A national assessment of math proficiency shows the lowest results in a decade, but in Ithaca, it’s even worse.
In late October the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is known as the “Nation’s Report Card” was released. This assessment is administered every two years and tests fourth and eighth graders on their math and reading proficiency. The report shows a huge drop in math proficiency in the United States, with the national average falling to 26 percent for eighth-grade math when just three years ago that number was 34 percent. According to data from these national report cards, math proficiency peaked from 2007 to 2011, when about 40 percent of students tested as proficient. Are there factors that caused students to perform poorly in math? How did math proficiency change in ICSD?
There isn’t any data from the NAEP about Ithaca specifically; however, there is data available from state math tests that are administered to grades three through eight. The most recent data available is the New York State test result from 2021, which was in the middle of the pandemic. In 2021, only 10 percent of eighth-grade students in Ithaca were considered proficient, meaning they scored a level three or four on the assessment. A level three on this assessment means that the student is able to meet the common core standards for their grade level, while a level four means that a student is excelling and is performing above their grade level’s standards.
The data pool may not be large enough to be completely accurate as only 82 eighth-grade students from ICSD were tested. Nevertheless, 10 percent is an extremely low percentage even compared to 2019’s results, which found that 21 percent of the 150 eighth graders tested were proficient. But it wasn’t always this way. In 2013, ICSD had 389 students take the state test, and only 41 percent of these students tested as proficient. Clearly, 41 percent to 10 percent is a considerable drop. One reason might be that the number of students that actually took these state assessments dropped significantly from 2013 to 2021. What additional factors might be contributing to this significant drop in math proficiency?
It is widely believed that the pandemic is the main reason why students are performing worse in school. Missing over a year and a half of a real school experience has set back a generation of learners. After the pandemic started, almost all school districts around the nation switched to a completely virtual learning plan. In the experience of many students in ICSD, this meant sitting around all day on computers, barely paying attention to what was going on in class. During the pandemic, students simply weren’t learning as well as they could, and definitely not like they had in previous years. It has been mostly agreed upon by educators and government officials, including the current Secretary of Education, Dr. Miguel Cardona, that this lack of proper education has caused a downfall in learning and proficiency for students.
After months of being completely virtual, schools slowly started to reopen and transition to a completely in-person classroom or a hybrid style of learning. The idea was that the earlier a school transitioned to being in-person, the more proficient its students were. That assumption, however, isn’t accurate, as data showed that there is no correlation between the two. Texas was a state that pushed for schools to reopen, however, their math proficiency is similar to the national average, which was 26 percent. According to NAEP data, in 2019 Texas had a math proficiency of 29 percent. Florida had similar reopening plans to Texas, and their math proficiency is slightly higher than the national average but is still below the 2019 proficiency of 31 percent. California, on the other hand, was very cautious when it came to reopening schools. Still, they had similar results to Florida, falling from 34 percent in 2019 to just a little over 26 percent. This data shows that reopening schools didn’t do much to change student performance, suggesting that there are other factors that may have contributed to student performance.
Returning to ICSD, the state math test results are not only affected by the number of students who took the tests, but also by who took the tests. In New York, a student in eighth grade taking Algebra is exempt from taking the state math assessment, because Algebra I counts as a ninth-grade course. This would have excluded the significant portion of eighth-grade students in ICSD who take Algebra I in eighth grade from taking the state math test, skewing the math proficiency data in Ithaca.
There might be other reasons. During the 2015-16 school year, ICSD elementary schools slowly switched from a branch of Singapore Math to a new math program, Eureka Math. This change caused widespread frustration among both teachers and students who felt that these math workbooks may have aligned with the curriculum requirements but they did not teach math effectively or in depth. This lack of foundation for math education in the district may have had detrimental effects on math proficiency in ICSD.
Math proficiency is going down in the U.S. and in Ithaca, and it cannot continue to deteriorate at the rate it is. There are many factors that could have caused this downfall such as a change in math programs, the COVID pandemic, and the number of students that actually take math assessments. In the coming years, the country and schools across the nation will see if they are able to bounce back from this and flip the story about math in the United States.