2026 State Test Score Results Data Series
The 2026 State Test Score Results Data Series is published by the Education Data Center and is designed to provide updates on 2026 state assessment data.
What to expect: Our goal is to provide high-level insights on ELA and math state summative assessment outcomes for students in grades 3-8. We will publish overviews as State Education Agencies (SEAs) publicly release assessment results and/or as we receive aggregate results via public records requests.
For additional information about each state assessment, please see the end of this post. All available 2026 assessment data used for this data series will be published by the EDC in December.
Questions, comments, or suggestions? Let us know at info@eddatacenter.org!
Trends Over Time
Yesterday (Aug 31), the Connecticut State Department of Education released the annual 2026 Smarter Balanced (SBAC) ELA and math results for students in grades 3-8. Remarkably, Connecticut has administered the SBAC assessment for over a decade, providing an extensive period of comparable data to understand changes in student achievement over time. Results are reported across four levels related to the achievement standards- does not meet, approaching, meets, and exceeds - with students reaching meets or exceeds considered proficient (levels 3 and 4).
In 2026, students in Connecticut demonstrated gains in both ELA and math compared to 2025. We see that girls have fallen farther from their 2019 rates than boys in both ELA and math. In fact, despite similar outcomes in 2019 in math (around 48%), boys now outperform girls by 5 percentage points in 2026 (49.2% vs. 44.2%), above boys’ 2019 rates.
ELA: Approximately 51% of students in grades 3-8 reached proficiency on the SBAC assessment in 2026, the state’s highest rate in the post-pandemic era, but not yet at the state’s pre-pandemic rate of 55.7% in 2019. All grades improved at least marginally from 2025, aside from a slight dip in Grade 4 (51.4% to 50.9%).
Math: Approximately 46.7% of students reached proficiency on the grade 3-8 assessments in 2026, up from 45.9% in 2025 and continuing a multi-year climb since 2021. In 2019, 48.1% of students reached proficiency in math. All grades saw gains except for Grade 3, which held steady.
The Education Scorecard - which looked at scores through 2025 - found that students were about half a grade equivalent below 2019 in ELA and math, but making progress toward recovery: CT is 13th of 38 states with comparable data in math growth and 9th of 35 states in reading growth between 2022 and 2025. In 2026, we see an extension of the Education Scorecard’s findings with regard to district-level recovery: the school districts highlighted as “Districts on the Rise” - East Hartford, Greenwich, Manchester, and Meriden - continued to improve and each district now has 2026 scores above their 2019 levels.
Results by Achievement Level
A Closer Look at 2026
State Assessment Background
Assessment Name: Smarter Balanced Assessment
Additional Information:
SBAC assessment resources can be found here: https://portal.ct.gov/sde/student-assessment/smarter-balanced/find-information-about-smarter-balanced
SBAC 2026 results are available from EdSight here: https://public-edsight.ct.gov/performance/smarter-balanced-achievement-participation?language=en_US
The CSDE 2026 press release can be found here: https://portal.ct.gov/sde/press-room/press-releases/2026/connecticut-test-scores-and-attendance-continue-to-improve
Data presented here are specific to this state’s assessment and are not comparable to assessments administered by other states. For questions, please reach out to info@eddatacenter.org.
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