Today Californians get their first statewide look at test scores measuring the toll the pandemic took on students — and the way state education officials have handled the rollout provides plenty of clues that the news won’t be good.
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Earlier this fall the state Education Department refused a media request to immediately release the scores, saying it would do so by the end of 2022. That fueled speculation that the agency’s head, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, was delaying the release until after his November re-election bid. Eventually the department reversed course and agreed to release the data.
But it did so in a way guaranteed to complicate coverage. Reporters received the data Sunday morning, under a news embargo until 10 a.m. today. Typically, they use that embargo time to interview district officials and education experts — so releasing test score data when those sources are unavailable hinders reporters’ ability to analyze and contextualize an important measurement of the pandemic’s impact on California’s public school students.
“I can’t read minds, but it does give the appearance of trying to conceal the data,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. “It’s not uncommon that government at all levels will release data or other news when it’s inconvenient for media.”
It’s also likely not a coincidence that the state results will be released to the public the same day scores on a different test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unveiled just past midnight on the East Coast. That test, taken by a much smaller sample of California students, allows comparisons between all states — and showed an achievement drop in every single one.
But Gov. Gavin Newsom immediately issued a press release highlighting the fact that California students overall didn’t fare as poorly as those in most other states. Anyone hoping to divine how divergent state pandemic policies impacted academic achievement will find these national results confounding: California fared about the same as Florida and Texas, two states that rushed to return to in-person learning.
Not so California, where state officials deferred to local control. Citing health concerns, schools here generally continued remote learning long after students in many other states had returned to their classrooms.
Unlike the national test, California’s Smarter Balanced tests are given to almost all students in grades three through eight and grade eleven every year. They measure whether students have mastered state standards for math and English language arts. The scores the state is releasing are for the 2021-22 school year, the first year that all students in the designated grades were required to take the tests since the start of the pandemic.
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