Look at recent history and vote no on question 2

But first, a warning: get ready for a big mood change.

After all, in the early years of MCAS testing, the results were somewhere between discouraging and dismal. In the first two years of MCAS, at least 52 percent failed the math exam. In the last year before this test started counting, the failure rate was 45 percent.

The English results told a similar story. For the first three years, when the test had no significance, the pass rate was never higher than 72 percent. In 2000, that number dropped to 66 percent.

So when MCAS came into prominence, many prepared for the worst. OK, ready? Here are the first few paragraphs from History of the globe about the results published that day.

“The state released the 2001 MCAS results yesterday, which show that the number of 10th-grade students who fail the test has dropped by almost half – a stunning turnaround that is sure to change the long-standing debate over the standardized exam.”

“Action Governor Jane M. Swift, surrounded by delighted lawmakers and education officials in the House of Representatives, he announced that 82 percent of 10th graders passed the English test, up from 66 percent in 2000. The math pass rate was 75 percent, up from 55 percent in 2000.

Education officials were understandably euphoric. They and academic testing experts attributed the large jump in scores to the fact that test-takers realized there were consequences to the exam.

It was a particularly good day for Swift, who despite waves of doom and gloom stood firm in favor of the Leaving Certificate exam, and for then-Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll, who predicted that scores would increase when rates were added to the test. Driscoll identified increased student effort as a “major factor” in high exam scores.

So what happened? One possible – though highly unlikely – explanation for such a large jump is that students simply took the test itself more seriously after 2001, but this was not actually the case. science no more.

What is much more likely, however, is that more students passed the exam because they studied harder, and their schools did more to help them clear the bar that suddenly mattered — in other words, that scores rose because student performance improved.

So, with this aspect of the past as a prologue, what happens if question 2 prevails and students are no longer required to take the MCAS exam in 10th grade, which now also includes a science exam, to earn a high school diploma?

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has spent millions on efforts to eliminate the requirement for students to pass the MCAS in 10th grade to graduate, maintains that the exams will remain an effective tool for assessing high school performance without the so-called high stakes and that students will not learn any less .

This rating may not reflect an accurate understanding of teenage nature.

As Secretary of State for Education Patrick Tutwiler noted at a recent Harvard forum on question 2, “In the future, high school students won’t take this seriously, so it won’t be a useful assessment anymore.”

He’s right. Based on history, we should expect MCAS scores to decline, perhaps sharply.

Does anyone think that if and when this happens, the MTA will advocate for restoring the exam as a graduation requirement so that students take it more diligently? It seems more likely that the union will argue that since many students simply do not take MCAS seriously, exam scores should not be considered an accurate measure of their mastery of the subject.

The situation that will unfold will see the state’s efforts to improve education regress toward the uneven efforts and large and persistent pockets of mediocrity that prevailed before the state’s founding the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993. Finally, as Tutwiler’s secretary noticed in the Harvard Crimson, “The only thing (question 2) is to deconstruct the current system. I don’t offer anything in return.”

Attorney General Andrea Campbell emphasized the same point in a recent letter to her supporters explaining her opposition to Question 2.

“I have serious concerns about question two because it would not only remove our only statewide graduation standard, but it would remove that standard and offer no replacement,” she wrote. “This would result in more than 300 different and unequal high school graduation standards across the Commonwealth and potentially lead to haphazard assessments of students’ readiness for college and careers, as well as even greater inequalities in student achievement and opportunity.”

The MTA argues that what really improved public education in Massachusetts was not MCAS, but rather the large infusion of state dollars that came through the 1993 law.

However, this claim only tells half the truth. Yes, new state money was important, but so were enforceable standards. Here’s how we know. The new dollars that came with education reform increased year after year after the 1993 law went into effect. However, MCAS scores did not begin to increase significantly until 2001, when the credit became part of earning a high school diploma.

As Gov. Maura Healey noted in an email to supporters urging them to vote “no” on Question 2: “In fact, as soon as we established MCAS as the graduation standard, we saw increases in student achievement across the state.”

Healey added that without an MCAS graduation requirement, “we will no longer hold ourselves to the same high standards across all of our schools. Instead, it will go back to the way it was before – with hundreds of different standards set by hundreds of cities and towns. “It will hurt our low-performing schools and poorer school districts the most.”

Healey i Campbell, Both liberal Democrats are absolutely right about this. As the state’s recent education history shows, “no” is the right vote on Question 2.

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