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⛅Some clouds coming in, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:26 p.m.
Massachusetts students on the whole scored lower on last year’s MCAS than their counterparts did in 2019. High school students scored, on average, slightly less than they did a year ago, according to results released yesterday.
Some of the possible reasons behind the drop: lingering learning losses from the early days of COVID, students are missing school more often than they used to, and less of a focus on standardized tests now that Massachusetts voters decided they should no longer be a high school graduation requirement.
“We need to resist the natural temptation to assume that schools have somehow dropped the ball,” Jack Schnieder, director of the Center for Education Policy at UMass Amherst, told GBH’s Diane Adame. “The impact of the pandemic is there, and it is not simply going to go away because we have returned to education as normal.”
Four Things to Know
1. Without federal funding, many community health care workers — those who help patients in medical offices navigate their care and connect them with other social services — are losing their jobs. Dr. Christina Briscoe, a pediatric neurologist who works in Lawrence, spoke to lawmakers yesterday about one such worker and advocated for a bill that would require insurance companies to cover services provided by community health care workers. Currently about half of such workers make less than $40,000 a year.
“She built trust, guided families through the door, coordinated appointments and connected parents to community resources,” Briscoe said, according to the State House News Service. “She helped families whose babies were struggling from epilepsy get everything from diapers to winter coats and, without her, I cannot adequately serve these families and children.”
2. Today is the last day for Congress to prevent a federal shutdown. Yesterday, Gov. Maura Healey said she’d be worried about what a shut down would mean for Massachusetts residents who work for the federal government or rely on it for food, housing or health care.
“We cannot have people’s health benefits shut off, their food supply, their housing shut off; the impacts are across the board in terms of the potential impact on the federal workforce,” Healey said.
3. Massachusetts is looking to invest more in solar power, and leaders in the industry gathered with politicians in downtown Boston yesterday to talk about how they can make that happen. They advocated for accelerating solar panel installations while federal tax credits are still available, and for making it easier for homeowners to get permits to install their own panels.
“My hope is here we can really create a framework that creates more jobs, that creates cheaper energy and that creates innovation in the state,” said Zaid Ashai, who leads the clean energy company NexAmp.
4. As Thornton Wilder wrote, “We all know that something is eternal.” The play “Our Town,” set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners, is on stage at Lyric Stage Boston through Oct. 19.
“It’s a deep, dark look at who we are, at who we are in community, at what time does and at the gift of life,” producing artistic director Courtney O’Connor told GBH’s The Culture Show. “I sometimes think of ‘Our Town’ as that old friend that you meet up with every 5, 10 years, and you see how much has changed – you see how much you’ve changed – reflected in what’s changed and what’s not changed in them.”
Scientists are studying fresh and brackish water located deep beneath the seafloor south of Nantucket
Underneath the ocean floor, around 50 miles south of Nantucket, there’s a freshwater aquifer — a pocket of water that has been there for somewhere between 20,000 and 1 million years. And this summer a team of scientists drilled three wells into it to try and learn more about how it got there.
Why are they interested in it? Let’s, well, dive in: “The UN states that by 2030, two-thirds of the population will experience water shortages,” hydrologist Mark Person told CAI’s Amy Kolb Noyes. “And they’re now embracing unconventional water resources and unconventional aquifers like this. But it’s controversial.”
Among the possible issues: scientists still don’t fully understand these aquifers. Are they being replenished, or is the water they hold entirely ancient? If they’re no longer replenishing, they become a finite resource — meaning they could only serve as a source of drinking water for a limited time.
On tap for this research: scientists have sent water samples to labs which will use carbon dating and Krypton‐81 dating to determine the water’s age. By figuring out how old the water is, researchers can try and determine how it got there.
“We need to know really carefully, in some level of detail, how those water bodies connect to our terrestrial system – if they do,” Rob Evans, a senior scientist in the department of Geology and Geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Kolb Noyes. “We don’t really even know that.”
After a year or so, they also plan to make the data public to anyone who wants to use it.
“Our goal is to explain the science and then let other scientists and other citizens use those data for whatever they want as well,” said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.
Read Amy Kolb Noyes’ full story (and see a few more photos from the mission) here.
Dig deeper:
-This small Virginia island could be underwater before the next century
-Scientists, state monitoring low oxygen zones in Cape Cod Bay
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