Math Proficiency Rates from a major Public School System show impact of Prolonged School Closures

Major School District Goes All-in on Covid Restrictions, Anti-Racism, & Gender Ideology. Math? Not so much.

I was recently enlisted to help create some visuals to help convey the concerning trend in math proficiency of Middle School students by a parent of a Montgomery County Public school student. I was eager to help, as this is precisely the data I believe was critical to have in order to make proper cost/benefit analysis of school closures and “hybrid” school. Sadly, it was precisely the data we did not have, nor did there seem to be any major effort to collect this in real time as we were closing schools and disrupting student’s lives in the name of safety. The results, in a way, are not shocking. They ARE alarming and awful. But to the parents and students who were abandoned by public school leaders like those in Montgomery County Maryland, this was entirely expected.

I’ll let the chart below speak for itself.

Source: https://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/Graphs/#/Assessments/SpecialAssessments/3/17/6/15/XXXX/2021

Notice that the 2020 School year is missing from the Proficiency charts? That is because like many states- “Maryland received a waiver from the US Department of Education to administer a shortened statewide assessment for the 2020-2021 school year during the early fall of the 2021-2022 school year.” This waiver seems pretty reasonable, as the 20/21 school year was fraught with disruptions, improvisation, and honestly abject chaos as parents scrambled to figure out how to deal with childcare, work, and remote school for their kids. Teachers were left with an almost impossible situation as well, and holding them accountable for something completely out of their control would have been completely unfair. Lets take a look at what the students, parents and teachers had to deal with over the last couple years.