So what passed with the MCAS bill?

Since this became something people were meme-ing, there's some oversimplification circulating of what actually passed. I thought it would be useful to sort that out a bit.
First, the Senate passed a different bill than the House had, then the House passed the Senate's language. That's what's going on with the sequence over here tracking the bill. (It went back to the Senate again with the emergency preamble added.) S2629 is what actually passed.
It now has been "enacted and laid before the Governor" which sometimes is called being "put on the Governor's desk," though at this point both of those are metaphors.

What did it do?

• The state legal requirement of testing for grades 4, 8, and 10 is waived for the remainder of this school year; the actual language is:
           the requirement for a comprehensive diagnostic assessment of individual
           students under said section 1I of said chapter 69 is waived for the remainder
           of the 2019-2020 school year
  The rest of the grades are federal requirements that are thus waived by that federal waiver.
• It provides for the Board of Ed to waive the high school competency determination for any disruption caused by COVID-19. It does not specify year, so this could be an authority that extends beyond this school year.
• It allows for seniors who have not passed the competency determination to take it at a later date.

I think it also is good to consider what it doesn't do:

• It didn't actually cancel the MCAS. It waived the requirement that there be an MCAS. Those are not the same thing.
• It doesn't yet sort out what's going on with the seniors who maybe had a test that they still needed to pass. That one goes to the Board via the Commissioner.
• It doesn't specify which class or classes are included in the competency determination handoff. The obvious question is the above seniors, but juniors lost a retest chance as well. Sophomores, of course, also are off sequence now. Will that power be used elsewhere?
• It doesn't sort out sequencing; if freshmen generally take biology and get the biology MCAS out of the way then, are they finishing bio? When? And when can they logically then take the test?
• It doesn't say we aren't testing next fall. For all the "wow, this is going to kill standardized testing FOREVER" posts I'm seeing, I think people need to understand that there is going to be a countervailing push to want to find out just how much the school closure set us back, and tests like MCAS will be seen as a vehicle for that.

The bill also, by the way, extends the deadline for Student Opportunity Act plans to May 15 "or such later date as determined by the commissioner." Yes, it is now April 10. Yes, the deadline was April 1.

It also provides a way for regional school districts to allow for the Commissioner to establish a 1/12 budget for them if they can't get their budgets passed through town meetings.

I'll update this post once it is signed.
The Governor signed the bill this afternoon.
Followed by this Friday night:

With our federal testing waiver secured and the state legislation officially enacted....I can now confirm that this spring’s regular administration of MCAS in grades 3-10 is cancelled. Further info on competency determination et al. will be forthcoming.

— Jeffrey C. Riley (@JeffreyCRiley) April 10, 2020

It's never not going to be super weird to me that people are hailing this as some sort of great victory, BTW. We're not actually in school; we're not going to be in school; we can't do this remotely.