MCAS results: 40 percent of city schools need help

Forty percent of Boston Public Schools require intervention and the district needs to improve when it comes to reducing chronic absenteeism, boosting English proficiency among English learners and advanced coursework completion for high school students, according to new state MCAS scores for the district.

Today, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released its annual statewide school and district accountability results under a new system that judges schools and districts based whether they are meeting targets, partially meeting targets, in need of focused/targeted support or requiring broad and comprehensive support.

In Boston, 52 schools are meeting or partially meeting targets while 42 need focused/targeted support and nine require comprehensive support.

Overall, BPS is rated as “partially meeting targets” as a district — an improvement over its designation as an underperforming Level 4 district under the previous system.

Meanwhile, 50 percent of students across Massachusetts met or exceeded expectations in grades 3 to 8 in English and math.

“This year’s MCAS results reflect continued hard work by teachers, students and families, and we recognize that more work remains to be done,” Commissioner Jeffrey C. Riley said in a statement.

The new system no longer ranks schools by using the numerical levels 1-5 and incorporates additional measures like chronic absenteeism rates and raising the performance of each school’s subgroup of lowest-performing students.

“BPS wants to focus on areas in need of improvement,” Interim Superintendent Laura Perille told reporters yesterday. “Science remains a concern. It is clear BPS must work more closely with schools.”

More Boston students are absent, with a growing chronic absenteeism rate (meaning missing at least 18 days or more) which increased from 19.1 percent to 19.7 percent for grades 1-8, and 35.4 percent to 36.1 percent for grades 9-12. And gaps continue to persist among different subgroups of students. Only 8 percent of students with disabilities met or exceeded expectations in math in grades 3 to 8 and only 15 percent of current English language learners did so.

Despite these challenges, BPS did improve or stayed level overall in English language arts and math. Winship Elementary School in Brighton and Joseph P. Manning Elementary School in Jamaica Plain also were also named as “Schools of Recognition” for making big gains — a status that reflects high achievement and growth.

Winthrop School, which was labeled underperforming in 2013 as one of the lowest-achieving schools in the state, is now among the top performers due to improved teaching practices, higher MCAS scores and improvements in English language arts and science.

“Our entire school community is grateful that the state has recognized the ongoing improvements taking place at the Winthrop Elementary School,” said Principal Leah Blake McKetty in a statement. “With the support of BPS, our school has adopted an inclusionary approach with a differentiated system of instruction for the variety of learners we serve.”