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English learners in Colorado saw the largest drops in PSAT and SAT scores this past spring, bigger even than the score declines experienced by all high school students in the state.
The overall declines have led to discussions among state officials about adjusting high school graduation requirements and whether last spring’s scores can be compared to scores from previous years. Now, one Colorado superintendent is raising concerns about whether the PSAT and SAT scores in school districts that serve large numbers of English learners should even be used to rate a district’s academic performance.
“The rate of lost points in the scores is not equitable and it is not comparable,” said Karla Loría, superintendent of Adams 14 schools. “It hurts multilingual students and students with disabilities at a greater rate than any other student groups.”
One of the largest gaps statewide, for instance: 10th graders who aren’t identified to receive English language services had an average 5-point drop in their PSAT scores, while 10th graders who are learning English as a new language had an average drop of 83 points, which is 11.6%, or more than 16 times that of their counterparts.
When looking at just math scores, 10th grade English learners had a 13.6% drop in scores compared to a 1.3% drop among 10th graders who aren’t English learners.
Students with disabilities also saw large drops, though not as large as English learners.
In previous discussions about the overall declines of 2024, state officials said it’s difficult to know how much they represent a drop in performance and how much is due to the changes in the test format.
The digital PSAT and SAT students took in the spring of 2024 was adaptive, meaning that the questions students saw were dependent on how they were answering questions.
State officials also told the State Board of Education that it’s possible these lower results are a more accurate representation of learning for students who already performed at the lower range of the possible points.
That’s because, they say, students used to get advice to guess at questions they didn’t know or when they ran out of time. And some of those guesses were bound to be correct, earning them some extra points. But the new digital PSAT and SAT test online is designed to know when students are likely to be guessing, and so even if the guess is correct, the test won’t give students those points.
“Students were earning credit for content they didn’t know,” said Christina Wirth-Hawkins, chief assessment officer for the Colorado Department of Education.
Still, she said, the department isn’t telling schools to change how they do test prep with students, but rather telling them that the important thing is to help students learn content.
Drops in scores for English learners follows concerns raised last year
In Colorado Springs District 11, where about 6% of the district’s 22,700 students are identified as having limited or no English proficiency, 10th graders who aren’t yet English proficient had a 127-point drop in their scores, compared to a 27-point drop for other students.
In Westminster, where more than 24% of the district’s 7,600 students are learning English as a new language, 10th graders learning English had their average score drop by 121 points, compared to a 28-point drop for those who aren’t receiving English support.
In both the Harrison and Fort Morgan school districts, 10th graders learning English experienced drops of 120 points in their average score.
Because of the large gaps, Loria asked the board last month to consider the PSAT and SAT tests students took in the spring as a new test and not to use them against districts or schools in evaluations for at least one year.
She worried that the ratings for the districts serving large numbers of students in those subgroups would be significantly lower than for other districts.
“The impact is too serious to take it lightly,” Loría said.
This fall, preliminary ratings have already been calculated for schools and districts. The state is reviewing appeals before the ratings are finalized. The state Department of Education had first run an analysis to ensure the scores were still comparable to the previous year and fair to use in the ratings. Based on the analysis, the state tweaked the cut scores for the PSAT and SAT math sections of the test, but said it was still appropriate to use them as a factor for evaluating school and district performance.
On Wednesday, having received some additional data, the State Board voted again to tweak the cut scores for ratings next year, in particular for districts that use a three-year average of the scores. But the State Board did not opt to follow Loria’s suggestion of taking the scores out of consideration.
A spokesperson for College Board, the makers of the PSAT and SAT tests, said they’ve found in general “SAT scores from spring and fall 2024 are generally comparable to previous years.” According to data reports from the College Board website, students whose first language was something other than English had large drops in 10th grade PSAT scores, but not in 11th grade SAT scores.
At that national level, according to College Board data, students whose language was something other than English had a 57-point drop in their average scores compared to last year, while 10th graders whose first language was English had a 44-point drop.
The State Board’s vote is meant to adjust the expectations so that Colorado schools aren’t penalized for some of the score drops, since some could be due to the change in the test format, but Loría didn’t think it went far enough to account for the subgroup disparities.
Other districts did not raise the same concerns.
A spokesperson for the District 11 schools said the district is “addressing complex and contributing factors at the heart of our scores. We do not share the same concerns as Adams 14 at this time.”
Last year, when state officials first raised an alarm that data showed English learners might have been more impacted by the pandemic losses and having a harder time recovering compared to other student groups, many district leaders in Colorado did not identify the issue, even when their data also matched state concerns. Some said they weren’t doing anything different to help these students.
Adams 14 may have a bigger motivation than other districts to ask the state to change its rating system for schools and districts. It has been the only district to continue to receive low ratings for more than 10 years and face state sanctions for it, including a loss of accreditation at one point. State Board members more recently have backed off and put more trust in the district’s own improvement efforts, but so far, they have not yet produced a higher rating for the district.
Adams 14 leaders earlier this fall also asked the state board to consider environmental polluiton’s impact on school performance when they rate schools and districts.
The 2024 drops mean some gaps have doubled
Gaps already existed among English learners and those who don’t need English services, but they’ve grown with the 2024 results released a few months ago. In some districts, including Adams 14, they’ve doubled.
In Adams 14, English learners in 10th grade had a drop of 108 points, compared to a drop of 30 points for other students. For Adams 14, compared to 2023, the gap in the performance of English learners and students who already speak English in 10th grade grew from 70 points to 148. That’s a 111% increase in the gap.
The gap between the average score for English learners and students not identified for English services in District 11 are some of the largest in the state – larger than statewide gaps and growing fast.
The largest gap in that district, for instance, is among 11th graders who took the SAT. English learners in 11th grade had an average score of 625, compared to an average score of 910 for students not learning English as a new language. That’s a 285-point gap, up from a gap of 225 last year.
Of 25 districts that had data that didn’t have to be suppressed for privacy in both 2023 and 2024, only the Boulder Valley school district had 10th graders who are not yet English proficient improve their average scores.
When looking at scores without disaggregating, many districts had other students do well enough to average out a more moderate drop for their total populations. On average, combining all students, 10th graders in District 11 only had an average score drop of 31. In Westminster, the overall drop for 10th grade was 49 points.
Jorge Garcia, an advocate for multilingual students through the Colorado Association of Bilingual Education, said that although he hasn’t looked at the 2024 data closely, the issues aren’t new.
And if the state is confident that this new test format is accurately testing all students’ learning, he said there should be a plan to help students who are not yet proficient in English.
“If the educational system and the state is doing worse than we thought, then what are they doing about it?” Garcia said. “It would not surprise me that perhaps we have some leaders in charge, some, who don’t know what to do. They should begin to take a long hard look at how they’re failing these students so they can start to turn that around. If they continue to ignore it, it’s not going to get better.”
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
