Gaps in Michigan student achievement remain wider than pre-pandemic norm, report finds – Bridge Michigan

Overall, Michigan students are making the growth in a school year that would have been expected before COVID, the assessment results in the report show, but some students are still falling behind, because they are not learning at a fast enough pace to catch up.

The same trend is being seen nationally, researchers say.

“We are making only very slow progress,” said Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington and director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

“You really need the pace of learning to be considerably faster” to make up for lost learning, he added, “and we’re not seeing that.”

Goldhaber said the state of recovery nationally is “concerning” because tests are highly predictive of how kids will fare later on in life.

Benchmark assessments offer researchers and policy makers a couple of advantages over yearly M-STEP standardized test results, because they more clearly measure student growth during a school year, from fall to spring. Some of the assessments show how kids are achieving at a level beyond their grade.

In many cases, the assessments can be better than letter grades or report cards at helping parents understand how their children are performing, said Goldhaber.

“Grades are actually higher than they were before the pandemic, and they don’t seem to comport with what we know about test scores,” he said. “The meaning of an ‘A’ in terms of knowledge as assessed by the test is different from what we knew before the pandemic. I am worried that parents can be getting false signals about how their students are doing from grades, and maybe they should be paying some attention to the tests.”

The assessment results do have their limitations. The analysis includes assessments from about 773,000 of the 947,000 K-8 students in the state, at 769 of 852 school districts.

Legislation that passed in 2020 requiring Michigan districts to give the benchmark assessments gave them several options of approved test providers. Because of this, researchers did not include students who moved districts in their analysis.

Additionally, many students missed testing dates.

“Some of the reasons students did not take tests are the same reasons that they may have been impacted even more by the pandemic,” said Kilbride. “That could mean our results are showing a rosier picture than what truly happened.”

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.