STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT REMAINS well below where it was in 2019, indicating a steep loss in learning during the pandemic that has yet to be made up, according to statewide MCAS results released Thursday.
“Compared to pre-pandemic we still have a way to go across all subject levels to fully recover learning losses,” said state Education Commissioner Jeff Riley.
The 2022 MCAS results reflect the standardized tests that were taken in the spring of 2022 in grades three through eight and grade 10. In every subject – math, English, and science – the percentage of students who scored as meeting or exceeding expectations fell between 2019, the last year of full, in-person education, and 2022.
There were some hopeful signs, with both math and science scores rebounding slightly compared to 2021, indicating that some learning recovery has begun. However, there were also areas where scores have continued to drop, including in writing and elementary school English.
Riley said the prevailing wisdom is it will take three to five years for students to fully recover from the pandemic but “we hope to do it sooner.” The state has said it will use 2022 as its new baseline for data to measure improvement going forward, and it will not designate any new schools or districts as underperforming this year.
Gov. Charlie Baker, in a brief interview, noted that learning loss occurred not just in Massachusetts, but across the United States and globally. “The biggest thing, the most important thing, is that kids are back in school on a full-time basis in person,” Baker said.
Baker said schools should be able to use increased state funding from a recently implemented change in the education funding formula as well as federal recovery money to implement after-school programs, acceleration academies, and other enrichment programs to help kids catch up. “I think the biggest challenge most communities are going to have in putting those dollars to work is the same one a lot of people have currently, which has to do with finding people,” Baker said.
In math, only 39 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 met or exceeded expectations – down from 49 percent pre-pandemic, but up from 33 percent in 2021. Half of tenth graders met or exceeded expectations, down from 59 percent in 2019 and 52 percent in 2021.
A new science test was given to tenth graders this year so only the fifth and eighth grade scores were comparable to previous years. The results showed that 43 percent of fifth graders and 42 percent of eighth graders met or exceeded expectations, down seven and five points, respectively, from 2019, but up one point in each grade compared to last year.
English cores continued to decline. They dropped from 52 percent of third through eighth graders meeting or exceeding expectations in 2019 to 46 percent in 2021 and 41 percent this year. For tenth graders, scores increased from 61 percent meeting or exceeding expectations in 2019 to 64 percent in 2021, but then dropped to 58 percent this year.
State officials said one major contributor to the drop in English scores was the required essay. The average student earned 0.6 points less on their essay this year compared to in 2019, representing a score drop of 18 percent.
Riley said pandemic-era declines in writing skills have not been identified as a major problem nationally, likely because most states don’t assess writing as closely as Massachusetts does. He suggested that, like reading, writing is a process that is better learned working closely with a teacher in person. “We might be the canary in the coal mine that this is an issue,” Riley said.
The data also show sharper declines in English in grades three to five compared to grades six to eight, suggesting that early literacy is a particular challenge.
Riley said schools can now use the data to focus attention on improving students’ skills in writing and early literacy. Like Baker, he noted that money is available to pay for tutoring, summer school, acceleration academies during vacation weeks, and other academic supports. Education Secretary Jim Peyser said the state has committed approximately $130 million in federal and state funds to these efforts. “We know our kids can, with the right time and supports, achieve at high levels and go beyond where they were before the pandemic,” Riley said.
One other major factor Riley flagged that likely contributed to lower achievement is high rates of absenteeism. The average Massachusetts student missed 11 days of school in the 2020-2021 school year, and 15 days of school in 2021-2022. In 2022, there were 98,000 students who were chronically absent, which means they missed at least 18 days, compared to 41,000 students in that category in 2019. The state reported that 1.7 million school days were missed in 2022 because of positive COVID-19 cases.
Riley said it is unclear to what extent COVID-related absenteeism will continue this year. “We hope and pray the numbers stay low, but we will be prepared for all contingencies this year,” he said.
Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said he does not think anyone will be surprised to see that virtual education was less effective than in-person schooling. Koocher said his biggest concern is for high schoolers. “If you’re an elementary school student and you lost fourth grade time, you can make it up fairly quickly,” Koocher said. “But if you’re a high school kid and you lost a quality biology, chemistry, or physics experience…making it up is a moot question. You have to wait until college.”
Rep. Alice Peisch and Sen. Jason Lewis, co-chairs of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, already announced plans to convene an informational hearing this fall, inviting experts to testify about the extent to which COVID interrupted learning and best practices for addressing students’ academic and social-emotional needs.
Lewis called the MCAS results “deeply concerning.” “We are far below the levels of performance that we were before the pandemic, and where we were before the pandemic was not good enough,” Lewis said.
Lewis said he is particularly concerned about the pandemic’s impact on certain subgroups, like special needs students, English language learners, and low-income students – all of whom faced additional barriers to learning remotely. “A lot of those students were not getting the kind of services and attention and support they need to really progress,” Lewis said.
Peisch said she intends to use the hearing to get information from experts about “what are the strategies we can use to reverse the loss as quickly as possible.” She hopes to dig into district level data and the results of nationwide standardized tests that will be released in October to figure out which districts and which states have developed the most effective strategies for improving student performance.
One noteworthy data point is that while Massachusetts has long had achievement gaps, in which Black and Hispanic students routinely score less well on standardized tests than white and Asian students, those achievement gaps do not appear to have increased due to COVID, despite COVID’s disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities. White students actually exhibited the largest drops in scores of all four of those groups during the pandemic period, based on this year’s MCAS results.
It is also clear that, as in the past, suburban schools in wealthier districts are performing far better than their urban counterparts. The school districts with some of the highest average scaled scores included Belmont, Harvard, Hopkinton, Lexington, Carlisle, Dover, and Weston. Toward the bottom are districts that have spent time in state receivership — Holyoke, Southbridge, and Lawrence — and other urban communities like Chelsea.
Natasha Ushomirsky, Massachusetts state director for The Education Trust, an advocacy group focused on equity, said achievement among Black and Hispanic students remains worrisome. Before the pandemic, 38 percent of Black and Latino third graders were reading on grade level; today that number is 28 percent of Black and 23 percent of Latino third graders. The percentage of Latino students doing math at grade level between third and eighth grades rose from just 14 percent to 18 percent from 2021 to 2022.
“The bottom line is the disparities were huge before and they continue to be huge,” Ushomirsky said. Even if white students had a greater drop in scores, she said, “That doesn’t in any way alleviate the equity issues that were there before the pandemic and have if anything continued to get worse during this time.”
The latest results were reported a month after the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to increase the MCAS scores tenth graders need in order to graduate, starting with the class of 2026.
Ushomirsky said it will be important going forward for every district and school to have a plan for addressing the pandemic’s impact on kids, and for state leaders to support these efforts, especially given the raised expectations. “The onus is back on policymakers and education leaders to ensure all kids are getting the support they need to meet expectations,” she said.
The state’s two major teachers’ unions opposed the higher standards.
Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page issued a statement saying the test results are unsurprising given the traumatic effects the pandemic had on students. Page argued that the state should eliminate the MCAS entirely. “Our schools need more educators who can help respond to their emotional and academic needs – including counselors, teachers, and education support professionals,” Page said. “What they do not need is a time-wasting, myopic focus on a high-stakes standardized testing system that has never worked as an accurate assessment of how well our students are doing in school.”