Students are showing “positive momentum” on state standardized tests, state education officials said Tuesday, though the results remain below pre-pandemic levels.
Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger told the State Board of Education Tuesday that she was glad to see an end to the “nosedive” that scores took between 2018 and 2023. But she knows the state can do better.
“Now we are seeing an uptick. It takes a lot to see even a percent of an uptick,” she told the board. “Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.”
Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a board member from Pasadena Hills, said she hoped to see more improvement.
“This just feels like we need to revisit our growth targets, understand what worked and figure out where we need to turn up the dial to our growth,” she said.
The results of the Missouri Assessment Program come in four categories: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. Grade-level equivalence, which is required to be reported in next year’s results, contains scores in the basic and proficient ranges.
In English language arts, 44% of students scored proficient or advanced, compared to 49% in 2019.
Math performance improved, with the lowest number of students scoring “below basic” in recent years. As a whole, 44% of students scored in the proficient or advanced range in math, beating 2019’s level of 41%.
But the achievement gap remains wide.
The state education department tracks the scores of students who are Black, English learners, free-and-reduced lunch recipients, Hispanic or those with an individualized education plan as a group. The group scores in the proficient or advanced range at less than half the rate of students outside those groups.
The board, with a tone of disappointment, spent part of Tuesday’s meeting examining ways to improve student achievement. The discussion often veered to low attendance rates.
“We have school districts with 49% attendance and that, to me, is not acceptable. So we’ve got to do something about attendance,” Eslinger said.
Her main areas of focus, she said, are literacy and attendance as mechanisms to boost performance.
“We need to truly, truly work on attendance and literacy,” Eslinger said. “And then I do think that we need to look at how we measure progress.”
The current way of measuring performance is too slow, she said, adding that she wants more granular data.
Educators have long been expressing the same sentiment. Standardized test results are one of the factors that determine school districts’ state accreditation and are often cited by lawmakers and researchers to advocate for policy change. But educators compare the test to an “autopsy,” showing what has happened in the past but not providing real-time performance data.
School leaders have advocated for a shift to benchmark assessments, instead of the MAP’s summative format. And schools in the Success Ready Students Network, which is exempt from the state’s accreditation process, have been testing new ways to monitor student performance.
At the end of July, the department announced that the whole state will move toward benchmark tests as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority Program. The program will allow the state to pilot a new assessment system beginning in the 2025-26 school year.
The department is planning on a “small-scale pilot of approximately five (schools) serving an estimated 100 students each in grade four English language arts and grade five Mathematics,” according to its application submitted earlier this summer.
The new test, which the department is calling the Success Ready Student Assessment, will have a minimum of three checkpoints throughout the school year and is intended to provide more timely feedback to educators and students.
“It just gives us a lot more information,” Eslinger said. “It is so much better for our kids to be able to have that opportunity to really see what it is that they’ve learned and what they need to learn next.”
