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YES FOR LEGISLATIVE AUDIT, NO TO MCAS IN MASSACHUSETTS  
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Matt Stout
November 6, 2024
Boston Globe
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_ ‘A stunning rebuke.’ Voters’ support for legislative audit,
ditching MCAS mandate sends message to Beacon Hill. _

Diana DiZoglio (center), Massachusetts state auditor, spoke as Max
Page (left), president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and
Deb McCarthy, vice president of the MTA, looked on at the Fairmont
Copley Plaza Hotel Tuesday night., Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

 

Most Massachusetts residents didn’t have a choice this November of
who represented them at the State House. That didn’t stop them from
sending legislative leaders a message.

The state’s voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved
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a pair of proposals that impose new scrutiny on the state Legislature
and scrap the MCAS as a graduation requirement, bucking the state’s
Democratic leaders who opposed, and in some cases outright campaigned
against, two questions that will shake Beacon Hill in different ways.

The measures, listed as Question 1
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and Question 2
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on Tuesday’s ballot, accomplish two very different objectives. The
first specifies that state Auditor Diana DiZoglio has the authority to
audit the House and Senate; the second eliminates a decades-old
mandate
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that makes earning a high school diploma contingent on students
passing MCAS exams in English, math, and science.

Neither was popular among Beacon Hill’s top leaders. The Senate and
House’s top Democrats opposed both questions and last month left
open the possibility
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of changing them if they passed. Governor Maura Healey was a staunch
opponent of the MCAS question and appeared on the campaign trail
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urging residents to vote against it. A legislative committee tasked
with reviewing the measures before they reached voters said the
Legislature shouldn’t pass
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them.

“This is one of those moments where there’s this incongruence
between what our elected officials would like us to do as a state, and
what our people would like us to do,” said Tatishe Nteta, the
director of the UMass Amherst Poll. He said the passage of Question 1
particularly is a “warning sign” for the Legislature’s
Democratic supermajority.

“Question 1 is the opportunity for citizens, symbolically or
actually, to say they have some fundamental problems with the way the
Legislature is working,” Nteta said. “In some ways, it’s a
stunning rebuke of the lack of engagement and lack of activity in the
Legislature.”

To what degree lawmakers view it that way remains to be seen. Almost
immediately after the Associated Press projected Question 1 to pass
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late Tuesday, House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen E.
Spilka said they’d weigh “how to best respect the Question 1
election results” while potentially altering it. DiZoglio said
separately she’d fight against any effort to “undercut” the
initiative and would lobby Healey to veto any bill the Legislature
passes seeking to alter it.

State Representative Paul Donato, a Medford Democrat, said Wednesday
that the speaker had yet to gather his leadership team to discuss
plans for the ballot questions.

“The Speaker’s got some ideas,” he said, without elaborating.

Legislative leaders regularly chafe at the idea of legislating by
ballot, where advocates can write the laws as they see fit and
lawmakers often fret
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about the potential for unintended consequences
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Activists frustrated by legislative inertia are often the ones driving
a measure to the ballot, either in hopes of forcing the
Legislature’s hand to pass similar legislation or simply to
circumvent it.

Indeed, voters approved another measure to give Uber and Lyft drivers
the right to organize
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a union, the AP projected Wednesday.

Voters rejected two other statewide proposals, however, according to
projections from the AP. About 57 percent of voters rejected a
proposal to legalize the use and possession of psychedelics
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like psilocybin mushrooms. Question 5, which would have eventually
raised the minimum wage
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for all tipped employees to $15 per hour, drew opposition from about
64 percent of voters, according to unofficial tallies.

It’s Question 1 and Question 2, however, that will reverberate
loudest in the State House. Legislative leaders have argued that an
audit of their chambers, particularly one that DiZoglio has sought to
do
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would violate the constitutional separation of powers. DiZoglio, a
first-term Democrat, argued that the Legislature is among the most
opaque legislative bodies in the country, and, on a recent podcast
appearance
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accused Democratic leaders of trying to “weaponize the Constitution
to protect themselves.”

“Even folks who aren’t really sure about what exactly an audit
would entail are across the board absolutely interested in more
transparency,” DiZoglio said Tuesday, wearing a bright yellow jacket
and shoes as symbols of her push to bring more “sunshine” to
Beacon Hill.

Residents, she said, are “tired of not hearing about what’s
happening with the bill until after the decision has already been made
and it’s already been voted into law. And they want to be able to
participate in what is called a democratic process, but is actually
more like an authoritarian regime in the Senate and the House of
Representatives right now.”

Voters who backed it Tuesday described the measure as a common-sense
addition.

“That’s the point of the auditor,” said Matt Ramsey, a
46-year-old Arlington Democrat who backed the measure. Audits, he
said, are meant to look back and identify problems in order to correct
them. “It doesn’t have to be [about] penalization.”

That voters approved it by such yawning margins — 72 percent to 29
percent, according to unofficial results with 95 percent of votes in
— doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that they believe in the
abstract idea of an empowered state auditor, said Evan Horowitz,
executive director of Tuft University’s Center for State Policy
Analysis, which studies the impact of ballot questions.

“It’s a referendum on the Legislature,” he said. “That one is
the clearest rebuke to current practice.”

For Question 2, he said, the message may be more muddled because
voters likely have different reasons for getting rid of the graduation
mandate. About 59 percent of voters supported removing the graduation
requirement, compared with 41 percent who did not, according to
unofficial vote tallies.

Indeed, voters on Tuesday cited a litany of reasons for supporting the
measure in interviews with the Globe, from the strain they believe it
puts on teachers to prepare students for the test to a general
discomfort with the “one-size-fits-all” requirements the mandate
creates.

“That’s not how students learn,” said Aimee Doherty, a
38-year-old Stoneham resident and elementary physical education
teacher. “We already have state standards — and Massachusetts has
really high standards.”

Horowitz, of Tufts University, said he read the Massachusetts Teachers
Association victory another way.

“It’s some voters saying: ‘No, we don’t need a statewide
system. We trust our districts more, we trust our teachers more,’”
he said. “It should be a wakeup call to the education reform
establishment on Beacon Hill, which I think has felt quite happy with
the status of our education system and the effect of the last two
decades.”

Ideally, voters who are unhappy with the direction the Legislature has
taken on certain issues could make their voices heard with every
biennial election, when every member of the House and Senate are on
the ballot. But the Massachusetts Legislature is considered, by one
measure, the least competitive in the country
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meaning many voters don’t often have an opportunity to choose
someone new to send to Beacon Hill even if they want.

Just three candidates
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seeking to unseat incumbent officeholders on Beacon Hill prevailed
during the September primary. On Tuesday, roughly three out of every
four seats in the Legislature listed a single name on the ballot. Only
a handful of seats actually flipped parties, with Republicans netting
a single seat in both chambers.

Nonetheless, polling has hinted at a growing frustration. The share of
voters who said they approved of the Legislature has regularly dropped
since the spring of 2023, when 57 percent of voters said in a UMass
Amherst poll that they liked what lawmakers were doing. That sank to
46 percent by an October survey, at a time when lawmakers still had
yet to pass major legislation addressing climate change
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or a sweeping economic development package, months after formal
sessions had initially ended
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“There needs to be more transparency in the Legislature. It’s all
Democratic. If you do elect some Republicans, you may have some
balance,” said Lynn Wetzel, a 71-year-old North Andover resident who
voted for the audit initiative Tuesday.

A registered independent, Wetzel said she had another reason to
support it. “The fact that [lawmakers] are so strongly against being
audited,” she said with a laugh.

_Samantha J. Gross of the Globe staff contributed to this report._

* high stakes testing
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* Massachusetts
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