The board of the Massachusetts Teacher Association has voted unanimously to back a ballot question eliminating the state’s MCAS exam graduation requirement, kicking off the next step in the prominent campaign.
“The elected leadership of the MTA has made clear how educators feel about the high-stakes nature of the MCAS exams and the unjust use of them as a graduation requirement,” MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy said in a statement following Sunday’s vote.
Two ballot initiative petitions ending the MCAS graduation requirement were filed by the Aug. 2 deadline. If approved by the Attorney General’s office, the petitions must receives about 75,000 signatures by mid-November to be put on the November 2024 ballot.
McCarthy and other MTA members were among the signatures on the filed petitions. The union’s board of directors met Sunday to officially vote to support and approve the gathering of signatures for the ballot initiative.
The board also voted to campaign for the Cherish Act, which increases state investments in public higher education, at the Sunday meeting.
The ballot initiative nixing the MCAS requirement would replace it with “locally developed alternatives for certifying academic mastery,” the union said.
The union has long been an outspoken opponent of the test. In their statement, the president and vice president argued the exam “has not only failed to close learning gaps that have persisted along racial and economic lines, but the standardized tests have exacerbated the disparities among our student populations.”
However, the union emphasized, the ballot question would not end the test, just the graduation requirement.
Opponents of the ballot initiative have argued getting rid of the requirement would lower standards for students and the value of the Massachusetts diploma.
The test is a “pernicious barrier” to student’s bright future, the leaders’ statement argued.
“Educators are committed to the success of our students, and at present the MCAS graduation requirement is doing nothing more than proving the wealth and education levels of parents, while also harming competent students who, for a variety of reasons, struggle with standardized tests,” Page and McCarthy said.
