Colorado students make gains, but achievement gaps by race, income "persistent and troubling"; plus girls struggled more

Colorado state officials on Thursday morning released the results of spring 2023 K-12 achievement tests and the results are mixed -- suggesting that where students were developmentally when their learning was disrupted by the COVID pandemic may play a role in how well they're succeeding academically today.

In the English Language Arts portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success for example, higher percentages of students in grades 5, 6 and 7 met or exceeded expectations than in 2022, but grades 3 and 4 saw drops or nominal gains.

The CMAS tests students in grades 3-8, finding that across the state 43.7% of students are proficient in English Language Arts and 32.9% are proficient in mathematics.

Gains in mathematics for 3rd through 5th graders came as a pleasant surprise to Chief Assessment Officer Joyce Zurkowski, and the state reports public school students are rebounding more consistently in math – with gains across grade levels - than in English Language Arts.

Here are highlights of districts through the Front Range:

As we reported last spring the state's HB 23-1231 created an academic accelerator grant program to provide opportunities for free academic enrichment in mathematics. The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) has also invested more than $50 million in Covid relief funds for tutoring, summer and afterschool programs, and math curriculum. 

CDE reported that districts and schools made instructional adjustments to address the missed learning opportunities from prior years, but that staffing challenges continued as the state's schools had a larger percentage of unfilled positions than in prior years.

The CDE stresses that CMAS tests achievement and not ability. A persistent challenge for the state's schools is addressing gaps in achievement by race and ethnicity and by income level. In 8th grade science for example, the Asian, White and Two or More Races groups scored approximately 23-36 percentage points higher than the Black and Hispanic groups.

The achievement gap is most evident in the state's largest school district – Denver Public Schools - where nearly 50% points separate White students from Hispanic and Black students in literacy. The chart further below also illustrates DPS has the widest disparities in achievement by the income level of students' families.

Denver Public Schools Deputy Superintendent of Schools Dr. Tony Smith says the district has invested in more robust student supports, but that growth will take time. 

"We're continuing with tutoring, we're continuing with science, reading, professional development, and we're continuing with Saturday school," Smith said. "Our goal in our strategic roadmap is to accelerate the trajectory of marginalized students... our strategic plan is a multi year plan, and nothing happens in one year."

He says chronic absenteeism has also posed significant challenges, because students can only improve from increased supports if they are actually there to receive them. 

"I thought we would rebound a little quicker than what we have, and I think it's been it's been something that we've really tried to get our hands around, and haven't had the answers that we wanted yet, and so I think it's a collective effort," Smith said. "It's something that I'm really surprised by and I'm wanting to see better attendance moving forward, but again, schools are reaching out to parents, communicating with parents, asking them, 'hey, what can we do to support you? What barriers can we remove, to bring you mentioned resources?' Again, most resources that we have are being expended to do that, but also additional resources to provide for families who need that additional assistance is important."

In Aurora Public Schools – which serves students from 130 countries – the gap is not as wide, but achievement levels lag the state and neighboring districts by significant margins.

Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said the dedication shown by educators, parents and students has been nothing short of inspiring, but the large gaps that remain between student groups "reaffirms my commitment to continue the hard work of eradicating long-standing disparities in opportunity and achievement."

One of the biggest drops in achievement after the pandemic has been for students taking language arts tests in Spanish. The state's presentation on results stated that multilingual learners "will continue to fall further behind without a focus on acceleration."

Van Schoales, Senior Director at Keystone Policy Center, said about the disparities based on race and poverty: "It's hard to say exactly what's going on, but I think it's fair to say that families living in poverty were much more severely impacted by the pandemic."

Regarding the issues in Denver, Schoales says DPS used to outpace other districts in growth. 

"Low income kids in Denver are doing in some cases significantly worse than other low income students in the state, and that's been a change. That was not going on," Schoales said. "Denver's low income kids were doing slightly better than state low income kids several years ago. So we've seen a shift."  

This chart illustrates proficiency in English Language Arts or Literacy, using Free and Reduced Price lunch data, a measure of family income.

Schoales also suggested initiatives effectively addressing gaps need to be scaled more broadly. 

"We see some evidence that summer schools in some places are making a difference," Schoales said. "We see some evidence that certain kinds or tutoring or after school programming helps in addition to having great classroom teaching, but we clearly need to do a lot more."

Another disparity was the slower growth of girls relative to boys. 

While girls still score higher overall, their numbers were lower in English Language Arts compared to 2019, and boys gained ground on girls in almost every CMAS grade and subject.  

State testing leaders are still trying to understand the phenomenon and suggested that one cause may be females have generally struggled with anxiety since the pandemic.

Nicholas Martinez, the executive director and co-founder of the education nonprofit Transform Education Now, says overall, the results demonstrate a concern lack of academic growth for Colorado students. 

"We know that when students fall behind, it's going to be very, very challenging to support them to kind of catch up. That's by no fault of their own. That's by no fault of the families or the communities. It is the responsibility of the system to educate our children, and we know that you need to be making extraordinary growth year after year after year, and I think we have a responsibility to our kiddos to be able to fulfill that promise," Martinez said. 

He believes the state and local districts should consider more progressive approaches to help students get back on track. 

"I think there's a couple of very clear actions that we can take as both schools, and districts, and a state, including a greater investment in high dosage, high impact tutoring, making sure that kids who have demonstrated academic needs have access to quality tutoring within the school day. It makes it more accessible to families who maybe have jobs, or other commitments outside of school," Martinez said. "The second thing is really trusting families and making sure that parents have a place in kind of the decision making here. There's programs kind of being piloted soon around putting dollars in the hands of families so that they can make targeted investments on behalf of their kids potentially outside of school. Things like tutoring, but also things like speech language therapy... and it could even be things like music lessons. We know that access to special programming inspires kids and actually does help boost performance."

He added, "I think those are things that folks in Denver and Colorado have already had conversations about, and I think we just need folks willing to try something new."

If your child is struggling to get back on track, Smith with DPS says don't be afraid to reach out to teachers or administrators at your child's school for help. 

"We want parents to have questions and to go to their schools and ask their school leaders, ask their teachers, how can we partner, what resources are available to me at my school? Also, call the district say, 'hey, I'm really looking at this program, can you give me some more information?'" Smith said. "I'm really thinking about how as a community we can wrap our arms around students and make sure that they have every support needed, and that they thrive, I think that's the most important piece."

Transform Education Now is also available to help students and families in the Denver metro area. See resources on their website by clicking here. 

The state has now enabled a QR Code so families can better understand individual student level performance and find online videos, visit https://coassessments.com/parentsandguardians/ 

To see more results, visit: All schools, districts, state summary (Excel Workbook). This includes overall performance and performance by level.  Also, performance by disaggregated groups.  http://www.cde.state.co.us/accountability/performanceframeworkresults

District and School Dashboards (Interactive)

Includes visualizations of achievement, growth and matriculation data.  Available at noon today:  http://www.cde.state.co.us/district-school-dashboard

Individual student growth reports

These reports have been prepared for districts to distribute to parents.  The reports explain the performance and growth of their students on the CMAS assessment.