We write to communicate our concerns about the data shared by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Spring 2021 MCAS testing.
Teachers, School Committees and school superintendents told state leaders last year that spring 2021 MCAS tests would be a waste of time because nothing could be learned from the scores that wasn’t already obvious.
However, state officials insisted that it was critical to measure exactly how much learning loss COVID has inflicted on our children, and how big the famous “gaps” among groups of students have grown.Now that the scores are out, we can see that the tests failed to reach even those limited goals. Several thousand 10th grade students didn’t take the tests, along with a few thousand middle school students at each grade level. The groups most likely to skip the tests were those that scored low in the past. Those were precisely the groups that state officials said they were eager to track. → Read More