The 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 for having the best public schools in America. There are many factors contributing to this success: a substantive and progressive funding system, a steady pipeline of dedicated and well-prepared educators, sustained bipartisan consensus and leadership, and adherence to rigorous academic standards and expectations for all children in Massachusetts.

Annual MCAS testing is the thermometer for these standards. Proponents of question 2 would like you to think differentlybut 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 MCAS data as information I could use to help my students and my instruction. As a teacher and principal, I received the first MCAS results each summer and spent the month of August with my colleagues rereading the standards, creating new lessons and activities, creating tutoring schedules, and more.

Many teachers did the same, and it showed. Before disruptions due to new testing and the pandemic, the system was working as intended. As you followed children over time, from one grade to another, they became better writers, better readers, and better mathematicians. In Boston and across Massachusetts, skill levels rose, even if sometimes only marginally.

That has not been the case since 2019. Literacy and arithmetic skills are declining for groups 3 to 8.

Alarm bells have been ringing continuously since 2020. There’s no shortage of great ideas to implement, from evidence-based reading instruction, to tutoring, to more mental health support. And for a change, there is no shortage of resources. Last month, districts and states had to spend the last remaining dollars in the budget $190 billion the federal government communicated to schools and school districts to address pandemic disruptions and learning loss.

However, research led by Harvard professor Thomas Kane shows that this is the case very little progress in student achievement since 2021. Curriculum Associates, based on assessment results from more than 10 million American childrensummarizes academic progress as ‘minimal’.

Why don’t things change?

For a very practical reason: it doesn’t matter how good a class is if no student is present.

Absenteeism rates have skyrocketed, not during the height of the pandemic — when most students were attending school remotely — but in the years since as they returned to classrooms. Despite an overall improvement since last year, the average child is missing far more school than five years ago.

This is most clearly reflected in the figures for ‘chronic absenteeism’, where a student misses 18 or more days in a school year. This troublesome trend is community agnostic and extends from cities such as Autumn riverto wealthy suburbs such as Waylandfor western communities such as Noordampton.

Unfortunately, attendance interventions often degenerate into what might more kindly be described as an “initiative,” but much more like a gimmick: door knocking, public relations campaigns, or, in a particularly regressive example, students in Springfield with a good turnout. may get the chance to watch their families gamble at MGM.

A recent RAND study came to a clear conclusion: there is no single way to improve school attendance. If you read case studies of communities – like Richmond, VA or Rhode Island – that dramatically improved turnout, you won’t find any new ideas, programs or interventions. You find data and goals, Often at school level. And you find focus and ruthless scope, and attention from families, teachers, school administrators and school secretaries to get children to school.

No gap can be identified and no intervention can be successfully implemented without access to accurate, reliable data. In Massachusetts, that includes not just attendance, but also assessment data. This is why it would be a mistake to undermine the MCAS by removing it as a graduation requirement – ​​as Question 2 would do.

We tend to rely on ideas to solve our problems in education. The success in Richmond, VA and Rhode Island reflects not the quality or ingenuity of an idea, but the quality of a process. Setting clear goals, public leadership, creating systems of control, strengthening culture, celebrating success and empowering individual schools does not fit on a bumper sticker. But this is how you bring about change.

Attendance has improved slightly in Boston and across the country, but returning to pre-pandemic status will require resources and coaching at the school level. With the direct relationships and the ability to act, it is the schools and the teachers that bring the students back, not the initiatives.

Something about the pandemic has fundamentally broken norms around school attendance, which have still not been adopted. Any intervention in response to recent MCAS results will only go so far without students participating frequently, which is the case why it is so important to keep this as a graduation requirement. In some ways, it’s just the lingering, post-pandemic work of schools to get kids back into the classroom — or even back into the classroom academically.