Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to keep up with education news from Denver and around the state.
Colorado released test results Thursday from this spring’s round of standardized tests given to public school students in third through eighth grades.
Overall, scores have improved slightly over last year, but still, fewer students are meeting expectations in 2023 than in 2019. The trend is similar to 2022.
The number of fourth and eighth graders who could read and write at or above grade level this past spring remains more than 4 percentage points behind the share who could do so in 2019. Seventh and eighth graders are similarly behind in math. Each percentage point represents thousands of students not meeting expectations and less prepared for the next grade.
At the same time, fifth and sixth graders are posting similar scores in reading and writing to their peers five years ago, and in math, all elementary students are.
When broken down by grade level, only one group of students did better than their counterparts in 2019: fifth graders in math. This year, 36.5% of fifth graders met or exceeded expectations in math, up from 35.7% who did in 2019.
Gaps remain large and persistent. Multilingual learners seem to be among the students state officials say could be falling farther behind.
Our searchable table below allows you to search for your school or district, and compare it to the state averages for both math and English language arts. The table shows the percentage of tested students who met or exceeded expectations in each subject.
The results will be used in school and district ratings which could be released later this month.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
