BOSTON – Now that Question 2 has passed, eliminating MCAS as a graduation requirement in Massachusetts schools, are there virtually no high school graduation standards in the state? One citizen activist thinks so.
Will Massachusetts Revert Without MCAS Requirement?
“It’s definitely back to the future,” said Bob Rivers, executive chairman of Eastern Bank. “The only standard we will have is four years of teaching, four years of PE and four years of social studies.”
Rivers was part of a group of local business leaders who joined Governor Maura Healey, Education Secretary Pat Tutwiler and others in opposing ending the MCAS standard. In an interview with WBZ-TV, he said that in response to the 59%-41% approval of question two“You just don’t know where your kids are in a certain way in an individual school. There will still be an MCAS that is administered, but it will become increasingly irrelevant because people won’t pay attention to it. They won’t study it. There are ways to opt out anyway.”
Campaign ads, sponsored by the state’s largest teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, offered a vision of graduation standards tailored to individual students by teachers and, presumably, local school districts. But Rivers — and even some Beacon Hill supporters of Question Two — see the need for some form of statewide standards.
Will there be new national education standards?
Rivers noted that this was one of the driving forces behind the 1993 Education Reform Act the MCAS standard There was concern among employers that a high school diploma did not provide a reliable guarantee that the graduate has the basic skills needed in the workplace.
“We see it a lot today, in many ways, that kids are just not prepared for work, the workforce, a career or higher education, and this is only going to make it worse,” he said. “Before the 1993 reform law, we were not number one in the country in public education. Today, by some standard, we are [but scores have been slipping in recent years]. A competitive strength of Massachusetts is the strength of our workforce. Unfortunately, this has been significantly damaged by the abolition of this standard.”
Rivers also discussed his objections to an agreement between Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and other business leaders that would temporarily raise the city’s commercial property tax rates above the legal limit to address an expected decline in revenues due to high to compensate for office vacancies.
