Marinscope
The numbers are out, and they aren’t pretty.
After months of delay – some say a deliberate delay – the National Assessment of Educational Progress numbers were revealed. In Marin, 48.7% of students taking the test failed to meet standards in Math and 37.9% of students failed to meet standards in English. That’s a 6.8 increase and 3.5% increase, respectively, in failure rate compared to scores before school shutdowns.
Marin’s numbers were the highest increases in the Bay Area.
Marin’s math failure rate increased 6.8% over pre-pandemic levels. Alameda increased 2.9%, Contra Costa 5.3%, San Francisco 5.6%, San Mateo 4.3% and Santa Clara 5.2%.
Marin students scored better than California students as a whole, and California generally out scored the nation.
That was of little consolation to Heather J. Hough, executive director of policy analysis for PACE, or Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent, non-partisan research center.
She called it “a massive decline”
“We have not seen anything like that ever,” Hough told the Mercury News. “This is an unprecedented challenge that we have to face. This should really provide a call to action and cause of alarm.”
CalMatters reported that the Education Department refused to release data on how California students performed on the Smarter Balanced standardized test based on state standards, saying it would do so by the end of the year — which skeptics interpreted to mean after the election.
The department reversed course in the face of a legal appeal and scheduled the public data release for last week.
David Loy of the First Amendment Coalition said: “I can’t read minds, but it does give the appearance of trying to conceal the data.”
Nationally, it was the largest drop ever in math scores. Math scores fell 8 points in eighth grade and 5 points in fourth grade. The drop was seen as another powerful indication of how children suffered during the pandemic.
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