Over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a considerable drop in the average standardized test scores of students across the country, including in MCPS, NPR reported. The overall decline in academic performance has prompted calls for reforms in the American education system reported Brookings. On Tuesday, August 27, MCPS received test scores from the 2024 Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP), which tests students’ math, reading and science skills, that show encouraging signs of growth and recovery and points to the fact that this trend may be starting to buck.
According to the recently-released MCAP testing data, the assessment saw around 55.3% of MCPS students achieve a rating of “proficient” in English Language Arts and 33.4% in mathematics. This marks a slight increase from the 54.4% and 32.8% of MCPS students who achieved the same rating of “proficient” in 2023 on the English Language Arts and mathematics tests, respectively. The county aims for constant improvement in academic performance, including a steeper increase in test scores. “We just need to accelerate [improvements], so we see a faster pace of growth,” MCPS Board of Education president Karla Silvestre said in an interview with Moco 360.
Moreover, the amount of MCPS students who were rated “proficient” in each subject was higher than the proportion of Maryland students in general who received the same rating by several percentage points each year. This trend has also been reflected at RM. According to the state MCAP data, 67% of Richard Montgomery students demonstrate proficiency in ELA testing. “Generally speaking, Richard Montgomery sees higher scores than MCPS and the state overall,” Joseph Jelen, the IB Magnet Coordinator at RM, said.
However, one trend that has remained since before the pandemic was the persistent under-performance of Black and Hispanic students compared to their White and Asian peers, despite also seeing minor increases in proficiency rates. Addressing these issues has been a central component of RM’s School Improvement Plan.
Plans for consistency among curricula will assist the county in closing gaps, along with smaller-scale work. “Some of the steps we can take as a school include affirming students’ cultural identities, ensuring classes are relevant to students’ lives and ensuring students see themselves in the curriculum,” Jelen said. “Moreover, as an Equal Opportunity School, we annually examine data to ensure that Black and Hispanic students are accessing rigorous curriculum and that we, as a school, are not intentionally or unintentionally putting up barriers.”
Despite the increases, literacy rates among MCPS students still remain stubbornly low, though work has also been done at the school-district level to address such concerns. For example, the county’s school board has adopted a new elementary language arts curriculum aimed at maintaining consistency between schools, and has also begun to implement literacy education that allows students to apply information learned in English class to other subject areas, a key to understanding unfamiliar educational texts.
However, many teachers and MCPS staff believe that although the adoption of a new curriculum and classroom instruction may benefit students, it remains up to the students themselves to be proactive throughout their studies. With MCPS scores in reading and math increasing by less than 1%, schools are tasked with working individually to best help their community. “Overall, I think promoting a growth mindset is important. If students utilize effective study strategies on a regular basis, they should see results over time,” Jelen said.
