CALL IT round two of the great Massachusetts education wars. 

Eight years after a high-profile ballot question showdown over charter schools broke campaign spending records, the state’s largest teachers union is leading a ballot drive to end the MCAS graduation requirement for high school students. Now, the Massachusetts Teachers Association has an opponent. 

A top official at a Boston nonprofit focused on education reform recently formed a ballot committee to oppose the union’s proposal, setting up another fight over education policy that is expected to land on the 2024 ballot.

John Schneider, who works for the nonprofit Mass Insight, filed paperwork to set up the ballot committee opposing the state teachers union. His group is named the “Committee to Preserve Educational Standards for K-12 Students,” while the teachers union calls its group the “Committee to Eliminate Barriers to Student Success for All.”

The ballot question would replace the MCAS, in place as a statewide graduation requirement for the last 20 years, with a requirement that individual school districts certify that students have obtained skills and competencies. The current requirement calls for a student seeking a high school diploma to pass the 10th grade MCAS in mathematics, science and technology and English.

The MTA’s approach would “result in a haphazard method of student evaluation and lead to inequities in student achievement and opportunities across the Commonwealth,” Schneider said in a statement. “As a national leader in K-12 education, Massachusetts needs to maintain statewide standards for academic achievement —common across all school districts—so that high school diplomas truly indicate a student’s readiness for college or career. Diluting those standards will weaken our children’s chances for future success.”

The MTA argues that the graduation requirement forces a narrowing of instruction to focus on test-taking and that it unfairly denies diplomas to students who have otherwise met all the requirements to graduate. 

Schneider, a Lowell resident, is managing director of policy and advocacy at Mass Insight. He has also worked for the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association and as an executive vice president between 2002 and 2011 at MassINC, the nonprofit think tank and publisher of CommonWealth Beacon. In the early 1990s, he served as research director for the Legislature’s education committee when the Education Reform Act that established MCAS was enacted. 

Schneider’s statement said his group would include business groups, parents, and community members, and pledged a “vigorous campaign” to defeat the union’s ballot question. The committee has also retained Boston-based Slowey McManus Communications.

Schneider’s group did not say how much they’d be willing to raise and spend.

The MTA has already filed a campaign finance report detailing contributions of time and effort on the campaign to end the MCAS graduation requirement valued at $1.1 million in the waning months of 2023.

The 117,000-member union’s effort pulled in the most signatures of voters of any would-be 2024 ballot question, coming in at 101,511, nearly 30,000 more than required. The union led the signature gathering drive last year. The ballot question is now before the Legislature, and if state lawmakers take no action, advocates must go out to gather 12,400 additional signatures in order to get it placed on the November ballot.

The last ballot battle over education policy took place in 2016, as unions opposed an expansion of charter schools backed by groups with ties to the business sector. The groups for and against Question 2, which voters soundly rejected, spent a record $41.2 million on their campaigns.

The MCAS question, if it makes it to the November ballot, could again see millions of dollars in spending on both sides.