Test scores among Colorado’s elementary and middle-school students continue to recover since schools temporarily shuttered in 2020, with this spring’s literacy and math scores reaching — and in some cases surpassing — pre-pandemic levels, according to data released by the state Department of Education on Tuesday.

The new Colorado Measures of Academic Success test scores offer the clearest sign yet that students are recovering academically after the pandemic upended in-person learning, but the education department cautioned that gains need to be sustained for a longer time to truly show that academic achievement has rebounded.

Despite the good news, the data shows that significant achievement gaps continue statewide among students of color, children with disabilities and multilingual learners.The gap between English language learners and non-multilingual students was especially large, which is notable given the influx of immigrant students who enrolled in Colorado schools in the past year.

In literacy, only 6.3% of English learners in fifth grade met or exceeded expectations, compared to 52.6% of students who are not multilingual. The gap between the two groups, which was 46.3 percentage points, increased from last year’s 45.7-point gap.

“We are encouraged by the continued improvement in our students since the pandemic disrupted learning,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a statement. “We continue, however, to see troubling and persistent achievement gaps across student groups. It is not enough for some Colorado students, we need to ensure that every child is getting the support they need to be successful.”

The education department only released statewide test scores Tuesday. The agency will make public the results for individual districts and schools on Aug. 29.

CMAS tests, which cover English Language Arts and math, are offered to students in third to eighth grade. Children who score at least 750 on the exams are considered to have “met or exceeds expectations,” which means they are on track to being college- or career-ready.

The tests are the only way to measure student academic performance across the state, Cordova said during a media call.

Schools also give tests in science, but fewer children take those exams. High schoolers also take the PSAT and the SAT, which for the first time were offered fully online. Other changes were also made to the PSAT and SAT, such as with content, so the education department said it wasn’t able to analyze academic recovery for high schoolers after the pandemic.

Student performance in the PSAT and SAT math tests dropped 7% among ninth-graders, 4% by 10th-graders, and 4% by 11th-graders compared to a year ago, according to a news release.

The public health crisis upended education, leading to widespread staffing shortages in schools and chronic absenteeism among children. The federal government has given Colorado schools nearly $2 billion in aid since the pandemic began to help them combat learning losses caused by remote learning. Schools have used the funding to expand tutoring and start summer school programs, but that money will be gone by the end of September.

“There’s been a great deal of attention, appropriately, put on catching kids up, particularly in younger grades,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at Keystone Policy Centers. “We’ve seen recovery to pre-pandemic levels in lots of states and we’ve had up until Oct. 1 all of this extra federal money, which means extra people and programming so I would expect with kids back in school that we would get back to where we were.”

The education department canceled CMAS testing in 2020 when schools moved to remote-learning. While CMAS tests were given the following year, many families opted out, leading some school districts, including Denver Public Schools, to disregard the results altogether.

That means this is the third year of data that shows how children are doing in English Language Arts and math compared to before the pandemic. (About 500,000 children took the CMAS tests this year, similar to 2023, but still down compared to the number of students who took the tests in 2019.)

The data released Tuesday showed that more third-graders (42.1%) and sixth-graders (44%) met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts compared to those who took the test in 2019. Five years ago, 41.3% of third-graders and 43.6% of sixth-graders met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts.

The English Language Arts results for fifth-graders and seventh-graders were comparable to 2019 levels, but the percentage of fourth-graders (42%) who met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts dropped 6 percentage points from five years ago and almost 2 percentage points from 2023, according to the data.

Fourth-graders, who were kindergarteners when the pandemic began, were at a critical point in their literacy development when schools moved to remote learning. The age group performed “OK” in literacy as third-graders, but they are now at an age where there’s more focus on writing and a shift in how they use reading to learn, said Joyce Zurkowski, chief assessment officer for the state education department.

This change has historically led to a drop in performance between the third and fourth grades, she said.

“We still have a lot of work to do to ensure that all students are progressing in a way that we know is going to be important for their long-term growth,” Córdova said.

In math, fourth- and fifth-graders also outperformed the 2019 cohort. This year, 34.1% of fourth-graders and 37.3% of fifth-graders met or exceeded expectations in math compared to the 33.6% of fourth-graders and 35.7% of fifth-graders who did so in 2019, according to the data.

The math results for third-graders, sixth-graders, seventh-graders, and eighth-graders were either at or just slightly below the 2019 levels.

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Originally Published: August 20, 2024 at 9:30 a.m.