How are Beaufort Co. schools addressing big drop in math, virtual student test scores?
When South Carolina’s Department of Education released school report cards for 2020-21 on Wednesday, the reaction across the state was that end-of-year test scores were “disappointing, but not surprising.”
That held true in Beaufort County, even though the school district scored above state averages. While English scores held steady in elementary and middle school and improved in high school, math scores declined, with a 6% drop in Algebra 1 scores from 2018-19 to 2020-21 and an 8.2% decrease in elementary and middle school students scoring on grade level.
Mary Stratos, chief instructional services officer for Beaufort County School District, said Wednesday that educators will have their hands full addressing lost learning during the pandemic.
They’re participating in professional development, using new software to target which concepts students are struggling with and rolling out robust after-school learning programs.
And they’re trying their hardest to keep students in-person, even as quarantines and COVID cases in schools continue to rise. This week, the district surpassed 500 COVID infections logged this school year, and more than 2,500 students and staff are currently quarantining.
“Last year, families had a choice of virtual or face-to-face instruction,” Beaufort County Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said in a Wednesday press release. “What we are gleaning from the data is that the schools that were predominantly face-to-face performed better on the state assessment.”
‘There’s no control group’
Both State Superintendent Molly Spearman and local officials point out that it’s not fair to compare the 2020-21 scores to 2018-19, the last year the state released this data.
That’s because testing looked very different last year. Students could be in-person, hybrid or virtual from classroom to classroom, and some opted out of taking the in-person tests altogether.
Additionally, it’s difficult to draw comparisons between the SC READY scores for elementary and middle school and EOC scores for high school.
According to the district’s director of data services, Daniel Fallon, SC READY scores are always drawn from one testing period, while EOC scores can include students in the same grade level who took the tests in different years.
“It’s not the same testing condition and testing environment” between 2019 and 2021, Stratos said. “The variable’s significantly different. ... Which children were not in a pandemic?”
Fallon added that since schools began virtually, parents had a better view “in the day-to-day environment what teachers do for our students.”
“It’s not in this report card,” he said. “It’s not a reportable category. They got a chance to see how hard teachers work.”
There were bright spots on the report card. The district had an 88.5% on-time graduation rate last year, which is 5.2% above the state average and “the highest for the county in recent decades,” according to a district press release.
What happened in math?
Even with those caveats, the new report cards are hard to stomach, and it’s the only testing data the state has released since the start of the pandemic.
Across the school district, 39.8% of elementary and middle school students scored at or above their grade level on SC READY math tests in 2020-21, compared to 48% in 2018-19. That number varies widely from school to school, ranging from 10.7% of students on grade level at the elementary side of Robert Smalls International Academy to 69.5% of students proficient at Coosa Elementary.
On the whole, clusters that had a consistently high percentage of virtual students, such as Whale Branch and Beaufort, saw a higher drop in test scores than their counterparts south of the Broad River, where in-person attendance was higher.
“We recognize the disparities that are pre-pandemic and in-pandemic,” Stratos said. “We also recognize there’s a correlation ... to performance and the number of students in virtual.”
Why did math fare so much worse than English in test scores? Stratos said it’s largely because math is a “continuum of learning,” much like learning a new language.
“Let’s say you were learning Spanish,” she said. “If you miss present-tense verb, you’re going to struggle with past-tense verb. If I miss order of operations, I’m going to have a very hard time at calculation there of a basic algebraic formula.”
Stratos noted that even with the major declines in math scores, Beaufort County schools still came out ahead of the state. State superintendent Molly Spearman estimated that seven out of 10 South Carolina students would end up behind grade level in 2020-21; in Beaufort County, that number was six out of 10, Stratos said.
The district is beefing up its resources to address math learning loss, adding software such as DreamBox and i-Ready Classroom Mathematics in elementary and middle school to figure out which specific concepts students are struggling with.
“These AI components actively assess student activity,” Fallon said. “It’s not just for the remediation of students; it will also accelerate students. It’s on both sides of the spectrum.”