California’s Education Department today released student test scores showing a statewide decline that nearly wiped out the academic progress made since the state overhauled how it funds education in 2014.
The gist of the scores, the most extensive measure so far of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement: The percentage of California students meeting state math standards plummeted 7 percentage points to 33%, and the percentage meeting English language standards dropped 4 percentage points, to 47%.
Some scores for students of color and those from low-income households dropped less dramatically than their counterparts, an indication that the state’s funding formula, which sends more money to high-needs districts, worked to soften the blow of two years of disrupted learning.
The results of the state’s Smarter Balanced test left education officials and experts neither surprised nor hopeless.
“It’s useful data, and it gets everybody talking,” said Li Cai, an education professor at UCLA. “Everybody comes up with creative ideas, and they say let’s do it. That’s pretty fundamentally an American ideal.”
As if to prove that pandemic learning loss is not just a California problem, officials released the state data to the public on the same day that results of a different test, nicknamed the Nation’s Report Card, revealed an unprecedented score dive among a sampling of students nationwide.
Gov. Gavin Newsom swiftly issued a press release headlined “California outperforms most states in minimizing learning loss….” Various state officials credited the state’s investments in summer school and other recovery efforts for minimizing the blow to pupils. Yet the national test, in contradiction to the state test, indicated that the achievement gap among students of color widened in California.
Nor will the national comparison data settle a fiery political debate about which school pandemic strategy worked best: Students in California, almost the last to return to in-person learning as the state strove to safeguard public health, fared about as well as students in states such as Florida and Texas who returned to their classrooms much sooner.
“California focused on keeping kids safe during the pandemic,” Newsom said in a statement, “while making record investments to mitigate learning loss and transforming our education system.”
The test upon which the Nation’s Report Card is based is older and was given to only about 4,000 California students, while the state’s Smarter Balanced tests are administered every spring to virtually all Californians in grades three through eight and grade eleven. The states set those tests, prompting some criticism that they encourage “teaching to the test”. The goal of those Smarter Balanced tests: to measure how well students have mastered the state’s Common Core standards.
The initial reluctance of state officials to promptly share the Smarter Balanced test data — and the way they timed and managed today’s release — raised questions about whether elected state schools superintendent Tony Thurmond and others were trying to minimize the impact of bad news landing before voters cast November ballots.
תגובות