It’s time for Massachusetts to make some serious choices when it comes to the path forward for our children: turn unprecedented challenges into the opportunity to support our children and embrace innovation — or regress back into the status quo that has been underperforming for too many of our kids for far too long.
National studies on COVID-19’s effect on learning confirm that students began this year academically far behind where they should have been. Not surprisingly, the disruptions disproportionately affected the most vulnerable students, with studies showing that students on average could lose five to nine months of learning by the end of June 2021, but students of color could be six to 12 months behind, compared with four to eight months for white students.
The extent of learning loss across the Commonwealth is anyone’s guess — but it shouldn’t be. Yet, there are efforts underway that would prevent us from finding out how bad the situation truly is and what we need to do to fix it. Parents, teachers and school leaders need information to be able to tell where kids are so educators can identify specific interventions our children will need in order to recover.
When the Massachusetts Education Reform Act was passed in 1993, it introduced statewide learning standards and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — changes widely credited with making our public schools the best in the nation. But longtime opponents of statewide testing are using the pandemic as an excuse to cancel MCAS tests this spring — then prevent its return — as part of an effort to dismantle the state’s accountability system.
While it made sense to cancel the tests last year when the early spread of COVID abruptly closed schools, eliminating MCAS tests this year would mean tossing out the most powerful tool we have to understand what our kids have lost — and what they will need to recover from the pandemic.
We do our children no kindness by going back to the days of social promotion and graduating high school without the skills needed to enter college or the workforce. Profound learning loss can have lasting consequences for individual students, for our economy and for our democracy.
Our state’s employers and our families are deeply concerned about the pandemic’s long-term educational impacts for students who were already on the losing end of achievement and opportunity gaps.
For them, the side effects of a lost education can often mean poverty or jail time. These gaps also affect businesses across the state that rely on an educated workforce.
Both the Biden and Baker administrations believe assessments are a critically important component in students’ education recovery, and each understands the need for flexibility. Although MCAS results are usually a benchmark for district performance, they won’t serve that function this year. Massachusetts is planning to administer modified versions of the tests to reduce testing time and focus on the essential standards for success in the next grade level. Every possible action should be on the table to get students back in the classroom, especially since Massachusetts will have available nearly $3 billion in federal funds to support our schools. Diagnosing learning loss will be critical to determine what to do with this federal money. The money could fund small group instruction, one-on-one intensive tutoring, accelerated programming, extended learning time or summer classes.
MCAS tests are the only consistent and objective source of information that provides detailed data about disparities in educational outcomes. These tests will provide the most accurate baseline for an equitable recovery, a goal we should all agree on.
Keri Rodrigues is the founding president of the Massachusetts Parent Union. Ed Lambert is executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.
