Put to the Test

High school students have so many pressures — passing the MCAS to graduate shouldn’t be one of them (Perspective, November 26).

Imagine how our teachers would feel without the pressure to teach to the test, if they had the ability to expose our high schoolers to more valuable, real-life lessons? The world is a beautiful place to explore and reading and writing is at the core — let’s give teachers and students the freedom to really learn!

Elizabeth LaFond Coppez

Southampton

Education is supposed to teach children in a manner that assists them in the greatest way possible to reach their individual potential. The MCAS is not at all relevant to what education is supposed to accomplish, and puts unnecessary stress on students. I also strongly question the cultural relevance of the test itself. I believe socialemotional learning is paramount for students to thrive and achieve. When changes to the MCAS were made in recent years, I found them non-educationally pertinent to the very serious needs of today’s students. All kinds of skills need to be promoted for students to reach their potential. I find the push to retain MCAS wasteful, irrelevant, and a misperception of today’s realities and needs in the educational sphere.

Rachel I. Branch

Dalton

This article confirms my perceptions around the dismal achievement levels in US secondary education. There are many skilled and dedicated teachers — and many unskilled. Teachers unions are receiving significant pay and benefit raises for nine months of work, paid for by taxpayers.

Perhaps testing should be implemented for teachers instead of students.

James Bacon

Manchester

[Arguing for] dismantling one of the best education systems in the country under the pretense of equity with no balanced counter-argument speaks volumes about the liberal bias at the Globe. Appalling.

Kevin Flaherty

Hingham

Amen to Dani Charbonneau’s Perspective. I have been screaming this point since MCAS was made a graduation requirement. It was supposed to be an assessment of the schools, not the kids. If a kid shows up every day, puts in the work, and passes their courses (even if barely), they deserve to graduate. And shame on a state that negates all that good faith effort by relying on a standardized test.

Lori Dougherty

Brighton

This initiative [to eliminate the graduation requirement] is counter-productive to fostering student responsibility and the accountability of the school system to properly educate students with at least some set of minimal academic competencies. School systems should welcome standardize testing as a measurement of both the schools’ and students’ performance. MCAS can also indicate specific schools where academic expectations are falling short. Promoting accountability and personal responsibility will promote a much stronger, more robust generation of students preparing for college and the workplace.

Ara Jeknavorian and Milka Jeknavorian

Chelmsford

Tossing MCAS as a graduation requirement and repurposing it as a sophomore assessment means that students would get diplomas with no proof that they have learned anything, which is the mission of schools: educating graduates to join and participate in a democratic, civil society. Charbonneau selected a single, nonrepresentative MCAS question in an effort to show that the MCAS exam is elitist and out of touch. It isn’t. The statewide pass rate is 96 percent. Trying to cancel student anxiety over this demonstrably passable test is a disservice to all students. In addition to encouraging test preparation, test stress helps prepare them for coping with the anxiety of college academics or life in the real world. As long as the primary goal of schools is to prepare all students for the real world, and not protect them from it, the MCAS graduation requirement should remain.

Steven Reilly

Swampscott