On November 5th, nearly two million Massachusetts voters decided that public high school students no longer need to pass the MCAS test in order to graduate. The measure was funded solely by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which spent over fifteen million dollars in ads, campaigning, and outside contractors, under the slogan “High Stakes, Not High Standards.”
CRLS teachers overwhelmingly supported the ballot measure. For freshman physics CRLS teacher Kristin Newton, the 9th grade physics MCAS was impossible to fully teach to. “We were just racing from one topic to the next every day,” she told the Register Forum.
Another freshman physics teacher, Tal Sebell-Shavit, explained that teaching to the MCAS was just as taxing as it was unhelpful: “There’s always the question of breadth versus depth,” he said. “If I want you to get a deep understanding of something, that takes time and you have to give up some of the MCAS test points.”
Cambridge students generally perform well on the MCAS; many lower-income districts struggle. “At the school my friend teaches at, they have to cut things like art and music in order to prepare for the MCAS,” history teacher Rachel Otty told the Register Forum. “The students are denied the classes that wealthier school districts have to offer.”
Others argue that removing the MCAS graduation requirement would harm lower-income districts. “The MCAS ensures that all students have similar graduation standards and are able to understand the fundamentals of the three subjects tested,” said sophomore Eleanor Younger. Removing it would allow for, “significant differences in schools and districts based upon the affluence and demographics of the town.”
The MCAS is also created for students who have been learning English since birth. “Some of my students are prevented from graduating, because it’s impossible to learn enough English in only a year or two,” Alicia Roth, a CRLS ESL teacher, told the Register Forum. “We can do MCAS prep, like how to turn around a prompt and make it an answer, but obviously their vocabulary is so limited.” Students who arrive in the US in their twelfth grade year can graduate without passing the MCAS, but they get a special diploma. “It’s not as good as a diploma that says you passed the MCAS–it’s not the caliber of diploma that colleges are looking for,” Roth said. The math MCAS, too, is hard for ESL students. The section can be translated into Spanish, but not any other languages.
Still, some see the merits of the data MCAS provides. “Standardized data does hold a school accountable for teaching all students, not just the high performing ones,” Newton said. “When I taught in this district before the MCAS was a requirement, I think we paid a lot less attention to all of the different subgroups.”’
There is some disagreement as to whether the legitimacy of state test data will decrease. Many expect scores to drop: between 2002 and 2003, when the test became a graduation requirement, the number of 10th-graders who failed the test nearly halved. In 2023, only 700 students, one-percent of Massachusetts’ senior class, failed to graduate because of the MCAS.
Still, Sebell-Shavit believes that students might do better. “I think some people do worse under stress,” he told the Register Forum. Eve Berube ’27 agreed, telling the Register Forum, “the MCAS brings a lot of anxiety, causing scores to suffer.” Langdon Rivas ’28 is glad to see the requirement go: “I feel like a big stress is off my shoulders.”
