A Potluck article public published Friday in the Minnesota Reformer, Minnesota test scores down since pandemic; MDE pledges to do more by editor J. Patrick Coolican got us wondering how school children were doing in our new home in South Dakota.
It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, since while Governor Kristi Noem closed the schools for in-person learning in mid-March 2020, students returned in person the next fall. Nor has South Dakota released any data from 2022.
We've posted a screenshot of the South Dakota Department of Education State Report Card 2020-2021 at the top of this post.
Coolican reports about the Minnesota data:
Fewer than half of Minnesota students are proficient in math and 51% are proficient in reading, according to newly released results of standardized test scores.
The portion proficient in math decreased from 55% to 45% since the last pre-pandemic round of tests.
Minnesota children proficient in reading decreased from 59% to 51%.
Just 41% of Minnesota students are proficient in science, down from 51% in 2019.
Seven percent of students didn’t take the tests, down from 20% in 2021. The tests weren’t given in 2020.
Minnesota’s racial gaps in education — for years among the nation’s worst — continued. Nearly 60% of white students were proficient in reading, compared to 31% of Black and Hispanic students, according to the Star Tribune.
The state Department of Education announced that 371 public schools — including 15 entire school districts — have been identified for varying levels of extra support through Minnesota’s “North Star accountability system.”
There's a lot more at the Star Tribune in Minnesota students' low math, reading test scores offer glimpse of pandemic challenges, by Eder Campuzano, MaryJo Webster and Mara Klecker.
And South Dakota? There's no data from 2022; the latest data on the South Dakota Department of Education is the State Report Card 2020-2021. Dig deeper on the page, and there's data by student population: gender, income, race and such, just as in Minnesota.
How did the pandemic affect South Dakota scores? At the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Morgan Matzen reported in South Dakota schools' report card shows absences up, performance down amid COVID pandemic:
Last school year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 47% of students across the state were not proficient in English Language Arts assessments and 57% were not proficient in math assessments in grades 3-8 and 11.
These metrics are according to the 2020-2021 report card released Thursday by the South Dakota Department of Education.
The report card is produced annually and provides information about how students and schools across the state’s 149 districts and 688 schools performed.
Those reviewing the report card need to recognize the state’s public schools were committed to providing in-person instruction in “a year full of disruptions,” Secretary Tiffany Sanderson said in a statement. And they managed those challenges successfully, she said.
“While other parts of the country struggled to return to in-person instruction, South Dakota schools understood the importance of tending to a child’s full development – physical, academic, social, and emotional,” she said.
Some data from the report card are incomplete this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as far fewer students took state assessments than in previous years, the DOE reports. Indicators like per-pupil spending will be added to the report card later.
About 90% of students attended at least 90% of the school days, while 12% of students did not attend for more than 90% of the days. Annual attendance typically averages 92%, the DOE said.
This data suggests COVID-19 impacted school attendance, and those absences impacted student learning, the DOE said in a press release, reiterating findings from last summer’s COVID-19 Impact Report.
Reduced attendance occurred most frequently among economically disadvantaged students. 72% of those who missed 30 or more days of school were considered economically disadvantaged. Chronic absenteeism is at 18%. . . .
Again, the sets of data aren't exact, but it looks like the pandemic was hard on school kids, whether classes were remote or in person. We're not a fan of remote learning, after trying to learn the Dakota language via Zoom.
Let's hope both states can do better by the kiddoes.
Screengrab: South Dakota Department of Education's the State Report Card 2020-2021.
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