The latest MCAS scores are not good, as students of all grade levels scored lower in English Language Arts than they did the year before.
These results definitely show that post-pandemic learning loss continues to be a concern.
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education – or DESE – released the scores from spring of 2024 on Tuesday.
While science, technology and engineering scores increased over the previous year and math scores remained pretty much flat, English Language Arts saw the worst results in about a decade.
Pre-pandemic, 50% of students met or exceeded grade level expectations, while in 2024 only about 40% hit that mark.
The most dramatic losses were in fifth grade, where the number of students meeting or exceeding expectations fell six percentage points below the previous year's fifth graders on the reading and writing portion of the test.
Other grades dipped between one to four percentage points from 2023.
This certainly adds more fodder to the debate over whether MCAS should continue to be a graduation requirement.
And people on both sides of the issue are using these results to bolster their arguments for or against it.
“We do ourselves a disservice when we use these one-time test scores to determine to make grand judgements on how individual students or schools, or our entire state's school system is doing," said Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
"The lack of the performance is not the blame of the assessment, or the test, or the graduation standard," said Ed Lambert, of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. "What we really need to be focused on is our students at the 10th grade level are lagging behind."
The decision on whether MCAS will remain a graduation requirement will ultimately be up to voters in November.
