(NewsNation) — Most states in America are not making information on student performance after COVID school closures accessible or transparent, a new study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education found.
“How easy would it be for a parent or advocate to compare student performance pre- and post-COVID?” the Arizona-based organization said. “The short answer: in most states, it’s not easy at all.”
Researchers evaluated all report card websites from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and gave them a grade based on how easy it would be for someone to find “longitudinal data” on performance. Only seven earned an A: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
There were 34 states that received a grade of C or worse, and reviewers rated 27 states’ reports as “fair” or “poor” in terms of usability.
Many of the report card websites differed “substantially” in usability and interpretability, researchers said.
“For instance, some sites featured attractive visuals that we thought a parent would be able to interpret,” they said. “In contrast, other sites bombarded the user with mountains of disaggregated data that would be very difficult, if not impossible, for an average viewer without a PhD in data science to understand. On some sites, the menus for searching and selecting schools were easy to use, while on others, they were sources of maddening frustration.”
This is a problem, the Center on Reinventing Public Education says, because the group has “lots of suggestive evidence that parents don’t understand the magnitude of the COVID-19 downturns in achievement or attendance, or at least aren’t as concerned as experts think they should be.”
The Education Recovery Scorecard found that while U.S. students made gains in subjects like math and reading in the last school year, they remained behind compared to where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning gaps created by this mostly fall along socioeconomic lines, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard. The Center on Reinventing Public Education also noted that students from historically marginalized groups — students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities and English language learners — were more negatively affected by the pandemic.
While student achievement in general has declined substantially in all core subjects, the Center on Reinventing Public Education said this isn’t the only issue that needs attention. Student absenteeism has skyrocketed as well, with rates in many locales “doubling,” the center said in its report.
“While students have recovered some of their losses, they are not where they were — or where they would have been if COVID-19 had not happened,” the center said in its report.
To rectify data accessibility issues, the center suggests states collaborate to create a unified, user-friendly report card model with “consistent and transparent data; that schools test users’ experience on the report card sites; and that federal support might be needed to standardize transparency efforts.”