Do High Schools With Less Arts Have Lower Test Scores
A majority of educators say their schools' or districts' standardized test results from last bound are lower than they were pre-pandemic—and that they find the numbers apropos.
Those are the findings from a contempo nationally representative EdWeek Inquiry Middle survey of teachers, principals, and commune administrators. The survey was administered in late Oct and early November, with 977 respondents.
Of survey-takers who had received their schools' leap state test results, 70 percentage said that scores were down across the lath from where they were before COVID, or were downward in some areas and held steady in others.
In math, lxxx percent of respondents said elementary scores were concerning and 81 percent said the aforementioned of secondary scores. Numbers were similar in English/language arts, with 76 percent of educators concerned by elementary scores and 74 per centum for secondary scores.
Virtually a quarter of respondents said they hadn't received state test results from last spring (the survey sample also included teachers who taught in untested subjects).
These results add to the growing stream of data demonstrating that students' academic progress stalled over the 2020-21 schoolhouse year, amid the pandemic'due south interruptions to instruction. Just earlier this month, for case, curriculum and assessment provider Curriculum Assembly released results from its reading and math diagnostic tests this autumn, showing that fewer students in grades 1 through viii are on grade level in reading and math than in years past.
But land standardized test results, specifically, come with several caveats, cess experts accept said. Equally Pedagogy Week'south Catherine Gewertz reported last month, disruptions to testing-as-usual during the 2020-21 school twelvemonth could affect the validity of the scores.
Some states allowed students to test remotely, making information technology difficult to compare their results to those of students who tested in person. And many states reported lower-than-average participation rates, meaning that the results might non reverberate the student population.
Even in districts where most students tested in person, some educators say that the results take limited usefulness this year.
In the past, Andrew McDaniel might take compared results at his school to others in the state, to see if he could learn from like schools that had better scores in certain areas. Just this year there are as well many variables at play—how much time kids spent in buildings, or how much support they had from families at domicile—to glean much useful information from that kind of comparing, said McDaniel, the principal of Southwood Inferior/Senior High Schoolhouse in Wabash, Ind.
"It's important, but it'due south non the simply data point that we look at," he said of land test scores.
Scores aren't 'fine-grained enough to guide instruction'
Land standardized test scores only capture one moment in time, a point that critics of using them for accountability purposes have long emphasized. But this fact makes scores especially hard to interpret during the pandemic, as students' learning environments go along shifting, McDaniel said.
For case, at Southwood Junior/Senior Loftier School, some students were remote during the 2020-21 schoolhouse year while others attended school in person. Many of those who were in person still had to get out the building for weeks at a time due to quarantining requirements. Lots of students struggled with online learning, McDaniel said.
"Our numbers for declining grades were just off the charts." And that was reflected in the school'southward state exam scores, which were lower than in years' past.
This twelvemonth, though, the commune isn't offering a remote selection, so all students are in the building. The district has also inverse the quarantining policy, and so that parents can cull to proceed sending children to school if they've been exposed to someone who tested positive, as long equally the student isn't showing symptoms. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all unvaccinated students who take been exposed should quarantine, though some schools have started to remove these requirements or put other policies in place during the 2021-22 school yr.)
Students are spending a lot more than fourth dimension in the building this year than they did last yr, and they're already making academic progress, McDaniel said. The 2020-21 test scores, while low, aren't his biggest business organization in this new mural. Instead, it'south behavior and social-emotional skills, as students re-learn the routines of school.
Other educators say that their students' scores from last twelvemonth reverberate persisting bookish needs.
Mike Huler, the secondary mathematics curriculum specialist in Westerville City Schools in Ohio, said that scores were "considerably worse in the concluding testing cycle" than in years' past. He attributes the dips to a few factors. Instructional mode in the district shifted throughout the year, betwixt hybrid and in-person learning, causing disruptions. And the spring shutdowns in 2020 pushed teachers to play catch-up with the previous twelvemonth's content at the kickoff of the 2020-21 school year, rather than moving on to grade-level work.
"It's very difficult to convince teachers to stay on grade-level standards and scaffold in when needed, as opposed to, 'We didn't comprehend that at the end of last year and nosotros need to do that first,'" he said. "Then there was much more backfilling than I would have liked earlier we even knew what [students] needed."
Still, he doesn't think that state assessment from concluding spring can provide much of a roadmap for how to support students now. "The information that we become from the state isn't really fine-grained enough to guide didactics," Huler said.
Instead, he'due south supporting teachers in using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data at the classroom and school levels.
Math teachers are using a supplemental online learning plan to diagnose and fill gaps in grade-level skills. The district has also started doing "learning rounds," sending groups of teachers and schoolhouse- and district-level administrators out to schools to detect what practices teachers are using.
These groups are looking for the kinds of practices that will set students upwardly for success in high school, like math conversation, persistence through complex problems, and working on tasks that require reasoning and could have more than ane solution.
"I'thousand more concerned with preparing kids for the long run," Huler said.
Source: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/low-test-scores-have-educators-worried-survey-shows/2021/11
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