(Correction appended November 7, 2024)

Massachusetts mom Shelley Scruggs says she’s spent the last decade thinking and worrying about standardized testing — specifically the three exams her son would need to pass in order to earn a high school diploma.

A junior at a technical high school in Lexington, her son, who has ADD and an Individualized Education Program, has always found greater success with interactive, hands-on learning and is now studying plumbing.

Last spring, he took the English, science and math exams. While she believes it’s important to assess how kids are doing in school, a frustrated Scruggs sees the exam requirement as forcing teachers to teach to a test, narrowing curriculum, putting undue stress on students and making the most vulnerable feel bad about themselves.

Her son is one of the approximately 70,000 10th graders who sit for at least one of the three Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams each year. Based on state policies, students must earn a passing score on all three exams to earn a diploma. Those who don’t can try again at least four times and some students are able to participate in an appeal process or an alternative pathway. Ultimately, the vast majority of students — about 99% — meet the requirements.

Scruggs said her son’s experiences motivated her to try and repeal the state’s graduation requirement. She drafted a ballot initiative last year and began collecting signatures, ultimately joining efforts with the Massachusetts Teachers Association. After collecting 170,000 signatures, the union got the question officially certified on the Nov 6 ballot, where it will appear as Question 2.

Lexington parent Shelley Scruggs, who initiated the ballot question to end the MCAS grad requirement, told legislators: This test “penalizes students like my son who are just not good test-takers.”

— Massachusetts Teachers Association (@massteacher)

The measure does not propose eliminating the administration of the MCAS exam, but rather its role as a statewide graduation requirement. If it passes, students in Massachusetts would still need to meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined requirements set by the roughly 300 school districts.

Scruggs recently got a call from her son’s guidance counselor: He passed his math and science MCAS exams, but failed the English exam by one point. Describing it “as the best phone call I ever got in my life,” she remains staunchly opposed to the graduation requirement and is campaigning alongside the union in favor of Question 2.��

The statewide teachers association has spent more than on the effort.  MTA President Max Page told  , “We’ve long  believed that this fixation on this one test does not help us understand how a student or school is doing.” 

Page, and other union representatives, did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s multiple requests for comment. 

Those who want to keep the requirement and see the ballot measure defeated — including Gov. Maura Healey, Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler and The National Parents Union  — argue that the MCAS is a high-quality assessment that is necessary to hold schools accountable, communicate progress with students and their parents and establish consistent academic expectations statewide.

According to the conducted between Oct. 2-6 by Suffolk University and the Globe, 58% of the 500 Massachusetts residents surveyed plan to vote “yes,” on Question 2, eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement, and 37% plan to vote “no.”

The state education department recently released the which predictably dropped in the pandemic’s wake and following the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision — implemented for the first time this spring —  to for what’s considered a passing score.

Statewide, 10th graders exceeded or met expectations on the English exam, 48% on the math exam, and 49% on the science one.  Historically, only of students — around 700 total — ultimately miss the requirement, the majority of whom are English language learners or have a disability.

Massachusetts resident Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union and the parent of five kids, one of whom receives special education services, believes that getting rid of the requirement in the name of kids with disabilities is “really offensive.”

“[My son] absolutely took and passed the MCAS … Kids like Matthew are capable not only of proficiency,” she said, “but excellence.”

Rodrigues argued that the data collected from MCAS scores actually contribute to equity, rather than detracting from it.

“The idea that we would just toss away data and call it social justice,” she said, “is just — it’s wild to me… we need more data and information on our kids so that we can be better equipped to help them and figure out what the challenges are.”

Massachusetts as a bellwether

The MCAS graduation requirement goes back to the 1993 Education Reform Act; it’s been used since 2003 as part of the graduation standard. Before that, the only state requirements were a U.S. history course credit and gym classes.

And what happens in Massachusetts, ranked the top state for public education nationally, matters greatly, said James Peyser, former state education secretary.

“I think Massachusetts in many ways is a bellwether for what goes on around the country… If a question like this succeeds here, I think it’ll send a signal to policymakers and to union leaders and educators … around the country that maybe it’s time to abandon the whole exercise,” he said.

As election day nears and the debate intensifies, neither side wants to focus on the high passing rate, according to Evan Horowitz, the executive director of at Tufts University who authored on the ballot measure. He found that those who don’t pass the MCAS typically don’t meet district requirements for graduation either.

Those in favor of the exam insist it’s a rigorous standard and those opposed insist it’s an unfair hurdle, “so there’s sort of no constituency to the argument that actually this test might be too easy to really matter, certainly too easy to have a big, statewide fight over,” he said. 

John Papay, director of the at Brown University and lead author of on the MCAS exam, said both test scores and course grades predict longer-term student outcomes and test scores can tell us something beyond grades about how well high schoolers are prepared for college and career. 

He remains concerned about how well vulnerable student groups are being served overall. 

“The question about the exit exam is a little bit of a red herring around this bigger, critically important question about, ‘How are we ensuring that English learners [and] students with disabilities, are getting the skills that they need out of the Massachusetts public education system?’”

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the reach of the ballot proposition. The measure proposes the elimination of the MCAS��exam as a statewide graduation requirement. If it passes, students in Massachusetts would still need to meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined measures, set by the roughly 300 school districts.��

When her daughter entered Huntington Park High School in Los Angeles this fall, Vega asked if tutoring was available, but was told only students with F’s or a teacher’s referral were eligible.

Vega picked up extra shifts cleaning offices on nights and weekends to pay the $470 a month to get a private tutor. She wonders, however, why that was necessary: The Los Angeles Unified School District is receiving in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan — 20 percent of which has to be spent to address learning loss, according to the law. 

“The district is really …concentrating on people getting their vaccines,” Vega said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Let’s let doctors and pediatricians do their job and focus on that. The district needs to focus on learning loss and getting to a good academic level.”

Under the law, tutoring is just one way districts can address learning disruption caused by the pandemic. But with research showing that so-called can provide struggling students the academic boost they need, both parents and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs.

Thus far, however, the enthusiasm over tutoring has not translated into widespread adoption. A from Burbio, which tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic, shows that out of 1,037 districts nationally, only about a third are spending federal relief funds on tutoring. The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s ongoing review shows that while 62 out of 100 large districts offer tutoring, most don’t provide details on their programs and how many students they serve. 

Some districts have addressed learning loss by lengthening the school day or providing small group instruction. Others that have launched tutoring programs either restrict services to specific students or limit the number of sessions available. A shortage of available tutors has only exacerbated the problem.

“There is good research that high-dosage tutoring has really transformative potential and it’s also true that school systems are struggling mightily to meet the demand,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change.

In October, another Los Angeles Unified parent, Ada Mendoza, was offered tutoring for her two youngest children twice-a-week at Manchester Avenue Elementary School. One hitch: It only lasted a month.

She signed them up, but had doubts that a month would be enough to make up for a year of distance learning. Eight-year-old Juan Jose was beginning to read when schools shifted to remote instruction, but now struggles with words of three or more syllables, reading comprehension and writing complete sentences.

Her children got the flu in October and missed some sessions. She said Juan Jose’s teacher told her he is still reading far below grade-level. “They lost a lot of learning, and they need a lot of help,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

According to the district, tutoring is available for children with disabilities, long-term English learners in grades three through eight, and foster, homeless and low-income students “based on performance indicators as identified by school sites.”

Mendoza said she can’t afford a private tutor, but some parents have gone that route. October from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that 3 in 10 families with at least one school-age child had spent their first three monthly child tax credit payments on school-related expenses, including tutoring and afterschool programs.

“Guess we’re not all spending it on getting our nails done and filet mignon,” quipped Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. The group’s recent polling showed that more than a third of parents consider not having enough tutoring or to be a major or moderate problem.

The union has launched — or EPIC — a “watchdog campaign” to follow the $122 billion K-12 schools are receiving through the relief bill. And in Los Angeles, Vega has joined other Los Angeles parents taking part in the nonprofit , which monitors how the district is using relief money to help students get back on grade level.  

Parent Revolution, another Los Angeles advocacy group, wants the district to create an “ for every student. Even if students can get free tutoring, it’s often a “blanket approach” that might not target their needs, said Jay Artis-Wright, executive director of the organization. 

“We work with populations of families who have academic challenges that preceded COVID and now have a wider gap,” she said. “There is a surplus of funds that can support them, but only if we can agree that each child’s academic recovery is unique and should be treated as such.”

‘This giant puzzle’

Districts that have launched tutoring programs say they can’t serve everyone — especially as a tight labor market and quarantine requirements continue to fuel personnel shortages.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, has been able to sign up 500 tutors — a mix of teachers, paraprofessionals and community volunteers, said Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer. But that’s half the number they had planned to recruit, which means less than 1,000 students are receiving tutoring instead of the 2,000 the district expected to enroll through its $19 million Accelerating Scholars program.

The Delta variant, Randolph said, affected the size of the volunteer pool and she wasn’t as successful hiring retired teachers as she’d hoped. 

The program — 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 10 weeks — currently targets low-performing first- through third-graders in literacy and eighth- and ninth-graders in math. 

“It’s this giant puzzle,” Randolph said, adding that tutoring is “hot right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.” 

Staff members at the 46 schools now offering tutoring manage the schedule so teachers aren’t “overburdened,” she said. The district tries to schedule the tutoring sessions during the regular school day to avoid the need for extra transportation.

But there are exceptions. Kindall Maupin, who has a daughter in eighth grade at DuPont Hadley Middle School in the district, was only offered a 7:30 a.m. slot for math tutoring — a time that doesn’t work because her daughter has ADHD and can’t focus that early in the morning.

“I feel like if they can have football practice and cheerleading practice at the end of the day, why can’t we do this then,” Maupin said. She added that she’s even considered refinancing her house to afford private tutoring. “I have been there, literally sitting down to crunch the numbers to see how I could do this.”

Maybe next semester

Experts said the current pressures on local districts affect whether they can pull off a new program on a large scale. 

“Many educators are understandably exhausted from these past 18 months of school disruptions,” said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Implementing a new program — no matter how much funding is available for it or how much research supports its effectiveness — takes effort.”

Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts address budgeting and staffing challenges, said many districts have contracted with vendors to give students 24-hour access to online homework help.

“We are trying to be clear that that is not the same thing” as high-dosage tutoring, he said, but added that with districts focusing on filling vacancies and managing quarantines, some are only now shifting to “actually putting canoes out in the pond around accelerating learning.” 

That doesn’t stop districts from adding tutoring programs next semester, he said. And he added that some who are frustrated with the pace of implementation may push for districts to reimburse parents spending their own money on tutoring.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, alluded to Travers’s idea in an this week, suggesting that districts share some of those federal funds with parents who are spending their own time and money helping students catch up. 

“Given all the labor shortages, and the willingness to pay parents for , it is interesting that districts haven’t done more to go the route of paying parents to tutor their kids,” she said in an interview. “We thought we’d see some by now.”

Randolph, in Nashville, said she thinks her district needs to do a better job of communicating the other ways the district is to address learning loss, such as funding $18 million for summer school and $6 million for computer-based literacy and math programs.

“It’s not just tutoring or nothing,” she said.

Still, she said leaders plan to continue tutoring beyond this period of recovery. That’s one reason why the district decided to build the program in-house, instead of contracting with a private provider, which can cost per student for a year. That’s not a sustainable solution, Randolph said. The district is spending $400 per student for the 10-week period.

“We don’t think tutoring is just for a COVID response,” she said. “If it’s the right thing to do now, it’s the right thing to do later.”