This article was originally published in Maine Morning Star.
Whether Maine students have recovered from pandemic-era learning disruptions is unclear due to the state’s choice to not make most data before 2020 publicly available.
That’s according to a new national report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, that developed a “report card” to gauge how easily accessible every state made data on student achievement, chronic absenteeism and high school graduation.
Maine was one of only three states across the country — the other two are New Mexico and North Dakota — that earned zero points out of the 21 possible. That means Maine had no data before 2020 available on any of the seven metrics mentioned in the report, including achievement levels, growth and proficiencies in English Language Arts, mathematics, science and social studies, chronic absenteeism or other attendance indicators, high school graduation rates, and English language learner proficiency, according to the CRPE report.
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The lack of this data conceals crucial information from parents and other stakeholders on how well their school district is doing on key performance indicators, according to Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and an author of the report. While making long-term data available is only one of the numerous ways of measuring transparency in public education, it is an important metric, according to the report and Polikoff.
“Parents … and other stakeholders may not be aware of the magnitude of this issue when states don’t make this data available for comparison, given how important covid was in disrupting education,” he said.
COVID-19 had enormous impacts on American education. Nationwide, public school students have not recovered from pandemic-era learning loss, chronic absenteeism continues to be an issue, and the pandemic disrupted high school graduation rates, which seem to be on the rebound .
“But those facts are only visible if the data are available,” Polikoff said.
The Maine Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Changing state assessments may be part of the problem
The issue of limited data availability is compounded by changing state-level assessments in Maine. The state has changed how it evaluates student performance at least five times in the last 15 years or so.
These testing discrepancies have continued post-pandemic. Testing paused for the 2019-20 school year, and the way Maine students are evaluated has not remained consistent since. The DOE announced a new mechanism in 2021, which was used for two years. The way students are evaluated changed again for spring 2023 testing, according to a note on the DOE website.
That means even with three years of publicly available data, test scores from the spring of 2021 and 2022 can’t be compared with 2023 to gain a comprehensive understanding of how students are performing.
Other states also have dealt with changing state-level assessments, Polikoff said, but still made data available while presenting the caveat of changing testing models, which Maine could have done for previous years.
“Maine has clearly made the choice to not present any information from pre-2020 and that might be … because they change their tests and so they don’t really feel it’s appropriate,” Polikoff said.
“But I would argue that that might be true of the standardized test data, but it’s definitely not true of some of the other indicators,” he added, pointing to high school graduation rates and chronic absenteeism data.
Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com . Follow Maine Morning Star on Facebook and X .
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