Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Indian students fall behind in testing amid COVID-19
The results are in: Standardized test scores fell during pandemic year
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – Standardized test scores in Arizona fell across the board last school year, as COVID-19 upended learning through the year and led to a sharp drop in the number of students taking the tests, the Arizona Department of Education said.
Results released by the department Friday showed that 38% of students got “satisfactory” grades on the language test and 31% passed the math test in 2021, compared to 42% for both tests in 2019, the last year for which test results are available.
The department warned that results from the pandemic year “need to be viewed with extreme caution” when compared to other years.
“When considering the results of students who did take the test, it is important to remember the learning disruptions from COVID-19 that may have impacted student learning in unforeseen ways,” the department said in a note released with the data.
It also pointed out that “a significant number of students did not take the test” last year. Close to 740,000 students took both tests in 2019, but just 520,912 took the math test last school year and 511,679 took the language skills test.
While the drop in test scores is not surprising, Arizona Federation of Teachers President Ralph Quintana said the decline is difficult to measure since there are no test scores from 2020 to compare them with. “The report isn’t looking at how students have grown between 2020 and 2021,” Quintana said. “Not being able to have growth scores, because students missed a year of testing, severely impacted what we see.” Declines were seen in all demographic groups, but scores for Black, Latino and Native American students were all below the state average. Quintana said that while all students faced challenges last year, minority students were particularly hard hit. “It was really hard virtually,” he said of remote schooling. “It’s not surprising that some of these demographics didn’t perform as well as we wanted. Poorer communities weren’t ready for virtual learning. Poor, working class communities lost access to education,” That was echoed by Hart. “It’s not just remote learning, but also what kids were dealing with,” she said. “People were experiencing trauma and loss. Kids were sick and quarantined. Some families experienced job loss and weren’t having regular meals. Social isolation as well has affected so many students.”The ADE Office of Indian Education is looking to expand its team with the addition of a Learning Specialist to help make a difference in its Native American’s educational initiatives! Please share the word to anyone who may be interested in applying for this exciting opportunity! pic.twitter.com/VfV4ozx6Uf
— Arizona Department of Education (@azedschools) August 25, 2021
While the latest numbers are of limited use looking back, Quintana said he hopes they will provide a measure of improvement going forward. “The real thing will be next year to see if we rebound, if we see growth within these subgroups and communities where they didn’t improve before,” he said. Hart said the latest scores can be “held in our back pocket” and used to “help students move forward, and how to use COVID funds to help them. But, as she noted, the test scores are the end-all, be-all. “Most educators know their kids are much more than a single test score,” she said. “There’s so much more information to see how their kids are doing.”In this week's Indigenous Arizona blog:
— Arizona Department of Education (@azedschools) August 5, 2021
✅A community spotlight of Dayhenoa Yazzie, ADE Indian Education Advisory Council Student Advisor
✅2021 HOPE Conference proposals
✅Registration for the 8th National Native American Language Summit
Read more! ⬇️
https://t.co/dN7nwmWaGl
AzM2 Results: American Indian and Alaska Native Students – [PDF]
The following table provides a summary results of the AzM2 assessment tests for American Indian and Alaska Native students. Source: Arizona Department of Education, August 2021
For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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