WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday heard that students across the district showed significant growth in their performance on the commonwealth's spring 2026 round of standardized testing.

 

Superintendent Joe Bergeron and committee member Curtis Elfenbein offered the panel its first look at the results of the most recent Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests.

 

"One thing I do want to say is that many people can look at scores and see them in a vacuum and think the score is the thing," Elfenbein said. "But in an academic setting, there's performance and then there's growth. And over the last decade or so of my teaching career, there was a massive shift toward an increase in focus on growth."

 

Elfenbein explained that the "student growth percentile" in MCAS reporting measures how an individual student performs in a given year relative to students who got the same score on a given test (mathematics or English language arts) in the prior year.

 

"So Timmy and Joanny each get 75 percent of the questions right on the fifth grade ELA MCAS," Elfenbein said. "Then they take the sixth grade ELA MCAS, and whoever improves on their score more gets a higher student growth percentile."

 

An SGP of 50 percent means that a student showed typical growth relative to his or her peers.

 

And in that measure of growth, Elfenbein said the district's results are "remarkable."