Topic Meeting on Ballot Question #2: MCAS as a High School Graduation Requirement

On Monday, October 7, 2024, LWVN, together with its cosponsors LWVMA, LWV Boston, LWV Brookline,  LWV Needham, LWV Harvard, LWV Waltham, LWV Wellesley, and LWV Weston, will be hosting a Topic Meeting to discuss Question 2 on November’s ballot:  Should Massachusetts eliminate the MCAS test as a high school graduation requirement?

This event will be held at the Druker Auditorium, Newton Free Library, 330 Homer Street, Newton Centre, 7:00pm – 8:45pm.  All are welcome.

Panelists include representatives from the Massachusetts Teachers Association (for a “Yes” vote) and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (for a “No” vote), and Farah Assiraj (CEO, cairEDducation).  The moderator will be Heather Hamilton, Deputy Director, Brookline Interactive Group.

For more detailed information on Question 2, and all the other ballot questions, see our Ballot Questions for November 2024 post.

For information on our panelists, read below.

Deb McCarthy will be the representative from the Massachusetts Teachers Association (for a “Yes” vote). Deb is the vice-president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. She was a fifth-grade educator in the Town of Hull for 25 years. She is the daughter of an educator, the mother of an educator, her sister was an educator and her daughter-in-law is an educator. She was a swimming instructor for the town recreation’s program for more than 40 years. She is the mother of four and the grandmother to nine. Working with children has been a lifelong commitment and she has been engaged in the fight to eliminate the high stakes of the MCAS for more than a decade now. As the niece of Maureen Dunn, the co-founder of the POW-MIA movement, Deb understands the importance of standing up and speaking out while demanding that systems be held  accountable for actions that have created unintended consequences and harm.

Edward M. Lambert, Jr. will be the representative from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (for a “No” vote).  Before joining MBAE in January of 2019, Ed served as vice chancellor for university relations at UMass Boston, where he was responsible for government and community relations, corporate relations and communications. Ed was founding director of the Urban Initiative of UMass Dartmouth, a research center focusing on urban policy and leadership issues. There, he helped organize the state’s Gateway Cities Coalition and assisted in designing and implementing state programs and legislation to support them, and led the Initiative’s work in urban schools assessing practices and serving as the regional satellite of the National Dropout Prevention Center. He also taught Public Policy and Public Management and served as the Chair of the Education Policy Committee of the Kaput Center for STEM Education and Research.

Ed’s record of service also includes seven years as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where, as a member of the Education Committee, he assisted in the creation and passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act. He co-chaired the legislature’s Literacy Caucus in support of increased funding for Adult Basic Education and literacy programs. He also served twelve years as the mayor of Fall River, initiating a comprehensive school building campaign and creating a series of community education summits. He served 22 years on the Fall River School Committee, earning himself the Massachusetts Association of School Committees Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ed served 8 years as a mentor to at-risk youth in the SMILES Mentoring program. He also served on a national task force for the development of the 21st Century Workforce of the Urban Serving Universities. He was appointed Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation by Governor Patrick and, earlier in his career, served as the director of social services at Saint Vincent’s Home in Fall River. He earned his BA in psychology at UMass Dartmouth and his MEd in counseling at Bridgewater State College.

Farah Assiraj is the Chief of Teaching and Learning for the Council of the Great City Schools. Farah is an equity-centered leader with 20+ years of service in urban schools. As a Moroccan immigrant who arrived to the U.S. at the age of ten fluent in three languages and later graduated high school as  an undocumented student, Farah’s personal schooling experience and professional trajectory have culminated in a deep understanding of systemic inequities and necessary conditions required for all students to thrive, especially those with other languages as assets, who have varying abilities that must be attended to and/or historically marginalized.

Farah recently served as the Deputy Chief Academic Officer for the Boston Public Schools (BPS) where she supported all of the academics departments and led the district’s Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) strategy to redefine equitable tiered supports, services, data and professional learning. She also served as the BPS Office of English Learners’ Interim Assistant Superintendent where she restructured the department to the Office of Multilingual and Multicultural Education (OMME) and secured $10MM ESSER funding to align the department’s work with the new instructional vision.  In other BPS roles, Farah led the district in areas of curriculum, instruction and research; developed guidance and professional development for language and literacy; adopted K-12 district instructional materials; implemented CCSS, WIDA standards and assessments; and implemented the 3Ls: ELs need Language, Literacy and Learning professional learning with lab sites for elementary and secondary school cohorts.

Read more about Farah Assiraj.

Heather Hamilton is a former Brookline SelectBoard Chair and Director of Programming at Brookline’s cable access TV.