IN HER recent commentary advocating for “reciprocal accountability” in Massachusetts graduation standards, Laurie Gagnon makes a seductive argument: trust local innovation, embrace portfolios, and free schools from the burden of standardized assessment.

It is a vision that sounds progressive and student-centered. But stripped of its appealing rhetoric, it is an argument for dismantling the very mechanisms that protect the students most likely to be left behind — and the evidence from other states tells a far more sobering story than the author acknowledges.

The Statewide K-12 Graduation Council should reach higher as it develops final recommendations on new Massachusetts high school graduation requirements.

High standards are not the enemy of creativity or equity. They are the precondition for both. When states establish clear, measurable expectations and enforce them through assessment, they create a floor below which no student should fall. The MCAS test was such a floor, and the state headed for the basement when it voted to eliminate the test as a graduation requirement.

History shows us what happens when such a floor is abandoned in favor of locally designed demonstrations of mastery: standards drift, rigor becomes subjective, and the students who suffer most are low-income students, students of color, and students with disabilities — the very populations that equity-minded reformers claim to champion.

The evidence from Texas is instructive. When the state loosened its standardized graduation assessment requirements in 2015, researchers at the University of Texas found that the resulting patchwork of local accountability measures correlated with declining college readiness rates, particularly in districts serving high-poverty communities. Without a common benchmark, “mastery” became whatever a district could defend — and in under-resourced schools, the pressure to graduate students overwhelmed the commitment to graduate prepared ones.

Florida offers a contrasting lesson. The state’s implementation of rigorous end-of-course assessments in Algebra I and English language arts, tied directly to promotion and graduation, produced measurable gains in student achievement. A 2022 analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that Florida’s fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores led the nation among large states, with particularly strong gains among Black and Hispanic students. The mechanism was not magic — it was the disciplining effect of a standard that meant something, enforced consistently across every zip code.

The op-ed cites Kentucky’s “Portrait of a Learner” model approvingly, but selectively. What it omits is that Kentucky still maintains state-administered assessments through its KPREP system and that its celebrated local flexibility operates within a defined accountability structure, not instead of one. In Kentucky, gains did not come from abandoning measurement — they came from pairing high expectations with support. That is a meaningful distinction the author glosses over entirely.

The author’s claim that the Massachusetts ballot question ending MCAS as a graduation requirement represents a mandate for this vision deserves scrutiny. Ballot questions are blunt instruments. Voters expressed dissatisfaction with one test — they did not vote to eliminate graduation standards or statewide accountability. Interpreting that result as permission to replace assessments with portfolios and capstone projects is a significant overreach, and one that conveniently serves the interests of institutions rather than students.

Constitutionally, the Commonwealth has an obligation that cannot be outsourced to local enthusiasm. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 established the state’s duty to ensure every student receives an adequate education — not an adequate opportunity for education, but an actual, demonstrated result. Portfolios evaluated by local educators, however well-intentioned, cannot fulfill that obligation. They introduce subjectivity, inconsistency, and the real possibility that a diploma in one district signals something fundamentally different from a diploma in another. That is not equity — it is the institutionalization of inequality dressed in the misleading language of personalization.

High standards and accountability in education use testing to guide student learning. They should also be about assessing teachers and administrators. That is where the friction lies for establishing nation-leading graduation requirements in Massachusetts and where the state is likely to go wrong given its lack of resolve to make sure all students graduate with the ability to become lifelong learners and ultimately earn a good living for themselves and their families.

End-of-course assessments, designed well and supported with adequate intervention resources, do exactly what public education in Massachusetts is constitutionally charged to do: they make the state’s promise to provide every child with a high-quality education enforceable.

They expose gaps that comfortable narratives about local innovation can paper over. They eliminate the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and the damage done by grade inflation. They respect every student’s ability to learn. They give parents — especially parents without the cultural capital to decode a portfolio or challenge a capstone rubric — objective information about whether their child is truly prepared to move through life after school. And, yes, they ensure teachers and administrators are doing their jobs in a way that matters most – delivering results.

Massachusetts has an opportunity to build something genuinely transformative. But transformation built on unmeasured hope is not accountability. It is abdication of the state’s constitutional responsibility to our children.

The Graduation Council should establish common, measurable high standards for all students. It must resist the elegant argument for softening standards and remember who pays the price when systems fail quietly: not the architects of the framework, but the students they promised to serve.

David Mancuso is a former long-time board and executive committee member of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and the founder of Mancuso Communication Strategies, a Massachusetts-based public affairs firm.