Meeting Recap: 2/9/26

Our three week sprint has come to an end. Last night’s meeting centered around MCAS and ACCESS results from 2025, but not without a Mustang Moment first. The middle school select band played a three-song concert for us and with all due respect to the data, it was the highlight of the evening. Other agenda items included the approval of an April vacation week camp run by our afterschool team (Tuesday through Friday, daily rate of $60 with sliding scale, located at the Brooks) and a resolution to update the official rules of the school committee at our next meeting. The full lineup, including consent agenda and condolences is here.

So now, on to MCAS. As always, observations and opinions are my own and do not represent the views of any other member or the committee as a whole. Video here.

Framing: Dr. Kim Talbot, assistant superintendent for academics & instruction, took the lead on the MCAS/Accountability presentation. She placed the results in the context of research by one of Medford’s newer learning partners, TNTP, touching on issues of opportunity (particularly for low income students), foundational factors for success, and observed gaps between student performance on assignments and standardized test scores. She made a case for why MCAS matters despite it no longer being a graduation requirement and presented high level results of Medford’s accountability and achievement scores and overall growth for both the district and for individual schools, noting that at this high level view, any numbers we were seeing were “directional not actionable.” She also placed the presentation in the context of MPS's overarching instructional vision, particularly its focus on data-informed instruction using high quality instructional materials. 

From there, four department heads (Humanities, Math, Science, English Language) presented results, celebrations, opportunities for growth, and action steps in their respective areas. This was the first time EL had been included in the presentation; those results were on the ACCESS test, which measures proficiency in reading, writing, listening, and speaking English, versus subject level content as is measured by MCAS. 

[My interpretation] I hesitate to encapsulate these results given the variation across grades and subjects (and my own mixed feelings about MCAS in general), but the most frequent patterns I saw were scores landing below what they were in 2024 but still higher than 2023, and not a lot of large movement in either direction. However, my main takeaway wasn’t to do with numbers, or even the action steps presented, but rather, the new tools for integrating the knowledge gained from MCAS with other things used to assess learning and classroom happenings. The new data dashboard (alluded to in Dr. Galusi’s self-evaluation/“state of the schools” presentation a few meetings ago) appears to make it much easier for department heads and teachers to access MCAS info alongside MAP data (which dives much more deeply into the specific domains of each subject area), DIBELS data, etc. and pull out answers to questions that will directly inform classroom practices in real time. On a more process-oriented level, this integration of multiple ways of looking at student learning is a much stronger foundation for goal-setting as part of strategic planning and practically speaking, it opens up avenues for more effective learning walks, peer mentoring opportunities, and instructional team planning. In many ways, this presentation felt more like a regrounding than a progress report.

[Back to the content] Topics addressed in the follow-on discussion were: year-to-year trends, strategic planning, equitable grading, access to Tier 1 instruction and grade level tasks, student joy, career and college preparation, using data to evaluate investments in curriculum, using data for formative evaluation, identifying and amplifying successful strategies including those that are teacher-led (there was a shoutout here to the seventh grade math team), the role of professional development, and the committee’s desire to provide MPS educators with what they need to facilitate student success.  

For the details, you can check out the meeting transcript here. My overall takeaway is that I am pretty unexcited by the scores we saw presented, but I do have more confidence that teachers will be better supported in making meaningful change going forward.

For context, however, Dr. Talbot cautioned that the numbers were “directional not actionable” and I’ll emphasize again that these were high level, lumping many different subgroups together and requiring much more nuance to both understand and move forward in addressing the issues at play. By way of example, Dr. Talbot ended by highlighting the gap between low income and non-low income subgroup scores and told us that “closing this gap is our commitment to the community.” I expect to see this revisited during the strategic planning process, among others.