As questions swirl about what a second Trump term will mean for public schools across the country, another less high-profile election result promises to reshape educational standards in a state long heralded as a national academic leader.
In Massachusetts last week, voters approved a ballot initiative that will eliminate use of the state’s exit exam as a high school graduation requirement. The exam has long been painted by detractors as an unnecessary barrier to graduation, and by proponents as an important common standard.
In making this change, Massachusetts joins a growing group of states that have recently considered doing away with exit exams.
Last year, legislators in Oregon passed a bill that suspended the state’s requirement that graduates demonstrate essential skills in reading and writing, a mandate that most districts met via standardized test scores.
And in New York, state education officials have proposed removing its exit exam, the Regents, from the list of diploma requirements. New York schoolchildren have taken the Regents for decades in a well-worn rite of passage.
The shift away from these high-stakes tests has been about a decade in the making. Only 13 states had them as of 2019, compared to 25 in 2012. But the pandemic accelerated this trend, said Tom Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University.
In Oregon, for instance, the push to suspend the essential skills requirement gained momentum after the state school board paused it throughout pandemic-related school closures. Outside of graduation requirements, other states, including Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska, have lowered the bar to pass state tests over the last few years—a move that critics worry will obscure the academic toll that national indicators have shown the pandemic took on students.
Districts are still facing the ripple effects of that time period, said Dee. “To my mind, this puts a premium on tracking data and finding aligned solutions, particularly at the local level, and also attending to the other dimensions of accountability, so we don’t lose sight of the standards we have for our kids and try to do right by this generation of students,” he said.
How Massachusetts decides to fill the void left by the MCAS could have national implications, said Jackie Kraemer, the director of policy analysis and development at the National Center on Education and the Economy, an organization that researches the world’s best-performing school systems. The state has a long history as a leader in academic achievement and accountability policy, and its 1993 law setting up a system of standards and aligned exams helped propel the standards-based education movement.
“People will be looking to the state to see how they shape a next generation of assessments,” she said.
Why exit exams rose—and then fell—in popularity
Exit exams first became popular in the 1970s, when the tests asked students to show mastery at roughly the level of 8th grade, said Dee. They became more widespread, and increasingly more rigorous, as the accountability movement gained traction in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The tests served a dual purpose, said Kraemer.
First, because students have to pass them to graduate, the theory goes, districts are incentivized to provide instruction that meets this baseline standard. They’re an “equity tool,” she said.
Second, they signal to employers and institutes of higher education that students with a diploma meet a certain bar. “Without some sort of statewide policy lever, it’s not clear, and it could mean different things in different districts in different parts of the state,” said Kraemer.
In practice, though, research has shown that these exams can lead to higher dropout rates, especially for Black students.
After the introduction of the Common Core State Standards in the mid 2010s, some states dropped these requirements. States tests aligned to the new standards were harder to pass, and instead of watching their graduation rates fall, states looked for other ways to evaluate student readiness for college or the workforce.
Massachusetts first gave the MCAS in the late 1990s, first making it a graduation requirement for the 2003 graduating class. The exam, which covers English/language arts, math, and one area of science, is given to 10th graders.
It was part of a broader suite of reforms, including the development of academic content standards and big boosts to education funding. In the decades following, the state climbed to the top of national education rankings.
Advocates for the MCAS say the test was an integral part of the shift. Before the exit exam, “we socially promoted and pushed out generations of kids that were functionally illiterate,” said Keri Rodrigues, the founding president of the National Parents Union, and a Massachusetts resident. The National Parents Union is a member of the No on 2 Coalition, which organized against the ballot proposal.
“We gave them meaningless pieces of paper that were certificates of participation, certificates of attendance,” she said.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which led the campaign in favor of the ballot initiative to end the use of the test, has argued that the state can maintain high educational standards without the exam—and that the MCAS has presented a barrier for students and teachers to overcome.
“For years, educators in classrooms across the Commonwealth have been voicing concerns about the harmful impact of the MCAS graduation requirement,” said MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy, in a statement last week.
“Students who were passing their courses were being denied diplomas because of this requirement. Educators were forced to narrow the curriculum in order to teach to the high-stakes test.”
Going forward, students will still take the MCAS, as required by federal education law, but passing the exam won’t be a graduation requirement.
Data show that most students—96 percent—eventually pass the MCAS, or meet the requirement through an approved alternative option, like presenting a portfolio of work. About 700 students, roughly 1 percent of the state’s graduating class, don’t graduate because they didn’t meet the requirement. The majority of this group of students are English learners or students with disabilities. The MTA has argued that high-stakes tests “stack the deck” against these students.
But proponents of the test say that it ensures districts provide everyone, including historically marginalized groups, rigorous educational opportunities.
The new policy could incentivize districts to lower standards to boost graduation rates, Rodrigues said.
“We are going to be able to watch the inequities in Massachusetts grow wider and wider as a result of this,” she said. “We’re never going to break through cycles of poverty and get kids to economic mobility if we don’t even believe they’re capable of getting to academic proficiency.”
What will graduation requirements look like?
It’s hard to know exactly how this change will affect academic outcomes in the state, said John Papay, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, who has studied the MCAS.
The 1990s reforms that reshaped the school system all happened in tandem. “It’s unclear, if you remove any individual piece, what impact that might have,” he said.
The MTA has proposed evaluating students through other forms of assessment, including course grades, local district graduation requirements, and other standardized test scores.
Rodrigues, of the National Parents Union, said that opponents of the ballot measure want to see legislation proposed to increase graduation requirements through other avenues, such as mandating a minimum number of courses taken and passed in each academic subject. And she said all districts should adopt MassCore, a state-recommended course of study designed to prepare students for college and career.
In New York, where education officials have proposed a timeline for ending the exit exam requirement, education officials haven’t yet decided on alternatives for students to demonstrate proficiency.
As other states have moved away from exit exams, some have switched to end-of-course tests. Rather than requiring that students receive a certain score, these exams, linked to classes like Algebra, are usually part of a student’s final grade in that class. Research has shown that these tests don’t depress graduation rates in the same way.
Whatever option the state chooses going forward, said Papay, it’s important that it includes some uniform standard across districts.
“It does feel like Massachusetts needs to create a system where the standards you need to graduate from high school don’t depend on your ZIP code,” he said.
