IT’S A SAFE BET that Woody Allen, who is often credited with the coinage, wasn’t thinking about student testing when he remarked that 90 percent of success is just showing up. But he might as well have been.
New MCAS scores released on Tuesday show a jarring, continued decline in English language arts scores, and state officials are pointing to an ongoing crisis of chronic student absenteeism as a major factor.
English scores on the statewide test given last spring fell across all grades, a dispiriting result at the end of the second full year in which students had returned to in-person learning following the Covid disruption and school closures. For grades 3-8, the share of students who scored proficient fell by 3 percentage points to 39 percent from 42 percent in 2023. On the 10th grade test, the share of students clearing that bar fell by 1 point, from 58 percent to 57 percent. (Scores were generally flat in math, while showing slight increases in science.)
When scores are analyzed based on student attendance, a yawning gap emerges. For students in grades 3-8, those who were deemed “chronically absent,” meaning they missed at least 10 percent of school days, were roughly half as likely to achieve proficient scores in English as those not chronically absent. Among 10th graders, there was a 27-point difference, with 36 percent of chronically absent students scoring proficient compared to 63 percent of those not chronically missing school.
“These results are concerning,” acting state education commissioner Russell Johnston said at yesterday’s state board of education meeting. “While we have been operating with a sense of urgency, these results fortify our responsibility, our deep responsibility to accelerate our work.”
In an interview following Tuesday’s board meeting, Johnston said he thinks the ongoing absenteeism crisis is “a significant factor” in the troubling achievement scores. The state’s chronic absenteeism rate actually ticked down last year to 19.7 percent from 22.2 percent in 2023. But it still remains 50 percent higher than the rate in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
The state recently launched a public awareness campaign focused on the importance of school attendance. In terms of specific work focused on English language arts skills, Johnston pointed to the Healey administration’s recent allocation of $20 million for a new state literacy effort plus a $38 million federal literacy support grant the state recently received.
“We continue as society, as communities, continue to underestimate how much of an impact the pandemic had on our students,” said Mary Bourque, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. She pointed to evidence of heightened mental health problems associated with the pandemic school shutdowns as one factor in the absenteeism crisis.
“I think alarm bells should be going off,” Ed Lambert, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said about the continued slide in English scores. He urged the state to “take more direct action to incentivize and require adoption of practices that will change this trajectory.”
Lambert praised efforts like the state’s new literacy initiative, but said the state’s strong tradition of local control of schools is holding back progress, citing the resistance of some districts to adopting evidence-based approaches to reading instruction. “We still have half of our districts not using a high-quality curriculum,” for reading instruction, he said. “Why? Because they’re allowed to.”
A national report released earlier this year on ongoing learning loss associated with the pandemic said the disruption had exacerbated already existing achievement gaps, with Massachusetts showing the largest such widening of gaps between poor and non-poor students of any state in the study. In the new English MCAS results, proficiency rates for both low-income and non-low-income students fell by 3 points.
Rob Curtin, the state education department’s data chief, pointed out to the state education board that English language arts proficiency rates for Hispanic students fell by 2 points while that for white students fell by 3 points.
“What that technically means is that the gap closed between our Hispanic and white students. But that’s not something we should be celebrating – because someone got worse a little less,” he said. “If anything comes of my remarks today, it’s that we have a long way to go with all of our students.”
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