Action and Advocacy Afoot

Structural oppression as a case study for racial disparities

Kira Goldenberg

“If you wanted to teach something about structural oppression, this would be a good case study,” said Marianne Yoshioka, M.S.W., MBA, Ph.D, LCSW, dean and Elizabeth Marting Treuhaft Professor.

The disparities in who passes the exam the first time and who does not—which extended beyond racebased discrepancies to include older test-takers, as well as people for whom English is a second language— have injected urgency into longstanding debates about whether post-master’s testing is an accurate way to gauge whether someone has clinical competence.

“One might feel like if you graduate from an accredited program, should that not be sufficient to be able to get a license?” Yoshioka said.

SSW graduates overwhelmingly pass the master’s-level licensing exam at rates that exceed both Massachusetts and national percentages. But true to the institution’s deep focus on racial justice and equity both within and outside the profession, Yoshioka is teaming up with fellow deans, both in-state and nationally, to work toward an ultimate goal of sunsetting the test.

In other words, she said, “there is action and advocacy afoot.” This action is taking place both at the state level, where licensure is granted and regulated, and at the national level with the ASWB, which is a consortium of state licensing boards.

In Massachusetts, the deans and directors of the state’s social work programs have agreed, along with Massachusetts hospital social work directors, to support the state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) in filing the SUPER Act: an act relative to Social work Uplifting Practice and Exam Removal to be considered in the state’s 2023 legislative session.

If passed, the act would remove the Massachusetts master’s level exam requirement in three years, allow LICSWs to earn continuing education credits for supervising earlier-career social workers, and ensure that at least half of field placement stipends go to students of color.

Yoshioka is also working with Dean Gautam Yadama at Boston College’s School of Social Work, to convene the deans and directors of Massachusetts social work programs to consider shorter-term remedies for the time period between when—they hope—state lawmakers vote to decommission the exam, and when it actually takes effect.

“We don’t want to go off and do our own thing as a School,” Yoshioka said. “It’s important that we work with the other schools in the state to mitigate the problems with the exam for all social work students.”

The deans and directors also want to ensure that the testing requirement is not replaced with onerous academic requirements that would be a hardship for lesser-resourced programs to enact. And at the end of any state process, it’s still unclear how exam reform will shape up nationally, and how differing state requirements could impact long-standing efforts toward interstate licensure.

“I feel hopeful that things are going to change,” Yoshioka said, but it’s essential that they “change in ways that are actually helpful, that create more justice rather than just making something look different, but it’s still the same problem.”