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The most recent Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment results showed that student achievement in Minnesota remains stagnant several years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused scores to fall precipitously.
Fewer than half of Minnesota public school students are meeting state standards in reading and math, the data show, essentially unchanged from the previous year. Before the pandemic, nearly 60% of students were proficient in reading and 55% were meeting standards in math.
Those calculations exclude the roughly 8% of students who opted out of taking the math exam and the 5% who didn’t take reading.
The numbers mask considerable grade-level variation in test scores, however. While achievement has fallen across the board since 2019, some grade levels have registered smaller drops than others.
And alarmingly, the data show that in some grade levels scores have continued to deteriorate every year since the pandemic, suggesting that effects of learning loss are ongoing.
Standardized tests are a blunt instrument for measuring student achievement, and many teachers are quick to point out that any given student’s abilities are greater than the sum of their MCA scores .
Education Minnesota, the state teacher’s union, said in a statement last week that “raising the academic achievement of all the students who take the state’s MCA tests will be difficult when more than 80% of school districts are still reporting a shortage of qualified educators to teach the material.”
Other experts have pointed to stark racial inequalities and a general sense of complacency as drivers of Minnesota’s test score declines.
In math, elementary students generally perform better than those in middle school or high school. In 2024, between 55% and 60% of third and fourth graders were proficient in math, compared to about 40% among middle schoolers and just 35% — barely over one-third — among high school juniors.
The share of students meeting proficiency standards, in other words, falls by more than 20 percentage points between fourth grade and junior year.
The trend among that latter group is especially concerning. After posting a smaller 2019-2021 drop than students in other grades, proficiency rates among juniors have continued to decline each year, perhaps a reflection of missing out on the crucial building blocks for high school math during their pandemic-era middle school years. The rate most recently dropped a full percentage point in 2024 while most other grades held steady.
Juniors are near the end of their high school careers, with little classroom time remaining to catch up to the standards. No MCA exams are administered senior year, so it’s not known whether the deficient juniors are able to catch up by the time they graduate.
The picture is somewhat more muddled in reading. Scores are higher overall, with fifth and sixth graders showing proficiency rates of 55% or more. Notably, more than half of students in tenth grade — the last year the reading MCA is administered — show proficiency, a much better showing for high schoolers than in math.
Fifth graders and eighth graders have registered declines every single year since the pandemic, suggesting that learning loss remains an ongoing problem.
Across math and reading scores, seventh and eighth graders continue to demonstrate the largest achievement deficits relative to 2019. Proficiency rates among seventh graders are down by roughly 12 percentage points, while among eighth graders the gap is closer to 14 percentage points.
Those deficits may stem from missing out on in-person instruction as third and fourth graders during the pandemic, when many foundational reading and math skills are usually established.
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