Boston schools celebrate higher graduation rates amid change in requirements 

Boston Public Schools is touting its highest-ever four-year graduation rate at 81.3% in 2025, even as the class was not required to meet a previous statewide testing standard to graduate.

“The 2025 graduating class was the state’s first to not be required to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or the MCAS, in order to graduate,” observed Boston.com. “Instead, the state’s K-12 Statewide Graduation Council released a new framework to set statewide standards.”

The new framework includes “capstone projects or portfolios, financial literacy lessons, and end-of-course tests administered and scored by the state,” according to another Boston.com article.

‘Declining Standards Hypothesis’ 

As previously reported by The Heartlander, public schools have drawn increasing attention for their declines in academic performance in recent years.

“The declines started before 2020 and have continued since,” Andrew Rice wrote for New York magazine. “(The COVID-19 pandemic) was an accelerant, but it seems education is suffering from something deeper and more ineradicable than a disease.”

Part of the problem could stem from what Rice calls the “Declining Standards Hypothesis,” which he describes as decreased emphasis on standardized testing such as the MCAS.

“Advocates of the Declining Standards Hypothesis can point to many indicators of softening expectations,” he wrote.

“Critics of these programs say they have long reinforced in-school segregation, offering students unequal opportunities. But instead of providing everyone who wants access to accelerated classes the support required to succeed, some districts have found it easier to do away with them entirely.”

As a result, “many districts (have put) in a floor on scores to make it easier for students to pull up an F,” according to Rice.

“The rationale linking all these policies is that supposedly uniform standards are applied unevenly against those who are already disadvantaged, often with devastating life consequences. Still, it is not hard to understand why even some Democratic officeholders in San Francisco erupted in ridicule when its school board recently proposed a ‘grading for equity’ plan that made a score as low as 41 percent a C.”

Such grade inflation often translates to trouble at the higher education level.

For example, a recent study from the University of California San Diego found 12% to 20% of its incoming freshmen needed to take remedial courses after failing college entry tests.

“Who wants to tell a student they have been lied to for years and that the buck stops here?” wrote Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The real compassion, though, lies in telling our young people the truth.”

Meanwhile, the Boston district focused largely on the gains in graduation rates – even though this year’s record still trails the state’s average four-year rate of 89.3%.

“BPS has made important investments in strengthening instruction and student supports, expanding early college and career pathways, and addressing chronic absenteeism so students stay connected to their learning,” said Superintendent Mary Skipper. “We are encouraged by this progress.”