Office of Planning and Research

ESE Research Update, March 2015

Recent Research on Massachusetts

In Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston    (December 2014), authors from MIT and Duke University estimate effects of charter school attendance on middle-school students in charter school takeovers, where students are accepted not by lottery but on the basis of previous attendance at the school. Students grandfathered into UP Charter School of Boston experience achievement gains on MCAS of about 0.3 to 0.4 standard deviations per year, similar to those admitted to Boston charters through the lottery process. This suggests that the positive impact on MCAS seen in Massachusetts urban charter schools may be attributable not just to which students choose to apply, but also to characteristics of the schools themselves.

Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time   , a June 2014 report from Harvard University and NBER, explored the impact of instructional time disruptions. Findings include: the average Massachusetts student misses 10 school days a year, eight of which are due to absences and two are due to school closures (snow days); school closures have no discernible impact on student achievement overall; and low income students have higher absences rates than non-low income students. The study suggests that one-fourth of the achievement gap by income is accounted for by attendance.

"Teaching to the Test" in the NCLB Era: How Test Predictability Affects Our Understanding of Student Performance, (October 2014), by Jenning and Bearak, examines test-taking in New York, Massachusetts, and Texas. They found that regardless of whether all standards were assessed over time (as was in Massachusetts for math), a relatively modest number of standards predictably compose a large portion of test points. This provides incentives for teachers to focus teaching on predictably tested content.

A January 2015 report prepared by the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University for the Boston Foundation, entitled Active Bodies, Active Minds, A Case Study on Physical Activity and Academic Success in Lawrence, MA, hypothesized that school-based physical activity initiatives and programs have positive effects in multiple domains of child well-being, including academic outcomes. They found that children attending schools with greater support for positive physical activity environments were 2.4 times more like to achieve Advanced or Proficient on the mathematics MCAS, and they scored higher on both the mathematics and English language arts MCAS in 2013 and 2014.

Two reports have recently been published that examine PARCC Assessments. The first, a March 2015 Rennie Center report, Testing the Test: A Study of PARCC Field Tests in Two School Districts examines the field testing of the PARCC computer-based mathematics and English language arts tests in Revere and Burlington. The report describes the implementation of the field testing and offers lessons learned for districts considering computer-based PARCC. The second report, Educating Students for Success: A Comparison of the MCAS and PARCC Assessments as Indicators of College and Career Readiness was produced by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and the Center for Assessment in February 2015 to examine how well MCAS and PARCC measure college and career readiness. The report concludes that the MCAS was never designed to measure those skills and knowledge. PARCC is designed to do so, but more information, including how Massachusetts high school students perform on the PARCC tests, will be necessary to fully assess the suitability of PARCC as an indicator of college and career readiness.