Linda Noonan

FOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) has served as a measure of minimum proficiency for high school graduation with a design that reflects what was state-of-the-art thinking in the 1990s.  It was never intended to be a measure of college and career readiness, and new evidence confirms that it is not. […]

With headlines routinely proclaiming that Massachusetts “tops the nation” on national or international comparisons of student performance, it might come as a shock that over 40 percent of all students and nearly two-thirds of high-needs students are not proficient readers by the end of third grade. And these numbers have remained largely unchanged for the […]