Despite billions of state and federal dollars pumped into Oregon schools to help students’ post-pandemic academic recovery, statewide reading, writing and math scores have barely budged, a preview of spring 2023 test results suggests.
According to preliminary data, the share of third graders performing proficiently in reading and math each ticked up by a single percentage point from the previous spring. Among eighth graders, proficiency rates stayed unchanged from the previous year.
The data comes from the Smarter Balanced Assessments, which include both open-ended questions and multiple-choice items and are used by at least nine other states, including Washington.
State officials cautioned that the statewide scores, released without authorization by the Newberg School District, are incomplete and may shift as test experts check them over before their official release in September. But Marc Siegel, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education, did not characterize the scores as substantially inaccurate.
The preliminary results show just 40% of the state’s third graders scored as proficient in reading and writing and in math this spring, down from a 2019 rate of 47% in English and 46% in math. Among eighth graders, 44% achieved proficiency in reading and a dismal 26% did so in math, down from 53% and 38% respectively in 2019.
Siegel said no one from the department was “in a position to discuss assessment data until it is final.” Monday was Charlene Williams’ first day as Oregon’s new interim state schools chief and she has not yet been briefed on the lackluster preliminary test results, Siegel said.
The lagging scores are consistent with nationwide test results, released Tuesday by Portland-based NWEA, a research organization that designs achievement tests given to millions of schoolchildren each year.
The organization found that students in most grades took longer to progress in core academic subjects during the 2022-23 school year than before the pandemic, despite billions in federal aid designed to spur an acceleration. Researchers at NWEA say that to catch up to the average student pre-pandemic, the typical U.S. student would need nearly five more months of concentrated math classes and four more months of reading instruction.
Meanwhile, time is running out on the $122 billion that the federal government earmarked to help students’ pandemic recovery, including $1.7 billion for Oregon schools, which must be spent or returned by September of 2024. Twenty percent of each school district’s allocation has to go to academic recovery, but school leaders in Oregon and elsewhere say they’ve been reluctant to spend the one-time funds on core programming and staff, only to pull back once the grant money runs out.
Researchers have suggested that a few intervention strategies — above all small-group tutoring multiple times a week but also intensive summer school programming and doubling up on subjects where students are furthest behind, like math — could pay off. But such initiatives have proven difficult to staff and scale up.
Portland Public Schools earmarked $1 million of its roughly $73 million in federal pandemic aid for high-dose tutoring, a program that did not begin until last winter. The district is also spending $4 million this year on summer school, with a focus on math and reading, though some parents have complained that the highest needs students weren’t fully included.
The Reynolds School District, in east Multnomah County, which serves a high concentration of Black and Latino students, has consistently posted some of the lowest proficiency scores of any district statewide. One of its middle schools had virtually no students who tested as proficient in math in the spring of 2022, for example.
The district has about $18 million left in federal pandemic aid, spokesman Steve Padilla said, and some of that money will go to literacy training for elementary school teachers, summer school programming and an initiative that tries to burnish middle schoolers’ study skills and executive function. But district officials wanted to avoid paying for staff with the federal money since it is expiring, he said.
So the district is also using the federal money to resurface all of its middle school running tracks, put in covered play structures at three elementary schools plus rubber surfacing and new play equipment at others, replace the roof at Reynolds Middle School and add a turf field at its high school.
The Hillsboro School District, which serves a large Spanish-speaking population, also did not report spending any of its federal funding on tutoring. Michelle Morrison, the district’s chief financial officer, noted that state funding can, however, support such programs.
“As a district we determined early not to use [federal pandemic recovery] funds for long-term investments because the funding is temporary,” Morrison said.
Instead, the bulk of Hillsboro’s federal money went to priorities such as mental health supports for students, professional development and coaching for teachers and its virtual school, Hillsboro Online Academy.
There are ways schools can take better advantage of their limited resources and time to boost learning, Chase Nordengren, NWEA’s lead researcher for instructional strategies, told The Associated Press. He said schools can group students based on their needs and provide targeted instruction, for example, adjusting groups as individuals progress.
“We’ve been trying to send the message that this is a multiyear, if not decades-long recovery period and is going to require some fundamental rethinking of the ways that not only we educate students but we think about how students are grouped and how we think about their learning,” he said.
Siegel, the Oregon education department spokesperson, said the agency will “look into the circumstances surrounding the release of the embargoed and invalidated data” by the Newberg School District.
He said the scores released by the district were incomplete, unofficial scores that are released to districts relatively quickly after students finish testing and do not include results including for students with intense cognitive disabilities that are factored in later. The Newberg superintendent and communications director did not return calls seeking comment from The Oregonian/OregonLive.
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com