MCAS woes persist as Hub schools achieve little improvement in test scores

Boston’s struggling high schools showed little improvement in MCAS scores over last year despite heavy pressure from the city to turn them around, while statewide, about half the students in grades 3-8 fell short of expectations on the new socalled “Next Generation” version of the standardized test.

“We realize that we still have much more work to do to accomplish our goal of closing persistent opportunity and achievement gaps,” Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang said about the district’s lackluster performance. “But we are starting to see gains from our work with high school math teachers to incorporate more cognitively demanding tasks to better prepare our students to solve the complex and rigorous problems they will encounter in MCAS and in life.”

Among Boston’s most troubled schools:

• At Excel High School, math scores improved, but English stayed the same and science scores dropped slightly.

• Brighton High School scores for English and science stayed stable, while math scores improved 5 percentage points.

• Dearborn saw its English scores drop 20 percentage points, while its math rose 11 points and science rose 9 points.

• At English High School, English scores dropped 5 percentage points, its math increased by 2 percentage points and its science scores dropped by 8 percentage points.

The district did see modest gains among its most vulnerable groups.

The proportion of black students achieving proficient or advanced in 10th-grade math rose by 3 points. The number of students with disabilities who scored proficient or advanced increased by 2 percentage points, as did the rate for economically disadvantaged students,

BPS also recognized four of its higher performing schools for showing improvement on the test — including Charlestown High, Burke High, Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Centers and Nathan Hale Elementary.

For the lower grades statewide, last spring was the first sitting of a revised test. Education Secretary James Peyser said the poor results for grades 3-8 — with roughly half of all students statewide failing to “meet or exceed expectations” — show the state hasn’t gone far enough in raising the bar.

“We are clearly sending signals to students that they are ready for post-secondary education when in fact they are not, so we needed to make some changes to our standards, to our assessments, in order to take that into account and send clearer signals to students and their families and more importantly prepare them better for success once they get out of high school,” Peyser said during a media conference call.

Boston’s elementary and middle school kids also did poorly on the new MCAS — only 3 percent exceeded expectations, 28 percent met expectations, 47 percent partially met expectations and 22 percent did not meet expectations.

Parents will receive individual student scores from districts on Oct. 24.