Alabama students are again standing out nationally for their academic success in the latest round of test result analyses showing how students are recovering from pandemic learning losses.
However, those same results also highlight stark inequalities in achievement across Alabama’s school districts.
The Education Recovery Scorecard, developed by researchers from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth universities, indicates that Alabama has returned to pre-pandemic levels in math and is nearing that milestone in reading.
“We’re leading the country in recovery,” Alabama Superintendent Eric Mackey told Alabama Daily News.
Strategy working?
Out of 137 school districts with test data for 2019 and 2024, 48 surpassed their average student 2019 scores in reading and math.
“What it tells me is that the strategy is working,” he said. Those strategies include providing teachers with coaching in reading and math instruction and extra instructional time in school.
According to the scorecard, Alabama leads the nation in math recovery and ranks second in reading growth. The scorecard follows January National Assessment of Educational Progress results showing Alabama fourth grade students leading the nation in academic growth since the pandemic.
The scorecard not only compares state performance, but also drills down to the district level, where it highlights troubling disparities in growth and measures of grade-level equivalency. In some Alabama school districts, students are as much as four grade levels below the national average while others are nearly three grade levels ahead of their peers.
And while the state as a whole showed impressive growth since the pandemic, the state still lags behind national average on grade-level measures, with students performing nearly a full grade level behind in math and slightly less than a grade behind in reading.
Some schools still need additional strategies and support, Mackey said.
“If some are not achieving as fast as others, what do we need to do differently there?” he said.
The scorecard reveals students in a dozen high-poverty districts are half-a-grade behind in math where students were five years ago. And more than two dozen districts are between a half and a full grade behind in reading.
Stanford’s Sean Reardon emphasized these gaps are not new.
“The pandemic highlighted inequalities in our education system; it didn’t create them,” Reardon said. “And so we don’t need just ‘pandemic recovery’ now, but long-term structural reform.”
Improvements and growth in learning from 2019 to 2024
The Education Recovery Scorecard is unique, combining NAEP results with state achievement test results. That makes it possible to compare states, school districts within a state and even across state lines on two measures: growth and grade level.
Growth measures show how students in 2024 compare to their 2019 peers in the same district. If that growth is positive, it means students are performing at a higher level than those in the same district five years earlier.
Statewide, growth measures for school districts closely follow results from Alabama’s standardized test, called the ACAP, because those scores are used as part of the calculations. In most districts, students performed better in math than reading.
Of nine districts that researchers highlighted for math success nationally, two are in Alabama: Birmingham City and DeKalb County schools.
Birmingham schools, where nearly 90% of students are economically disadvantaged, saw scores rise from 2022 to 2024, nearly returning to pre-pandemic levels. Mackey said he’s impressed with Birmingham’s growth and attributes it to their efforts to expand learning after school and holding intersessions during traditional school breaks.
“We started school early; first of August,” Superintendent Mark Sullivan told researchers. “We went to school for nine weeks. And then we had a week off. …The first intersession we had about 1,800 students.”
DeKalb County schools, where 75% of students are economically disadvantaged, have surpassed 2019 scores in math and in reading. Superintendent Wayne Lyles told researchers they focus heavily on making sure teachers are well-equipped.
“Our goal in DeKalb is to have an effective teacher in every classroom,” he said. “To make that a reality, we have a responsibility to provide the materials and training needed for them to be successful.”
Piedmont City Schools in eastern Calhoun County came out on top in math, with students performing nearly two-and-a-half grade levels above their 2019 peers. Piedmont held the same top ranking in math progress on the 2022 scorecard.
While at the other end of the scale, Dallas County students fell nearly a full grade behind students five years earlier.
Similarly in reading, Piedmont City schools again come out on top, with students more than a grade level ahead of where they were in 2019, but students in Perry County schools are 1.3 grade levels, or about a year and three months, behind.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Mary Sell and originally published by Alabama Daily News. It is reprinted with permission.
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