Citizens for Public Schools, in cooperation with other education organizations, is organizing a series of six public forums across the state where parents, teachers, students, and other people concerned with our public schools can come together to discuss three fundamental questions:
1. What should students know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school?
2. How should students demonstrate their readiness to graduate?
3. What should high school look like to prepare students for your recommended graduation requirements?
The first of the series will be April 30 at 6pm at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. (Register here. Download flyer, in English and Spanish, here.)
The meetings follow on the approval of Question 2 last November when Massachusetts voters decisively rejected the one-size-fits-all MCAS graduation requirement, 59 to 41 percent. The margin was widest in our less affluent, more racially diverse cities and towns like Springfield, New Bedford, and Pittsfield.
Question 2 was on the ballot because, for years, our state leaders refused to listen to parents and educators who pointed out the many problems with this high stakes, standardized test. Instead, Governor Maura Healey and the legislative leadership campaigned to keep the MCAS requirement.
The voters emphatically disagreed with them.
Now state leaders are rushing to come up with another way to decide that a student has earned a high school diploma, in addition to local districts certifying that the student has passed all required courses aligned with the state standards.
Governor Healey has created a Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council to come up with new requirements. Their interim report is due December 1.
The Governor’s executive order creating the council said most of the members would be chosen by the governor, legislative leaders, or business organizations that campaigned against Question 2, and thus might lean toward recommending yet another form of a one-size-fits-all test..
There is a better way.
The Massachusetts Education Reform Act was passed in 1993, over 30 years ago. Now that the voters have passed Question 2, we have an opportunity to reconsider what we want from public education and to align our assessments with our goals. We can forge a path forward that will do justice to our talented students and educators, as well as parents, in all their diversity.
That will require a thoughtful and inclusive process, one that devotes the necessary time to solicit and center the knowledge and views of those who will be called upon to implement these changes and those who will be most affected.
We can learn from models in other states, especially New York, where a Blue Ribbon Commission embarked on a multiyear process with 86 community forums across the state. More than 3,300 people participated; another 2,700 sent in comments.
From this broad public input, the New York commission came up with a “portrait of a graduate” reflecting seven areas in which students must show proficiency. They include academic knowledge but also 21st century skills like critical thinking and problem solving.
New York students will be able to demonstrate competency in a variety of ways, many of which reflect the real world they are about to enter as young adults, including performance assessments, capstone projects, experiential and work-based opportunities.
New York’s comprehensive process took time, considerably more than a year. But it has paid off, with widespread public support of the results, unlike the divisiveness that MCAS as a graduation requirement has wrought across the state for decades.
Citizens for Public Schools and the groups working with us cannot carry out a process as extensive as New York’s, but we can demonstrate the approach and collect the views of enough stakeholders to outline a new direction for our state. Those are our ambitions for the forums we are organizing .
We will tabulate the results, make them public, and present them both to the governor’s council and the legislature.
We welcome participation from everyone who cares about the education of our young people.
