Local requirements, compliance with statewide standards in the mix

BOSTON (SHNS) - Massachusetts school districts have to come up with new processes before the end of the school year to determine if a student has shown competency over state academic standards, as state officials face an onslaught of questions raised by the passage of a new voter law.

Voters in November passed Question 2, an initiative petition that removed the requirement that students pass the MCAS exam to graduate. The new law also delegated the power to determine if a student met statewide standards to individual school districts.

Rob Curtin, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's chief data and accountability officer, said students on track to graduate in the spring who passed the MCAS exam prior to November are still considered to have passed the "competency determination" (CD) -- the term that means they proved they have skills and knowledge that meet the statewide standards.

Some students, however, still have not passed the test. The most immediate question the department and local districts have to answer, Curtin said, is how to create new, local CDs to ensure that these students still have the opportunity to graduate.

"We think it's really important that there actually be still two processes here, one for local graduation requirements and one for the competency determination aligned to the language that's in the new law," Curtin said.

He gave an example -- that a district could have a local graduation requirement of two years of science. A student could meet that requirement by taking life science and geology, for example. That wouldn't, however, meet the statewide CD requirement.

"There's wide variance in the local graduation requirements across the state," Curtin said. "I think we've all seen that now, and for some the local graduation requirements might envelop what's needed for the competency determination, but that might not be true for all. So we are stressing that it's important that there be separate processes here and set up by all districts."

Now, heading into the second half of the 2024-2025 school year, local school committees and administrators need to figure out how they can each independently certify that students are meeting that statewide standard.

DESE released guidance that advised districts that they could still use the MCAS for their local requirements.

"We received a number of questions about whether on the local graduation requirements side, schools could use MCAS, or a qualifying score on the MCAS as a local graduation requirement. We were clear in the latest FAQ that the answer to that is yes," Curtin said.

As DESE pivots in their approach to accountability, Curtin said they're focusing on short-term, medium-term and long-term regulatory responses. In the short-term, they're trying to answer questions for districts that are coming up with their own CDs, so students who have not yet passed the requirement can have the opportunity to graduate in 2025.

"Medium-term" is focused on current high school students. Curtin said there could be opportunities for the board of education to build more accountability back into the system by adding regulatory definitions to the statutory language of the new law.

The language of the new law added by the ballot question is only half a sentence long. Curtin said there could be opportunities for the board to interpret more specific definitions of that language through regulation.

"This language is a mess... We need to get to work," said board member Martin West.

He said earlier, "I guess the ballot question process is the ultimate version of writing by committee, which is never a good idea, because I think what we have now is hard to make sense of. It says 'satisfactorily completing coursework that has been certified as showing mastery.' Well, coursework doesn't show mastery. You know, work on an assessment shows mastery. And so that can be read as implying assessment needs to play a role here. Like, we have to regulate that language in order to make it something that districts can understand and work with."

The board of education was "disempowered" to engage in the process of creating a new accountability system in a "meaningful way," board member Michael Moriarty said.

"We're really limited in doing much that's of serious consequence, and I'm not particularly interested in pretending we have that authority," Vice Chair Matt Hills said, agreeing with Moriarty.

In the "long-term," or planning for students who are not yet in high school, Curtin said it's possible the Legislature may want to intervene to make a new system.

Sen. Jason Lewis, who co-chairs the legislative Committee on Education, plans to file a bill next session to require all students to complete MassCore, a recommended set of courses for high school students.

Overall, board members seemed open to the idea of Lewis's bill, though Hills warned that implementing MassCore statewide may not be "realistic" to pass through the Legislature "given the history of much smaller amounts of curriculum that couldn't make it through legislation."

Moriarty said research shows that MassCore implementation across districts is inconsistent, and that if the state is seriously considering that path to patch over the inconsistencies in accountability from district-to-district, "that's something we can get in front of right now."