Ventura County's standardized test scores flat one year after pandemic drop

Ventura County students saw little improvement in state test scores last spring, confirmation that schools still have work to do reversing the sizable drops they saw in 2022, the first year of post-COVID standardized testing.

Countywide scores echoed trends across the state, with math scores ticking up slightly and English language arts scores staying flat. Those trajectories held true across most demographics, including low-income students and Black and Latino students, who continued to average lower scores than their counterparts.

Across the board, just 33% of students met standards on the math portion of the state's annual Smarter Balanced test. That mark is 1.5% better than last year, but still a full two percentage points behind this year's state mark and four behind the county's own peak in 2019.

English scores looked better, with 45% of test-takers meeting standards, virtually the same as 2022. But the county mark is still 1.6 points behind the state and more than three behind its 2019 high of 48.4%.

California debuted the Smarter Balanced tests in 2015, rolling them out across the state every spring except 2020, when they were canceled, and 2021, when only a limited number of districts used them.

County superintendent César Morales called the latest scores are "largely unchanged" from last year.

In a statement Thursday, Morales said that the county education office was still "pleased to see some areas of improvement," including math score bumps of 3.2% for fifth graders and 4.5% for fourth graders along with a 1.5% improvement in English scores for high school juniors.

Morales downplayed the significance of the scores, saying they are "only one measure of student progress."

The state plans to release more data in December, covering graduation rates, suspension rates, English learner progress and college/career readiness. Together, Morales said, that data amounts to a "much more nuanced picture."

California lags

In a statement accompanying the newly released scores on Oct. 18, the state education department called the largely flat trajectory "particularly promising" in light of lagging test scores nationwide and an increase in "high-need" test-takers across California.

Statewide, 63% of students who tested were economically disadvantaged, compared to 60% in 2022. Ventura County saw a similar, smaller increase in the proportion of economically disadvantaged test-takers from 56% to 57%.

Not everyone is as optimistic as the state office.

“Seeing only slight improvements in already alarmingly low levels of student achievement is cause for concern, not celebration," Christopher Nellum, executive director of advocacy group The Education Trust–West, said in a statement. “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.

Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney for the public interest law firm Public Counsel, told education news site EdSource the scores were further evidence of why it sued the State Board of Education, the California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, charging the state mishandled remote learning and failed to remedy the harm caused to low-income and minority students.

The 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," he said, "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."

Cayla J. v. the State of California, is set for trial in December in Alameda County Superior Court.

Before COVID-19 struck, changes in California’s test scores occurred slowly, a percentage point or two annually, education researcher Heather Hough told EdSource. Then, Hough said, came the "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,” said Hough, director of the Stanford-based group Policy Analysis for California Education. “We have to keep that intensity that we have not fixed this problem, despite investments and despite good intentions.”

Bits of optimism

California school districts have hauled in billions of dollars targeted at making up for the learning lost in the pandemic.

State legislators cobbled together a $5.3 billion Learning Loss Mitigation Fund from state and federal dollars in 2020 — Ventura County districts got $103.7 million, according to the county education office —and set aside $4 billion in the 2023-24 budget for after school and summer programs as part of the Extended Learning Opportunities Program.

From the archive: 'It's been a disaster': Post-pandemic test scores erased decades of progress

Oxnard School District has used some of those expanded programs to target students who need additional support with special "math labs," district Interim Superintendent Ana DeGenna said.

Oxnard also changed its approach to math last year, DeGenna said, after some teachers said they were worried the district's curriculum was not sufficiently rigorous. Today, teachers get more training, and the district has shifted from a "skills-based" approach focused on memorizing the steps in a math operation to a "mathematical practices" focused on the logic behind the operation.

The district's math scores improved by nearly four percentage points in 2023, with over 18% of students meeting standards. The mark is still well below the overall state level, but almost a full point above the district's pre-pandemic score.

"We're just beginning to see the fruits of that labor," DeGenna said. "We're hoping we'll see more of that."

DeGenna said the district has also seen improvements in English language arts outcomes among students, though they haven't surfaced in test scores in the same way as math.

"We can see that growth in a variety of different ways that aren't necessarily represented on the test scores," she said. District instruction is built primarily around the district's ideal student profile, which is focused in part on innovation, problem solving and global thinking.

"This growth is one of those indicators but it isn't really a significant measure," she said.

Santa Paula Unified School District saw test scores follow state and county trends, with the percentage of students meeting English standards dropping slightly but math scores increasing by more than a percentage point.

Elizabeth Garcia, a former Santa Paula High School principal who moved to the district office this year as director of special projects, said some of the district's fixes, including a K-2 literacy project, are "going to take time" to implement.

The district is shifting to project-based learning and rolling out more mental health supports for students, but still trying to catch up to pandemic losses, she said.

"One of the things we do know is that during distance learning and quarantine period, students struggled. There was definitely a gap in what they were learning," she said. "Growth, it sort of just stopped. That definitely compounds as we're trying to right this ship."

But Garcia said there are still glimmers of improvement in the data, especially when the district tracks cohorts of students across multiple grades. More than 29% of the district's fourth graders met English language arts standards this year, a nearly 4% improvement over their scores as third graders in 2022. Similarly, 34% of the district's fifth graders met English standards in 2023, 6% above the mark they set as fourth graders.

Garcia said she "absolutely" believes the district will see similar jumps in the future. But even then, she said, test numbers don't paint the full picture.

"We have students who are resilient. Our graduation rate is 96%," she said. "We know there's a lot more to the story, and it's beyond test scores."

Detailed test scores are available at caaspp-elpac.ets.org.

Nonprofit news site EdSource contributed to this report.

Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County's test scores flat one year after pandemic drop