School Officials Explain Low Scores

Cambridge public schools that failed to achieve the targets of No Child Left Behind could still be making progress, district officials said at a presentation to the city’s school committee last night.

Maryann MacDonald, the executive director of student achievement and accountability, and superintendent Thomas Fowler-Finn, discussed the district’s results on the MCAS, the state’s standardized tests, highlighting both areas of improvement and places that need more work.

The aggregate scores showed that in many tests, public schools in Cambridge do not do as well as those in the state as a whole. Fowler-Finn, however, told the committee that he believes the way results are calculated is biased against urban schools.

MacDonald said that aggregate scores include the scores of typically under-performing subgroups, including minorities, as well as students who are from low-income families or who do not speak English well.

MacDonald added that when the results are broken down by subgroup, 72 percent of the subgroups in Cambridge outperform their counterparts in the state. But the district’s aggregate scores are still low because the student population in Cambridge has a higher proportion of these subgroups, she said.

Fowler-Finn and MacDonald stressed the importance of factoring in the difficulty of the tests when interpreting the results. They both said that the MCAS is harder than the standardized tests used by most other states.

Fowler-Finn also pointed out that 75 percent of the city’s middle schools are on the No Child Left Behind watch list, while far fewer high schools or elementary school are included.

He said this may suggest that the problem may not be in the education.

“If we can’t do this, there’s a reason beyond we’re not trying or we’re not professionals,” he said, adding that the tests at the middle schools are much more difficult than those at other levels.

MacDonald also said that the district has already adopted many of the recommendations made by the state for improvement.

“We’ve been doing the things on the list, and we’re not getting the results we want,” MacDonald said.

Deputy Superintendent Carolyn Turk said that the district can use the tests as a preliminary tool to better understand and address students’ needs.

“There have been areas of progress, and at the same time, we are able to recognize the areas where we still need to do some work,” she said.

But when a school committee member Nancy Tauber asked how educators could help students meet requirements without solely teaching to the test, Fowler-Finn said, “Quite honestly, I don’t know.”

Another challenge, according to MacDonald, will be explaining to parents that a school with a low Adequate Yearly Progress score could still be making headway.

“We’ve made progress, there’s work to be done, but we’re heading in the right direction and we have a plan for every child,” she said.

—Staff writer Michelle L. Quach can be reached at mquach@fas.harvard.edu.