Even as Colorado students are showing signs of rebounding from pandemic-driven learning setbacks, fewer than half of students in grades 3 through 8 are reading on grade level and, in some grades, fewer than a third of students are meeting math expectations.
Standardized tests administered last spring demonstrate that students as a whole are inching in the right direction in core subjects, but many kids still have serious academic leaps to make to get on par with state standards.
The Colorado Department of Education released results from the 2025 Colorado Measures of Academic Success exams and the PSAT and SAT on Thursday afternoon after sharing them with the Colorado State Board of Education.
Colorado districts administer CMAS exams to students in grades 3 through 8 every school year to examine how well individual students and schools are faring in reading and math while also testing fifth, eighth and 11th graders in science. In high school, ninth and 10th grade students put their reading, writing and math skills to the test in the PSAT and 11th graders are assessed in those same subjects through the SAT.
The tests give the Department of Education a way to better understand how kids and schools across Colorado are performing and if they are meeting academic standards set by the state. The department evaluates student proficiency, which refers to whether students are meeting state standards, and student growth, a metric that gauges the amount of progress students make from one school year to another compared with their peers.
The latest round of test results give state education officials reasons to be elated and deflated.
In one major mark of academic momentum, the percent of students in most elementary and middle school grades meeting and exceeding grade-level benchmarks in reading and math matched or surpassed the percent of students excelling in 2019 before the pandemic. And in every elementary and middle school grade, the percentage of students meeting and exceeding grade-level expectations mirrored or improved upon scores from last year.
Meanwhile, 9th graders who took the PSAT and 11th grade students who completed the SAT outperformed students from the previous year in reading and writing. In math, the percentage of 10th graders who met or exceeded benchmarks on the PSAT and the percentage of 11th graders who met or exceeded expectations on the SAT ticked upward.
Still, most Colorado students are not performing at grade level in reading, math and science and student groups that have historically struggled, including children learning English, still trail behind their peers.
Colorado Commissioner Susana Córdova celebrated students’ strides reflected in this year’s data while also acknowledging there is more work to be done.
“We still know both for achievement as well as for gaps that we’re nowhere close to where we would like to be in terms of ensuring that all students are achieving at grade level,” Córdova said during a media briefing Tuesday morning. “We know that our state assessments tell us a lot about students. They don’t tell us everything, but they tell us a lot about how students are performing and how schools are doing.”
Here are some of the big takeaways from test outcomes:
Participation increased from last year across most grades and subjects
Participation rates on CMAS tests and the PSAT and SAT held steady or jumped modestly in most grades and subjects from 2024 exams, state data shows. But participation rates still have not caught up to 2019 across the board.
Participation on standardized assessments took a significant hit during the pandemic but, year by year, more students have opted back into the tests.
Similar to last year, elementary schoolers had the highest rates of participation this past spring, with between about 92% and 94% of students sitting for CMAS exams in reading and math.
Middle school and high school test takers tended to turn out in greater numbers than in 2024 as well, but their rates of participation skewed lower than kids in younger grades. Participation among middle schoolers ranged from about 90% in reading and math for grade 6 down to 80% for reading in grade 8.
Participation on the PSAT and SAT hovered between 84% and a little more than 86%.
Mimicking past years, the lowest turnout for exams was in CMAS science exams, particularly in grade 11, in which only about 52% of students sat for the test — just barely higher than the participation rate in 2024.
Officials from the state education department noted that they also study demographics of students who complete the tests to compare how closely the composition of test takers resembles the composition of Colorado’s general student body.
“Across all of these grades and tests, we really have tight matches comparing our tested population to our enrolled population,” Christina Wirth-Hawkins, chief assessment officer for the department, said during Tuesday’s media conference. “This gives us confidence in the interpretation of our results at the state level.”
Fourth and eighth graders are still lagging in literacy, compared to scores before COVID
On the whole, reading scores in grades 3 through 8 paralleled outcomes from last year. Students in grades 5 through 8 performed better than their peers in 2024, with the most significant improvement in grade 7 — 48.8% of students met or exceeded expectations in reading in 2025 compared with 46.3% the year before, according to state data.
Most grades are also returning to performance levels recorded before the pandemic. However, fourth graders and eighth graders’ scores remain lower than scores in 2019 — the second year in a row for their scores to come up short.
Forty-two percent of fourth grade students met or exceeded grade-level benchmarks in reading this year, down from 48% in 2019 while 43.9% of eighth graders met or exceeded grade-level standards in reading, down from 46.9% in 2019.
State education officials cited fourth grade as a particularly important year of learning in literacy — in fourth grade, the goal is for students to have shifted from learning to read to reading to learn.
Córdova described fourth grade as a point when historically the rigor of learning increases. In third grade, educators typically are still evaluating foundational skills in reading while in grade 4, students must apply their literacy skills to understand texts.
“We certainly think that it’s going to be important that we’re continuing the full court press on both stronger foundational skills, attendance, engagement, all of the work,” Córdova said. “We’ve had such a big focus on early literacy and we definitely are seeing that when students get to third grade if they’re not at that level where we need them to be, that they continue and persist in struggling.”
With a statewide push to get more kids on track with literacy, the state education department has a goal for 60% of third graders to be reading on grade level by 2028.
“We know that as a department and as a state, we’re really focusing on literacy, especially early literacy,” Wirth-Hawkins said, noting last year marked the final year of the rollout of the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act. “We’re going to be continuing to prioritize this, and it’s something that we are hoping to see even larger gains on in future years. But it is encouraging that in most cases, we are staying stable above our pre-pandemic rates, and in many cases even making improvements.”
Students in many grades are making encouraging splashes in math
Everyone from individual Colorado educators and schools to the state education department to even Gov. Jared Polis has touted the need to nurture students’ appetite for math and hone their math skills — and the payoff is beginning to take shape.
State officials sounded the alarm on widespread student struggles in math in 2023 after the pandemic took a particularly heavy toll on kids’ performance in math. Polis and the General Assembly swooped in with legislation passed into law that year that ramped up training opportunities in math for teachers and aimed to provide more resources to parents to help their child hone their math skills at home.
Some of those efforts appear to be working, with a greater percentage of students in grades 4 through 7 meeting or exceeding expectations than their counterparts who took the exams in 2024 and in 2019. Tenth graders who took the PSAT and 11th graders who took the SAT also showed gains in math, according to state data.
“Math is an area that we really want to highlight and spotlight and celebrate because we’re seeing a lot of positive movement and momentum in math,” Wirth-Hawkins said. “Math was a content area that was really hard hit during the pandemic. We had a lot of disrupted learning, and when we first came back and looked at results directly after 2019, we saw some of our lowest math results that we’ve seen. And each year since then, we’re seeing stairstep improvements, which is exactly what we want to see.”
When asked what is behind the promising results in math, state education officials cited Zearn as one resource that has likely helped students boost their math skills. The state invested about $10 million of federal COVID relief dollars into the online math platform, which reinforces grade-level math skills for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. About two-thirds of school districts took advantage of the math tool during the 2023-24 school year, according to CDE.
“Certainly, I think that’s part of it,” Córdova said. “We saw enormous declines in mathematics during the pandemic, and so in part I think what we’re seeing is the really necessary recovery efforts. But the fact that we’ve seen gains year over year over year at this point, I think, is a real indication that the focus, the legislation, the resources are really paying off.”
Still, many students continue to flounder in math. Even with the improvements in scores from the 2025 exams, the majority of Colorado kids still aren’t proficient in their math skills. Less than half of students in every tested grade met or exceeded grade-level standards in math. For example, 36.5% of fourth grade students met or exceeded grade-level expectations in math while 39.1% of fifth graders and 31.4% of sixth grade students met or exceeded expectations.
“We are nowhere close to where we need to be when it comes to math, and math still lags where we are with literacy,” Córdova said. “And the only way we’ll catch up is to continue to have year-over-year gains both in achievement and in growth. I think the real push that we have now is how do we accelerate growth, particularly for the groups of students who are furthest from where they need to be? And that improvement effort is not happening equally across the state. We know that we need more supports, and we need to learn from places that are doing the best work in math.”