Since the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1993, Massachusetts has earned a reputation for having the best public schools in America. There are many factors that contribute to this success: a substantial and progressive funding system, a steady pipeline of dedicated and well-trained educators, sustained bipartisan consensus and leadership, and adherence to rigorous academic standards and expectations for all Massachusetts children.

Annual MCAS testing is the thermometer for these standards. Proponents of Question 2 would like you to think otherwisebut the purpose of the MCAS and similar statewide assessments is to better understand student progress and meet their needs. Like any good teacher, I saw the MCAS data as information I could use to help my students and my instruction. As a teacher and principal, every summer I received initial MCAS results and spent August with my colleagues re-reading the standards, creating new lessons and activities, developing guidance programs, and more.

Many educators have done the same and it has shown. Before the disruptions due to new tests and the pandemic, the system was working as intended. As you watched the children, over time, from one class to the next, they became better writers, better readers, and better mathematicians. In Boston and Massachusetts, the level of proficiency has increased, if sometimes only marginally.

This has not been the case since 2019. For grades 3-8, literacy and numeracy are in decline.

Alarm bells have been ringing steadily since 2020. There has been no shortage of good ideas to implement, from evidence-based reading instruction to mentoring to increased mental health support. And, for a change, resources were not lacking. Just in the last month, districts and states have been forced to spend the last remaining dollars of the $190 billions to the federal government delivered to schools and school districts to address pandemic disruptions and learning losses.

However, research led by Harvard professor Thomas Kane indicates that it did exist very little progress in student achievement from 2021. Curriculum Associates, based on assessment results from over 10 million American childrensummarizes academic progress as “minimal”.

Why don’t things change?

For a really practical reason: it doesn’t matter how good a class is if a student isn’t here.

Absenteeism rates skyrocketed, not during the height of the pandemic — when most students attended school remotely — but in the years after classrooms returned. Despite an overall improvement from last year, the average child misses far more school than they did five years ago.

This is most evident in “chronic truancy” rates, when a student misses 18 or more days in a school year. This troubling trend is community agnostic, extending from cities like Fall Riverto the rich suburbs like Waylandto western communities as Northampton.

Unfortunately, presence interventions often turn into what might be better described as an “initiative” but is much more like a gimmick: door knocking, PR campaigns or, in one particularly regressive example , Springfield students with good attendance. they 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, VA, or Rhode Island—that have dramatically improved attendance, you don’t find new ideas, programs, or interventions. Find data and objectives, often at the school level. And you find focus, relentless touch, and attention from families, teachers, school administrators, and school secretaries to get children to school.

No gap can be detected, no intervention can be successfully implemented without access to accurate and reliable data. In Massachusetts, this includes not only attendance but also assessment data. This is why undermining the MCAS by removing it as a graduation requirement—as Question 2 would—would be a mistake.

We tend to rely on ideas to solve our problems in education. Success in Richmond, VA and Rhode Island does not reflect the quality or ingenuity of an idea, but the quality of a process. Setting clear goals, public leadership, creating monitoring systems, strengthening culture, celebrating success and empowering individual schools does not fit on a sticker. But that’s how you drive change.

Attendance has improved slightly in Boston and across the country, but returning to pre-pandemic status will require school-wide resources and training. With proximal relationships and the ability to act, it is schools and educators who will bring students back, not initiatives.

Something about the pandemic fundamentally disrupted school attendance norms, which have yet to return. 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 a way, just getting kids back into the classroom — not even academically — is the persistent, post-pandemic work of schools.