New results from the annual Georgia Milestones tests show academic gains in the wake of the devastation of COVID-19, when many parents, politicians, teachers and others feared a generation of students was falling behind.
English Language Arts and math are the most frequently tested subjects, from third grade into high school.
More students statewide scored high enough in English to be deemed “proficient” or above than was the case in the prior school year, with increases of 1 to 3 percentage points in most of the tested grades. Students in fifth grade had the most meaningful increase, with a 6-point jump. Third graders produced the only negative aggregate result, with a 1 percentage point drop in the proficiency rate.
The reading scores, which have been the cause of much hand-wringing since the pandemic, were less promising.
More than half the tested grades (the reading questions are embedded in the English tests) went backward a bit, though students in fifth and sixth grades made significant headway, with 3-point proficiency increases.
State officials have not analyzed why the Milestones scores changed the way they did, with those varied performances between grades. Allison Timberlake, the Georgia Department of Education official over testing, had a hunch about the English scores though.
She noted that third graders — the one grade that lost ground on the English tests — were in kindergarten during the first full school year of the pandemic. It was a time of massive upheaval, when many kids tried to learn at home, in front of a computer, or endured frequent school disruptions due to infections.
Kindergarten, and even the years before when children are learning to talk, builds a foundation for the reading and writing skills that will be taught in elementary school.
“They were at that crucial age,” Timberlake said. “I think that probably likely has an impact here.”
Students saw gains in science in only fifth grade, with no change in eighth grade and 1-point declines in the two high school subjects, biology and physical science, which some take in eighth grade. The scores rose in social studies at the two tested grade levels — in eighth grade and in high school.
The department did not present an analysis of the changes in math performance because of a 2021 rewrite of the math content standards.
Students encountered the tests for those new standards for the first time last school year. Officials had to evaluate the results and determine the “cut” scores that would place students at one of four performance levels, with the threshold between the two middle tiers — developing and proficient — among the most closely watched.
The state Board of Education met on Thursday after the Department of Education press briefing and approved new cut scores for math. There were no changes to the line between developing and proficient or between developing and the bottom quartile, called “beginning.” But the board lowered the scores that place students in the top tier, known as “distinguished,” for most of the grade levels.
During a briefing about the Milestones scores Thursday, the state Department of Education reported that 60 literacy coaches have been placed in low-performing elementary schools across the state and that the agency worked with 100 teachers to provide online tutoring for high school students. AmeriCorps provided math and reading tutoring for up to 5,000 students.
The recent gains build on spotty results from the 2022-23 school year, when younger students tended to score better than their peers had the year before. However, those gains didn’t reach much into the higher grades, particularly in high school, where students generally lost ground.
They also come amid sobering results nationally on a proprietary test used by many Georgia schools independent of the state tests.
NWEA reported earlier this month that scores on its MAP Growth tests show nearly all grades lagging pre-pandemic trends.
Yet these latest Milestones results would not come as a surprise to Angira Sceusi, the incoming executive director of redefinEd, an education advocacy group that works with metro Atlanta schools. (The group also processes the various state educational metrics, including test results, and publishes them in easy to consume charts; it’ll take a while before these new results are included, though.)
The statewide focus on literacy may give reading and English scores a lift over time, Sceusi said Thursday before the state released the Milestones results. But a major impetus for any gains in that subject may simply reflect a return to pre-pandemic norms.
“If we look at how far those numbers fell during the pandemic,” she said, “we should assume that there should be growth — some sort of catch-up that is occurring for a few years — to bring students back at least to the level where they were pre-pandemic.”
Metro Atlanta still isn’t there yet, she added.
And the path to recovery may become more difficult, as federal support wanes. Georgia was given more than $6 billion in federal grants to address academic losses caused by the pandemic. Districts had a time limit to spend it. September is the deadline, observed Dana Rickman, president of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
Yet many problems linger.
“There is still sustained mental health trauma. There are still gaps in learning,” Rickman said Friday morning after the results were released. “So to sustain what they have been doing with fewer resources is a big challenge.”
