Early Grade Reading in the North State Worsened during the Pandemic

North State Together supports the various interventions that the county networks have already implemented as well as future plans to increase English Language Arts/Literacy and Math for our children. Our region uses shared measurements to evaluate the effectiveness of our initiatives. For Early Grade Reading and Middle Grade Math, we rely on The Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments which are part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) System.

Assessing the impact of the pandemic on children has been difficult during the pandemic since statewide testing was suspended for the 2019-2020 school year and Assembly Bill (AB) 130 suspended the reporting of state indicators on the 2021 California School Dashboard (Dashboard). However, the statute requires that available data that would have been included in the Dashboard are reported on the California Department of Education’s (CDE’s) website if they are determined to be valid and reliable.

Early Grade Reading in the North State Worsened during the Pandemic

North State Together has compiled the recently released 2020-2021 3rd Grade Reading data at the county and state level and further disaggregated the data by ethnicity. Overall the State of California saw a 8.7% drop in students meeting or exceeding reading standards from prepandemic levels. Each of our five counties also saw various levels of English Language Arts/Literacy decline with some demographics being harder hit by the education disruptions brought on by the pandemic. For example, 34.6% of Shasta County American Indian/Alaskan Native 3rd Graders assessed at grade level before the pandemic which dropped to 18.9% for the 2020-2021 test year. North State Together will continue to support targeted, system interventions implemented by our county network teams to address learning loss.