NORTHAMPTON — Students in third through eighth grades made sharp gains on state accountability measures this year, but the district’s English learners fell well short of their progress targets, Superintendent Annie Azarloza recently told the School Committee.
The district’s accountability score for those grades rose from 17% to 77% between 2025 and 2026, according to data from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). After earning zero of 12 available achievement points in English, math and science last year, the district earned 10 this year.
“Last year … we actually declined in all three subjects,” Azarloza said at the committee’s Oct. 8 meeting. “This year, we earned 10 of 12 accountability points — growth also improved. [English] and math each moved from two points to three points, which means we met the target. Our lowest-performing group showed progress too.”
For the district’s lowest-performing students, the overall accountability score rose from 36% to 57% in the last year, and the “achievement points” used to measure their progress increased from two out of five in 2025 to five out of eight in 2026, Azarloza said.
Each year, DESE evaluates public schools and districts based on progress toward targets, academic achievement and growth, using standardized testing, attendance and other factors.
English learners are held to an additional benchmark, progress toward English proficiency, and that is where the district slipped. Its points for English language development fell from four to zero.
Each year, students who speak English as a second language take the state ACCESS test to assess their English proficiency. In third through eighth grades, 72.4% of students taking the test met their progress goals, while only 46.3% met their improvement goals in 2026.
“A scholar can improve their English and still fall short of that individual progress goal,” Azarloza said. “The 2026 result was below the 74% target that the DESE had provided us here — that’s a concern. Fewer than half of the [students] included met their expected progress goals. This doesn’t mean [students] lost English skills, it means too many were not progressing at the pace expected for them.”
After consulting with Lauren Barry, the district’s English language coordinator, Azarloza said the drop was heavily concentrated in sixth and eighth grades, where there is a “steep leap” into more “complex, multi-paragraph academic writing.”
The most advanced English learners also tend to exit English learner services, which skews the data, she said.
“We often forget that it takes about seven years to really acquire academic language for the English language learners, so it takes some time. DESE state targets become aggressively steeper as students spend more years in the program,” she said. “Because our highest-performing students steadily exit, the remaining evaluated cohort naturally contains a higher proportion of intermediate learners facing these higher state benchmarks.”
The high school also improved overall, though less dramatically than the elementary and middle school grades.
Between 2025 and 2026, the district’s accountability score for high school students rose from 52% to 58%, with “strong” growth in math and science, Azarloza said.
However, the district earned zero achievement points toward its English target at the high school, even though 67% of 10th graders met or exceeded expectations on the English MCAS, she said.
“Both can be true,” she said. “One measure asks where scholars performed, which is achievement; the other asks whether we reach an improvement target.”
Chronic absenteeism, the share of students absent for 10% or more of the school year, rose from 15.9% to 17.7% at the high school between 2025 and 2026. Among elementary and middle school students, it dropped slightly, from 14.7% to 14.3%, though the district still fell short of its 13.7% target.
To improve student performance, Azarloza said, the district will track students’ progress throughout the year and provide targeted instruction and support.
“We need to know how each [student] is progressing throughout the year through progress monitoring — that means regular conversations about [student] work, timely feedback, adjustments when learning stalls. Scholars should also understand their goals and next steps,” Azarloza said. “Where we see strong growth, we need to identify the practices contributing to it and share them across the district.”
