State graduation requirement a muddled mess

January 29, 2025

By Michael Jonas

It’s clear that Massachusetts students no longer have to pass 10th grade MCAS tests in English, math, and science to graduate from high school. But determining exactly what they do need to do to secure a diploma is proving to be a high-stakes test of its own for state officials – one with no straightforward answer.

When voters overwhelmingly passed Question 2 on last November’s ballot, it removed passing MCAS as a graduation requirement. But members of the state board of education continue to struggle with the confusing state of play they’ve been left to sort out. 

The new state law put in place by voters says that, in place of passing the 10th grade tests, students will now be eligible to graduate “by satisfactorily completing coursework that has been certified by the student’s district as showing mastery of the skills, competencies, and knowledge contained in the state academic standards and curriculum frameworks in the areas measured by the MCAS high school tests … and in any additional areas determined by the board.”

Last month, education board member Marty West said the language is “hard to make sense of” since simply “satisfactorily completing coursework” is not the same as “showing mastery” of skills and knowledge in the state standards for such classes. 

At Tuesday’s meeting of the board, members wrestled with whether they need to provide more guidance to districts by setting out definitions of what’s meant by the language in the new law.

“Districts have reached to me and asked, what does mastery mean?” said associate education commissioner Rob Curtin in a presentation on Tuesday to the board. 

Without such definitions, there will be no consistency in how districts judge whether students have met the state “competency determination” to graduate. 

But if the board were to craft definitions, it would open a whole new can of worms with the state education department tasked with monitoring compliance with the standard by hundreds of school districts, said Matt Hills, the board’s vice chair. “It's really hard for me to see options that avoid creating a whole bureaucratic role” for the department, he said. 

Curtin said an early look at how districts are interpreting the ballot question wording shows that fears of inconsistent standards are well-founded. Some districts, he said, have decided that completing first-year algebra will satisfy the math requirement going forward, while others have concluded that students must complete first-year algebra and geometry. 

“So just right there you have a difference in what it means to receive the competency determination for students in different districts,” he said.

Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order earlier this month establishing a state “graduation council” to develop recommendations for a uniform state graduation standard in the wake of the vote on MCAS. But until any new law or policy is in place, the state will be struggling to make do in what education board chair Katherine Craven called a “Hades-esque” type of “limbo.” 

Hills proposed that the board provide districts with two options. The first, he said, would be to follow definitions that the state board establishes related to mastery of coursework. Since that could mean submitting a plan that the state determines is not in compliance with the standard, Hills said the board should make clear that districts can opt out of that path and simply decide to use a passing score on the 10th grade MCAS test as a measure of mastery of the subject areas. (Students will still take MCAS in 10th grade even after the vote to end its use as a statewide graduation requirement.) 

While some superintendents may be concerned about resurrecting the MCAS test as the graduation standard following the statewide vote, Hills said they may be “a whole lot worse than concerned” once they see the regulations the state adopts concerning course mastery. “We’re putting definitions on things that were not put in the law to have definitions applied to them by the state,” he said of the dilemma the state board is now facing. 

A more immediate conundrum, Hills said, concerns the roughly 1,500 students now in 12th grade who did not pass the 10th grade MCAS test but also don’t appear to have completed courses that would fit any definition of what’s required under the ballot question language. “There is no reasonable, magical solution there,” said Hills, adding that the state education commissioner may have to grant these students some kind of waiver from any graduation requirement. 

Craven said she may schedule a special meeting of the board to continue the conversation on the graduation standard. She has repeatedly emphasized that it is one of the board’s biggest responsibilities in meeting its obligation, set out in the state constitution, to “assure learning” in its public schools.

Not mincing words over the current situation, Craven said, “It’s a mess right now.”