Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Elizabeth Nelson described the district’s MCAS results and potential reasons for any declines or lack of improvements.
Photo credit: LongmeadowTV
LONGMEADOW — While Longmeadow students outperformed their peers in the state on the MCAS, stagnant and declining scores have school officials taking a deeper look at where the district can improve.
Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Elizabeth Nelson ran the School Committee through the MCAS results and potential areas of improvement at its meeting on Oct. 13.
Superintendent Martin O’Shea said the density of the data means it can be looked at “100 different ways.”
Nelson said the MCAS data never really accurately displays what is happening in the classrooms or what the students are achieving.
“There’s really phenomenal and dynamic instruction happening in our classrooms every single day,” Nelson said. “I hope that when we leave this presentation tonight, we think about all of the wonderful ways that we are measuring student success and progress, and that we’re just reminded that this is one data point. One day that some 8-year-olds are sitting down to take a test for the first time on a very different format than what they’re used to in their classroom.”
She said MCAS is also using absenteeism toward the accountability criteria, which is something the district tracks daily to ensure students are in the classroom and families are engaged when needed.
Nelson previewed some of the district’s other methods for capturing student data on a daily basis, such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.
DIBELS is a series of timed assessments to measure early literacy and reading fluency. The district also tracks SATs and AP exams at the high school.
She said hands-on learning and presentations in the district’s “daily growth” category isn’t something that can be measured with a standardized test, but is some of the best learning the district is seeing from students.
The state examines MCAS results by grouping grades 3-8 together and high school grades together.
Looking at statewide MCAS performance and trends, Nelson said the data were flat across math and civics. English language arts results declined and science showed mixed outcomes by grade, with eighth grade science showing the only increase since the 2025 testing.
Longmeadow outperformed state averages in all subject areas, although Nelson said there was a significant decline in 10th grade results across all three disciplines.
“As we know, last November, the voters passed that they no longer wanted MCAS to be considered as a graduation requirement,” Nelson said. “You’ll see that this cohort, their scores aren’t really that far off from where they’ve been, going all the way back to third grade … When you think about the performance declining by 11 points, that’s from a completely different cohort of students who we’re measuring them against from the year prior.”
She said the MCAS vote could be playing a part in declining achievement scores after seeing some students who are “highly capable of completing” left essay portions completely blank.
Nelson said there are elementary data points that show great amounts of achievement, and other areas the principals and instructional coaches are already zoned in on.
“We’re working in grade level teams and data meetings to address that right down to the standard,” Nelson said. “We know that fourth and fifth grade, we did not do well on fractions. So, we’re already looking at what units those are in our fourth and fifth grade curriculum and what we need to do to make sure that, not only is our curriculum explaining fractions in a way that students need to be able to understand it, but that they’re not being thrown off by the wording of a question.”
Nelson also displayed the percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations in specific cohorts over the years, noting a decline of 10% or more in almost every class immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are areas to celebrate for the district’s scores, such as outperforming state average by a wide margin, significant academic growth by low-performing students, district-wide science increases and chronic absenteeism decreases in the elementary schools.
Nelson did note specific areas for growth since the grades 3-8 students meeting or exceeding expectations in math and ELA declined by 1% and the percentage of high school students meeting or exceeding in all core subjects dropped by 7% to 10%.
High needs students and students with disabilities also showed ELA achievement declines across all grade levels.
“Our principals, they’ve been looking at the data for a couple of weeks now,” Nelson said. “They’ve identified areas. While what we’re sharing here tonight is more globally looking at areas of growth, they’ve really zoned in on very specific areas that we’re hoping to make some improvements on … We use MCAS data, it’s an important piece of data, it’s a lot of data, it gives us really great information, but again, we’re using many other measures to make sure students are moving forward.”
