Back to School But Not Back to Normal
2022 MCAS scores reveal students aren’t learning like before, with low-income learners hardest hit
Summer Maxwell
When Robert Lee first saw the post-pandemic scores on the MCAS, the test used to assess educational performance across Massachusetts, he worried he’d made a calculation error. “Wow, that’s a decline,” recalls Lee, the chief analyst for MCAS, “I better make sure the results are equated properly.”
But Lee’s numbers were right, and he had reason to be worried. Lee says the losses in educational performance between the 2019 and 2021 scores are as large as the decline experienced by students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Educators were hoping scores would bounce back this year.
Unfortunately, the 2022 scores, released at the end of September, didn’t paint a much brighter picture. The percentage of students graded as “meeting” or “exceeding” expectations in math across the state stubbornly remained 9% lower than in 2019. English/language arts (ELA) scores continued to plummet 11% below pre-pandemic scores. What’s worse, those ELA scores dropped an additional 5% lower than scores in 2021.
The Commonwealth isn’t alone in experiencing an educational downturn following the pandemic; data shows that test scores continue to decline in both reading in math across the nation. And although Massachusetts students scored well compared to much of the country, the state was one of just 17 to experience a double-digit drop in national test scores, indicating the Commonwealth is not a leader in score recovery.
Despite the concerning data, state officials insist scores will rebound once kids settle into in-person classes. “We know that with time and the right supports, our students can achieve and exceed their previous successes,” said Jeffrey C. Riley, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education.
But simply getting kids back into the classroom might not make up for the lost ground. In addition to the low test scores, disturbing mental health trends reveal the pandemic fundamentally impacted student’s cognitive development and learning ability. What’s worse, these damaging effects are unequally distributed upon the state’s low-income communities and students, costing students thousands in future earnings.
Without serious interventions in the classroom, and additional aid to communities in need, Massachusetts’s students might never recover.
As schooling returns to normal, faltering scores make a convincing case for pivoting away from the status quo toward an approach that puts more focus on mental health support, individualized care, and helping families outside of school so that Massachusetts students bounce back.
Struggles in the Classroom
Getting kids back in the classroom may improve the quality of instruction, but child experts argue that the pandemic has caused lasting damage to the development of children’s cognitive function and critical learning skills. This could have a lasting impact on students’ long term educational outcomes.
During the pandemic, children were made “more susceptible, potentially” to anxieties about losing their parents or their grandparents, says Paul Chase, a professor of child study and human development at Tufts University. Chase argues the increased stress experienced during the pandemic “was extremely problematic” for young learners.
He calls pandemic-related anxiety an example of persistent toxic stress, which can “damage intellectual development” to the point that “physical brain development does not work in the way that it should.” Pandemic stress has the potential to leave a lasting impression on children’s cognitive maturity.
Supporting Chase’s assessment, experts have identified other data that may indicate chronic stress-related impairment. “Our incoming fourth graders have the weakest phonics skills that I think our nation has ever seen,” says education consultant Rachel Schechter, founder of LXD Research, an education consulting service. Phonics is a learning method that educators use to teach kids to read, and there is evidence that if students don’t pick up those skills by third grade, she says, it becomes vastly more difficult for kids to achieve them, meaning younger students may have missed a key learning window when schools were remote.
The Continued Impact on Social Development and Mental Health
Removing kids from school and isolating them at home may have also stunted some children’s emotional and social growth. “There’s been tremendous alienation from school, from the learning process, from peers, and from teachers,” says Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “They lost the routines, the party of growing up,” he continues, “and so bringing people back after that is difficult.”
These routines and relationships with peers and teachers are an important part of maturing social and emotional skills, which have been shown to boost academic achievement if properly developed.
Due to pandemic-forced isolation, says Schechter, students are probably 6 to 12 months behind in social and emotional development, but without data, like MCAS scores, the extent of this problem is more difficult to assess. “It's not the law that every child is tested on their social emotional wellbeing,” says Schechter. “So because there's not as much data, there's not as much access for researchers.”
Mental health workers note that lack of emotional development among young residents might be more serious than we thought. Dorian Crawford, a Beverly-based psychologist who studies high schoolers and young adults, says that she’s noticed an uptick in anxiety, depression, and stress in older children since the onset of the pandemic.
Worryingly, Crawford says “all of those things have simply gotten worse” since the start of the pandemic, showing little rebound. Crawford described patients who were stable before covid struck, suddenly developing suicidal ideations as the pandemic progressed.
These mental health challenges can negatively affect a child’s ability to thrive in an academic environment. Crawford noted some patients who previously excelled in school were forced to to take time off to seek mental health recovery during the pandemic. Crawford isn’t sure when these students will recover, saying before the pandemic she was used to patients assuming they would one day get better. “I’m just not hearing that anymore,” she said, describing her clients’ loss of optimism.
Some Students Fare Better Than Others
Although some Massachusetts students have rebounded, MCAS data suggests that academic recovery is not equal across the state. Some of the wealthiest school districts, like Dover-Sherborn, only exhibited losses in ELA and math around 6%. Another affluent district, Wellesley, lost only approximately 7% in ELA and 4% in math.
In contrast, some of the state’s lower income communities, where scores already were well below average, have shown greater post-pandemic losses. For example, Lawrence saw a 14% decline in ELA scores and 16% decline in math. Greenfield showed losses of 17% in ELA and 15% in math.
Schechter attributes the differences in districts to resource access. Affluent communities could get laptops into kids’ hands faster, and had more reliable access to the internet. “The schools that were able to [get online fast] successfully had better outcomes than schools that were not able to,” she argues.
The pandemic also left Massachusetts residents scrambling to find childcare. In many double-income families, one parent, often the mother, left full-time work to oversee children when schools closed. More than 3.5 million working women across the nation left the workforce in spring of 2020.
While Massachusetts’s women may have lost ground as a result, children who were lucky enough to have a stay-at-home parent, or a caretaker during school hours, may have fared better. Data from the Boston Schools Fund shows that higher income students in Boston Public Schools actually had better scores across the board in 2022 than in 2019, demonstrating they may have benefited from the move to remote learning. In contrast, low-income students’ scores continued to fall in ELA and rebounded slightly in math, but still hung well below pre-pandemic levels.
The difference between these two groups may be access to technology, but also parental oversight and resources. Boston’s more affluent students “may have benefitted from their parents accessing resources to provide their children with additional academic and social emotional support” says Kerry Donahue, the Boston Schools Fund Chief Strategy Officer. The disparity is particularly concerning to Donahue, because most of Boston’s students are low-income.
Donahue also warns these gaps have lasting implications for students later in life by affecting future earnings. Math skills in particular are linked to the high wage jobs in sectors like biotech and finance that drive Boston’s economy, she says. According to new analyses from researchers at Harvard and Stanford, pandemic learning losses may cost Massachusetts students over $21 billion in future earnings, with each student missing out on an average of $23,840. Over the entire nation, estimated losses top $1 trillion.
What’s more, poor foundational learning skills can lead to less educational attainment down the road, and fewer students earning their high school diploma. And when kids drop out of school, “they cause strain on already struggling public infrastructure like social welfare systems and health systems,” said Donahue.
As the costs of the pandemic on learning are overwhelmingly cast upon low-income students, the effects will reverberate for years in lost wages and strain on public infrastructure.
Getting Students Back on Track
To improve post-pandemic student outcomes, the state has pledged $130 million to school districts to implement strategies like increasing the presence of Acceleration Academies—intensive voluntary programs to boost learning offered over school breaks that the state is now extending to summer sessions. In addition, Representative Alice Peisch and Senator Jason Lewis—co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education—will hold an informational hearing in November about the extent of the damages and the best strategies moving forward.
But experts warn that the damage students have sustained needs to be more directly addressed. “They don’t have the capacity to deal with almost everyone being behind,” said Paul Chase, who argues that the state needs to adapt intervention programs to accommodate more students. Donahue argues for new interventions as well, suggesting increasing individualized instruction and high-dosage tutoring.
Paul Reville adds that education policy needs to include reforms beyond the classroom. “If you purely view [academic recovery] as a technical challenge, something that is just about instruction,” without addressing “the challenges and barriers that exist in the ecosystem from which students come to school,” he says, then students are “not gonna be able to benefit from high quality instruction or the perfect academic regime.”
Reville is hopeful that the abysmal MCAS post-pandemic scores will give the state the grist necessary to address external factors that affect students. “Everybody wants to revert to the status quo,” he says, arguing schools should be focused on personalizing education, mental health supports, and family support. Reville argues these changes could help the students still struggling with recovery better than the legacy school system in place. “There’s opportunity in every crisis to pivot,” says Reville. “I think we have such an opportunity now.”