Graduating in the Name of Equity – The Latest ‘Participation Award’
April 7, 2026
In 1767, candidates for Harvard University had to interview with the President of the University and at least two of its tutors. To be admitted, they also had to demonstrate the following:
No one shall be admitted, unless he can translate the Greek and Latin Authors in common use, such as Tully, Virgil, The New-Testament, Xenophon & understands the Rules of Grammar, can write Latin correctly, and hath a good moral Character.
Can you even imagine?
In 2026, 44 states no longer require high school students to pass a standardized test for graduation anymore. Only 6 states still do: Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia.
Critics of standardized tests, or as to which they are more commonly called, “high stakes” tests, such as FairTest, argue that high school exit exams:
- Disproportionately deny diplomas to low-income, minority, disabled, and English-learner students
- Are “racist”, “classist”, and perpetuate “meritocracy”
- Raise dropout rates without improving overall learning
- Narrow the curriculum to “teaching to the test” and rote memorization
- Rely on flawed measurement
FairTest is also leading the charge to keep college admissions test optional/test free. Harry Feder, the Executive Director of FairTest calls tests like the SAT “gatekeepers” and “eugenicist” in origin. He writes:
What the SAT, and standardized tests generally, seem to pick up better than anything is whether your origins lie in the winning side of the existing birth “meritocracy”.
Sounds to us like we are dumbing the whole educational system down and nobody needs to prove they know anything.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Schools around the nation removed standardized exit exams to boost abysmal graduation rates and then “celebrated” the higher graduation rates as academic “success”. Let’s look at what just happened in Boston Public Schools (BPS).
Daily Caller reported on March 24, 2026, that BPS was celebrating their 2025 graduation rate of 81.3%, their highest ever. The mayor held a presser to celebrate the “achievement” saying:
When students feel challenged, they stay engaged,” Wu said, according to the Boston Globe. “We didn’t get here by lowering any expectations for students who might be experiencing challenges or moving the goal posts and making it easier for people to get by.
They didn’t? Well, there IS a difference between feeling challenged and being challenged.
What Mayor Wu didn’t mention was that in 2024, Massachusetts decided standardized tests were “barriers” to graduation, so the class of 2025 was the first class that didn’t have to pass or even take exams.
Wu also didn’t mention BPS’s new “no fail” policy. In 2025 BPS banned teachers from handing out failing grades to any student yet, somehow, 19% of their students still managed to fail its “no fail” policy that year,
BPS also reported its lowest drop-out rate of 3.6% in 2025. Note: High failing rates historically correlate with high drop-out rates. No wonder BPS had its highest graduation rates ever!
Another deeply concerning trend in play: The people of Massachusetts voted to drop test requirements.
In 2024, Massachusetts voters ended the graduation requirement by a margin of almost 20%! The ballot question on which voters cast a ‘YES’ vote stated this:
This proposed law would eliminate the requirement that a student pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests (or other statewide or district-wide assessments) in mathematics, science and technology, and English in order to receive a high school diploma. Instead, in order for a student to receive a high school diploma, the proposed law would require the student to complete coursework certified by the student’s district as demonstrating mastery of the competencies contained in the state academic standards in mathematics, science and technology, and English, as well as any additional areas determined by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
After the public voted down the MCAS, the Massachusetts Department of Education began crafting a new graduation “framework” to “reimagine” the high school experience. It is highly unlikely to include any kind of standardized test because the Massachusetts Teacher’s Association (MTA), the state’s largest teacher’s union, has stridently vowed to “vigorously fight” any attempt to “reinstate any standardized testing as a graduation requirement.”
The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education opposed the initiative and even appealed to one of Education’s most sacred idols: Equity.
Importantly, we know from Brown University research that “high school MCAS scores predict long-term success and appear to reflect students’ academic skills,” not simply socio-economic status or school characteristics. We can’t eliminate gaps in achievement and equity if we strip ourselves of the tools to measure them. Instead of wasting time fighting for legislation that does away with the graduation standard, a true commitment to equity requires we focus squarely on helping all students meet it.
What in the world is going on?
Has the public been duped into thinking that demonstrating “competency” equates to “academic” achievement? Have they been told their children don’t need basic literacy or math comprehension anymore because AI can do it for them?
Are these voters people who also, by chance, marinated in the Marxist educational system of low expectations and have had their worldview completely skewed?
Because reading competency is not the same as reading comprehension
Comprehension requires understanding, thinking and interpretation; knowing what the text means and/or implies on a deeper level. Competency simply means one can read.
Furthermore, Boston students aren’t even reading well. On the nation’s “report card”, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), BPS 8th graders are already performing below national averages in math and reading and have been experiencing steady declines on both indices since 2019.
The results are crystal clear – and ‘telling’, BPS students are graduating at record rates while demonstrating steady decline in academic proficiency.
Make it Make Sense
Minnesota repealed its GRAD (Graduation Requirement Assessment for Diploma) test back in 2013. GRAD had replaced the Basic Skills Test (BST) which had been in place from approximately 1997-2009. Both tests were ditched, in large part, due to concerns over low graduation rates.
Obviously, graduation rates spiked in Minnesota after graduation requirements were relaxed, reaching an historic high of 84.2% in 2024. Yet, since 2019, the NAEP indicates that Minnesota student achievement is in steep academic decline – just like in Boston.
In 2024, math results stabilized at 282 but reading achievement declined even further to 266.
In 2024, only 30% of 8th graders in Minnesota were reading at or above “proficient’ levels. Are we really supposed to be satisfied with or accepting of stats like this? We don’t believe so.
CPL asked Why Can’t Johny Read? in a 2024 article. Wondering out loud we wrote:
Could it be that school curriculum has been stuffed with Marxist pedagogies which fixate on students’ racial, social and gender identities and are served with sides of division, jealousy, hatred, shame and anger…. are making kids dumber on purpose?
Could it be classrooms have traded away academic instructional hours for the psychosocial surveys, assessments, circles, and exercises that are quantifying children’s values, attitudes, and beliefs using Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?
Could it be kids are not learning – by design, because an ignorant populace is easier to predict and control?
Uneducated people taught to fixate and agitate on perceived grievances become predictable and controllable activists. They will readily champion the overthrow of their own nation – which is the stated goal of the Cultural Marxists. Marxists set out to overthrow Western civilization by marching through its institutions while tearing it down from within and through the classrooms it captured without firing a shot. Our education system and our children are the primary targets through which they are intent on accomplishing their goal.
If you don’t want your children coming out of school with a Marxist mindset, loathing themselves for being born into a non-minority and voicing open hatred for America and all her institutions, you must get them out of the public education system. It’s nothing more than ‘equity propaganda’ masquerading as education.
Rather, instill in your children the joy of learning and critical thinking: problem solving, phonics, the science of reading, classical literature, a robust vocabulary, true history, real math, real science and home-educate if at all possible.
And – get kids off their devices! They must return to learning from books, direct instruction and interaction. We will be writing soon about the growing body of evidence which indicates that “screen” learning is creating, what some experts are calling, the “shallow brain.”
Stay tuned for more to come from Child Protection League.