Standardized test results make Colorado schools look bad. There’s more to the story. 

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Fewer than half of last year’s third graders in Colorado public schools could read and write at grade level.

This means that just 40.8% of kids now entering fourth grade are able to read and understand a variety of texts and write essays supported by facts, standardized test results released last week by the Colorado Department of Education show.

This is despite a 2012 state law that made reading and writing a priority, with Colorado spending nearly $39 million this year on strengthening literacy among young readers, including by training teachers and administrators in the science of reading.

But there’s more to the story, educators say.

Colorado schools assess students every spring beginning in third grade using the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, part of a federal requirement to gauge whether students in elementary, middle and high school are meeting academic standards set by the state in subjects including reading, writing, math, science and social studies. It’s what Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova calls “a measuring stick” so that state leaders, teachers and parents understand how their kids are doing in school compared with their peers in other districts.

Yet the consequences for poor performance on CMAS are significant. School districts receive one of six accreditation ratings from the state largely influenced by how their students score on CMAS. Those that are high performing earn the title of “distinction.” And on the other end of the spectrum, the state assigns the lowest-performing districts a “turnaround” rating. 

Low-performing districts that see little academic improvement five years in a row land on the state’s accountability clock. That gives the State Board of Education more say in how to get the district back on track. Last year, three districts were labeled as turnaround and four were ranked one rung higher, meaning many of their students are still falling short of meeting state standards.

Not everyone is convinced that CMAS — which costs $18.3 million in state funding and about $2.2 million in federal funding each year — gives a definitive verdict on a school’s overall success or a child’s ability to finish a book, or that the test captures how students statewide are performing in reading, math and other core subjects. 

Much of their criticism is based on four issues:

• In some districts, more than half of students don’t sit for the tests because parents are allowed to opt them out. Statewide, participation varies across subjects and grade levels from 50.2% of 11th graders taking the CMAS science exam this past spring to 94% of fourth graders participating in the CMAS social studies test and 93.9% of third grade students taking the CMAS math test.
• Some districts don’t even have enough students taking the test to publicize the results. If a school has fewer than 16 students taking a specific CMAS test, the state masks that data from the public to prevent anyone from identifying how individual students scored. Schools and families in those districts can still see how students performed.
• Parents, schools and districts usually don’t get test results until after the end of the school year, making it impossible for teachers to take action for their current students with the data.
• The test offers only a snapshot of what students know and preparing for it can pull lesson plans away from other learning experiences, educators say.

“It’s one point in time, one day,” Lisa Yates, superintendent of the high-performing Buena Vista School District, told The Colorado Sun. “It does give some information, but there’s so much other information about a student’s reading ability that may not be captured in that one moment in time.”

Disagreements over standardized testing across the country have kept fiery debates crackling among educators, parents and policymakers. Behind those debates are varying opinions about whether schools can use the results to tailor instruction, concerns over how much stress standardized tests force upon classrooms and whether test content is biased toward certain groups of students. 

In Colorado, the longtime battles have led to discussions among district leaders, teachers, parents and education groups about how much students’ standardized test scores should count when rating schools. A task force, convened by the legislature in 2023, explored that question while taking a closer look at Colorado’s school accountability and accreditation system to find ways to improve that system and student learning. 

The task force released initial recommendations and will finalize those in November, proposing sweeping changes such as creating a statewide dashboard to display the academic programs and extracurricular activities schools offer. That way, families can make decisions about where to send their kids using more than just test scores. 

Córdova, Colorado’s top education official, said she sees standardized tests as one critical part of “a body of evidence around how kids are doing in school.” 

“Standardized tests actually give us the opportunity within the state to look at if you live in Huerfano or if you live in Harrison or if you live in Denver or if you live in Holyoke, how are kids doing on a common measure?” Córdova told The Sun. “It is not the only thing that’s important, but I think it’s a very important component of the whole body of evidence of how kids are doing in Colorado.”

But are the test results accurate?

Some superintendents have their doubts, arguing that test outcomes can be misleading, largely because state law allows parents to decide whether their students take CMAS assessments.

Parents who don’t trust the test 

Lonnie Brungardt has opted his son, now in seventh grade at Merino Junior-Senior High School, out of CMAS tests every year. Brungardt said he does not trust that CMAS test data is a reliable indicator of kids’ abilities in school.

His son is part of the vast majority of students in Buffalo School District RE-4J whose families reject the annual exams. Just 26% of the rural northeastern Colorado district’s 310 students sat for the assessments in spring 2025, said Brungardt, who is also the district superintendent.

Of those taking the test, 22% were kids with disabilities, Brungardt said.

Opting students out of the standardized test has picked up momentum, especially in rural districts. Participation in 2025 CMAS reading, writing and math exams in Julesburg School District was at 13.5%. The district, which hugs Colorado’s northeastern corner, served 668 students that year.

During the same round of assessments, 8.5% of students in Mancos School District in Colorado’s southwestern corner participated in CMAS reading, writing and math assessments. The district’s student count totaled 511 kids that school year.

In Merino, the long hours some young students spend answering CMAS questions drives the resistance to state exams, Brungardt said.

Likewise, frustration over the fact that students sit for as long as 11 hours during the one-, two- or three-week testing window led a bipartisan group of state lawmakers to call for a working group that would examine how to cut down on CMAS testing time, though their bill ultimately failed.

With serious concerns that his district’s CMAS data misrepresented both the makeup of his students and their proficiency, Brungardt in September asked the state education department to declare his district as one with insufficient data. The request was granted and concluded that the district did not have enough data to indicate how students were performing.

“Students who tested were more likely to be performing below grade-level expectations, while many students who opted out — based on parent choice or absence during testing — were performing at or above grade level,” Brungardt wrote. “This skews results and creates an inaccurate picture of the district’s overall academic performance.”

Daniel Koretz, a retired professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said opt-out numbers impact statewide data along a continuum. The more students who forgo a test, the greater the potential for bias, he said.

“Once you have big opt-out numbers, average scores don’t mean anything anymore,” said Koretz, who has researched standardized testing on and off since the 1980s. “Unless the people who are opting out are sort of typical for the school, which they probably are not, then you don’t know what a school average actually means.”

That creates the possibility for distorted statewide data, Koretz said, adding “and we don’t know how much.”

CMAS is not a perfect tool, but it offers “really good, valuable data” about how students are performing along the “general trajectory set up by the standards,” said Madi Ashour, director of K-12 education policy at the Colorado Children’s Campaign.

It’s critical to remember that the assessment is not a judgment call on students’ ability but rather a reflection of the education system as a whole, Ashour said, describing statewide education data as the “bedrock of educational equity.”

“Without this data, we don’t have a way of seeing where students aren’t getting the supports, the resources and the instruction that they need and deserve,” she said, “and we wouldn’t have a way of systematically addressing those shortfalls.”

State report: Drawing conclusions requires “caution”

Even though 95% of students in Harrison School District 2 take the test, Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of the district in Colorado Springs, is skeptical about its usefulness statewide.

“When we allow opt-outs in the state and we have such a large opt-out population, you cannot say the results are representative of our state,” said Birhanzel, who also served as chair of the state task force that reviewed the state’s accountability system. 

Superintendents’ concerns are backed up by a state-commissioned report published in November 2022 that evaluated Colorado’s school accountability system.

“Ultimately, nonparticipation in state assessments limits the available data about student achievement and growth and negatively affects the ability of school and district leaders, the Department, policymakers, and the public to understand and assess overall school and district performance,” the report stated. “As participation rates decrease and vary across student, school, and district groups, challenges with interpreting results will increase.”

Different student groups may be overrepresented or underrepresented among test-takers in individual schools and districts, the report noted, and “in some cases, conclusions should be drawn with caution or completely avoided.”

Córdova maintains state testing “generally” illustrates a clear enough picture of where students statewide stand in their academics. The department flags individual schools and districts where participation or the student count is too low to yield sound test results, giving disclaimers in cases of insufficient data.

“The vast majority of our schools and districts do have sufficient data to give valid and reliable results,” Córdova said, noting that the state won’t publish test results of schools and districts unless it is confident those results are a true representation of student performance.

One oft-repeated statistic that has emerged from CMAS data infuriates Birhanzel, in Colorado Springs.

“When you see Colorado public education is failing kids because only 30-some percent can read, that’s not accurate because we haven’t tested every student,” she said.

And when people cite that statistic, they often believe it means that many 8-year-olds can’t pick up and book and read the words on each page, said Yates, of Buena Vista School District.

CMAS tests much more than whether a child can simply keep up with words. The assessment asks third graders to read two passages and then compare and contrast them, for example.

“It doesn’t mean that that’s not what a third grade teacher is working on,” said Yates, who also served on the state task force, “but that’s what we’re holding as the standard.”

Even kids who don’t meet state benchmarks can still independently read, state education officials acknowledge. Some simply struggle with “the consistency, depth and quality of their comprehension and communication,” Christina Wirth-Hawkins, chief assessment and state accountability officer for the state education department, said last week while explaining the latest CMAS results.

The statewide statistics also don’t capture the week-by-week wins that play out in schools, often among kids who struggle the most, Birhanzel said.

Public schools educate every student who walks through their doors, Birhanzel said, including third graders who might have never attended school and don’t speak English.

“And those are the stories that we don’t talk about,” she said. “And then we don’t talk about by fifth grade, we got them caught up to third grade and by sixth grade, we got them caught up to fifth grade.” 

“Their learning is more important than what they can do on a state test”

The second week into school at Monterey Elementary School in Colorado Springs, fifth graders followed along as their teacher read aloud a story about civil rights activist Rosa Parks’ childhood, many of them using a pointer finger to trace the words on the page line by line.

A worksheet asked them to explain how Parks’ experiences in school influenced her as an adult and to offer specific examples from the text. Another prompt instructed them to break down differences between schools for Black and white students and expand on how those differences impacted Black students and their families.

Those are the kinds of questions students will face come April when they put their reading comprehension skills to the test on CMAS. The young learners were also preparing for the first of three i-Ready tests, a local assessment that gauges where students are in learning critical reading and math skills. The class took that first exam that same day.

Next door, their peers in a math and science class reviewed addition and subtraction, brushing up on lessons from fourth grade to gear up for fifth grade math. Before the end of class, students formed a giant circle to take turns shouting out multiples of three, four and 10 in a lively game that revved up their excitement for math.

Their teacher, Christie Armstrong, was also beginning to prepare students for skills they’ll confront on CMAS, which she says are, more importantly, life skills.

Now in her 18th year of teaching, Armstrong said CMAS is a helpful tool for educators to see how their students are faring in subjects compared with others in the district and state and understand how students performed on specific math concepts. The results, she said, set her up to improve her teaching for her next set of students.

At the same time, CMAS outcomes cannot “define” kids and their education, Armstrong said.

“Ultimately their learning is more important than what they can do on a state test,” she said. “I want to see their growth every single day, not just in April when we take those tests. I want to see their learning day to day and, if they do that, then normally they do fantastic on CMAS. So I feel like taking the focus away from CMAS actually ends up helping them do better.”

A few of her students said they usually don’t feel many jitters or overwhelming pressure to get a perfect score when standardized test days arrive.

Gianna Gallo, 10, talks about CMAS like it’s any other test, though said occasionally she has a hard time keeping a sharp focus for a full hour while taking the exam.

“Sometimes I like to take a couple breaths and then just think about if everybody around me would appreciate me if I got a really good grade, and that encourages me to keep going,” Gianna said.

Listening to her teachers in class every single day, minus a few distractions here and there, helps her feel prepared.

“As long as you try your best, it’ll be very easy,” Gianna said. “As long as you pay the best attention for the whole year and maybe get distracted maybe once or twice, then it’ll be extremely easy.”

CMAS also doesn’t fluster Alondra Alvarez’s children, a fifth grader at Monterey Elementary School and a sixth grader who attended the school last year. Teachers have reassured both that there’s no reason for nerves. Alvarez said she uses her kids’ results to get more clarity on their academic abilities and pinpoint additional support they might need.

She said the test is preparing her kids for harder exams they’ll take in high school and college, but she also recognizes that one assessment can’t capture the full scope of what kids know, particularly for good students who freeze on tests.

“I always tell my kids to try their best and to always give it 100%,” Alvarez said, “and if they don’t understand something it doesn’t mean they’re not capable of learning in the future.” 

Graduation rates, attendance matter just as much

In other schools, the standardized testing season brings with it groans and fits of anxiety. Birhanzel described it as “one of the worst times of the school year in a school.”

“No educator would tell you that April is anything but testing,” she said. “It totally disrupts April instruction because testing takes over.”

In Buena Vista schools, teachers try to limit test preparation to less than 10% of the school year, Yates, the superintendent, said. Last year, that included setting aside a full day for high schoolers to skip scheduled classes and attend workshops in which teachers guided them through different aspects of test-taking for CMAS, PSAT and the SAT college entrance exams. Students learned strategies to reduce stress as well as how to succeed on multiple choice questions and how to construct written responses.

More of the district’s focus rests on making sure teachers are thoroughly covering the state standards in classes throughout the school year and measuring student progress along the way. Teachers want their students to excel on CMAS exams, Yates said, but not at the cost of other classroom learning.

“We are unwilling to sacrifice quality lifelong learning so that a student does well on this one measure,” she said. 

While trying to keep test pressure manageable for her students, teachers like Armstrong track kids’ strengths and setbacks in all kinds of ways. Armstrong said she displays a word problem on the board for students to write out how they would solve it, which tells her if they understand that day’s lesson. She tests them informally, sometimes throwing out a few problems they must work through to earn “an exit ticket” before the bell rings. And she frequently strolls through her classroom, listening to students discuss concepts and offering individual feedback.

It’s an approach to teaching and learning that many educators, district leaders, state education officials and education advocates can get behind, regardless of where they stand on CMAS. A growing chorus is clamoring for schools to look at student performance from different angles — such as more teacher observations and student demonstrations that better convey what they know and don’t. Some, like Córdova, refer to it as “a body of evidence.” Others call it a portfolio of student work.

Similarly, one metric can’t determine the success of a school, superintendents say. That success is the sum of many other factors beyond test scores — things like attendance, graduation rates, dropout rates, after-school activities — which get drowned out by louder conversations around CMAS.

Preparing students to think critically, continue learning well after high school and do something meaningful with their lives is what drives teachers, Birhanzel said. Not producing expert test-takers.

“And, as a community, we need to then say, ‘But how do we measure that and what does that look like?’ Because one standardized test point is not going to get what we need as a society if we want to continue to grow and do right by our next generation.”