The teachers union wants to make school easier. She says no.

It’s no surprise that many in the Massachusetts Legislature support the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s proposal to eliminate the graduation requirement for MCAS, thereby eviscerating the impact of the test that’s a national example (“AG OK’s possible ballot questions: MCAS graduation requirement eyed,” Metro, Sept. 7). Conventional wisdom is that testing students is bad. Politicians cater to constituents. The 2015 Common Core State Standards setting expectations for literacy and math aren’t something the average person necessarily knows. As a former English teacher, I can say that the reading and writing areas tested are what we want every student to know, for education equity, upward mobility, and lifelong learning.

Under then-commissioner of education Mitchell Chester, schools pushed hard to radically change in order to help every student learn as well as possible. I know because it was my job, as curriculum director in various districts, to help schools make that turn. This was a hard shift for educators to make, but mind-sets changed over the years, and teachers now use excellent strategies to help each child.

Eliminating the pressure of the graduation requirement would relieve the push to help each student and set learning back decades. After so many have worked so hard to comply and with the state top-ranked nationally, is lowering expectations really what we want to see happen? We want to now let more students down?

KATHERINE SCHEIDLER

Providence

The writer is the author of “Renegade Teacher: Inside School Walls with Standards and the Test.”