Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington DC
Plus a short summary
Our newsletter today shares the ELA (English language arts) and math test score changes during and after the pandemic from Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. Each of these states and D.C. has released its 2023 assessment data within the past week.
At this point, 25 states and D.C. have released their data. As the releases slow down in the next few weeks, we’ll be putting together some broader summaries. Thus far, a large takeaway is the substantial variation in recovery in ELA in particular. Massachusetts (released in our newsletter today) remains 10 percentage points behind pre-pandemic proficiency rates in ELA; South Carolina is over 8 percentage points up.
This variation does not seem to be entirely due to the COVID-year declines. Mississippi, Ohio, West Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts had similar percentage-point declines during the pandemic year but have had wildly different trajectories after.
As all education researchers well know, there are variations across states in testing that make detailed comparisons complicated. But it seems at least worth asking what is happening differently — what, specifically — in the states that are seeing more success. And then trying to learn from it.
Below, we present an overview of how states are progressing in the recent post-pandemic era. If you’d like to see the full set of results, PDFs are accessible here. The new state PDFs are linked below.
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). In ELA, we observe a wide range of recovery patterns across states, with some states continuing to decline in proficiency rates in 2023 and others surpassing 2019 rates. In math, all states in this sample demonstrate at least a small degree of progress toward 2019 proficiency rates, though the rate of recovery has differed.
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.
Some states have seen recovery, partly because recovery was easier. For example, Massachusetts went from 51% to 42.3%, and has not recovered. Meanwhile, Mississippi, praised in an earlier post, went from 39% to 46%. Even with their growth, they are marginally higher than Massachusetts lowest ELA proficiency rate in decades. Ohio is a similar story, starting at a much higher level than many states pre-pandemic (62.7%), and 61% now. Need to add a layer that compares overall proficiency rates, and not just “recovery”.