CHARLESTON – It is no secret that educational attainment for West Virginia students in the areas of math and reading was low even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove those scores lower, but education leaders in the state are looking to reverse the trend.
Earlier this week, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its 2022 Report Card showing a nationwide decrease in English Language Arts (ELA) and math scores for students in fourth and eighth grades – the largest drop since NAEP first issued assessments in 1990.
NAEP assessments report out math and ELA results based on average scores ranging from zero to 500. In West Virginia, fourth graders during the 2021-2022 school year scored 226 in math, six points below 2019 scores. Eighth graders scored 260 in math, 12 points below 2019 scores. In reading, fourth graders scored 205, eight points below 2019 scores, while eighth graders scored 249, six points below 2019 scores.
Speaking Thursday, West Virginia Education Association President Dale Lee said he and his fellow educators understand how the NAEP scores look, but they don’t tell the full story, and they don’t provide specific data for teachers to know what areas within math and reading need the most attention.
“It’s a random selection of students; 14% of our fourth graders, 13% of our eighth graders took the test,” Lee said. “You don’t know where they were, who they are, what schools or anything else, so you can’t get the data to say here’s the area that we need to improve on. Here’s the counting that we need to improve on, or something.”
The NAEP scores confirmed what West Virginia’s own summative assessments showed in September – students in the state took a big hit in learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding to already below-average test scores. Members of the West Virginia Board of Education received a sneak peek at the scores during the summer.
“These scores are not surprising to me. I fully expected they’d be that way,” said West Virginia Board of Education President Paul Hardesty by phone earlier this week.
It was Hardesty’s first meeting as the new board president when the board received the preliminary data.
Since then, Hardesty has been vocal about the need for the state Department of Education, under new State Superintendent of Schools David Roach, and county education officials to redouble their efforts on focusing on reading and math fundamentals.
“I have directed Superintendent Roach, and we’ve directed the department that we’re going to focus on going back to the basics, being math, reading and writing,” Hardesty said. “We have to do that going forward. We have to get those core, basic classes functional, so to speak, to where we can move forward. We’ve got to go back and focus on the basics.”
The Balanced Scorecard looks at multiple factors, including test scores from the annual statewide assessment in Grades 3, 8 and 11. It first debuted for the 2017-2018 school year, after Gov. Jim Justice called for the end of a previous system that graded schools on an A-F scale.
The Balanced Scorecard for the 2021-2022 school year showed that 53.9% of West Virginia students were proficient in ELA, a three-point improvement from the 2020-2021 school year as schools were dealing with shutdowns and remote learning due to the spread of COVID-19. However, it was three points below the 2018-2019 school year, when 56.9% of students were proficient in ELA.
Only 48.8% of students tested were proficient in math during the 2022 school year, nearly five points up from 44% during the 2021 school year but down nearly five points from 53.5% during the 2019 school year. No statewide summative assessment was offered during the 2019-2020 school year after schools were shut down when the pandemic first hit the state in March 2020.
Lee said it is easy to blame the pandemic for the loss in learning, but other factors continue to affect how students perform even prior to the pandemic, such as the number of students from low-income families, students being raised by other family members or foster families due to the state’s opioid crisis.
“We have higher percentage of poverty and a higher percentage of students who don’t live with their biological parents being raised by grandparents or neighbors, uncles or aunts, then we have a higher number that are tested, which affect scores,” Lee said.
State Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, is the new chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee and a public school teacher for more than 15 years. Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, gave Grady the charge of working with education officials on ways to improve educational attainment in public schools.
Speaking by phone Thursday, Grady said she was already collaborating with Roach on a new literacy program before the NAEP scores were released.
“The two of us share a passion for wanting to make sure that our school systems are successful and make sure that our students are successful,” Grady said. “We had been looking at some literacy initiatives and literacy programs that other states have implemented … so we are modeling some literacy legislation for specifically focusing on kindergarten through third grade based on the models from other states that have shown success.”
Lee said he would like to see the return of the innovation zone program, which allowed schools and teachers more flexibility from state board policies to implement new programs. Funding for the program ceased and the Legislature turned its focus to the state’s public charter school pilot program and the Hope Scholarship educational savings account program.
“Innovation zones was where teachers got together and came up with ideas to improve their school and to try new things and to ask for waivers from the voluminous number of policies that we have,” Lee said. “In each of those, you saw test scores increase, but the Legislature stopped funding it so we can fund charter schools and Hope Scholarships and everything else.”
Grady said one of the problems she sees in the classroom is that students often don’t have the support at home, with parents and guardians keeping school and home life separate instead of continuing the learning at home.
“As a teacher, one of the things that I have seen more and more over the course of my 15 years in the classroom is the value of education from a family perspective, as in like a parent perspective,” Grady said. “It’s more of an attitude of, well, that’s your schoolwork and we’re at home now.
“I think it’s a combination of everybody being overwhelmed,” Grady continued. “You have more parents working long hours now. You have running from place to place and activity to activity, and there’s maybe not as much time to sit down and, um, actually work on things that are helping or enriching the kids.”
Lee said teachers need more freedom and fewer burdens that limit their time working directly with students, and schools need more freedom to focus on the needs of students in their communities.
“If you want to make a difference, we have to ask the experts — the educators — and it can’t be a one-size-fits-all top-down type of situation,” Lee said. “It has to be each school figuring out what they need, what they need to do, how to best reach their kids and move forward that way.”
It also might take a culture shock to wake parents and guardians to the problems their children are having in schools. House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, sponsored a bill last year that would have required students be held back in they did not reach math and ELA proficiency rates by the end of third grade. Grady and Lee didn’t agree with the legislation itself, but they did agree with the goal.
“I think the intent was great, but I wouldn’t have supported that bill just the way it was written,” Grady said. “However, this literacy bill that the state superintendent and I have been working on together incorporates that to an extent. It is specific about the interventions that take place in each grade level and how often that has to happen when a child shows they’re not proficient.”
“We have to change the culture in many of our classrooms, many of our schools and many of the kids,” Lee said. “They have to learn to value education. It has to make a difference for him. Almost everyone could tell you of a teacher that changed their lives in some way. We have to go back to giving the freedom to the teachers to be able to address the need of each student and figure out how to make that change for them.”
Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.
