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BOSTON (State House News Service) — Students of color, English language learners and students with disabilities are disproportionately not completing a set of recommended courses before they graduate high school, a new report found.
Voices for Academic Equity, a coalition of education nonprofits, looked at differences in how students are accessing MassCore coursework. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved MassCore, a recommended program of study intended to align high school coursework with college and career readiness, nearly two decades ago.
Massachusetts is one of just two states that does not require all students to complete designated high school coursework in order to graduate, the report says, and the state's education department does not track data on which districts have opted to require MassCore for all students.
"Most troubling, if one sees MassCore as a means to foster equity, is that no matter the source of data -- self-reported, or transcript-based -- Black, Latino, and Native students as well as English learners, students with disabilities, students from low-income families, and students who spoke a first language other than English complete MassCore at lower rates than the population of high school graduates as a whole," the report said.
The coalition recommends that, in the short term, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education analyze which districts are not using MassCore, and eventually add district accountability measures tied to the coursework recommendations.
"DESE should explore ways to increase districts’ sense of accountability for this indicator — such as adding the percentages of students completing MassCore to districts’ Student Opportunity Act funding reports or adding MassCore completion rates to the states’ accountability system," the report said.
Written by Sam Drysdale/SHNS.
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