After Massachusetts voters opted to eliminate the MCAS test as a graduation requirement during last November’s election, 43 teachers, administrators and parents from across the region met Wednesday evening to brainstorm potential new education standards.
Financial literacy, a comprehensive outlook on history, English language arts, and social and emotional regulation were brought up as potential benchmarks for education at a virtual forum hosted by Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution (FCCPR), the Massachusetts Teachers Association and Citizens for Public Schools.
“Across the country, we’re seeing serious and dangerous shifts — the dismantling of the Department of Education, the withholding of federal funding [and implementation of] rigid ideological agendas in our schools, stifling of free speech, the rolling back of civil rights protections,” Massachusetts Teachers Association Retired Members Committee Co-Chair Rick Last said. “While we stand up and resist these harmful policies, we also need to dream, to imagine and to build something better.”
Thirty-seven-year teaching veteran and testing reform advocate Kathy Greeley explained that after voters passed Question 2 in the November 2024 election, doing away with the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) test as a graduation requirement, Gov. Maura Healey appointed an advisory council to recommend new graduation requirements. Notes collected from the discussion at Wednesday’s forum, she said, would be sent to the Statewide K-12 Graduation Council.
Forum participants were placed into six breakout rooms to discuss three main questions: What should young people know and be able to do by the time they graduate, how can they demonstrate that they are ready for graduation, and how can education leaders organize and structure schools to support these goals?
Returning from Breakout Group 1, Greenfield School Committee member Stacey Sexton summarized the need for financial literacy, media literacy and understanding of how to use artificial intelligence responsibly, if at all. Sexton explained that their group discussed the relationship between history and civics education and the fundamentals of democracy.
“We talked about using education as a tool to open ourselves up to the world and really embrace other cultures and have dialogue, promote democracy, civic engagement and education,” Sexton said. “We really talked about wanting schools that didn’t just ask ‘Did a student meet some arbitrary bar?’ but says ‘Given a child’s imagination, what can a student, with their curiosity, accomplish?'”
University of Massachusetts Lowell Professor Emerita Charlotte Ryan summarized her group’s discussion, explaining that she believes competency requirements should be based on foundational skills such as basic math, reading and literacy on lower grade levels, with an emphasis on civics, communication and social skills at higher grade levels.
Ryan added that science and education focusing on climate change should be implemented as a graduation requirement, highlighting a need for students’ knowledge on the issue and ability to someday help combat climate change.
“The specific topic we talked about was climate change, and the need for interdisciplinary knowledge to figure out what we as citizens, or our children and grandchildren as citizens, can do about climate change,” she said. “It’s not just a technical problem, but it is a technical problem. It’s not just a science project, but it is a science project — it’s also an ethics problem.”
FCCPR member and education management professional Pixie Holbrook summarized the discussion from her breakout group, explaining that schools should have enhanced communication between educators and parents and that students should, in the group’s view, learn to be members of a community before they graduate.
Doug Selwyn, who chairs FCCPR’s education task force, concluded the meeting by telling participants that another forum will be held in the coming weeks and months once organizers have compiled all the notes taken from Wednesday night’s forum.