This summer, Tim Callahan took over the North Adams Public Schools as superintendent. With its 1,200 students and four schools, the district serves the second-largest community in Berkshire County — the city of North Adams and its roughly 13,000 residents. When Massachusetts voters last November overwhelmingly decided to remove passage of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, as a high school graduation requirement, Callahan applauded the move.
“I actually did my doctoral dissertation about the state accountability system, and I dove deeply into the flaws of the MCAS as a measure, and as a measure of accountability, as a measure of a graduation requirement," he said. "And so, I thought that it was overdue that the people of Massachusetts would consider the MCAS as not what they need students to be able to demonstrate mastery and to be able to graduate. So, I thought it was the first step in hopefully many other steps to really reconsider the MCAS for all grade levels.”
Callahan says standardized tests like the MCAS offer a limited picture of a student.
“The MCAS only measures about 18% of the standards," he told WAMC. "They prioritize standards that can be easily measured on multiple choice tests and short writing assignments that are often scored in ways that real writing in the real world would not be scored or not be evaluated. So, for example, if you're a high school student, you're taking all these courses, you're learning all this content. The MCAS doesn't measure anything to do with your ability to collaborate. It doesn't measure anything to do with your ability to communicate with your peers, other than in writing in very specific, narrow definitions of what writing looks like. It doesn't measure your content knowledge in anything but English language arts and mathematics, a little bit of science, basically just biology.”
Extensive research shows standardized tests typically reflect the affluence of a given community.
“You can predict the MCAS score of a community based on the average income of the community," said Callahan. "So, if you take the per capita income or the average family income, you can identify, without even knowing what the test scores look like, you can identify whether they'll score in the bottom quartile, the bottom half of results, the top half, the top quartile. It's purely correlated to the economic status of the community. So, therefore, the test is inequitable if it's used as a measure of student mastery and school accountability, because low-income schools will always score lower than higher-income schools, because that's the nature of the test and how things are measured.”
Callahan says his district in the northern reaches of the Berkshires is set up to fail on tests like the MCAS as opposed to the comparatively affluent communities of the southern part of the county.
“A school like Drury High School will always underperform compared to a Lenox, but that's based exclusively on community income and the way the test is scored and the kind of things that are measured, even though at Drury High School, we have more students completing college courses while in high school than they have at Lenox, because you're measuring things different ways,” he said.
This month, Democratic Governor Maura Healey’s Statewide K-12 Graduation Council released its preliminary draft regulations for new standards in the commonwealth’s public school system. Notably, the document includes new "end-of-course assessments” that will be “designed, administered, and scored by the state, promoting a uniform standard across Massachusetts.” That immediately set off alarm bells for Callahan.
“Hearing this proposal from the graduation council was shocking, because there was limited opportunity for input over the summer, and when I heard about the original draft proposal a couple of weeks ago, it not only had a proposed return to standardized tests, end-of-course assessments scored by the state, which sounds a lot like MCAS, but it also added other required components for graduation,” he said.
The North Adams Superintendent says that the council has failed to consider longstanding regional inequities in the preliminary draft.
“It also added other required components for graduation," said Callahan. "It added a specific series of coursework aligned to the MassCore, which is usually what's required to get into college, which we would love to have all of our students do, but it requires things like two years of a world language. Hiring a world language teacher in Berkshire County is very difficult because we have so few applicants. So, often our schools in Berkshire County may not offer as many world languages as we would like, making it very difficult to meet that requirement. The state doesn't seem to recognize that need in the western part of the state.”
Callahan’s counterpart at Berkshire Hills Regional School District, which constitutes the comparatively moneyed communities of Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge in the Southern Berkshires, doesn’t see the draft the same way.
“I think people might have jumped the gun a little bit on this," said Superintendent Peter Dillon, who notes the plan remains in draft stages and says he’s optimistic about the council’s work. “I think they put together a group of core skills that most people would agree make a lot of sense and are meaningful and authentic. I think the challenge now is, how do you move forward with that. We're a commonwealth that cares a whole lot about local control, and can you simultaneously balance the tension of local control and having a shared standard.”
While Dillon acknowledged the undeniable correlation between testing results and economic class, his stance on the MCAS is more favorable than Callahan’s.
“There were parts of it that I thought were valuable," he told WAMC. "It gave an objective measure to look at student achievement and growth across multiple contexts and districts, and in some ways, it was a valuable tool, and a tool for school improvement and reform.”
The median household income in North Adams is just under $49,000 a year compared to almost $83,000 in Great Barrington, the largest of the three towns Berkshire Hills serves.
State Representative Leigh Davis, of the Southern Berkshires, says something has to be done as reading scores in the commonwealth continue to fall.
“We've recently received word that between, I think, 2011 and 2024, the average fourth grade reading score has fallen by 11 percentage points," she said. "So, something has to be done. And we're looking at MCAS, we're looking at the youngest readers are still failing. So, something has to be done. I don't know what can be the replacement for MCAS. Obviously, there's a lot of worry about these standardized testings and the weight that was on a lot of students, but I can't say what's the right replacement.”
Despite those drops, Massachusetts students were the best in the nation in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, which measures math and reading in elementary and middle school.
State Representative Tricia Farley Bouvier, of the 2nd Berkshire District, which comprises the largest community in the county, Pittsfield, is a fellow Democrat.
“I was a big supporter of removing the requirement, and at this juncture, as they look at what can come next, I have more questions than anything else," she told WAMC. "I question, for example, if this is going to be a statewide test, and who is writing this test, and one, how much money is this going to cost? And are we just giving some big test writing industry another way to make money off of our school systems? I have some questions about that. I think there should be standards, and the teachers and the students should meet the standards. But I have great skepticism on it being a statewide standardized test.”
Max Page is president of the 117,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association, the union that represents education employees in the commonwealth.
“The MTA led a coalition of community members and parents on Question Two in 2024 and we won overwhelmingly, almost 60-40, that people said we no longer want to use a one size fits all standardized test to determine who gets a diploma," he said. "We're adamantly opposed to trying imposing these end-of-course assessments. There are other pieces of the larger proposal that we think are still worth working on, but we think that that this is a very bad idea, and we worry that people on that council and maybe in the legislature are trying to relitigate the last election, which the voters could not have been clearer on. Sixty-40 is a landslide, and they said, we no longer want this. We think you had a 30-year experiment at these high stakes MCAS tests, we've done with that, do better, and so they've challenged us, the voters did, to have a real conversation about how we help every student chart a path through courses and experiences in high school and have them finish as fully rounded young people ready for college, career, and citizenship.”
A prominent Berkshire County public education leader is a member of the Massachusetts Statewide K-12 Graduation Council.
“I think people might be losing sight of the fact that the federal government requires testing in the K-to-12 system, and that’s partly how MCAS came about, I think," said Berkshire Community College President Ellen Kennedy. "And each state is allowed to determine what they want to do with those test results.”
Kennedy is a member of the council Healey convened in January to explore ways to maintain educational standards after the MCAS vote.
“There is now a discussion of the testing happening, and in some cases, kind of end-of-course testing in certain subject areas to make sure that there is consistency across the commonwealth in the ways in which students are learning and mastering the materials," she told WAMC. "And then, is that no portion of a graduation requirement? Is it some percentage of a graduation requirement? But it would never be all of a graduation requirement, if that makes sense.”
Kennedy represented both the westernmost region of the commonwealth and community colleges. She acknowledged outreach efforts did not make it all the way out to the Berkshires ahead of the preliminary draft regulations being released.
“The closest it got to us in the Berkshires was in Holyoke, and a lot of it was, they were trying to do it around end of school year to make sure that the sessions happened and not happen during the summer,” she said.
Kennedy says a final report is likely to emerge next June, and that any implementation is still a long way off.
“I believe that the first class that would be impacted by this might be 2030, so it's years away, because it would take time to stand something up, to both develop something and to educate everyone on what the new standards and requirements would be for graduation, and then get people prepared to be successful in that,” she said.
Meanwhile, back in North Adams, Callahan says the entire debate around the role of testing distracts from the actual demands of Berkshire County and represents a major disconnect between what the community needs and what it expects of young people.
“It's clear that our community needs are in two major sectors, education and healthcare," he said. "It's one of the reasons that we prioritize those as pathways in our school system as far as preparing students for those careers. Berkshire County needs teachers. It needs people to work in the education field. There's a huge shortage. And it also needs healthcare workers, people to work in hospitals, people to work in medical centers, nurses, doctors, etc. So those are the huge needs. The MCAS does not measure how good a person would be at doing those careers. It's a very, very, as I said, it's a very, very narrow band of skills that are tested via multiple choice means, and what we really need is, we need to make sure that our young people are prepared to do those careers, which means being good at collaboration, being good at critical thinking and problem solving for more complex issues, not just reading a passage and answering multiple choice questions.”
