Kansas’ national reading, math scores drop to some of the lowest on record
Almost three years after the start of the pandemic, education leaders and officials across the nation have the clearest look into the missed learning opportunities that students suffered in COVID-era education, with Kansas dropping to some of its lowest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Students on this year’s version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed steep, “appalling and unacceptable” declines in learning rates, according to data released Monday by the National Assessment Governing Board, and Kansas was in a majority of states to show declines in reading and math.
More:Kansas high school seniors’ ACT scores remain flat, while nation’s average falls to historic low
“A once-in-a-generation virus upended our country in so many ways, and our students cannot be the ones who sacrifice the most in the long run,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters Friday. “We must treat the task of catching our children up with the urgency this moment demands.”
The national assessment, also commonly referred to as The Nation’s Report Card, tests but a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders around the country. Normally assessed every two years, the 2021 NAEP was postponed to 2022 as many schools were still returning to full-time, in-person learning. As an anonymized, representative test, the assessment is not meant to hold any specific significance for the actual students who take it.
But if low stakes at the local level, the test holds broader significance to K-12 leaders and officials as to the effect of policy and practice, particularly at the state level.
"It's going to take us a few years to turn this around," said Kansas education commissioner Randy Watson. "Every state is in it. We don't like it, but we've got to respond pretty aggressively."
Kansas NAEP scores drop to 20-year lows
At the national level, students experienced the largest declines in math scores on record, falling by five and eight points at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, respectively. No states saw any improvements in math scores, and the vast majority saw declines.
Just 35% and 26% of fourth- and eighth-grade students scored at or above NAEP Proficiency level, a measure that determines the number of students who can "demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter."
In Kansas, the decline in fourth-grade math scores similarly dropped four points, but the eighth-grade decline was more pronounced, dropping 10 points to levels not seen since 2000.
In reading, the nation’s scores also dropped by three points in fourth and eighth grades, erasing about 20 years of gains. A little less than a third of students across the nation were deemed proficient.
Kansas scores, which historically had outpaced the national average, fell by three and seven points, respectively, and fourth- and eighth-grade scores continued the state’s recent trend of either parity or lower scores than the national average.
About 31% of Kansas fourth-graders were deemed proficient in reading, while 26% of eighth-graders met the same benchmark, compared to 32% and 29%, respectively, at the national level.
Low-income Kansas students scored particularly low
While student proficiency fell by similar percentage points at all levels, low-income Kansas students' scores had already been well below the national average among all students, and this year's test showed even further declines.
Just 18% and 15% of low-income Kansas fourth- and eighth-graders were deemed NAEP Proficient in reading, respectively, compared to 21% of all low-income students and 41% and 45% of non-low-income Kansas students. In math, Kansas' low-income student scores were 18% and 10%, compared to national low-income scores of 20% and 13%.
As with overall scores, Kansas' low-income student scores, while lower than the rest of their peers, had usually outpaced the national average for low-income students, until the last half decade or so.
Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute, a limited-government think tank that has advocated for school choice policies, traces the declines to what he said has been a statewide de-emphasis on academic improvement in favor of other measures, such as social emotional learning and graduation rates.
Trabert argues the Kansas State Board of Education's shift to those measures, especially in accrediting school systems, avoids accountability, especially when students are performing at lower levels on the state assessments (NAEP Proficiency measures, while similar, are separate from each state's definition of proficiency on state assessments).
He said school officials, at the local and state levels, have "blown off" attempts to re-shift focus to student academic achievement, including a law earlier this year to have schools put together building needs assessments to determine budgetary priorities in getting more students on track for college and career success.
More:Kansas K-12 funding debate ends for 2022. But public school advocates ask — at what cost?
"You have to measure what matters, and we're not measuring improvement in academic performance," Trabert said. "It can't be overall — it should be focused on low-income kids, and if you do what you need to bring them up, everybody will benefit."
Comparatively, other states, in particular Florida, also saw declines in low-income student NAEP Proficiency, but increases over the past decade had given it more of a buffer, and Florida's low-income student test scores were better than the national averages.
Trabert said Florida schools were in a better position to weather the pandemic because they have a strong system of school choice, giving low-income families better options to choose their places of education and forcing public schools to compete.
Florida, and other states like it, should be models for Kansas as some legislators push to allow families to use taxpayer funding to send students to private schools, Trabert said.
“This has to become the No. 1 priority, and it needs to be about students,” Trabert said. “Every student has the capacity to learn. We just need to give them the opportunity and the tools — with a student-focus, not a system-focus.”
Watson, whose first actions as education commissioner included creation of the Kansans Can plan, rebutted the assertion that the state department has eschewed academics as a priority.
"Kansans Can never, ever said that academics are not important, but when we look at the success of young people as they transition to young adulthood, it's about multiple skill sets, not just academics," Watson said.
Other measures needed to get whole picture on state of Kansas education
When all states began taking the NAEP tests in 2003 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, Kansas was a leading state for education over the next decade, with the state's average scores between the four reading and math tests usually outpacing the national average by a few points.
That began to change around 2010, when the Kansas Legislature began to cut funding for public schools, said Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards. Student academic achievement on the NAEP exam and the state assessments began to stagnate and decline, he said.
More:Kansas K-12 classrooms are missing more than 12,000 students. Here's what that means for schools.
"I think people would some people would say that it's certainly been one factor," Tallman said. "Maybe the biggest factor — it's very difficult to pull these things out, because there's so many different things going on."
Additionally, Kansas education officials in the last decade stopped the No Child Left Behind practice of "teaching to the test" and increasingly emphasized other measures of school success beyond test scores, including social-emotional growth, graduation rates and post-secondary success.
He pointed out recent data from the Kansas State Department of Education that shows that students who scored at level 2 on the state assessments — which Trabert and others have argued shows below-grade-levels of student understanding — still go onto graduate and reach post-secondary success.
"If kids are going to be successful, academics are important, and certainly these results are worrisome," Tallman said. "But they aren't the sole factor for success. And I think many schools have been trying to work on a broader set of skills, if you will. I think that's one reason we've been able to see success in some of these other areas, even while the academics have been declining."
Tallman put forward an optimistic tone — that with constitutionally adequate school funding, millions of federal relief dollars and new investments into literacy instruction, COVID-19 was only a short-term disruptor in Kansas' path to better academic achievement in the next few years.
More:More than one in four Kansas students were chronically absent from school last year
But his main takeaway from Monday's results is that COVID-19 and the reduced access families had to schools significantly disrupted most students' lives, especially as some students still struggle with chronic absenteeism.
"School really matters, and when kids are not in school, and they're not working with teachers and have those supports and socialization, they don't learn as much," Tallman said. "The one thing this tells us if you remove kids from school or limit their access or provide it in a removed way, most students will not do as well."
NAEP results are a start, but more research needed into causes of declines
Researchers caution against using the data as a barometer for the effectiveness of in-person, remote and hybrid learning styles, as the test simply measures student achievement, although future research, using the NAEP scores as a base, could further study any relationship between the learning practices.
"There is nothing that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and achievement," said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. "There’s nothing in the data that shows a measurable difference in performance between states and districts, based solely on how long schools were closed."
Similarly, education leaders have stressed that the NAEP results, and the expected declines this year, do not measure student failure or forgotten learning, but rather show that students learned at slower rates than their older, pre-pandemic peers. Beside learning mode, students also faced the broader trauma of the pandemic disrupting their lives, with many children knowing at least one adult or family member who died of COVID-19.
After years of increases in the 2000s, scores had stagnated in the past decade, and education leaders said this year’s results may also be symptomatic of larger, systemic problems in U.S. education beyond COVID-19’s disruption.
More:Kansas' colleges, universities continue to see downward enrollment spiral — with a few exceptions
“The pandemic simply made that worse,” said Cardona, the U.S. education secretary. “It took poor performance — and dropped it down even further. As an educator and as a parent — that’s heartbreaking and horrible. It’s an urgent call to action. We must raise the bar in education.”
Cardona called on states to boost efforts to strategically use nearly $200 billion in federal pandemic relief funding for schools, with the U.S. Department of Education soon releasing further guidance on best practices for learning loss recovery.
Kansas’ K-12 system is set to receive as much as $1.25 billion, including $830.6 million as part of the American Rescue Plan that can be used through September 2024.
In Kansas, Watson earlier this month called on schools to take immediate steps to stop a surge in chronic absenteeism, get more students to score above level 1 on the state assessment, and make mental health of students and teachers a priority.
"I'm optimistic, because we have a better feel, I think this year than school districts have had compared to the last couple, that we can get this work done," Watson said. "The pandemic is over, and we can focus on the work we know we need to get done. It's hard work, but if you talk to teachers and educators, they're optimistic this year, and I am too — that we can turn around the slide we saw with the NAEP release today."
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas 2022 NAEP reading, math results drop in Nation’s Report Card
