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Worcester School Committee reviews 2025 MCAS accountability results, asks for student-level participation data
Summary
District staff told the committee Worcester met 47% of 2025 accountability targets, with mixed results across grade bands; committee members asked for grade-level counts of students who took the MCAS and absentee figures to inform the district improvement plan.
Marco Andre, director of research and accountability for Worcester Public Schools, presented the district's 2025 accountability and MCAS results and told the School Committee the district met 47% of its targets in 2025 and showed improvement on several indicators.
"You'll notice here that for us as a district we're hitting 47% of our targets in '25," Marco Andre said, summarizing the district's accountability score and the split between indicators the district met, improved on, or still needs to address.
Andre walked members through individual indicators for non-high-school (grades 3—) and high-school levels, saying ELA performance rose at the non-high-school level while high-school achievement fell even as growth measures improved. He said non-high-school science (grades 5 and 8) met the achievement indicator, and that chronic absenteeism had improved across the district.
Member Benander (a School Committee member) challenged the reporting frame for science, noting students take the biology test in grade 9 but that the cohort reporting is associated with the grade-10 cohort. "You may have done really well with last year's ninth-grade class, but you won't know that until next year's data," Benander said, urging caution when interpreting year-to-year results.
Andre acknowledged reporting lags and coding issues in some data categories, including advanced coursework, and said the district is investigating. "Once we received the data we started looking into it ' there's some coding issues ' we're closer to the 60% range where we were before," he said, adding the district expects some of those cases to be resolved in next year's accountability files.
A School Committee member moved that the committee receive the number of students who took the MCAS by grade level and that any absences or missed testing also be reported. The member said that count "is very important for us to take a look at" as the district develops an improvement plan. The committee approved the motion to receive and file the presentation and the request for student-level participation counts by roll call.
Deputy Superintendent (speaker 12) told the committee the district will present a comprehensive improvement plan at the next School Committee meeting on November 20 that will synthesize MCAS and other data and identify district actions.
What happens next: District staff will return with the requested grade-level participation counts and an improvement plan to respond to indicator-level findings.
