Oregon students’ performance on reading, writing and math tests remains stuck at dismal post-pandemic lows, despite the billions of state and federal dollars aimed at helping them recover in the two years since the pandemic shuttered school buildings across the state.
The results, based on tests given last spring and released Thursday by the Oregon Department of Education, are virtually identical to 2022′s abysmal outcomes, with students across the board showing miniscule improvement in math and a slight backsliding in English.
The data show only about 40% of students scored as proficient on Smarter Balanced reading and writing tests, far below even the relatively anemic pre-pandemic levels of 51%. The picture is bleaker yet in math, where just 30% scored proficient, an enormous drop from the pre-pandemic low point of 40%. Proficiency in this context means that the student is on track to be ready for college or the workforce once they graduate from high school.
Middle schools emerged as a particular disaster zone. Seventh and eighth graders lost ground in English; seventh graders demonstrated only the barest hints of growth in math, and eighth graders’ performance was statistically stagnant in that subject, with only 25% of them hitting proficiency targets.
Interim state schools chief Charlene Williams, who has been in that role for just two months, acknowledged the flatlining of the results.
“We owe our students much better than we are delivering right now,” she said. “We have to buckle up and deliver, given the resources that we have and the information that we know moves the data with kids.”
But she and other state education officials also cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions about the state’s schools and students from a single test. Gov. Tina Kotek, who pledged during her 2022 campaign to “not let districts off the hook,” groped for a silver lining, noting via press release that as a whole, the state’s students had “stabilized” and not lost significant ground from the previous spring.
After queries from The Oregonian/OregonLive, Kotek released a revised statement Thursday in which she said the state needed to “pick up the pace” for students.
“The results are unacceptable and must improve,” Kotek added. “Oregon has made record investments in K-12 education in recent years following three decades of disinvestment. While the impact of the pandemic on our schools has lasted longer than anyone hoped and it can take time for investments to show results, [I am] working with Dr. Williams on proactive strategies the Oregon Department of Education and districts can take to improve these results.”
That still leaves students at proficiency levels dramatically below four years ago, before the bulk of Oregon school buildings were shut for the better part of 18 months, in one of the nation’s longest pandemic-era closures.
Oregon's overall student test scores have yet to begin recovering from their post-pandemic lows, even though individual districts, including Portland, demonstrated growth.
Other states have seen their standardized test scores rebound after two years back in buildings, albeit modestly. In Massachusetts, for example, education officials this week said students in grades 3 through 8 made statistically significant gains in both math and English from the previous year. In Washington, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction this week reported students registered encouraging progress in math at all grades and in English at the elementary level.
Learning loss is an issue in all 50 states. But extraordinary sums have been available to try to help children regain emotional and academic footing.
Oregon has benefitted from a $1.7 billion infusion from the federal government to help students catch up, in addition to an additional $1 billion a year in business taxes for education starting in 2020.
But school districts have spent wildly varying portions of their federal money to address academic deficits head on. And unlike in states such as Tennessee, Oregon has not coordinated efforts to implement strategies that researchers have said are the most effective at helping students catch up, including one-on-one or small group “high dose” tutoring delivered during school hours multiple times a week or academically intensive summer learning programs. Tennessee, which has implemented both of those strategies, reported in June that its students exceeded their pre-pandemic performance on the state’s English and social studies tests and made significant gains in math.
Though Oregon districts receive the bulk of their funding from the state, each district decides how that money will be spent, making it difficult to implement statewide reforms. Williams said that the state is strengthening its guidance on how districts spend proceeds from the business tax-fueled Student Success Act. She also said the state education agency, under her leadership, is working harder to help districts pinpoint which students need what kind of help the most.
That data and more, Williams said, will help districts determine whether they need to provide such extra help as extended school days or more rigorous summer school programming for students who are furthest behind.
She pointed to small bright spots among individual grade levels in small school districts around the state — like big reading and writing gains for third graders in Scappoose and a huge jump in proficiency among eighth graders in Phoenix-Talent — as evidence that growth is possible. She said state officials will work to see what strategies can be shared with other districts.
Overall state results showed large disparities between white and Asian students and their counterparts of color, students with disabilities and students classified as economically disadvantaged. For example, only 24% of Black students scored as proficient in reading and writing, as did 27% of Latino students. Both of those figures dropped slightly since last year, and both are far below the 50% of white students and 63% percent of Asian students who met proficiency goals.
Some districts bucked the trend of stagnant performance. In Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district, students at every grade level showed growth on both math and English tests, said Renard Adams, the district’s head of research, accountability and assessment, though he noted that the district is aware that middle school students have a long way to go. Only 40% of the district’s eighth graders met math proficiency standards in 2023 — better than the year before, but still far from ideal.
A handful of the district’s elementary schools posted double-digit growth, including Sitton Elementary in North Portland in both math and English, Whitman Elementary in Southeast Portland in English and Lent Elementary in Southeast Portland in math.
Adams said Portland’s growth was helped by scheduling changes that have given teachers and students more time during the school day for catch-up work including adding a “What I Need” block to elementary schools and adding more flex periods to middle schools. The district has also added guidance counselors, literacy specialists and begun tutoring programs for elementary students who are the furthest behind.
In Beaverton, the picture was more mixed, with math gains for students in grades three through six compared to 2022, but backsliding from 2022 in grades seven and eight, in keeping with statewide declines at the middle school level. That same pattern repeated itself in English. Both Beaverton and Portland have relatively low child poverty rates — 8% and 9%, respectively, according to the Census Bureau — which means both districts should be expected to post student achievements level above state averages, given the historical correlation between family income and student success.
In Hillsboro, the state’s fourth largest district, math and English proficiency rates barely budged from last year’s levels, meaning that only 30% of students hit the target in math and only 40% in English.
So many high school juniors in nearly every Oregon district opted out of state testing that 11th grade results aren’t considered reliable, making it difficult to get a sense of how well high school students have mastered the skills they need to succeed in college.
The Smarter Balanced Assessments scores reflect students’ response to open-ended questions and performance tasks as well as multiple-choice questions. Nine other states, including Washington, also use Smarter Balanced tests to measure school performance.
State officials and others noted that student behavior and mental health issues have been front and center since students returned to school after a year and a half spent learning mostly online, often in isolation. That has deep implications for how well students can learn, said Kali Thorne Ladd, the executive director of Portland-based nonprofit Children’s Institute, which has lobbied for more state investments in early childhood education.
“In the districts that I am closest to, they are working hard to address the learning loss amidst increased behavior challenges because of social emotional dysregulation,” she said. “This is a real thing. If kids can’t be anchored, they cannot learn.”
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com