I guess I will trust the recommendations of my former education colleagues and vote “yes” on ballot Question 2: that is, to eliminate MCAS as a high school graduation requirement. Teachers make a persuasive case that standardized testing creates anxiety and stress in the classroom instead of excitement and engagement in learning; that it discriminates against low-income school districts and marginalized populations; and that it risks relegating some not-untalented young people to a lifetime of trying to get a decent job without a high school diploma.

But I wish my former colleagues would, in return, listen to members of the business community who are pushing back on the bill and trying to keep the MCAS requirement in place. Most of them are not ignorant or callous: they are genuinely disheartened by the poor skill levels of some youths who move from high school into their workplaces. It’s not a myth that there are young workers demonstrating that they can’t read a ruler, calculate a simple percentage, or write a coherent paragraph. I’ve seen it firsthand at worksites where I facilitated training in my former job.

Whether these former students learned the basics too long ago and need a refresher in their senior year, or whether they’ve never had the opportunity to actually use in a real life situation something they “learned” and parroted in a classroom setting, there is something systemically wrong in our educational approach that needs to be fixed.

It’s been going on far too long. I wrote my first letter to the editor on this subject over 30 years ago, when a small group of business people and educators in one local public school district were trying hard to crack a system in which too many youth were graduating with too few basic skills.

It’s not just a problem with the non-college-bound either. Many of our first-year college students do so poorly on placement assessments that they have to take remedial courses before they can get started on actual college-level curricula.

A single standardized test, flawed and inflexible, may not be the right tool for documenting that students are ready for their next steps after high school. But I wish educators would actively seek out members of the business community to learn more about what they are seeing, and then work together to come up with solutions that are fair to teachers, respectful of employers, and effective for kids.

Patricia Crosby of Gill is a former teacher and past executive director of the Franklin Hampshire Workforce Board.