Maryland Department of Education releases Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) Assessment Data, as school districts begin to draft policy for Blueprint overhaul
MARYLAND- The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) released preliminary statewide English Language Arts (ELA), and Mathematics 2021-2022 school year assessment results, the first year of the new Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) assessments.
The results showed an improvement over the previous PARC test administered to students state-wide last fall.
According to the MSDE, English Language Arts (ELA) assessments saw the greatest improvements across grades with 45% proficient in grades 3 and 4 and 40% proficient in grade 5. For the high school English 10th grade assessment, 53% of students were proficient, characterizing a return to pre-pandemic outcomes.
While for math students also saw significant improvements, but did not return to pre-pandemic levels.
Chief Safety and Academic Officer Grades 9-12 for Worcester County Dr. Annette Wallace tells 47ABC, while the numbers for the MCAP are useful to the state in aggregate, individual districts are not yet able to see how their school’s students fared, and are still relying on internal tests for Career and College Readiniess standards.
“We feel good about our kids and their scores where they will end up with college and career standards, but looking at that 3rd-grade reading score we know that you can make a lot of projections about how a student is going to do,” she said referring to their own internal tests conducted in the county once per academic semester.
While the MCAP numbers show an important trend for students in the state, the tests also had a secondary purpose, to act as the working baseline for the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future School overhaul.
The numbers from the test, if the state elects to keep it will be the first set of numbers used in determining academic progress as a result of changes to school systems in the wake of the legislation.
“The Blueprint is calling for more tutoring in our younger grades k-3 so this is a way to see where we need that tutoring, it seems that math is where students are falling short compared to ELA so we need to beef up our tutoring in math,” said Maryland State Education Association President Cheryl Bost.
Bost tells 47ABC that the guidelines for drafting Blueprint policy were made available to districts starting December 1st, and that the districts have until March to draft the policies and submit them back to the state.
According to Bost, the MCAP scores will be one of many factors that the state considers when seeing if changes work.
“The state will look at areas of concentrated poverty, at assessment scores, they’ll look at enrollment so there are many metric indicators and it does help us that there is this baseline for continued progress,” Bost said.
She tells 47ABC that while certain targets and goals will be individual to the districts, there are certain requirements, including expanded Pre-K programming, smaller class sizes as well as a mandatory $60,000 starting salary for teachers.
“Many of our Eastern Shore districts are far below that starting salary so they will have to put money into it to attract and maintain quality educators,” she said.
But how much money individual districts are being asked to contribute varies.
For Worcester County Public Schools, administrators tell 47ABC they are in a unique budget situation that adds additional complexity for them to implement Blueprint changes.
“Worcester county is unique 80 percent of our funding comes from local governments, we don’t receive the blueprint funds our neighbors in Wicomico or Somerset might receive so all challenges are unique but we are starting down this path,” said Chief Academic Officer Grades PreK-8 Denise Shorts.
Shorts tells 47ABC the district is exploring options including differing Capital Improvement projects for buildings within the district’s long-term budget planning.
“We know that teacher salaries and some pieces we know about are going to be a challenge for everyone to fund, we are just starting to write that,” Shorts said.
Shorts tells 47ABC that the district is making steady progress on its Blueprint implementation, and that once finalized they will be presented to the public and stakeholders.
“The template we are working off of has been adopted over the weekend by District and has the MSDE and the Academic Integrity Program approval so now we are working through that template,” Shorts said.
Shorts tells 47ABC they plan to submit their finalized Blueprint plan by March 15th.
