Since the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993, Massachusetts has gained a reputation for having the best public schools in America. Many factors contribute to this success: a substantial and progressive funding system, a consistent pipeline of dedicated and well-prepared educators, enduring bipartisan consensus and leadership, and adherence to rigorous academic standards and expectations for all children of Massachusetts.

The annual MCAS tests are the thermometer of these standards. Proponents of Question 2 would like you to think otherwisebut the goal of MCAS and similar statewide assessments is to better understand student progress and meet their needs. Like any other good teacher, I viewed MCAS data as information that I could use to help my students and my teaching. As a teacher and principal, I received the first MCAS results each summer and spent my August with my colleagues reviewing the standards, creating new lessons and activities, writing tutoring schedules, and more. even more.

Many educators have done the same, and it shows. Before the disruptions from new testing and the pandemic, the system was working as expected. As you followed the kids, over time, from year to year, they became better writers, better readers, and better mathematicians. In Boston and throughout Massachusetts, proficiency levels have increased, although sometimes marginally.

This has no longer been the case since 2019. From grades 3 to 8, literacy and numeracy skills are in decline.

Since 2020, alarm bells have been ringing constantly. There is no shortage of good ideas to implement, from evidence-based reading instruction to tutoring to increased mental health support. And for a change, there is no shortage of resources. Last month, districts and states had to spend the last remaining budget dollars. $190 billion the federal government forwarded to schools and school districts to address pandemic interruptions and learning loss.

However, research by Professor Thomas Kane at Harvard indicates that there have been very little progress in academic success since 2021. Curriculum Associates, based on assessment results from more than 10 million American childrensummarizes academic progress as “minimal.”

Why don’t things change?

For a very practical reason: it doesn’t matter how good a lesson is if a student is not there.

Absenteeism rates soared, not at the height of the pandemic — when most students were attending school remotely — but in the years that followed, as the classroom returned. Despite an overall improvement since last year, the average child is missing school much more than five years ago.

This is particularly evident in rates of “chronic absenteeism,” when a student is absent 18 days or more during a school year. This troubling trend is community-agnostic and extends from cities like Autumn Rivertowards the rich suburbs like Waylandto Western communities like Northampton.

Unfortunately, attendance interventions often devolve into what might be more kindly described as an “initiative” but are much more of a gimmick: knocks on the door, public relations campaigns, or, in a particularly regressive example, Springfield students having good attendance. can have the opportunity to watch their families play at MGM.

A recent RAND study came to a clear conclusion: there is no single way to improve school attendance. When you read case studies of communities—like Richmond, Virginia, or Rhode Island—that have dramatically improved attendance, you don’t find new ideas, programs, or interventions. You find data and the objectives, often at school level. And you find concentration, incessant awareness, and the attention of families, teachers, school administrators and school secretaries to get children to school.

No gaps can be detected, no interventions can be successfully implemented without access to accurate and reliable data. In Massachusetts, this includes not only attendance data, but also ratings data. This is why weakening the MCAS by removing it as a graduation requirement – ​​as Question 2 would do – would be a mistake.

We tend to rely on ideas to solve our problems in education. The success in Richmond, Virginia and Rhode Island reflects not the quality or ingenuity of an idea, but the quality of a process. Setting clear goals, public leadership, creating tracking systems, strengthening culture, celebrating success, and holding each school accountable doesn’t fit on a sticker. But this is how you drive change.

Attendance has improved slightly in Boston and across the country, but returning to pre-pandemic status will require resources and guidance at the academic level. With proximal relationships and the ability to act, schools and educators will bring students back, not initiatives.

Something about the pandemic fundamentally broke norms around school attendance that still haven’t recovered. Any intervention in response to recent MCAS results will only go so far without frequent student participation, which is also why it is so important to keep it as a graduation requirement. In some ways, just getting kids back into the classroom — not even on track academically — is the enduring job of schools post-pandemic.