Not Lowering Standards, But Rethinking the Bar
Who benefits, who gets left behind, and a question we have not asked clearly enough: What are students supposed to know by graduation—really?
This is the second part in a series on education, assessment, and the systems we build around children. My first piece examined what my daughter’s MCAS experience revealed about systemic failure. This follow-up goes deeper—into who benefits, who gets left behind, and what we are actually trying to measure.
The Student the System Missed
How do we know standardized tests can really measure what students are supposed to know? And what are students supposed to know by graduation—really? Not what a test can capture, but what actually serves them beyond it: the ability to learn anything they need to pursue the life they choose.
We have all seen that student. The one who scored well on every test, who knew every answer within the system—and then collapsed when the system was removed. Not because they weren’t intelligent, but because they had been taught to perform within a structure, not to learn beyond it. They thought they were prepared. The test told them they were. And then life didn’t look anything like the test.
Who Really Benefits When the System Changes
However, here is what rarely gets said openly: when Massachusetts replaces one accountability system with another, the question of who benefits financially is never far from the answer. The K-12 testing and assessment industry was valued at nearly $14 billion globally in 2024—projected to reach $32 billion by 2033. It is a rapidly expanding market with powerful financial incentives to ensure that testing remains central to how we define education. Whoever designs the tests, sells the curriculum, and publishes the materials profits—regardless of whether students learn anything more effectively.
The structural risk is this: those who decide what the replacement looks like are rarely the students who struggled, the families who couldn’t navigate the process, or the teachers who watched children disengage. They are more often those who have always had influence within the system. This is why we should ask openly—are we replacing MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), or are we replacing its name?
This is not about protecting students who struggle academically from being measured. It is about whether the measurement itself is valid for any student. Imagine using a single type of soil and one fixed amount of water to test which plants are inherently “superior”—and then concluding that the ones that didn’t thrive are simply deficient. The rigid condition of the test is never questioned. Only the plant.
That is what a single standardized measure does to children. We can absolutely measure growth, but we have to use the right tool for the right conditions instead of forcing every child into a single, uniform comparison. A standardized test does not become more accurate simply because it is applied to everyone equally—it becomes equally inaccurate for everyone.
A Snapshot Is Not a Record
As we looked at in the first part of this series, MCAS remains the center of gravity for our school system, even though it is no longer a standalone graduation requirement. But a single standardized test is a narrow measure of proficiency. It is a snapshot, not a full record of learning. It captures performance in a specific moment under specific conditions, but it cannot tell you why a student made an error, how their thinking is developing, or how they apply knowledge in new contexts.
When this snapshot becomes the dominant metric, the incentives distort the entire system. Instruction naturally shifts toward what is measured. This is not because educators lack commitment, but because the stakes are predictable: schools with higher results are rewarded, while those with lower results are labeled as underperforming, regardless of context or student population.
A research synthesis published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) reviewing dozens of studies found that more than 80 percent of them documented curriculum narrowing as a direct result of high-stakes testing—with the greatest pressure falling on students and schools already most at risk.
Rethinking the Bar, Not Lowering It
Moving away from a high-stakes test is not about lowering standards. It is about questioning whether this test was ever the right bar to begin with.
A common defense is that without a standardized test tied to graduation, academic rigor will inevitably weaken—that the test itself is what holds the system accountable. Wanting high expectations is correct. The question is whether a standardized test is the right tool to demonstrate them. Using a ruler to measure your waist gives you a number—but not an accurate one, because the tool cannot conform to what it is trying to measure. A standardized test tells you what a student knows at a specific moment under specific conditions. It cannot tell you whether that student is ready to learn, adapt, and grow beyond school. Those require a different kind of measure entirely.
If our standard is that graduates can think independently, learn continuously, and adapt to an unpredictable world—then we should ask honestly: is a standardized test actually measuring that?
Failure itself is not the opposite of learning. It is part of it, and it is often where real learning happens. Any accountability system that cannot recognize growth through struggle risks misunderstanding what education is meant to achieve.
The starting point is not which assessment to adopt. It is a question we have not asked clearly enough: what are we actually trying to do? If the goal is to ensure students are genuinely ready for the world beyond graduation—not just ready for the next test—then that goal should drive every decision about how we measure, what we measure, and when. Without that clarity, we will keep designing systems around the tool rather than the purpose.
Assessments and tests are tools. Like any tool, they have strengths, limitations, and conditions under which they work well or poorly. When we mistake the tool for the goal, we stop asking whether it is the right tool for what we are actually trying to build.
To compromise, some educational leaders propose keeping a standardized test merely as a “minimum baseline”—operating under the assumption that strong district leadership can simply instruct teachers not to teach to it. This strategy, however, rests on a profound misconception. A standardized test does not protect or represent a standard—it merely measures a single, highly specific condition. Believing a single tool can capture a student’s readiness just because you label it a “minimum baseline” displays a fundamental misunderstanding of data. No matter how well a school is led, a rigid tool can only produce a partial data point. It cannot provide a complete picture of a student’s capacity, and using it as a gatekeeper forces the system to conform to the tool, regardless of what leadership says.
We should move toward a system that includes multiple forms of evidence—writing, projects, problem-solving tasks, and portfolios—that allow students to show their learning in different ways over time. Accountability should mean understanding how well a school supports student growth, especially when students begin with very different starting points.
When Even Individualization Gets Standardized
In general education, all students are assumed to learn similarly. Instruction and scaffolding are designed accordingly—for a hypothetical average student that does not actually exist.
Special education law was established to shatter this assumption. When a student qualifies for a learning disability designation, they become eligible for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). An IEP is exactly what the name says: education planned around the individual child’s needs, not around what the system finds convenient to deliver.
However, as our education system became increasingly focused on measurable outcomes, standardized tests became the primary way to hold schools and educators accountable. And when tests define success, instruction follows. Even the implementation of an IEP gets pulled back toward standardization—because at the end of the day, school districts are pressured to measure that individual plan against a single, uniform test score. The IEP, designed to honor difference, gets pulled back toward the same endpoint as everyone else.
Some might argue that students with IEPs are doing a modified version of the MCAS, and that such accommodations will simply carry over to whatever new standardized test is adopted. Modifying a rigid instrument, however, does not change its fundamental nature. The accommodation changes the conditions slightly—yet it is still the wrong tool.
I see this play out constantly in my advocacy work. In one instance, a student with an IEP who had been struggling with chronic absenteeism directly linked to their disability finally made it back into the school building. The immediate response from the system wasn’t to triage their learning gaps, re-establish a sense of safety, or address the root causes of their absence. It was to scramble to get a computer in front of them so they could sit for the MCAS.
Even though the test is no longer a standalone requirement for graduation, it remains the absolute center of gravity for the institution’s compliance machinery. The system prioritized collecting its data point over educating the child who was drowning. This is what happens when the tool replaces the goal.
This defeats the purpose—not just for students with IEPs, but for every student, especially those who learn differently without meeting the threshold for a formal disability designation. Because that threshold is never questioned either. We accept that a certain score means ready and below it means not ready—without ever asking what that score actually represents, how it was defined, or whether meeting it tells us anything real about a student’s capacity to learn and grow beyond school.
Multiple assessments are only an improvement if they genuinely cover different conditions—different contexts, formats, and moments in a student’s development. Five tests measuring the same thing in slightly different ways are still one measurement. Even a genuinely varied system fails if its underlying purpose remains comparison rather than growth. The question is not how a student performs relative to every other student in Massachusetts. It is how that student is growing relative to where they started.
Who should be asking these questions? Policymakers, educational leaders, district leaders—those with the authority to shape the system. When they don’t, they are making decisions through a corner or a hole and claiming that’s the full picture.
Don’t Just Replace the Name
As Massachusetts considers a replacement for MCAS, we are standing at a massive crossroads. The easy path—the institutional path—is to just swap one testing company for another, change the acronym on the booklet, and keep the compliance machinery running exactly as it was before.
Putting a new label on the same rigid box, however, does nothing to fix a system that treats all students as if they learn the same way.
The real challenge ahead isn’t to build a slightly better test. It is to deliberately design a system built around individual children, with all their unique ways of learning. We need an accountability system that measures actual growth from where a student started, honors different types of minds, and values deep human capacities—like analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, independence, kindness, and the curiosity that drives lifelong learning. If we do not design for flexibility now, the system will naturally slide right back to what it knows best: forcing children to fit into a rigid, one-size-fits-all box.