Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania
And a reminder about Zelma, our AI tool for exploring state data
Happy New Year!
First up, we wanted to remind everyone who subscribes here about Zelma, our AI-powered tool for exploring state assessment data. Zelma has all of the data we’re using to produce these briefs, plus you can ask for data by school or district (make sure to specify the state!), race/ethnicity, economic status, and more. You ask questions in natural language, and Zelma will produce graphs and tables to display the results.
You can visit the site here — it’s completely free — and read more about it here.
In today’s post, we surface data from five new states: Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. As before, we’ve got graphs looking at changes before and after the pandemic, and a classification based on recovery patterns. Just as we see nationwide, among these five new states, there are greater differences in English language arts (ELA) recovery trends compared with those for math. For example, most states are making progress in math scores, although Oklahoma reflects minimal change. On the other hand, in ELA, Idaho and Montana have had slight declines in achievement in 2023 compared with 2021; Oklahoma and Pennsylvania have had minimal change (compared with their baseline year of 2022); and New Jersey has been making progress. None of these states have yet reached pre-pandemic achievement rates in ELA or math.
Overall Changes Compared with Pre-Pandemic
The figures below illustrate declines during COVID and recovery post-pandemic. For each state, we illustrate the change in proficiency rates from 2019 to 2021 (red), along with the change from 2019 to 2023 (blue). The five new states since our last post are in bold in the figures.
Classifications
The tables below classify states in broader categories, based on their recovery in both ELA and math:
Continued Decline: States that have continued to see test scores decline in the post-pandemic period
Minimal Change: States that have seen little recovery in the post-pandemic period (less than 1% change)
Making Progress: States that are making steady progress (more than 1% change) but have not yet recovered to 2019 proficiency rates
Recovered or Exceeding: States that have recovered to or are now exceeding their 2019 proficiency rates
These tables help display the distinct recovery patterns between ELA and math.
If you are interested in other information out of these data — other analyses, data cuts, or visualizations — please reach out and we’ll see if we can help. We’ve only scratched the surface here, and a main goal of our work is to make these data more accessible to people who want to write about, analyze, or use them in their work. You can email us at statetestscoreresults@gmail.com or leave a comment below.