How did American students fare academically last year?
There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them show that students made little or no gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will be released in early 2025 and have the final say.
The first results were the interim benchmark assessments such as MAP Growth from NWEA and i-Ready from Curriculum Associates. Combined, they test millions of students multiple 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 perhaps even regressed in English language arts.
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The interim assessments are voluntary and results are not broken down by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each spring, and those results are slowly trickling out. Now the team behind AssessmentHQ.org has collected that data, and by the end of November they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia.
The states paint a slightly more optimistic picture than the interim evaluations showed, but hardly. For example, median status reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8e graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains in all grades and subjects except 8edegree in English Language Arts, which dropped by 0.2 points.
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To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back to pre-pandemic performance levels. And with ESSER funds set to expire earlier this year, there isn’t much fuel left to get students back on track.
The table below shows the state level results in 8e degree in mathematics. Readers should take this with a grain of salt. Oklahoma and Wisconsin, for example, reported double-digit increases, but these are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards.
You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states have not released their results by grade level, as required by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the AssessmentHQ post, 10 states do not comply with federal law regarding how scores are reported, and 13 states do not report what percentage of students actually took the tests.
Some states have made modest gains in recent years. On 8e For example, ten states (Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia) have all increased their proficiency rates by more than 1 point per year for several years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, most notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming and the District of Columbia.
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To know for sure which of these gains are real and which are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data: the NAEP results expected to be released early next year. Since they use one common benchmark across the country, these should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Based on what we have seen from the first two sources, we should not hope for much more than a very slight increase nationally.
Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success.
