A High School Diploma Should Mean Something
Why I would vote "No" on the Massachusetts Question 2 ballot initiative
Next week Massachusetts residents will vote on a ballot initiative called Question 2. It asks voters whether they want to repeal the state requirement that students achieve a passing score on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam in order to graduate from high school.
If I lived in the Bay State, I would vote “No” on Question 2. That is, I would keep the requirement in place.
Before I get into my reasons why, it’s important to understand what the MCAS graduation requirement is. It’s not just a “single test,” as some critics have claimed. Students have to score above a passing threshold on the 10th grade math, English language arts, and one of the state’s science tests. The state has adjusted the passing thresholds over time, and those are currently set at about the 10th percentile of performance.
Students can also re-take the tests, and if they continue to fail, districts can eventually appeal on their behalf. If a student never passes their tests and doesn’t qualify for an exemption, they can receive a “certificate of attainment” signifying they met local but not state requirements.
What do we know about the MCAS as a graduation requirement? In July the Annenberg Institute at Brown University published a comprehensive report summarizing the research on it. They note that most students who fail the tests on the first try take it again and succeed on a later attempt. They write that, “Among the 69,488 students who completed all local graduation requirements in 2019, only 1,237 students (1.8%) did not eventually pass all three MCAS tests or have a successful appeal.”
They also point out that many of the students who fail to complete the MCAS graduation requirement fall into historically disadvantaged groups. In fact, the vast majority of students who ultimately fail are English Learners or students with disabilities.
So why would I vote to keep the MCAS graduation requirement in place? There are three main reasons why:
The MCAS is an important signal for students and schools.
The MCAS tests are picking up on important information about the chances that a student will be successful later in life. As the Annenberg authors note, “Even among students with the same demographic profile who earned the same GPA at the same high school, those with higher MCAS scores have better long-term outcomes, on average.” Moreover, high schools that boost their students’ test scores also tend to boost their students’ earnings at age 30.
In other words, the fact that the graduation requirement is mostly hitting disadvantaged groups is more a reflection of underlying instructional gaps and problems that need to be addressed, rather than a reason to get rid of the MCAS requirement.
The specific cut point is not the only important thing here. It is true that students who barely pass the tests do better than students who fail them. For example, among low-income test-takers, students who just pass the math portion were 6 percentage points more likely to attend college than those who initially scored just below the cut-off line.
That matters, but I’m more persuaded by stats like the fact that when the state added the science requirement in 2010, the percentage of students taking 9th grade biology rose from 37 to 56%. That’s evidence that schools are paying attention to the MCAS requirements and responding by reshaping their course offerings in ways that are likely to benefit students.
Now is a bad time to remove objective standards of quality.
The union advocates behind Question 2 say that students should be able to graduate, “if their teachers, grades, and coursework all prove they’re ready for future success.”
That sounds like appealing messaging, except that these subjective measures are telling parents that kids are doing fine, when objective measures are showing that kids are losing ground. We see this in K-8, where student performance started falling about a decade ago and cratered in the wake of the pandemic. Four years later, students in Massachusetts today are still well behind where their older brothers and sisters were just a few years ago.
At the high school level, Massachusetts schools have been giving out higher course grades. Since the pandemic hit, the disconnect between course grades and objective test results has only gotten wider. The MCAS graduation requirement has not prevented these trends, but it at least serves as a check on schools and districts. That external quality check is more important now than it’s ever been.
The state does not (yet?) have another meaningful backstop or replacement.
My read of the evidence suggests that setting high standards encourages kids to work harder in ways that boost their short- and long-term outcomes.
If Massachusetts were starting from scratch it might be able to design a better way to hold the line on high standards. I’m personally a fan of end-of-course tests like the ones my kids will eventually have to pass in Virginia, because those are explicitly linked to specific high school courses. North Carolina has a similar testing structure and requires that the exam results be included as 20% of the student’s course grade.
I also like the idea of using carrots rather than sticks. For example, a state could set a minimum number of credits for a “standard” diploma, and then measure whether students have mastered the content in order to earn an “advanced” diploma. This isn’t an entirely new idea; most states have some form of tiered diplomas. But as far as I’m aware, none of them have gone the extra step of making the “advanced” diploma mean something for higher education. In my vision, states would say that any student who qualified for an advanced diploma was automatically eligible for a state college and was exempt from taking remedial courses once they got there.
Massachusetts could do all of these things, or find other ways to ensure its diplomas meant something in the real world. But it hasn’t. And it does not have a back-up plan. As the Boston Globe reported recently, Massachusetts does not have the same type of graduation requirements that other states have in place. Those types of rules can be quite helpful for students.
As it stands today, Massachusetts “recommends” that high school students complete the “MassCore” program of classes, but it’s not a requirement. If the repeal vote passes, the Massachusetts class of 2025 would have no graduation requirements at all except to take physical education and civics classes. The state doesn’t even require students to pass those classes!
In other words, the ballot initiative has the order of operations wrong. If the union activists behind it wanted to make a compelling argument for replacing the MCAS requirement, they should have built that alternative first. For now, I hope voters say “No” on Question 2.