aid students indirectly in the future.
“While the MCAS is not perfect, we need some sort of standardized measurement to help us see how well schools and students are doing,” McGee said. “It puts a healthy kind of pressure on students to hold themselves accountable for their education. By removing it as a graduation requirement, we lose it as a measurement tool.”
According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the main goal of MCAS is to assess students’ understanding of key concepts in different fields, and it helps students, teachers and parents identify what areas need improvement. The data collected from the MCAS allows schools to improve the curriculum to fit the needs of all students.
McGee previously worked within the New York City Public Schools. Instead of MCAS, there was a more comprehensive regional exam called the Regents Exams. The “4+1 option” for scoring made it so that, to pass these exams, students in New York City were required to pass a test in English, social studies, math, science and then an additional test of choice. McGee said the test can deliver motivation not for the student, but the teacher.
“It holds teachers and students accountable, and it says to everybody, we have standards, these are the things that we, at the minimum, need to know,” McGee said. “So, from a teaching perspective, it kept us on our toes, and we had to make sure we covered enough ground. I think that’s good.”
On Nov. 6, 2024, Massachusetts officially approved the exclusion of MCAS tests as a high school graduation requirement. The voting has brought a new question into light for Massachusetts: Should we have the MCAS exam at all?
English teacher Peter Sedlak said that although MCAS is no longer a graduation requirement, it could still have benefits for students.
“It is always interesting to see how you perform on the MCAS in comparison to other people. I’m aware that there are biases in every assessment that can be administered,” Sedlak said. “Hence, some people just feel more disadvantaged, but now that it’s not a graduation requirement, there are not a lot of high stakes attached to it. I’ve always told students that they should always try to do the best they can.”
