MIDDLEBOROUGH
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Receiving Your Child's Spring 2017 Next Generation MCAS Score Reports
In the report, parents will find a letter where I have taken our Acting Commissioner of Education for the Commonwealth, Mr. Jeff Wulfson's letter and added it to your child's score packet. Commissioner Wulfson explains the report, how to read the report, and steps parents can take in terms of your child's scores:
“The new MCAS assessment was created with input from teachers following a thorough review and update of our Massachusetts curriculum frameworks. Both the frameworks and the next-generation MCAS were developed with the active involvement of hundreds of experienced Massachusetts teachers and educators from all over the Commonwealth to ensure we provide every child with the opportunity they deserve to graduate high school ready for college or career. We are deeply grateful for their participation and expertise.
Even though Massachusetts has the highest performing public education system in the nation, we have to keep improving to remain globally competitive. Equally important, too many of our high school graduates are not fully prepared for post-secondary education or training. That's why we embarked on this vital project to take responsibility for improving our own standards and assessments.
The next-generation MCAS is a reformatted test from the old MCAS, and the scores are not comparable to the prior tests your child has taken. On the legacy MCAS, the four scoring categories were Advanced, Proficient, Needs Improvement, and Warning/Failing. On the next-generation MCAS, the four scoring categories are Exceeding Expectations, Meeting Expectations, Partially Meeting Expectations, and Not Meeting Expectations. The new categories emphasize readiness for higher-level work at the next grade level.
Roughly half of Massachusetts grades 3-8 students are already scoring in the Meeting Expectations category or above, but many students will find that they scored in the Partially or Not Meeting Expectations categories. As you look at these scores and help your child understand them, please note:
- The next-generation MCAS establishes high expectations to better reflect whether students are on track for the next grade level and ultimately for college and a career.
- 2017 is the baseline year - the first year of a new assessment - and we expect that over time, more students will score Meeting Expectations or above. (When the original MCAS debuted in 1998, relatively few students scored Proficient, but that changed as students and teachers adjusted to the new expectations.)
- Students in grades 3-8 do not face any negative consequences as a result of their scores.
- Students in 10th grade will not begin taking the next generation MCAS until 2019, so they are not affected by any of these changes.
- The next-generation MCAS is a new test with a different approach to assessing student performance in grades 3-8, and this year's results cannot be compared to last year's.
- MCAS results are only one measure of your child's growth and achievement. Your child's teacher can also talk to you more broadly about your child's academic growth and about his or her social and emotional development.
- In some subjects and grades, fewer students scored Meeting or Exceeding Expectations this year than scored Proficient or Advanced in previous years. This does NOT mean that students learned less; it reflects the fact that the next-generation MCAS measures more rigorous standards in a different way.
Massachusetts has the best public school system in the country, and giving students a clearer signal of their readiness for the next grade level is an important part of that. Please see the FAQ sheet on the website link below for more details on the tests.”
Learn more about the next-generation MCAS and your child's score here: http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/parents/
Also on the Massachusetts DESE website is an excellent explanation guide of the Next Generation MCAS for Parents/Guardians: http://www.doe.mass.edu/odl/e-learning/mcas-parentguide/content/index.html#/?_k=nmybv7
If you have any questions about the report or what you could do to help your child, please do not hesitate to contact the school, your child's guidance counselor (last name A-J, your counselor is Ms. Buron buronl@middleboro.k12.ma.us or last name J-Z, then it is Ms. Creditor screditor@middleboro.k12.ma.us), or me.
Improvement of our MCAS scores is something we as a school community know and understand we need to do; for success to us will only be when we have 100% of our students in the "Meeting" and "Exceeding Expectations" range.
Each and every day we are working to make this a reality. We teach to the Massachusetts frameworks and it is those, which are tested on the MCAS. We are working diligently as a faculty and school community to make sure our curriculum and instruction are where they need to be. We, as a school, continue to look at how we deliver instruction, our curriculum, and our utilization of any means to gain greater success for our students and keep them at the center of their own learning.
As a school community, we will not be satisfied until all of our students are in the categories of “Meeting” and “Exceeding Expectations,” and this is our mission we will be targeting throughout your child’s time at the Nichols. We, as a school, hold ourselves to a high standard in making sure we do the best we can with everything we do each and every day for all of our students. We understand the effort we need to put in to have all of our students reach success. We believe this is attainable and we will continue to function towards this. Our professional development and our PLC periods during the school day center on creating better means to support our students. Our DIAL period is one of those places where we look at our MCAS data and figure out better ways to personalize our student’s learning particularly with some of their weaknesses. Utilizing our 1:1 Chromebook environment also helps us in supporting the learning with more technological capacities. In the end, we are applying this MCAS data as a way to better help our teachers assist your children to be successful not only in these tests but, more importantly, in life.
Again, if you have any questions about the MCAS report, the scores, what we are doing about them, or our mission and vision for NMS, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
M R Geoghegan
