By Chad Aldeman, The 74
This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
How did U.S. students fare academically last year?
There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word.
The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they both found that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts.
The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind AssessmentHQ.org has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia.
The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points.
To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track.
The table below shows the state-level results in 8th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and Wisconsin reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards.
You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the AssessmentHQ release, 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests.
Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.
To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally.
Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success.
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This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
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