CMS student test scores plummet, district points to ‘seeing the impacts’ of COVID
COVID-19, not just the forced switch to virtual classrooms, is to blame for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students performing far more poorly on fall end-of-course tests compared to the previous year, a top school district official says.
“We’re seeing the impacts of the COVID instructional conditions,” Frank Barnes, CMS chief equity and accountability officer, told the Board of Education this week after releasing the test results.
“We’re not just experiencing remote teaching,” he said. “We are trying to teach and learn through a global pandemic. And that is different than just remote learning. What we’re seeing is the cumulative impact of that experience on our kids and students.”
CMS test results during pandemic
Barnes released 2020 end-of-course test results that showed:
▪ Half of all CMS students who took the biology test were deemed “not proficient,” compared with 39% in late 2019.
▪ On the NC Math 1 test, the numbers were even worse: 62% of CMS students who were tested performed on the “not proficient” level, compared with nearly 37% the year before.
▪ Nearly 46% were deemed “not proficient” in NC Math 3, compared with 36.5% the previous year.
▪ On the English 2 test, 33% were not proficient in 2020, compared with 32% in the fall of 2019.
Officials said 88% of all CMS students took the tests, and students in all racial subgroups generally performed worse than the previous year.
Among the exceptions: On English 2, 47.7% of Black students were not proficient, improving from 48.9% the year before. The percentage of Asian students deemed non-proficient on the test also improved, from 17.7% in late 2019 to 10.8% last fall.
The percentage of white students deemed non-proficient on that test worsened from 10.2% to 12.9%.
At the meeting, Barnes announced a “multi-phase, multi-year” plan to improve the numbers, including an ongoing return to in-person learning and a free six-week summer learning and enrichment program for up to 50,000 students.
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 12:16 PM.