No matter how you slice the data, one thing is clear: Minnesota’s students are struggling to master the academic skills they need to succeed.
The Minnesota Department of Education released annual data Thursday designed to inform parents and federal regulators how public schools are performing. It includes scores from various proficiency tests, measures of academic growth, attendance and graduation rates.
Nearly all those measures show the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an adverse impact on education. Fewer than half of students are proficient in math, and about 51 percent can read at grade-level.
That is a significant decline from before the coronavirus outbreak shuttered schools in March of 2020 and upended nearly two years of learning. Reading scores are about 7 percentage points below 2019 levels and math scores have dropped 10 percentage points.
A ‘TIME OF HOPE’
Despite those declines, Minnesota Education Commissioner Heather Mueller says she sees the coming school year as a “time of great hope.” Mueller was tapped by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz to lead the state Department of Education in March 2021, a year after the pandemic began.
“We cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend the pandemic had no impact. We can’t use it as an excuse,” Mueller said. “We are going to use it as a reason to provide support, to be able to focus in on not only academics, but also mental health and wrap-around services our students and families need.”
Republicans have criticized Walz’s decisions to close schools during the pandemic as well as other school-based coronavirus mitigation measures. They say distance learning and a loss of focus on basic academic skills have led to declining achievement.
“Primarily because of their refusal to stay focused on academics and early literacy. These latest results are further proof we need a major course correction,” said Sen. Roger Chamberlain, who leads the Senate education committee. “We need accountability, transparency and proven learning methods to get kids on the right track.”
State leaders have identified 371 different schools and 15 entire districts that will receive extra help from the Collaborative Minnesota Partnerships to Advance Student Success, or COMPASS, system. Those schools were identified through Minnesota’s North Star federal school accountability system.
Schools get extra help if they have students who are struggling in a number of different ways. The North Star system uses the academic performance of students overall and of specific student groups to determine which schools could best benefit from state help.
By federal measures, Minnesota’s reading and math proficiency is slightly worse than what is reported on the state’s report card. That’s because federal rules require the state to count every student who was tested, even if their test was eventually deemed invalid.
A student’s proficiency test could be invalid for a number of reasons including if they refused to take the exam, didn’t finish it or a parent opted them out. Nearly 11,000 proficiency tests were deemed invalid in 2022, a little more than 1 percent of students who were tested.
SUPPORT IN ST. PAUL
St. Paul has 20 schools identified by the state this year for extra help. While academic proficiency remains well below pre-pandemic levels, after more than 500 invalid tests were removed the district saw modest gains in reading and math.
Superintendent Joe Gothard says district educators hope to continue to regain learning that was lost during the pandemic.
“We certainly are seeing our students climb back,” Gothard said. “We have more work to do. We need to sustain the strategies that are effective.”
The district’s strategic plan as well as its more than $200 million in federal coronavirus aid will be largely targeted at catching students back up. That means extra help for students and teachers including added literacy teachers in classrooms as well as new methods for students to recover lost academic credits.
But those new efforts required federal funds, and district leaders will have to identify resources to continue them long-term.
“It shouldn’t take a pandemic and federal funds to do what we know is right and research-based to help students,” Gothard said. “We need sustained funding to sustain our efforts.”