The latest achievement data highlights the daunting challenge schools across the state, including in the Denver metro area, face in overcoming student learning gaps, even now that the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us.
The slight gains in math and English are strikingly similar to last year, when state officials described the results as a “step-like” improvement and local educators said they were disappointed with the scores.
Colorado students showed a 1.3-point improvement in math and a 0.4-point improvement in English.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) saw an even smaller increase.
But overall, student performance remains below pre-pandemic levels, and four years after the virus spread across the globe, Colorado students have yet to catch up.
Just 31.2 percent of DPS students met or exceeded expectations in math, an increase of 0.9 percentage points from last year, while 40.7 percent of students met expectations in English, an increase of 0.4 percentage points.
“Our ultimate goal is to get back to pre-pandemic levels,” DPS Superintendent of Schools Cesar Cedillo said.
DPS is the state's largest school district, with 207 schools and more than 88,000 students.
In the 2018-2019 school year, 32.7% of DPS students met or exceeded expectations in math and 42.7% exceeded expectations in English, meaning the district is within 1.5 points of pre-pandemic levels in math and within 2 points in English.
On Thursday, the State Board of Education released school- and district-level results of the Colorado Academic Performance Scale (CMAS), an annual measure of student academic success.
Each spring, the state administers the CMAS tests to students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math, and to a lesser extent in science and social studies.
High school students take the SAT and PSAT, administered by the College Board, to measure their college readiness.
CMAS testing was not administered in the 2019-2020 school year.
Authorities have grappled with learning losses during the global pandemic, including closing schools in response to COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic, forcing students to rely on parents and engage in remote learning.
Educators now view the 2019 scores as a benchmark year.
Highlights from this year's evaluation include:
• Test-taking numbers during the pandemic dipped to an all-time low four years ago but are slowly recovering. Test-taking numbers are still below 2019 levels, when 69.4% of students took the test. Statewide, only 88.3% took the test, down from 89.0% the previous school year.
• Colorado students achieved a new record high in meeting or exceeding expectations in math.
• English scores showed continued improvement, approaching the highs achieved in 2017 and 2018.
Statewide testing data released last week showed a mix of good and bad results, with elementary school students' performance gradually improving compared to pre-pandemic scores, but high school math performance declining significantly.
Colorado's sixth and seventh graders caught up in English and language arts, while third and fifth graders surpassed 2019 performance in math.
In Denver, 20.9 percent of Spanish language arts students met or exceeded expectations, compared with 40.7 percent of English language arts students.
Immigrant students boosted Denver's enrollment numbers last school year, but because of disruptions to their studies, they are largely excluded from testing data.
“The vast majority did not take the exam,” DPS academic dean Simone Wright said.
Changes in assessment methods — the tests included fewer math questions and shorter reading and writing passages — led state officials to not evaluate students' recovery from the pandemic as they usually do.
To better understand and compare these CMAS scores, the Denver Gazette averaged math and reading and writing results to calculate an “aggregate” to create rankings.
Of the 1,387 schools with enough data to rank them, eight schools in the Denver metro area ranked among the top 10 performing schools in the state.
Denver metropolitan schools also ranked among the bottom 10 performing schools.
Aurora Public Schools holds the ignoble record of having the most schools in the bottom 10 performing schools, with three campuses: Altura Elementary School, ranked last at 1,378th, Crawford Elementary School at 1,386th, and Aurora West College Prep School, ranked 1,387th.
Aurora school leaders said financial support, new curriculum and monthly assessments are being implemented to help struggling schools.
“These aren't the only schools we're lifting,” said Nia Campbell, chief academic officer for Aurora Public Schools.
Adams County School District 14 has struggled with poor academic performance for more than a decade, remaining among the 10 lowest performing districts in the state. With only 7.7 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations in math and 11.8 percent in English, Adams County School District 14 ranks 167th out of 169 districts.
These scores are significantly below how students perform statewide.
Statewide, 44.1 percent of students met or exceeded expectations in English, and 34.2 percent performed above expectations in math.
Adams 14 spokesman Diego Romero declined to comment.
Centennial R-1 School District in San Luis ranked last at 169th.
In the district, which serves fewer than 200 mostly economically disadvantaged and minority students, fewer than 5 percent of students met or exceeded expectations in math and 10.8 percent in English.
Superintendent Joe Garcia, who took office last month, said he came out of retirement to address the district's challenges.
The problem, as Garcia sees it, is that education funding enjoys economies of scale to the detriment of rural schools.
“Funding local schools is not at the top of the budget list,” Garcia said. “They're working on the I-25 corridor.”
“We're at the bottom in the state of Colorado, and we're going to stay there unless we change this (funding),” Garcia added.
DPS officials said what's often overlooked in all the percentages is that one percent can represent thousands of students.
“We are not satisfied with the performance results,” said Wright, the academic director.
DPS ranked 59th in academic performance out of Colorado's 169 school districts, meaning DPS performed better than two-thirds of the districts in the state.
While state testing is common across the United States (Nebraska is the only state that does not mandate it), there has been simmering anti-testing sentiment against “teaching to the test” for at least the past decade.
Some education advocates argue that “teaching to the test” strips the system of expertise and the joy of learning, while others argue that assessments provide objective standards to measure whether kids are actually learning and whether educators are doing their jobs.
School principals across the region who recently received their CMAS scores are digesting the results and scouring the data for outliers, particularly for areas of repeatable improvement.
Officials said the testing data should inform educators how to best identify effective strategies.
“Anything below 100 per cent would be disappointing,” said Anthony Smith, vice-chancellor for schools. “This is an opportunity for us to reassess the system.”
Smith adds: “Data doesn't define us; it's an opportunity to do better.”
Editor's Note: This is a developing story.