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Massachusetts’ accountability system plans to include both student achievement and growth.
It is planning to place a strong weight on both, but neither of its proposed measures is aligned to the state’s grade-level standards for students.
The state’s proposed achievement measure is an average scale score.
This method combines all student scores into one number, which avoids setting rigid cut points for students, but it can obscure information about how many students are meeting various performance thresholds. Similarly, the state’s growth measure, Student Growth Percentiles, compares students with each other, not with an objective standard. While the state plans to add another growth measure based on whether students are growing at a pace sufficient to meet state standards, the plan provides very little information about how that measure will be used or when it will be phased in.