2024 MCAS scores show Massachusetts falling further behind post-pandemic

Students at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester on the first day of school last year.Erin Clark/Globe Staff

Long after schools reopened from the pandemic, Massachusetts students across the board are falling further behind academically, according to the latest state MCAS scores released Tuesday. The results raise worrying questions about whether an entire generation of children will ever fully recover.

More than 450,000 students in elementary, middle, and high school took the math, English, and science exams last spring. In most grades and subjects, fewer students scored at grade level than the year before. And, on every single test, students trailed their pre-pandemic peers by substantial margins

Overall, only 42 percent of students met expectations on the tests; before the pandemic, half did. Nearly 40,000 more students failed English tests than in 2019 — even though there were fewer test-takers.

Even the youngest students, third-graders who weren’t yet in kindergarten when schools shut down, remain significantly behind their pre-pandemic peers. Likewise, 10th-graders, whose graduation hinges on the high-stakes exams and who have the least time left to catch up, continue to lag.

The lack of full recovery — four-and-a-half years after the pandemic shuttered schools — could have lasting effects on Massachusetts youth, raising questions about the efficacy of the hundreds of millions of federal relief dollars spent on post-pandemic academic recovery. And with other states showing much more progress in catching students up, the lack of momentum jeopardizes the Commonwealth’s prized claim to the nation’s best schools, a status that already elides massive disparities by race and wealth.

“These results are concerning,” education Commissioner Russell Johnston said at a state education board meeting Tuesday. “While we have been operating with a sense of urgency, these results fortify our responsibility, our deep responsibility, to accelerate our work.”

Tom Kane, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education who has studied academic recovery efforts, said the lack of recovery means students from the state’s poorer districts will face even steeper barriers to succeed in adulthood.

”Now that the federal money is running out, the state needs to take leadership on the recovery,” Kane said. “All the students in the state will be competing with students in other states who have had a more robust recovery.”

There was little variation in trends among demographics: Most groups lost some ground from 2023 and remain far below pre-pandemic levels. But with preexisting disparities and marginalized students suffering the worst pandemic setback, that means there are immense achievement gaps. Only about one-quarter of Latino students, for example, met expectations on each test, compared to the majority of white students.

The new data also show that 22 percent of 10th-graders did not score high enough on the tests to graduate, up from 18 percent in the prior year — putting diplomas on the line for an additional 3,000 Massachusetts students. The increase reflects both the decline in achievement and a higher score to graduate the state set for the class of 2026. The news comes during the buildup to a November ballot measure, that would eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement.

About half the 10th grade students who failed the MCAS in 2023 passed on a re-test last year, state education data chief Rob Curtin said at a briefing Monday; students get up to four chances to re-take the tests as juniors and seniors. English learners and students with disabilities fail the MCAS at disproportionately higher rates.

Yelitza Leon, 16, a junior at Boston Latin Academy, is part of the first cohort of students who have to meet the new benchmarks to graduate from high school. Preparing for the MCAS last spring was especially stressful, she said, knowing the stakes were higher. She said her teachers rushed through topics covered on the MCAS. Some content still felt unfamiliar when she finally took the tests.

“Honestly, I think we already have a lot expected from us, especially as juniors and seniors,” Leon said. “Practicing for AP exams at the same time that [students] were practicing for the MCAS and finals was really overwhelming for a lot of people.”

Lisa Guisbond, executive director of Boston-based nonprofit Citizens for Public Schools, said the MCAS could “be a more useful tool if we took away some of these high stakes consequences. I’m not anti-standardized testing at all. I’m against the way we’re using the tests and using them to punish our most vulnerable student groups.”

Her organization supports repealing the MCAS graduation requirement.

But Ed Lambert of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which supports keeping the graduation requirement, said the dismal results make it a “particularly bad time to lower standards.”

“We can get students across that bar. These results don’t change that,” Lambert said “We should put the political issues aside and come together and say, ‘What are we going to do to address student learning? Why is Massachusetts moving in the wrong direction?’”

The Grade 10 scores are a particular focus with the looming referendum, but the general trends are concerning. On most grades and subjects, scores improved at least somewhat in the immediate recovery from the pandemic, but that rebound appears to have stalled out.

But state leaders said they still believe students will recover and that efforts addressing absenteeism and diversifying the workforce, among others, will help. Education officials attempted to paint an optimistic picture of the results, noting in particular that a recent state report on chronic absenteeism, indicated progress. Improved student attendance often is linked with better academic performance.

The statewide rate of chronic absenteeism, or missing 18 days of school, was about 1 in 5 last year, still elevated but down from a record high of more than one-quarter two years prior.

Still, the test scores point to a different direction.

Some recent national reports from the nonprofit testing group NWEA show students, particularly those in middle school, falling further and further behind pre-pandemic levels. NWEA researcher Megan Kuhfeld, whose group administers interim assessments mostly to students in grades 3 to 8, said that while there were signs of recovery in 2023, it “mostly stalled.”

“The gaps that we see in test scores actually widened in a number of grades, particularly in reading,” Kuhfeld said. “The test scores are giving us a signal around really big challenges school districts are going to face.”

Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who tracks state test data from around the country, said that while the new scores are concerning, they do not mean federal relief spending has gone to waste — because students could have been even worse off without it.

“We’re really not entirely sure exactly what we spent it on,” Oster said. “The combination of that and not knowing the counterfactual makes it really hard to say this money was wasted.”

Many results in Massachusetts were similarly dismal. Boston, despite a much ballyhooed reading overhaul, fell further in reading: Last year, just 1 in 4 Boston students in grades 3 to 8 read at grade level. The state’s other two largest districts, Springfield and Worcester, have had similar regression.

In a news release, Boston Public Schools noted the district’s trendlines were similar to those statewide, but pointed to areas of promise, including reducing chronic absenteeism, and raising math achievement in grades 3 through 8, where the average student scored about one point better on the 120-point scale than in 2022.

District-level scores demonstrated little relationship between demographics and strength of recovery; while the poorer districts tended to suffer the biggest pandemic declines, they have not had accordingly sized recoveries.

“We did not see huge swings in terms of different student groups,” Curtin said Monday. “Certainly our gaps are important, and we need to focus on them, but I think coming out of the out of the pandemic, we are in a place where we need to have the focus on all of our students.”

Without significant swings among marginalized groups, Massachusetts will be unable to close gaps. The new data show, for example, that districts with the most low-income students, English learners, and students of color, including Lawrence, Chelsea, and Randolph, continue to perform much worse than the state as a whole.

The state also released new accountability determinations for schools and districts, taking into account MCAS data and other indicators. Fifty-seven schools were named “Schools of Recognition,” based on growth or achievement, among them some with high poverty rates such as Boston’s Fenway High School and Lowell’s Moody Elementary. The state also named dozens of schools and districts as needing assistance or intervention.

Mandy McLaren of the Globe staff contributed to this report.