Ryan Walter, the firebrand MAGA Superintendent of Schools in Oklahoma, has hired PragerU, a rightwing organization, to develop a test specifically for teachers from California and New York. The test, now under development, is intended to identify teachers with views about gender and patriotism that are unacceptable in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma has a shortage of teachers and lower pay than either of the targeted states. I seriously doubt that teachers from California and New York are flooding in to Oklahoma.
Oklahoma will require applicants for teacher jobs coming from California and New York to pass an exam that the Republican-dominated state’s top education official says is designed to safeguard against “radical leftist ideology,” but which opponents decry as a “MAGA loyalty test.”
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s public schools superintendent, said Monday that any teacher coming from the two blue states will be required to pass an assessment exam administered by PragerU, an Oklahoma-based conservative nonprofit, before getting a state certification.
“As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York,” Walters said in a statement.
PragerU, short for Prager University, puts out short videos with a conservative perspective on politics and economics. It promotes itself as “focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.”
Quinton Hitchcock, a spokesperson for the state’s education department, said the Prager test for teacher applicants has been finalized and will be rolling out “very soon.”
The state did not release the entire 50-question test to The Associated Press but did provide the first five questions, which include asking what the first three words of the U.S. Constitution are and why freedom of religion is “important to America’s identity.”
Prager didn’t immediately respond to a phone message or email seeking comment. But Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, told CNN that several questions on the assessment relate to “undoing the damage of gender ideology.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, said Oklahoma’s contract with PragerU to test out-of-state would-be teachers “is a watershed moment.”
“Instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system,” he said. “There’s no other way to describe it.”
Zimmerman said the American Historical Association did a survey last year of 7th- to 12th-grade teachers and found that only a minority were relying on textbooks for day-to-day instruction. He said the upside to that is that most history books are “deadly boring.” But he said that means history teachers are relying on online resources, such as those from Prager.
“I think what we’re now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers,” Zimmerman said.
One of the nation’s largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, has often been at odds with President Donald Trump ‘s administration and the crackdown on teacher autonomy in the classroom.
“This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.
She was critical of Walters, who pushed for the state’s curriculum standards to be revised to include conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
“His priority should be educating students, but instead, it’s getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him,” Weingarten said in a statement.
Tina Ellsworth, president of the nonprofit National Council for the Social Studies, also raised concerns that the test would prevent teachers from applying for jobs.
“State boards of education should stay true to the values and principles of the U.S. Constitution,” Ellsworth said. “Imposing an ideology test to become a teacher in our great democracy is antithetical to those principles.”
In recent decades, many universities have sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student body and faculty. In addition to grades and test scores, they looked at many other factors, such as talents, life experiences, meeting challenges. This process meant that more students of color were admitted, while some students with higher test scores were rejected.
The Trump administration adamantly opposes this process, known as affirmative action. Its view is that scores on the SAT and ACT and grades should be the most important, if not the only criteria for admission. Those scores, to Trump officials, are synonymous with merit. Any deviation from their view will be grounds for investigating violations of civil rights laws.
As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.
That aspect of the agreements with Columbia andBrown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.
The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.
But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.
The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.
The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.
“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisionwas wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”
One morning, some 20 years ago, I took an anonymous phone call that stunned me. Years had passed since our decadelong federal class action discrimination lawsuit against the CBEST had ended with only partial reforms in 2000. From its origins in 1982, the California Basic Educational Skills Test, which purports to measure the universal reading, writing and math skills needed to perform in all the varied public school jobs requiring credentials, has been controversial for deterring tens of thousands of educators of color from entering the public school workforce. The horrific first-time pass rates — 38% for Blacks; 49% for Latinos, and 53% Asians vs. 80% for whites — improved, but only modestly, after 1995 changes instigated by our lawsuit.
The caller had personal knowledge that a recently deceased former employee of the defendant Commission on Teacher Credentialing had examined the CBEST for her doctoral dissertation and concluded it was racially and culturally biased. The Commission suppressed the study, including when our lawsuit specifically requested such reports. Instead of producing it or making us and our judge aware of it, the commission’s lawyers quietly procured a protective order from a state judge to keep the study out of the federal case.
From its inception, the racial and cultural bias undergirding the CBEST — like the phantom study — has been suppressed, lurking, just beneath the surface. The sickening pass rates — rather than spurring reform — have been used to support the worst kind of circular reasoning: If it’s failing that many people, especially Black and brown people who’ve been subjected to inferior public education in California, the state’s lawyer repeatedly told the court, it must be working.
Federal guidelines dictate that a test and its passing levels should correspond to “normal expectations of proficiency within the workforce.” Yet there has never been evidence that over half of all Black college graduates (or a fifth of whites, for that matter), are graduating lacking basic reading, writing and math skills.
Rather, the CBEST’s passing scores, and to some extent its math content, have always been set arbitrarily high, bent more on failing many to justify itself politically than on fairly assessing educators on the minimum level of basic skills needed for their jobs.
The CBEST ran off track from its inception. Rather than being created by employment-testing experts like a civil service exam, it was a high-profile political showpiece, divorced from critical employment testing standards and processes. When employment tests have a substantial adverse impact on diverse candidates, “job-relatedness” requires that assumptions about what skills are needed must be proven by analyzing each job tested. Likewise, untested desires for high performance on partial job elements must be scrutinized. Insisting that all your players sink 90% of their free throws may sound good, but that unexamined standard would fail legions of hall of famers.
Documents uncovered during the case acknowledged that in 1982, California chose the faster and cheaper development plan from Educational Testing Service that specifically rejected making the test “job-related.” Even so, ETS’s initial validity study undertook the most careful and extensive examination to date of where to establish passing scores, for, as required, “minimally competent” (not high or average-performing) educators. Relying on the professional judgment of some 289 educators and academics, that study recommended relatively modest passing scores. A typical employment exam process would likely have called it a day. Instead, a much smaller, politically appointed advisory board of 11 recommended substantially higher passing scores, which were further one-upped by then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig. Spurred on by “campaign promises to raise [teacher] quality,” Honig set yet higher passing scores without regard to job-relatedness. The final effect reduced Black, Latino and Asian first-time pass rates from 63%, 69% and 76% if the 289 ETS panelists had been followed to 38%, 49% and 53%, respectively.
Enter Public Advocates’ litigation 10 years later. The state defendants were blindsided when the courts held the CBEST is an employment exam for public school educators which must be “job-related.” The pre-litigation validity studies admittedly had never taken the essential first step for employment tests — a job analysis of all those educator jobs. When the commission finally attempted one in 1994, its own expert advised that most of the math test — the algebra and geometry portions used since 1982 — was not job-related, that those items should be removed and the test re-scored to pass unfairly failed candidates.
Did the state and the commission acknowledge the harm caused and right the wrong? No. They doubled down on protecting the CBEST and its racially discriminatory failure rates.
The policymakers had their expert “reconsider” and then delete that recommendation. Then, they engineered a revised CBEST that imported the difficulty level and high failure rates for people of color of the prior invalid test by removing much less of the math content than called for, swapping in relatively difficult “lower order” math items and — when test-takers still performed better — raising the math passing score.
In 2000, six judges on a deeply fractured 11-judge federal appellate panel looked the other way and accepted the “revised” CBEST. But state decision-makers don’t have to continue to do so. At its meeting this week, the commission is examining whether to renew the CBEST contract with its vendor. After 40 years, it’s time to retire the CBEST. In a post-George Floyd era of racial reckoning, we should be working to overturn the harms against people of color caused by unnecessary, biased, standardized tests. In 2015, California dropped another discriminatory, misguided “accountability” measure from a bygone era, the High School Exit Exam. The University of California and California State University have dropped the SAT from their admissions processes, and the state has essentially halted community colleges from using questionable exams to place students from marginalized communities in dead-end remedial classes disproportionately. Oregon, the only other state that used the CBEST, phased out administering it years ago, concerned with its redundancy and adverse impacts.
There are more than enough entry requirements to ensure credential candidates possess job-related basic skills. These include requiring a bachelor’s degree, subject matter competency, the California Teaching Performance Assessment, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment or RICA and, since 2000, transcript reviews of basic skills proficiency as an alternative to the CBEST. It’s time for the credentialing commission and the state to drop the tainted CBEST. It’s also time for some reconciliation. The commission can start by releasing that long-suppressed study of the CBEST’s racial and cultural bias.
•••
John Affeldt is a managing attorney at Public Advocates, a public-interest law firm in San Francisco, where he focuses on educational equity issues.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
This story was updated on Oct. 18 to include comments from districts and on Oct. 25 to describe kindergarten absentee data as including students enrolled in transitional kindergarten.
In the second year fully back in school after remote learning, California school districts made negligible progress overall in reversing the steep declines in test scores that have lingered since Covid struck in 2020.
There was a slight improvement in math while English language arts declined a smidgeon, and the wide proficiency gap between Black and Latino students and whites and Asians showed little change.
Only 34.6% of students met or exceeded standards on the Smarter Balanced math test in 2023, which is 1.2 percentage points higher than a year ago. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, 39.8% of all students were at grade level. Only 16.9% of Black students, 22.7% of Latino students, and 9.9% of English learners were at grade level in 2023.
Year-over-year scores in English language arts dropped less than 1 percentage point to 46.7% for students meeting or exceeding standards in 2023; in 2019, it was 51.7%. The large proficiency gaps between Black and Hispanic students compared with Asian and white students showed little change. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, about 4 in 10 students in the state and 3 out of 4 Asian students, the highest-scoring student group, were at grade level in English language arts.
Among the state’s nearly 1,000 districts, small districts tended to show more gains, results show.
Smarter Balanced tests are given to students in grades three to eight and grade 11.
English language arts scores dropped slightly in every grade except 11th and third grades, which showed slight growth. The 0.8% percentage point increase in third grade may reflect that students had two years of face-to-face instruction, which is critical for learning how to read. It could also reflect concerted efforts to focus on and change reading instruction to phonics-focused curriculums in districts like Long Beach, up 4.1 points over 2022 for all third graders, and Palo Alto, where reading scores for low-income Latino students increased 47 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
Fewer English learners met or exceeded standards in English language arts this year. In 2023, 10.9% of English learners met or exceeded the standard for English language arts, down from 12.5% in 2022. Among students who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 35.7% met or exceeded the standard in English language arts, down from 36.5% in 2022.
In math, English learners were about the same as last year, with 9.9% meeting or exceeding the standard. Among those who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 24.2% met or exceeded the standard, up from 23.4% in 2021-22.
A slightly larger share of English learners achieved a proficient score this year on the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC): 16.5%. Students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the ELPAC every year until they are proficient in English.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser to Californians Together, an organization that advocates for English learners, said the fact that a higher percentage of English learners are not achieving proficiency each year shows that California needs to invest more in training teachers in how to help students improve their English language skills, especially within other classes.
“That’s when we see a big bump in students’ language proficiency — when they’re using language to learn about something, when their language development is taught while they’re learning science, while they’re learning social studies, while they’re doing art,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “There’s been no major funding and no major effort to do this kind of work. It’s time now.”
Shifting demographics
In its news release, the California Department of Education stressed that over the past year, the proportion of low-income students statewide rose from 60% to 63% of all students and the increase in homeless students who took the test by 2,000 to 94,000, the equivalent of the third-largest district in California.
Given “the relationship between student advantage and achievement, California’s statewide scores are particularly promising as the proportion of high-need students has also increased in California schools,” the department said.
Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust–West, an advocacy organization, viewed the results differently.“Seeing only slight improvements in already alarmingly low levels of student achievement is cause for concern, not celebration. In recent years, as in this year’s results, the state’s progress on student outcomes in English and math has been marginal at best. In fact, at no point in the past 9 years have we seen more than 1 out of 5 Black students at grade level in math.
“This trend is an indictment not of the efforts of California’s K-12 students but of the efforts and choices of the state’s adult decision-makers,” he said in a statement.
The latest test results, he said, “are as unsurprising as they are disappointing. What they mean is that California’s most disadvantaged students are falling further and further behind their more affluent counterparts, in large part because the state failed to assure the delivery of remote instruction to their communities during the pandemic and compounded that failure by failing to assure meaningful remediation once schools reopened.”
The latest test statewide results will disappoint others who had hoped to appreciably reclaim some of the lost academic ground. That has not happened in California or in neighboring states that also give the Smarter Balanced assessment. In Oregon, English language arts scores also fell less than 1 percentage point to 43% proficient, and math scores increased less than point to 31.6%. In Washington, it was the same story: English language arts scores were flat at 48.8% while math scores rose 1.8 percentage points to 40.8%.
A handful of states reached pre-pandemic levels on their state tests. They include Iowa and Mississippi in both reading and math, and Tennessee, which created a statewide tutoring program in reading, according to the COVID-19 School Data Hub, an effort led by Brown University economics professor Emily Oster.
Before Covid struck, changes in California’s test scores occurred slowly, a percentage point or two annually, said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE, a Stanford-based education research organization. “It took years of dedicated effort, with investments in education and the workforce, with steady increases in achievement over time, and then we had this huge drop. We can’t afford another 10- to 20-year period of slow incremental change, especially when what we know we’re facing is huge inequities in student achievement,” she said. “We have to keep that intensity that we have not fixed this problem, despite investments and despite good intentions.”
Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district with 429,000 students, is representative of where most districts are. It has seen widespread improvement in math scores across most grade levels, with 30.5% of students meeting or exceeding state standards. Its English language arts scores have been a “mixed bag,” said district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at Tuesday’s board meeting. Forty-one percent of students in the district met or exceeded standards in English language arts – a drop of less than point from the past year.
Carvalho said he was pleased to see third- and fourth-grade English language arts scores moving in the “right direction” — but stressed the need for improvement among upper elementary grades and middle schools. The district has found small-group instruction and “high dosage tutoring” to be critical, and hopeschanges to the district’s Primary Promise program will help, he said.
Infusion of funding
California school districts received record levels of one-time and ongoing funding since the start of Covid and had wide discretion on how to use it. This includes the last $12.5 billion in federal pandemic relief, which districts must spend by next September. At least 20% must be spent on learning recovery.
Some districts, mainly small ones, saw double-digit gains in 2023. Escondido Union High School District in San Diego County, with 7,000 students, saw its English language arts proficiency rise from 43.5% to 53.7%. The 800-student Wheatland Union High School District in Yuba County raised its proficiency level in English language arts by 21.5 percentage points, to 60%; its math scores rose 13.3 percentage points to nearly the state average for meeting state standards. Math scores in Healdsburg Unified in Sonoma County, with 1,200 students, rose 11.9 percentage points to 39.3% at grade level.
But in most districts, record student absences and staff shortages — not only among STEM and special education teachers but also vacant positions for aides and counselors and unfilled jobs for substitute teachers — undermine strategies for recovery. And the problems linger.
Stubbornly high chronic absences
Along with test scores, the state released chronic absenteeism data on Wednesday showing nearly a quarter of all students chronically absent in 2023, double the 12.1% rate in 2019.
While the 2023 chronic absenteeism rate is high, it’s a drop from 2022, which saw an unprecedented high rate of nearly a third. Students are counted as chronically absent for missing 10% or more of school days. The rates of the state’s minority groups and most vulnerable students remain disproportionately high: 34.6% for students with disabilities, 40.6% for homeless youths and 28.1% for English learners.
“The staffing has been a huge struggle for us, but so has absenteeism,” said Rick Miller, chief executive officer of the CORE districts, a school improvement organization that works with eight urban districts, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno and Sacramento City. “There was the notion that kids go to school every day. The pandemic changed that. And there’s a mindset we’re working through that you don’t need to be in school every day. You be there when you can.”
That appears to be the case in kindergarten, where the chronic absenteeism rate was 40.4% in 2021-22 and 36.3% in 2022-23, compared with 15.6% in 2018-19. Unlike many states, California includes excused absences in its chronic absentee rate calculations. The kindergarten data includes students enrolled in transitional kindergarten, a program for 4-year-olds whose 5th birthday will fall between Sept. 2 and April 2.
Other factors are working against student learning, PACE’s Hough said. At the same time, teachers need to accelerate learning, they are backfilling the needs of absent students. Some students come to school with mental health issues or lack socialization. Political disputes at school board meetings are diverting attention from districts’ learning priorities.
“The basic work of educating kids and running school districts has gotten a lot more complicated,” she said.
Amy Slavensky, interim deputy superintendent of San Juan Unified, agreed. “When you’re in schools every day, or nearly every day like we are, we can see the direct impact of that on our students,” she said. “It’s just not the same as it was before. So it’s going to take time.”
San Juan Unified, in Sacramento County, has sharply increased training for teachers, added intervention teachers and improved attendance at its schools, but its students’ test scores still have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
Nearly 42% of the 49,000 students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts in 2023, down about 1 percentage point from 2022. Math scores were stagnant with 29.6% meeting or exceeding state standards, down 7.5 percentage points from 2019.
The district has used multiple tactics to increase achievement, including hiring intervention teachers and expanding training for teachers in reading and math. The district is training grade-level cohorts of teachers using some of the latest research to strengthen their strategies around reading instruction, Slavensky said. The district is seeing gains in kindergarten and first grade at Dyer-Kelly Elementary School, which has been focusing intensely on early literacy, she said.
“Anytime you implement a new change initiative, it takes four or five years to really see the impact of that, and especially on a summative assessment like CAASPP,” Slavensky said.
To increase math scores, the district is also adding math sections in middle and high school master schedules to reduce class sizes so teachers can offer deeper instruction and differentiated instruction, Slavensky said.
But pulling dozens of teachers out of their classrooms for training isn’t always possible during a teacher shortage, said Superintendent Melissa Bassanelli. Training schedules often fall apart when there aren’t enough teachers to fill the classrooms.
Garden Grove Unified in Orange County, with 79% low-income students and 94% students of color, has scored well above state averages on Smarter Balanced tests and ranks highest among the CORE districts, but saw its math scores fall 7.5 percentage points from pre-pandemic 2019. In 2023, it clawed back half of the difference, though it wasn’t easy, Superintendent Gabriela Mafi said. Many families still struggled financially; resurgent Covid kept students at home; and a lack of subs strained schools.
But Garden Grove, a highly centralized district, stayed true to its system of deploying teacher coaches to schools and encouraging conversations around math concepts in elementary grades. It is using extended learning time at Boys and Girls Clubs and summer programs for academic interventions and supports, Mafi said. “We haven’t quite rebounded to our pre-Covid, but we’re getting close,” she said.
Perhaps no district high-achieving in math took a bigger hit to its Smarter Balanced scores than Rocketship Public Schools, a network with 13 K-5 Title I charter schools in the Bay Area. In 2018-19, 60% of students were at or above standard. By 2021-22, the proficiency rate, while still above the state average, had fallen to 40%. In 2023, overall scores increased by 2 percentage points with variations among schools.
Recovery will entail a multipronged, multiyear strategy, said Danny Echeverry, Rocketship’s Bay Area director of schools. It started with using its community schools funding to hire a Care Corps worker, akin to a social worker, at each site to help families who experienced housing and food insecurity during Covid. “We’ve seen ourselves as a hub of connecting at-risk families with social services in the community,” he said. Chronic absenteeism fell 10 percentage points, and attendance increased 7 percentage points in 2022-23.
Students in kindergarten, first grade or second grade during the pandemic had foundational skill gaps that had to be filled before students could handle grade-level content and move to proficiency on state tests, Etcheverry said. The Rocketship model builds in flex time so that teachers can provide one-on-one interventions.
Scores increased 2 percentage points overall on the 2023 math test, with variations among schools from a decline of 7.4 percentage points to a gain of 15.8 percentage points. Rocketship Los Sueños in San Jose, which piloted the Eureka Math curriculum, gained 5.4 percentage points in 2023, leading to a decision to adopt it in all Bay Area schools.
“We’re building traction, and we have no reason to believe that we’re not going to continue that momentum and see greater gains this year,” Etcheverry said.
Twin Rivers Unified, in Sacramento, made incremental gains this year but still has a long way to go before catching up to 2019 scores. More than 80% of the students are from low-income families.
“Our scores might be below the state average, but our growth is ahead in both English and math,” said Lori Grace, associate superintendent of school leadership.
In 2023, 31.9% of its students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts, up 0.5 points from 2022. In math, 22.7% of the district’s students met or exceeded state standards, an increase of 2.7 points. In 2019, 37% of students were proficient in English language arts and 29% in math.
To combat pandemic-related learning loss, the district added a multitiered system of support at schools, a framework that gives targeted support to struggling students, Grace said. To improve literacy skills, the district began a reading intervention program focusing on the science of reading for kindergarten throughthird grade. The district also tapped its best teachers to offer coaching on the subject to fourth through sixth grade teachers.
Central Valley strategies
Most students in Fresno Unified, the state’s third-largest school district with over 70,000 students, are not meeting standards. Last year, 33.2% of Fresno Unified students met or exceeded English language arts standards, a 1 percentage point gain from a year ago. In math, 23.3% met or exceeded state standards, a 2.5 point increase.
“We are definitely not satisfied with our results,” said Zerina Hargrove, the Fresno Unified assistant superintendent of research, evaluation and assessment. “While we had many students grow in their achievement, we had just as many who slid backward, contributing to very little change overall.”
Fresno Unified plans to focus on ensuring that every child shows growth, specifically targeting the needs of historically underserved student groups, Hargrove said.
One way to do that is by evaluating the “shining stars,” the schools that made significant progress. For example, at Jefferson Elementary, 6.9% more students met or exceeded standards in English, and 15.6% more students met or exceeded math standards. At Bullard High School, 17.6% more students met or exceeded English standards; at Patiño School of Entrepreneurship, 27.5% more students met or exceeded math standards.
“We desire to learn from the schools that have made significant gains and dig deeper into the why of those who didn’t,” she said.
Fresno Unified’s neighbor, Clovis Unified, has some of the highest student achievement scores in the area.
With more than 40,000 students, 72.7% were at or above state standards for English language arts in 2019. By 2022, that percentage dropped to 66.2% and remained flat in 2023. In 2019, 58.7% of Clovis Unified’s students met or exceeded math standards, and in 2022, 49.3% did so. The nearly 2 percentage-point growth in math in 2023 puts the proficiency level at more than 51%.
Still, the numbers haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic proficiency levels.
“Some of our schools saw student achievement grow by anywhere from 15 to 22% at certain grade levels. We must now work together to replicate that level of achievement across every grade level and school in our district,” said Superintendent Corrine Folmer.
The pandemic’s impact persists, district spokesperson Kelly Avants said, citing continuing challenges to learning. They include, she said, “restoring classroom behavior expectations; re-developing the interpersonal relationships between students and between students and their teachers that equates to success in the classroom and facing the impact of decreases in attendance rates has on learning.”
EdSource reporters also contributed to this report: Diana Lambert, Lasherica Thornton, Mallika Seshadri and Zaidee Stavely.
in Robin Bryant’s class at West Contra Costa Unified’s Stege Elementary School are learning how to add and subtract.
Photo: Andrew Reed/EdSource
This story was updated on Nov. 15 to correct information received from a source.
Most exams to prove teachers are prepared to teach reading are ineffective, according to an analysis released Tuesday by theNational Council on Teacher Quality. Only six of the 25 licensure tests currently used in the U.S. are considered to be strong assessments, including the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, which California will do away with in 2025.
Fifteen of the 25 reading licensure tests being used in the U.S. were “weak” and four were “acceptable,” according to the analysis. One state does not require a reading licensure test.
Council researchers based their rankings on whether the licensure exam adequately addresses the five core components of the science of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. They also took into consideration whether the tests combined reading with other subjects and tested teachers on methods of reading instruction already debunked by researchers.
“The science of reading or scientifically-based reading instruction is reading instruction that’s been informed by decades of research on the brain and research on how people and how children learn to read,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan research and policy organization.
California will replace the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, or RICA, with a literacy performance assessment that allows teachers to demonstrate their competence by submitting evidence of their instructional practice through video clips and written reflections on their practice.
“The state really needs to ensure that this new assessment is aligned to the science of reading and can provide an accurate and reliable signal that teachers have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach reading effectively,” Peske told EdSource.
The RICA addresses more than 75% of the topics in each of the five components of the science of reading. The state also gained points for not combining reading and other subjects in the examination, according to the analysis.
In California, the reading instruction assessment is required of teacher candidates seeking a multiple-subject, a prekindergarten to third grade early childhood education or an education specialist credential.
The RICA has not been popular in California in recent years. Critics have said it does not align with current state English language arts standards, is racially biased and has added to the state’s teacher shortage.
Between 2017 and 2021, more than 40% of teachers failed the test the first time they took it, according to state data. Black and Latino teacher candidates overall have lower passing rates on the test than their white and Asian peers.
“I think that when you have a test that is aligned to the research like the RICA and … a third of candidates are failing, it signals that they’re not getting the preparation aligned to the assessment, aligned to what’s on the test,” Peske said.
Low student test scores nationwide have most states reconsidering how they teach literacy. Fewer than half of students who took the California Smarter Balanced Tests met or exceeded state standards in English language arts in 2023.
California Senate Bill 488, passed in 2021, called for new literacy standards and a teacher performance assessment that emphasized teaching foundational reading skills that include phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency. The new standards also included support for struggling readers, English learners and pupils with exceptional needs. The California Dyslexia Guidelines have been incorporated for the first time.
The California literacy performance assessment that will replace the RICA on July 1, 2025, is based on new literacy standards and teaching performance expectations approved by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing last year. The standards and teaching expectations are derived from state literacy policies and guidance, including the state’s English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and the California Comprehensive State Literacy Plan.
The performance assessment was designed by a team of teachers, professors, researchers, nonprofit education advocacy organizations and school district administrators. It will be piloted in next spring, said Nancy Brynelson, statewide literacy co-director at the California Department of Education, who serves as a liaison to the assessment design team.
“There was a view that a performance assessment would do a better job of showing what a teacher can really do, how a teacher can apply their knowledge about literacy to a classroom situation and to particular students who need support,” Brynelson said. “And there had been a call for changing that test for quite a while.”
The assessment will be revised in the summer and field-tested with a larger number of teacher preparation programs in the 2024-25 school year, said Mary Vixie Sandy, executive director of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
“High-stakes standardized tests evaluate whether prospective teachers know enough about a subject, while performance assessments measure whether students can apply the knowledge appropriately in various contexts,” Sandy said. “As such, performance assessments serve to strengthen and deepen a prospective teacher’s knowledge and skill based on authentic practice in real classrooms.”
During small group reading instruction, AmeriCorps member Valerie Caballero reminds third graders in Porterville Unified to use their fingers to follow along as they read a passage.
Credit: Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
Top Takeaways
On July 1, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment will be replaced by a literacy performance assessment.
The licensure test puts a sharpened focus on foundational reading skills.
The new test is one of many new changes California leaders have made to improve literacy instruction.
Next week, the unpopular teacher licensure test, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, will be officially retired and replaced with a literacy performanceassessment to ensure educators are prepared to teach students to read.
The Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) has been a major hurdle for teacher candidates for years. About a third of all the teacher candidates who took the test failed the first time, according to state data collected between 2012 and 2017. Critics have also said that the test is outdated and has added to the state’s teacher shortage.
The literacy performance assessment that replaces the RICA reflects an increased focus on foundational reading skills, including phonics. California, and many other states, are moving from teaching children to recognize words by sight to teaching them to decode words by sounding them out in an effort to boost literacy.
Mandated by Senate Bill 488, the literacy assessment reflects new standards that include support for struggling readers, English learners and pupils with exceptional needs, incorporating the California Dyslexia Guidelines for the first time.
“We believe the literacy TPA will help ensure that new teachers demonstrate a strong grasp of evidence-based literacy instruction — an essential step toward improving reading outcomes for California’s students,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of EdVoice, a nonprofit education advocacy organization.
Literacy test on schedule
Erin Sullivan, director of the Professional Services Division of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the literacy performance assessment is ready for its July 1 launch.
“We’ve been field-testing literacy performance assessments with, obviously, the multiple- and the single-subject candidates, but also the various specialist candidates, including visual impairment and deaf and hard of hearing,” Sullivan said.
California teacher candidates must pass one of three performance assessments approved by the commission before earning a preliminary credential: the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), or the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers (FAST).
A performance assessment allows teachers to demonstrate their competence by submitting evidence of their instructional practice through video clips and written reflections on their practice.
“It’s very different,” said Kathy Futterman, an adjunct professor in teacher education at California State University, East Bay. “The RICA is an online test that has multiple-choice questions, versus the LPA — the performance assessment — which has candidates design and create three to five lesson plans. Then, they have to videotape portions of those lesson plans, and then they have to analyze and reflect on how those lessons went.”
Field tests went well
This week, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing board is expected to hear a report on the field test results, approve the passing score standards for the literacy cycle of the performance assessment and formally adopt the new test.
All but one of the 280 teacher candidates who took the new CalTPA literacy assessment during field testing passed, according to the report. Passing rates were lower on the FAST, with 51 of 59 passing on the first attempt, and on the edTPA with 192 of 242 passing.
Cal State East Bay was one of the universities that piloted the test over the last two years.
“It’s more hands-on and obviously with real students, so in that regard I think it was very helpful,” Futterman said.
State could offer flexibility
Upcoming budget trailer bills are expected to offer some flexibility to teacher candidates who haven’t yet passed the RICA, Sullivan said.
The commission is asking state leaders to allow candidates who have passed the CalTPA and other required assessments, except the RICA, to be allowed to continue taking the test through October, when the state contract for the RICA expires, she said.
“We are looking forward to putting RICA to bed and moving on to the literacy performance assessment, but … we don’t want to leave anybody stranded on RICA island,” Sullivan said.
The commission has approved the Foundations of Reading examination as an alternative for a small group of teachers with special circumstances, including those who would have completed all credential requirements except the RICA by June 30, but the test may not be the best option for them, Sullivan said.
“It’s just a very different exam,” Sullivan said. “It’s a national exam. And while the commission looked at it and said, ‘We think this will work for our California candidates,’ it’s not the best-case scenario. So, trying to get these folks to pass the RICA and giving them every opportunity to do that until really it just goes away, that’s kind of what we’re looking at.”
The Foundations of Reading exam, by Pearson, is used by 13 other states. It assesses whether a teacher is proficient in literacy instruction, including developing phonics and decoding skills, as well as offering a strong literature, language and comprehension component with a balance of oral and written language, according to the commission’s website.
Teacher candidates who were allowed to earn a preliminary credential without passing the RICA during the Covid-19 pandemic; teachers with single-subject credentials, who want to earn a multiple-subject credential; and educators who completed teacher preparation in another country and/or as a part of the Peace Corps are also eligible to take the Foundations of Reading examination.
The Foundations of Reading test has been rated as strong by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
State focus on phonics
SB 488 was followed by a revision of the Literacy Standard and Teaching Performance Expectations for teachers, which outlined effective literacy instruction for students.
California state leaders have recently taken additional steps to ensure foundational reading skills are being taught in classrooms. On June 5, Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed that the state budget will include hundreds of millions of dollars to fund legislation needed to achieve a comprehensive statewide approach to early literacy.
Assembly Bill 1454, which passed the Assembly with a unanimous 75-0 vote that same day, would move the state’s schools toward adopting evidence-based literacy instruction, also known as the science of reading or structured literacy.
A high school girl mixes chemicals during a chemistry experiment.
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
The State Board of Education is moving forward with plans to add the state’s science assessment to the California School Dashboard, making it a new piece of the statewide school accountability system.
Students first took the online science test in 2019, before Covid forced an interruption of testing in 2020. Starting in 2025, performances by district, school and student groups will receive one of five dashboard colors, designating the lowest (red) to the highest performance (blue) — just as with math, English language arts and other achievement indicators. Each color reflects two factors: how well students performed in the latest year and how much the score improved or declined from the previous year.
Science teachers welcomed the move as a way of drawing more attention to science instruction. “Doing so will add visibility to ensure that districts invest in making sure that all California students receive the science ed they deserve,” Peter A’Hearn, a past president of the California Association of Science Educators, told the state board at a hearing March 6.
“Our biggest frustration is that students have not been getting any or minimal instruction in elementary schools, especially in low-performing and low-socioeconomic schools,” A’Hearn said.
As required by Congress, all students in grades five, eight and at least once in high school take the California Science Test or CAST. Designed with the assistance of California science teachers to align with the Next Generation Science Standards, the test includes multiple-choice questions, short-answer responses and a performance task requiring students to solve a problem by demonstrating scientific reasoning.
For the 2022-23 year, only 30% of students overall scored at or above grade standard. Eleventh-grade students did best, with 31.7% meeting or exceeding standard.
The test measures knowledge in three domains: life sciences, focusing on structures and processes in living things, including heredity and biological evolution; physical sciences, focusing on matter and its interactions, motion, energy and waves; and Earth and space sciences, focusing on Earth’s place in the universe and the Earth’s systems.
California replaced its science standards with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013. NGSS was a national science initiative that stressed hands-on learning, broad scientific concepts and interdisciplinary relationships of various science domains. The state board adopted the state’s NGSS framework in 2016, and textbook and curriculum adoption followed.
Districts’ implementation has been slow, with no funding specifically dedicated to teacher training and textbook purchases. The pandemic set back momentum, said Jessica Sawko, director of the California STEM Network, a project of the nonprofit advocacy organization Children Now.
“NGSS pointed us to a higher-quality and richer approach, but it has not yielded statewide equitable access to science,” she said. “There have been shifts in instruction, but they have not been widespread and haven’t resolved a narrowing of access to science, particularly before fifth grade.” She said many districts don’t include goals for science education in their three-year planning document, the Local Control and Accountability Plan. Tracy Unified, which budgeted $768,000 this year for teacher training in NGSS and STEM studies, is an example of one that did (see page 28 of its LCAP).
Although the science assessment will be part of the state dashboard, the State Board of Education has yet to decide how it will factor into the state and federal accountability systems — if at all. Congress does not require the science test to be included with math, English language arts and graduation rates. Folding the science test into the state system would entitle the lowest-performing districts and student groups to assistance in science instruction from their county office of education.
Student growth measure, too
Also at the March 6 meeting, the state board discussed a timetable for adopting a system to measure individual students’ growth on standardized test scores — an idea that has been discussed for nearly a decade. More than 40 states are using a student growth model for diagnosing test scores.
The state’s current system, which the California School Dashboard reflects, compares the percentage of students who achieved at grade level in the current year with the previous year’s students’ level of achievement. The student growth model, a more refined measure, looks at all students’ individual gains and losses in scale points over time.
A comparison of the two ways of measuring scores was a factor that led to the settlement last month of the Cayla J. v. the State of California lawsuit. Brought on behalf of students in Oakland and Los Angeles, one of its claims was that Black, Latino and low-income children’s test scores fell disproportionately behind other student groups during the pandemic.
The state, using the current method, said that all student groups’ scores fell about the same percentage from meeting standards. Harvard University education professor Andrew Ho’s analysis for the plaintiffs showed that “racial inequality increased in almost all subjects and grades. Economic inequality also increased.” The settlement calls for using scale scores under a student growth model to determine which groups of students will be eligible for state improvement money.
The state must collect three years of data for a student growth model, which it won’t have until next year. Then the state board must decide whether to use it as a replacement or as a complement to the current system for the state accountability system, said Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser for Children Now.
Four-year-olds are crying, putting their heads on their desks or simply refusing to answer the questions during an English proficiency test they’re required to take in transitional kindergarten.
The initial English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) is used to determine whether new students will be designated English learners. Under current law, the test must be given to all students whose parents speak another language at home within the first 30 days of enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade. The test measures proficiency in four domains — listening, speaking, reading and writing in English.
The test is different for each grade. But since transitional kindergarten, often referred to as TK, is classified as the first year of a two-year kindergarten program, and not as a separate grade, schools have had to administer the test to students as young as 4 years old.
School district staff and advocates for English learners and young children say the test was not designed for 4-year-olds, may not be accurate for assessing language acquisition and may misidentify children as English learners when they are simply too young to answer questions correctly.
“We’re assessing children on reading and writing when we know that children that are young 4-year-olds are not reading and writing,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of dual language learner programs of Early Edge California, a nonprofit organization that advocates for early education.
A new bill, Assembly Bill 2268, introduced by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, would exempt transitional kindergartners from taking the test until they enter kindergarten.
Brett Loring, student services coordinator for Vallecito Union School District, a tiny district in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Calaveras County, said giving the ELPAC to a transitional kindergartner was “probably the most frustrating test administration I’ve ever given.”
Loring said the 4-year-old spoke Spanish at home, but he had seen that she understood some English in the classroom. Still, she was intimidated by having to leave her classroom to take the test.
After a few questions, the child said “No want to. No more,” crossed her arms and put her head down on the table.
“Why are we making kids do this?” Loring asked. “Let them develop in the TK year, get them used to the classroom, get them used to socializing. That’s the purpose of TK. It’s really a developmental year. Don’t throw this heavy test on them and expect that you’re going to get good results.”
Concerns have grown as transitional kindergarten is being expanded to all 4-year-olds, meaning younger children are taking the test each year. This school year, children as young as 4 years and 4 months were eligible to enter transitional kindergarten. By 2025, all children who turn 4 years old by Sept. 1 will be eligible.
“Why are we making kids do this? Let them develop in the TK year, get them used to the classroom, get them used to socializing. That’s the purpose of TK.”
Brett Loring, student services coordinator, Vallecito Union School District
The English proficiency test for kindergartners, which is also administered to transitional kindergartners, requires students to read and write simple words like “cat”, “pan” and “dip”, and identify the first letters in words, based on their sounds.
“My experience is ELPAC is very challenging for all kinder and TK students,” said Bernadette Zermeño, multilingual specialist at Oakland Unified School District. “Even if kids were monolingual and only speaking English, it would still be a very hard exam.”
Proponents of the bill said districts should instead use the home language survey, observations by teachers and conversations with families to assess what language help transitional kindergartners need. This would be similar to how school districts and other state-subsidized providers assess students enrolled in preschool programs.
Muratsuchi said he does not believe that students who are English learners could fall through the cracks if not tested in transitional kindergarten.
“All of these children are going to be assessed in kindergarten, so I’m confident that those who really do need the support will be properly identified in kindergarten, but in the meantime, we want to make sure we’re not over-identifying students,” Muratsuchi said.
The state funding formula gives districts more funding based on how many students are English learners, low-income, homeless or in foster care, so this bill could potentially cost districts some funding, but Muratsuchi and proponents of the bill said the loss of funding would be minimal.
“I think more important than funding is making sure that we’re serving our students well with developmentally appropriate assessments,” Muratsuchi said. “We don’t want kids to be having meltdowns over tests that are not appropriate for their age.”
Crolotte said if students are misidentified as English learners when they actually speak English, resources could be allocated for children that don’t need English language development services.
In addition, Crolotte said she’s worried students could be identified as English learners “and then get in the hamster wheel and not be able to get out of EL status.” Once identified as English learners, students must take the ELPAC every year until their test results, both on the ELPAC and on academic English language arts tests, show they are proficient in English. Some advocates believe many districts have set the bar too high for students to show they are fluent in English.
Crolotte said that Early Edge California has been researching other ways to test young children, including how other states assess young students. She pointed out that Illinois and Virginia only assess English skills in listening and speaking during the first semester of kindergarten, since many children have not yet learned to read or write. Both states wait to begin testing reading and writing skills until the second semester of kindergarten.
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, right, with students at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park.
Credit: Twitter / LAUSDSup
The Los Angeles Unified School District is showing signs of recovery from the learning losses it incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Tuesday at a press conference, following his Opening of Schools Address at The Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The preliminary scores for the California Smarter Balanced Assessments show that English proficiency increased from roughly 41% to 43% among LAUSD students. Meanwhile, district students’ math scores went up by more than 2 percentage points — reaching a 32.8% proficiency rate across the district, a spokesperson for LAUSD confirmed. The scores were first reported Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.
Carvalho said the increase in math scores was particularly impressive given the subject had always been LAUSD’s “achilles heel.”
“For every grade level tester — those are Grades 3 to 11 — both in English Language Arts as well as mathematics, our students beat the odds,” he said Tuesday. “They rose to the expectation we had with them.”
Since 2015, when the state began its current testing system, there has only been one other year when scores have gone up at every grade level.
According to a district announcement on X Tuesday evening, students “are achieving success” in both English Language Arts and math, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or gender.
Specifically, students who are English learners — and make up a significant portion of LAUSD’s student population — made the most significant progress of any sub-group, Carvalho also said Tuesday. He added that foster youth was the only sub-group that did not make the same strides.
The district has not yet released its science scores; last year, it was LAUSD’s weakest link, with only 22% of students meeting or exceeding state standards.
At this point, the California Department of Education has not released scores for the state as a whole, so it is impossible to know how Los Angeles Unified performed in comparison to other districts.
In fall 2022, Carvalho vowed to curb the district’s pandemic learning losses. Last year, halfway to that benchmark, math scores went up by small margins, while scores in English Language Arts declined slightly.
Experts at the time called the district’s goal of returning to 2018-19 levels in another year ambitious but possible if they specifically target students who are struggling.
“I just want to appreciate and celebrate the amazing work of our schools in achieving the progress that has been discussed today,” said LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez at Tuesday’s press conference. “When you think about the struggles that our families are facing, they are significant.”
She applauded the principals, teachers and classified staff members who support Los Angeles Unified students on a daily basis — especially as students continue to struggle with mental health challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Everyday we’re showing up for our students, and it’s showing results,” Gonez said. “I believe that we’re at the tipping point of really achieving the ambitious goals that we have for our students in our school district. And I’m excited for the best school year yet.”
As states across the nation release their annual data from tests administered to students in the 2023-24 school year, we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of how far along we are in our post-pandemic recovery. The release of California test data today shows our public schools are continuing to turn the corner on pandemic recovery, with gains on most assessments, while highlighting areas where we have more work to do.
Overall, the percentages of California students meeting or exceeding the proficiency standards for English language arts (ELA), mathematics, and science increased. This is encouraging given that the population of socioeconomically disadvantaged students tested increased again over the past year — as it has for each of the last three years — this time from 63% to 65% — an increase of more than 60,000 students. The number of students experiencing homelessness also rose once again. Despite the challenges they face, achievement levels for socioeconomically disadvantaged students increased more than the statewide average in all three subjects at every grade level.
Furthermore, Black and Latino students showed positive score trends in mathematics across all grades, and the stubborn achievement gaps long experienced by Black students began to close with gains larger than the statewide averages in math and ELA at several grade levels. The same was true for foster youth.
These gains for California’s most vulnerable students are likely due in large part to the investments made by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and efforts to target inequities in life circumstances and educational opportunities. These include programs like the California community schools initiative that provides wraparound whole child supports, the expanded learning opportunities program (ELO-P) that provides academic support and enrichment after school and over the summer, the literacy coaching initiative, and the equity multiplier — all targeted to high-poverty schools. Attracting and keeping better prepared teachers in these schools has also been enabled by the Golden State Teacher Grants for new teachers and incentives for accomplished veterans who are National Board certified.
It is encouraging that overall scores are up, but there is more work needed. And an accurate understanding of what’s being measured and what the scores mean is critically important for diagnosing and improving student learning.
Smarter Balanced assessments are administered in California and 11 other states and territories that helped develop the tests. California’s Smarter Balanced assessments are more rigorous than those in most other states as they focus on higher-order skills and critical thinking, and measure more standards.
For example, whereas most states’ English language arts assessments test only reading and use only multiple-choice questions, California’s tests include reading, writing, listening, and even research, as well as open-ended questions and performance tasks that require students to analyze multiple sources of evidence and explain their conclusions.
Each Smarter Balanced assessment measures grade-level content along a continuum. Higher test score performance represents a student’s ability to handle greater complexity as they use evidence, analyze and solve real-world problems, and communicate their thinking.
Smarter Balanced defines benchmarks at levels 2, 3 and 4 respectively as foundational, proficient, or advanced levels of grade-level skills, while a “1” shows “inconsistent” demonstrations of grade-level skills. In the case of English language arts, students as early as grade three who achieve levels 2 or above are reading, writing and demonstrating research skills.
As an example, a sixth-grade writing prompt asks students to research and explain the impact of the 1893 World’s Fair, and different levels of performance show different levels of sophistication, from communicating a few facts to elaborating on how the activities of the fair led to other human accomplishments with long-term impact:
To understand where improvements are most needed, educators can look at “claim scores” on the assessment — measures of what students have shown they know and can do on specific topics. These show, for example, that 25% of students statewide score below the standard in reading, but 31% score below the standard in writing — an area for greater focus. Since research shows that writing improves reading, ensuring that students are receiving regular writing instruction and practice will improve performance in both areas of literacy.
Similarly, in mathematics, California assessments are more sophisticated than those in many other states, as they measure math concepts and procedures (where many state tests begin and end), plus data analysis, problem-solving, and how well students communicate their reasoning through additional performance tasks in which students must solve a complex real-world problem and communicate their reasoning.
The states that created and use these assessments believe that when students are asked to learn and show higher-order skills, they are better prepared for later schooling and life than if they were only prepared to bubble in answers on a multiple-choice test.
A recent study from Washington state provided evidence for this belief. The study found that over half of students who scored a “Level 2 / Nearly Meets” on the Smarter Balanced high school mathematics test (and more than one-third of those who scored a 1) successfully enrolled in post-secondary learning without additional remedial courses, and the large majority succeeded. Among those who scored a 3 or 4, 70% and 82% respectively attended college, and nearly all were successful.
We hope that educators, parents and policymakers will not only understand and act on what they learn from these assessments, but also use the evidence productively for improving teaching and learning. Smarter Balanced assessments include lesson plans and interim assessments teachers can choose to examine student learning and adjust their teaching throughout the year. The score reports also provide information about the levels at which students are reading and computing, linked to resources parents can access directly to support their children — supplemented by what they know authentically about what their children are learning and doing at home and school.
Students’ engagement, parents’ observations, teachers’ reports and classroom-based assignments will always provide more detailed, timely and useful information about individual students’ interests, needs and progress. Hopefully, these assessments can provide a useful adjunct if we know what they mean and how to use them productively.
