MCAS can help solve the post-pandemic learning crisis in our schools

Since the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993, Massachusetts has earned a reputation as having the best public schools in America. Many things contribute to this success: a substantial progressive funding system, a steady recruitment of dedicated and well-trained educators, strong bipartisan consensus and leadership, and the maintenance of rigorous academic standards and expectations for all Massachusetts children.

The annual MCAS testing is a thermometer for these standards. The proponents of Question 2 would like you to think otherwisebut the purpose of the MCAS and similar statewide assessments is to better understand student progress and meet their needs. Like any good teacher, I saw the MCAS data as information that I could use to help my students and my learning. As a teacher and principal, every summer I received initial MCAS scores and spent August with my colleagues rereading the standards, creating new lessons and activities, making tutoring schedules, and more.

Many teachers did the same, and it was visible. Before the disruptions due to new tests and the pandemic, the system was working properly. When you followed the kids, over time, from one grade to the next, they became better writers, better readers, and better mathematicians. In Boston and Massachusetts, skill levels have increased, even if sometimes only marginally.

This has not happened since 2019. In grades 3-8, the level of literacy and numeracy declines.

Alarm bells have been ringing since 2020. There was no shortage of good ideas to implement, from evidence-based reading instruction to tutoring and strengthening mental health support. And, on the other hand, there was no shortage of resources. Last month, counties and states had to spend their last remaining dollars 190 USD billion federal government given to schools and school districts to address pandemic disruptions and learning loss.

However, research led by Harvard University professor Thomas Cain shows that it was very little progress in the success of students from 2021. based on the results of assessments of more than 10 million American childrensummarizes academic progress as “minimal”.

Why doesn’t everything change?

For a really practical reason: it doesn’t matter how good the class is if the student isn’t there.

Absence rates spiked not during the height of the pandemic, when most students attended school remotely, but in subsequent years, when they returned to classrooms. Despite the overall improvement since last year, the average child misses school far more than five years ago.

This is most evident in the indicators of “chronic absenteeism”, when a student misses 18 or more days in the school year. This nasty trend is community agnostic, spreading from cities like Fall Riverthey love wealthy neighborhoods Waylandfor western communities like Northampton.

Unfortunately, attendance drives often degenerate into what might more kindly be described as “initiatives” but are much more like gimmicks: door-knocking, public relations campaigns, or, in a particularly regressive example, students in Springfield with good attendance can get a chance to watch their families gamble at MGM.

AND a recent RAND study came to a clear conclusion: there is no single way to improve school attendance. When you read examples of communities like Richmond, Virginia, or Rhode Island that have greatly improved attendance, you won’t find new ideas, programs, or activities. You find data and goals often at the school level. And you find focus, unceasing reach, and the attention of families, teachers, school administrators, and school secretaries to get children to school.

No gap can be identified, no intervention can be successfully implemented without access to accurate, reliable data. In Massachusetts, this applies not only to attendance but also to assessment data. This is why undermining the MCAS by removing it as a graduation requirement, as Question 2 would have, would be a mistake.

We tend to rely on ideas to solve our problems in education. The success in Richmond, Virginia, and Rhode Island reflects not the quality or ingenuity of the idea, but the quality of the process. Setting clear goals, community leadership, creating monitoring systems, strengthening culture, celebrating success and empowering individual schools don’t fit on a bumper sticker. But that’s how you drive change.

Attendance has improved somewhat in Boston and across the country, but it will take resources and mentoring at the school level to return to pre-pandemic levels. With close relationships and the ability to act, it is the schools and teachers who will bring back the students, not the initiatives.

Something about the pandemic has fundamentally disrupted the norms regarding school attendance, which have not yet taken hold. Any intervention in response to the recent MCAS results will only continue without frequent student engagement, which is also present why is it so important to keep this as a release requirement. In some ways, just getting kids back into the classroom — not even into learning — is the back-and-forth of post-pandemic schools.