This testimony by Lisa Lazare, Education Consultant, MassInc Policy Researcher and former Executive Director of Educators for Excellence Massachusetts, advocates for maintaining rigorous high school graduation standards as a matter of educational equity and integrity. She argues that meaningful graduation requirements are a promise to families that showing up to school will genuinely prepare their children for an unforgiving world. Drawing on an educator survey, Lazare emphasizes that teachers want students to demonstrate proficiency and sustained growth rather than being passed through an unjust system without essential skills. Ultimately, she asserts that high standards are a necessary prerequisite for true equity, ensuring that a diploma represents real, substantive preparation for the future.
Written Testimony to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
Submitted by: Lisa Lazare, Executive Director, Educators for Excellence, Massachusetts
Dear Secretary Tutwiler, Chair, Members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Commissioner Martinez,
My name is Lisa Lazare. I’m the Executive Director of Educators for Excellence–Massachusetts, a teacher-led organization working to ensure all students have access to an excellent, equitable education by elevating educator voice in policy and practice. I’m here on behalf of classroom teachers across the Commonwealth and the Massachusetts Educator Collective for Change, educators shaping policy based on what they see every day.
There is something deeply unjust and fundamentally irresponsible about sending children to school every day and then failing to educate them.
Graduation requirements are not paperwork. They are not technical standards. They are a promise we make to children and families: that if you show up, if you do what we ask of you, this system will prepare you for the world beyond its doors.
Right now, for many families in Massachusetts, showing up to school is not easy and it is not safe.
In Black and Brown communities across this Commonwealth, school attendance has become an act of courage. Children are navigating fear, instability, and surveillance. Families are making daily calculations about safety, visibility, and belonging. Some students are afraid to walk to school. Some parents are afraid to let them go. And yet, the overwhelming majority of them come anyway. Because education is a life-changing pathway to dignity, stability, and opportunity.
When children continue to show up despite growing challenges, often overcoming many barriers, our responsibility deepens.
Graduation requirements should reflect our belief that all children -- regardless of race, language, disability, or zip code -- are capable of deep learning and worthy of rigorous preparation. The requirements should not be designed for convenience or comfort. They should be designed to help students meet the reality they are stepping into.
If students are willing to come to school in a world that questions whether they belong, if they are coming despite fear, despite uncertainty, despite real risk, then it is our duty to give them an education worth coming for. Worth fighting for. Worth trusting.
This is why graduation requirements matter.
Without clear, meaningful standards, we are being negligent. We are asking children to invest their time, their energy, and in some cases their safety, without guaranteeing that they will leave with the skills they need to survive and succeed.
Educators see this tension every day.
Teachers across Massachusetts are clear: students should graduate only when they have demonstrated mastery of essential skills, not because teachers want to exclude students, but because they want to see them succeed in learning and in life. Teachers are not calling for punishment. They are calling for preparation – for all students.
In an Educators for Excellence MA statewide survey, the majority of educators affirmed that students should demonstrate proficiency before graduating and that graduation should reflect learning over time, not a single moment, not a single test, but sustained growth. Teachers want high expectations because they understand what happens when students are passed forward without the tools they need: it is students, not systems, who pay the price.
We often talk about supporting the “whole child.” But we must be honest about what that means in this moment.
What does it mean to care for the whole child in a world that is increasingly unforgiving?
What does it mean to graduate students into a society that may judge them on sight, question their right to belong, or deny them opportunity, if we have not equipped them with strong literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills?
This is not the world of twenty or thirty years ago. The margin for error is smaller. The cost of under-education is higher. And the consequences fall hardest on the students who already face the greatest barriers.
High standards are not the opposite of equity. They are a prerequisite for it. Let me say that again: High standards are not the opposite of equity. They are a prerequisite for it.
At its core, this conversation is not about policy design. It is about integrity.
If we are going to ask children to keep coming to school, and they and their families to keep trusting us, to keep believing in education, then we must ensure that graduation means something real.
Not symbolic. Not aspirational. Real.
Our students deserve nothing less.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
