Colorado schools assessment reveals some groups are still struggling to catch up to pre-pandemic numbers
Lower growth rates for disadvantaged students have commissioners worried they will ‘never catch up’
Chris Dillman/Vail Daily
As school districts in Colorado continue their efforts to recover from a global pandemic, simply returning to normalcy might not be enough to see positive growth from student groups already facing large achievement gaps.
The Colorado Department of Education released its 2023-24 state and district assessment results on Thursday, Aug. 29, measuring student participation, achievement and growth related to administrations of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success and the PSAT/SAT.
Since the pandemic, districts have seen statewide dips in participation and test scores both in Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests, which are the state’s standardized tests, and the PSAT/SAT. Aside from efforts to improve results, both measures of achievement are also being compared with pre-pandemic numbers, which have quickly become an immediate benchmark.
Growth for elementary and middle schoolers has generally returned to pre-pandemic levels, with English language arts baseline growth once again resting near the 50th percentile — indicating average growth — after a three-year dip into the 40s. Math, on the other hand, has seen a slight boost since the pandemic with a baseline growth improvement in the 53rd percentile, or higher than average growth.
“We actually saw a much bigger drop (in math) due to the pandemic, and then we’ve seen a more pronounced bounceback in 2022,” said Marie Huchton, the accountability analytics supervisor for the department, during the Aug. 29 meeting. “We are still seeing that students now are making a little bit more progress than we had been seeing pre-pandemic. I do think that a lot of that is … the extra attention that has been paid on math instruction over the past years.”
Commissioners on the State Board of Education indicated they had already expressed concerns about growth and achievement levels before the pandemic began, and that simply returning to these levels after pandemic-caused dips would not be enough.
“It is one thing to have low achievement — we know that we’ve struggled with low achievement for many many many many many years — (but) if any of our groups of students are experiencing low achievement and low growth, they will never be able to catch up,” Commissioner Susana Córdova said.
“I do also feel like it’s really important that we mention (that) there is a lot of data out there, as we talk about COVID affecting these different groups, of it affecting families of color at a much larger rate,” Commissioner Rhonda Solis said. “So not only were they vulnerable before COVID, but the way COVID hit them was a lot harder than other groups.”
One of the more troubling statewide trends seems to be the gaps in the test scores and participation of students belonging to historically disadvantaged groups, which include students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch, racial and ethnic minority students, multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Despite having returned to pre-pandemic levels, the “recovered” growth rate for the majority of these groups is below the 50th percentile for growth, meaning they aren’t improving at the rate necessary to make ground on those achievement gaps.
“They’re about where they were pre-pandemic but they’re still below the 50th percentile, so we’re not actually closing those achievement gaps potentially, we’re just probably maintaining them,” Huchton said about the English and math growth of students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch.
Participation numbers still struggling after the pandemic
The 2024 CMAS tests are split into three separate subjects: English language arts and math in grades 3-8 and science in grades 8 and 11.
Statewide standardized test participation, which compares how many students tested compared with the total number of enrolled students, was relatively consistent with spring 2023 testing numbers. Certain grade levels saw small increases, though it was still significantly lower compared with 2019.
Some decreases in English language arts, math and science participation from 2023 can be attributed to an increase in first-year U.S. students who did not test this year, according to Chief Assessment Officer Joyce Zurkowski’s presentation to the Colorado State Board of Education.
“Back in 2023 for third grade we had 168 students who used that (federal) exemption. In 2024, we had 843,” she said. “That accounts for a large portion of that decrease.”
CMAS participation in 2024 saw slightly lower numbers compared with 2023 for grades 3-8 and 11, with the difference being less than 2 percentage points. Despite the relative consistency within the past year, these results are still significantly lower than pre-pandemic numbers by as much as 10.3 percentage points for eighth grade science and 10.7 for 11th grade science since 2019, which had the lowest 2024 participation at 51.7% for English.
“You know what we saw between 2023 and 2019. We know that after the pandemic we saw a fall,” Zurkowski said. “Getting back to pre-pandemic levels, I suggest, is the first step.”
Disadvantaged students face large gaps in scores and achievement
In terms of scores, grades 3, 5, 6 and 7 showed similar English language arts achievement to 2019, while grades 4 and 8 remained below pre-pandemic numbers. For math, grades 3-6 saw numbers comparable or above those in 2019. Science scores put grades 8 and 11 close to 2023 scores, while grade 5 increased significantly (only grades 5, 7 and 11 test in science).
The state saw significant score gaps for students with disabilities, multilingual learner status, and those with limited or no English proficiency. Gaps for English language arts were above 33 percentage points while gaps for math scores were above 26 points. These percentages indicate the portion of the student population whose scores met or exceeded the state’s performance expectations.
Between grades 3-4 students who tested in English language arts compared with Spanish language arts, Spanish scores were roughly 25 percentage points lower and were significantly farther from pre-pandemic numbers than their peers who took English.
“That is very significant,” Zurkowski said. “When we’re looking at the fact that our students who are taking the grade three version of (Colorado Spanish Language Arts) have not fully recovered, and it appears that our students who took the English version have recovered. That’s something to note and to be concerned about.”
Students eligible for free and reduced lunches were the only group to improve in English by at least 1.5% since 2023 in all grade levels. When comparing scores between students belonging to different racial and ethnic groups in both English and math, there were a few glaring disparities. According to a Aug. 20 Colorado Department of Education report, achievement gaps ranged from 20-35 percentage points between most races/ethnicities to as high as 46.3 points for multilingual learners on the fifth-grade English language arts test.
Growth on the English standardized tests was below the 50th percentile among almost all students of color except for Asian students — a trend that has not changed since 2023.
“When we compare our white group with our Black group, and our white group with our Hispanic group, those gaps range anywhere from about 26 to 33 percentage points,” Zurkowski said about grade 6-8 English language arts performance. “(Those are), I would suggest, unacceptable gaps.”
PSAT and SAT changes see mixed results
Results of the spring 2024 PSAT show that the percentage of students “at or above the college readiness benchmark” increased in the reading and writing tests on ninth and 10th grade PSAT compared to 2023. On the SAT, however, 11th graders fell behind on this section by 1.3 percentage points.
The math portion showed a slightly steeper decline for both the PSAT and SAT, with ninth grade decreasing by 7%, 10th grade decreasing by 4%, and 11th grade decreasing by 4.1%.
This negative shift in statewide and districtwide math scores is widely due to changes in state testing.
Zurkowski noted that the state implemented a new testing method for both the PSAT and SAT starting in 2024, which means the department was not able to calculate baseline-referenced growth to examine student recovery following the pandemic. The tests were administered in a fully online format (having previously been on paper) and some of the sections were updated. The department still deemed it appropriate to calculate growth data at the high school level and use it in the 2024 performance frameworks.
“Given that these changes are inconsistent with what we have seen with our 3-8 system … I’m going to suggest that in math we are seeing impacts based on test changes, as well as some impact based on true student achievement,” Zurkowski said. “I can’t disentangle it, but I think (next year) you will be able to look with more confidence and say, ‘These changes are based truly on changes in student achievement.'”
Although several other states in the U.S. also switched to an online testing model, not all of them made changes to the actual material. Still, Zurkowski said these other states also saw a drop in math.
“Did other states see a drop in math? They did. Did Colorado see a more significant drop than some states? We did,” she said.
Similar to CMAS scores, multilingual learners, students with special needs, first-year U.S. students and other disaggregated groups showed lower growth in comparison to the overall state.
“Again, there are unacceptable gaps based on disability or multilingual status ranging from 28-40 percentage points,” Zurkowski said. Students in an Individualized Education Program, as well as students with limited or no English proficiency, saw gaps of around 44-63 percentage points compared with their peers in the reading and writing portion.
In terms of participation, all three PSAT/SAT grade levels had lower participation than in 2019 by roughly 6-9%, with a much smaller decrease of 0.2-0.8% between 2023 and 2024.
How do Western Slope districts compare?
As a whole, Western Slope districts tended to see better participation results than the statewide average of 87.8% for English and 88.8% for math. Garfield County School District 16, Roaring Fork School District and East Grand School District 2 all saw over 95% participation for both English and math.
The opposite is true for achievement at the district level, however. The majority of Western Slope districts reported numbers that fell below the statewide average of students who met or exceeded expectations for English and math, 44.1% and 34.2% respectively. The only Western Slope districts to score higher were East Grand (48.6% English, 37.2% math), Aspen (51.2% English, 42.3% math) and Steamboat Springs (69% English, 54.5% math).
Despite seeing the greatest improvement in participation, Garfield County School District 16 reported the lowest percentage of students in the Western Slope who met or exceeded expectations based on their Colorado Measures of Academic Success test scores. Roughly 16.8% of students met or exceeded expectations for English while 10.5% met or exceeded expectations for math in 2024.
While it is certainly fair to attribute many of these dips in statewide trends to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zurkowski acknowledged that others may be coming from an attitude shift in students, parents and teachers’ approach to education.
“When I see what our scores are today, I would not say this is all due to the experiences of 2020 and 2021. I think there are longer-term implications that have changed what has happened for kids, (like) something as easy and simplistic as, ‘When do you send your elementary-aged student to school and when do you not?'” she said. “I don’t think we’re in ‘typical business,’ nor do I think we want to go completely back to typical business, and I think this is an opportunity to do things differently and make things better.”
