COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio students have improved in recent years in English language arts and math on state school report cards, but scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, new state data shows.
The latest school and district report card ratings, which the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce released Sept. 13, show that more progress needs to be made in those subjects.
READ MORE: Ohio report card day: Cleveland schools shows improvement, outperforms Columbus, Cincinnati
In the spring of 2020, Gov. Mike DeWine became the first governor in the country to send students home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, for which no vaccine was available at the time.
The state canceled the school and district report cards for that school year since many students did not take the standardized tests from which scores are calculated. In the following years, school attendance has been spotty, as schools with high infection rates sent students home and held classes online. Children who were sick also missed in-person classes.
Even during the 2023-2024 school year, years after the vaccine’s availability, 25.6% of students were chronically absent, which is defined by missing 10% or more of the school year, said Chris Woolard, DEW’s chief integration officer.
“We did see some incremental improvements in math, particularly in grades four through seven and algebra statewide,” Woolard said Thursday during a bimonthly DEW meeting. “Yet it’s only about 53.4% of students who are proficient in math statewide.”
Math proficiency rates have improved each of the last four years, but they still are far below the statewide average before the shutdowns:
2019 (pre-pandemic): 61%
2020: No report cards
2021: 48.2%
2022: 50.5%
2023: 53%
2024: 53.5%
For English language arts, 60.9% of students were proficient, which is the same score as last year, and up from the two years before then. Like math, statewide proficiency rates still lag behind 2019 levels:
2019 (pre-pandemic): 64.6%
2020: No report cards
2021: 57%
2022: 59.5%
2023: 60.9%
2024: 60.9%
Woolard expressed optimism that English language arts scores will improve now that the law requires all public schools to teach literacy using the “science of reading” approach.
The science of reading emphasizes phonics, vocabulary and comprehension over the method known as “three-cueing,” “whole language” or “balanced literacy,” that generally emphasizes meaning from context, visual information and syntax, which is word and sentence order, subject-verb agreement and verb tenses.
Chad Aldis of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank and charter school sponsor, said that Ohio students’ proficiency levels in English language arts are now close to pre-pandemic levels. Math scores are another story, he said.
“It is growing increasingly concerning that this pandemic-era decline is going to become a permanent lowering of Ohio students’ achievement in math,” he said. “… If we’re being honest with ourselves, our achievement for our students was not enough pre-pandemic, and now we’ve adjusted the goalposts to say, ‘If we can only get back to pre-pandemic levels, that’s fantastic.’ But most advocates were saying we need to do better for our students.”
As with the efforts to improving literacy, he said, there needs to be a similar plan in numeracy.
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Laura Hancock covers state government and politics for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.
