New student test data released Thursday by the Colorado Department of Education gives educators, school and district leaders and state officials a deeper look into where students are rebounding in reading and math coming out of the pandemic.
The detailed performance data — which illuminates how students in individual districts and schools fared on state standardized tests in the spring — builds on statewide results from CMAS, the PSAT and the SAT unveiled last week by CDE that pointed to a mix of good and bad news. Some grades performed better last spring than their peers before the pandemic, but serious achievement gaps continue to hold some students back.
The new data captures both student proficiency in districts and schools — meaning the percentage of students who met or exceeded state expectations in reading and math — and student growth, which measures how much progress students show from one school year to another compared to their classmates.
You can check out how your school and district performed on reading and math last spring as well as each year since the 2018-19 school year by exploring the map created by the Keystone Policy Center for The Colorado Sun below.
Colorado schools have largely continued to inch forward in helping students overcome learning deficits from the pandemic, when schools immediately shifted to remote learning and spent the next few years unpredictably pivoting between in-person and online lessons.
In some parts of the state, districts have made notable gains in getting some of their most vulnerable students reaching and even exceeding state expectations in reading. That’s a top priority for educators, who widely agree students must know how to read by third grade, when their instruction takes a turn and they switch from learning to read to reading to learn.
Those districts include Calhan School District near Colorado Springs, where 45.3% of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch — a federal indicator of poverty — met or exceeded state standards in reading. The rural district far outpaced the statewide percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch who met or exceeded state standards in reading — 26.4%.
So did Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 in Colorado Springs, where 45.7% of kids qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded reading benchmarks.
Other districts whose students from low-income households outperformed the state in reading include:
- Liberty School District J-4 in Joes (70.6% of students on free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading expectations)
- Norwood School District in San Miguel County (50% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
- Sanford School District 6J in the San Luis Valley (49.5% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
- Sangre De Cristo Re-22J in Mosca (48.5% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
- Salida School District (47.7% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
- Peyton School District northeast of Colorado Springs (47.6% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
- Idalia School District RJ-3 on border with Kansas (46.7% of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch met or exceeded state reading standards)
The high-stakes dash to get young kids reading at grade level
When Calhan students who need an extra hand learning how to read gather in small groups, much of the time they’re wiggling around or racing one another rather than sitting still.
It’s not a distraction but rather a way to help words better stick with each student, said Megan Lightner, a reading interventionist for Calhan elementary schoolers.
And it’s working, as many Calhan students — including those living in poverty — have proved they are proficient in reading.
Still, Lightner said her district of about 420 students continues to see lingering struggles from the pandemic shaping young readers, who in recent years often became confused about how to form vowel sounds while trying to learn from teachers wearing masks.
Difficult behaviors have also inhibited some students from making leaps in literacy, she noted, as educators have had to drill down to the basics of how to learn in a classroom.
“Reading requires quite a bit of your focus to be able to read proficiently,” said Lightner, who has been coaching Calhan elementary students for three years. “And what I think a lot of us notice is a lot of the kids just don’t have a lot of grit as far as like, ‘I have to sit here and do this task for this long.’”
The stakes to get students reading on grade level in the earliest grades are particularly high: Once past first grade, only one in eight kids will catch up in reading if they’re not caught up by first grade, Lightner said.
“So it’s like by the time they get to fourth, fifth grade, you’re like trying to turn around a semi versus let’s focus on these couple little things and it’ll probably all start to click,” she said. “If they’ve been behind all through elementary, it’s almost impossible to get them up to grade level by the time they’re in fourth or fifth grade.”
One strategy that has made a difference has involved folding students’ families into the learning process in Calhan, where last year 56% of kids qualified for free and reduced-price lunch. Lightner regularly meets with families of students falling behind in reading so she can keep them updated on their child’s progress and offer them ways to work on literacy at home and prioritize reading every day.
She also works to inject as much fun as she can into her reading groups, turning her lessons into lively games. Sometimes, students jump onto scooters and race each other toward cones labeled with words.
“Movement is really, really important,” Lightner said. “There’s so many areas of your brain that have to engage when you read. So if we can get them moving their bodies, most of the time you can bridge the gap from one side of the brain to the other.”
Students living in poverty who attend the nearby Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 have also bounded forward in reading. During the 2023-24 school year, 17.4% of kids qualified for free and reduced-price lunch.
Assistant Superintendent of Student Achievement Stacy Aldridge acknowledges her district serves fewer kids living in poverty than other districts in the region, but concentrations of students from low-income households vary throughout schools in the district. At one school, more than a third of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.
Aldridge said the district narrows its focus to the factors it can control to give students a greater chance at succeeding — including how class time is spent, what research-based learning strategies work for kids, ways to make sure kids feel like they belong at their school and efforts to mitigate challenges parents face.
School staff in the district of about 3,500 kids maximize the amount of time students are exposed to reading materials in school, since some students from low-income families have less access to books, said Aldridge, who taught for 13 years and served as a principal for nine years. Teachers also work to develop students’ critical thinking skills from an early age, asking them thoughtful questions about the texts they’re reading and assessing their reading skills in a variety of ways beyond multiple choice.
Another approach to bolstering literacy throughout the district revolves around having “vocabulary-rich experiences” across subjects including in science and social studies, Aldridge said, so that the school day is packed with reading from start to finish.
One of the biggest lessons that Aldridge and other educators carry into schools as they work to give all students the best shot at thriving: A student’s potential to excel in reading — or in any class — is not dictated by their family’s circumstances.
“Poverty knows no ZIP code,” Aldridge said, “and I think no matter where you are or how you’ve been impacted by either COVID or challenging financial times as a family, all kids have the ability to show high levels of achievement.”