Colorado student performance improving but far from goal, test scores show

More public school students are meeting grade-level expectations on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success.   

The state's CMAS and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were released Thursday, and students are performing at or above pre-pandemic levels in most grades and subjects. The tests were administered in April.

Still, fewer than half of public school students are meeting grade-level expectations set by the state and measured on the CMAS test.

Achievement in math is nowhere near where educators want it to be - fewer than four in 10 fourth graders are meeting expectations in math, for example. But there have been solid gains after the state invested more heavily to provide math tutors and more tools to teachers to help kids catch up.

"The fact that we've seen gains year over year, over year, at this point, I think it's a real indication that the focus, the legislation, the resources are really paying off," said Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Cordova.

The results show that longstanding achievement gaps between student groups persist and remain too wide, according to Cordova.

"How do we accelerate growth, particularly for the groups of students who are furthest from where they need to be? That improvement is not happening equally across the state, and it's a place we know that we need more support and we need to learn from the places that are doing the best work in that," said Cordova.

For multilingual learners, students whose native language is not English, achievement was low across grades and subjects, with most students in the lower performance levels. 

Cordova said what was particularly concerning was that many new-to-country students whose first language is Spanish were also performing poorly on the Spanish test.

She said cohorts of educators across districts will work together to tackle the challenge, to ensure these students have the right supports they need to be successful in school. 

"To be able to have a foundation in their first language, to be able to make that strong transition into English. I think it's an area we're going to continue to apply great focus on for our multilingual learners if we hope to see them perform at levels that we know they can," said Cordova.

Another bright spot: SAT results for 11th-grade students improved in reading, writing, and math compared to last year, with more than 61% of 11th graders taking the SAT meeting reading and writing goals.

The disaggregated results show that female students outperformed male students in English Language Arts, and males outperformed females in math.

See complete results by school district, individual schools, and student groups online.