Backing ballot question to eliminate MCAS graduation requirement, Warren breaks with GOP opponent — and Governor Healey

‘We got the best system, but let’s change it? Makes no sense,’ argued John Deaton, Warren’s Republican challenger

Senator Elizabeth Warren and GOP challenger John Deaton before their first televised debate at WBZ in Boston on Tuesday.Ken McGagh for The Boston Globe

During their hourlong debate Tuesday night, one of the starkest differences between Senator Elizabeth Warren and her Republican opponent, John Deaton, came over a ballot question this fall that gives voters the opportunity to eliminate the requirement that students pass the MCAS standardized test to graduate high school.

Deaton said he wants to preserve MCAS as a graduation requirement. Warren, meanwhile, said she will vote to get rid of it.

The question has made for somewhat odd political bedfellows: It is Deaton, not Warren, who is lining up with the state’s Democratic governor on the issue. Maura Healey has said she supports keeping the MCAS requirement.

“We can’t have 351 standards” across the state’s many cities and towns, Deaton said, arguing the MCAS requirement offers an essential, uniform way of assessing which students are ready to move on from high school. “If you don’t have MCAS, and you have no standards, you’re going to get people graduating from high school that can’t fully speak English now in this state, and that puts them at a disadvantage.”

Warren, who started her career as a special education teacher and went on to work as a law professor, argued that “one test is not a great measure for every kid.”

She credited teachers here for Massachusetts’ strong standing in education — by some metrics, the state boasts the best public school systems in the country, though there are major disparities — and said voters should listen to those educators.

“Our teachers are telling us that the consequence of this test is actually to teach our kids less, because we’re teaching them more about test-taking skills,” Warren said in the final minutes of the debate Tuesday night. “They want an opportunity to help shape a broader view of which children get a high school diploma. And I think that’s something that we should support.”

“This logic that these career politicians use just escapes me,” Deaton shot back. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. ... We got the best system, but let’s change it? Makes no sense.”

Warren’s position puts her in line with the state’s largest teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, as well as the broader electorate. In a recent Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll, 58 percent of voters said they would support ending the MCAS requirement.

But top state leaders including Healey want to keep the question as a graduation requirement, meaning she and Warren are at odds over the question. Business groups are also fighting to preserve the requirement, arguing that doing away with it could hurt the state’s economic competitiveness.