MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – “You can’t put enough lipstick on the pig. They’re terrible. Plain and simple,” state Board of Education President Paul Hardesty said last week on “MetroNews Talkline,” after release of the state Department of Education’s assessment from the 2021-22 academic year.
In Monongalia County, superintendent Eddie Campbell said all proficiency scores have dropped statewide, but Monongalia County continues to trend above state averages in the 2021-2022 report. Proficiency for Monongalia County students is nearly 10 percentage points higher in Math, Reading and Science than the state average.
“There’s no shortage of data that we’ll have available to us,” Campbell said. “Teachers, building level principals and all the other people that support those folks, so we’ll be digging deep into that data to see what we need to do to improve our scores overall.”
Compared to the pre-pandemic assessment in 2018-2019, proficiency assessments in Monongalia County dropped about five percent in math, about one percent for reading and about three percent in science. The decline over the same period was three percent for math, about two percent for reading and and an increase in about three percent for science.
“It wasn’t nearly as bad as maybe we were hoping it wouldn’t be,” Campbell said. “We didn’t see the same effects as many of our college as around the state, but we definitely saw a drop off.”
Students are back in the classroom, but studies have said in-person instruction is preferred. Online learning has decreased communication and interaction between the students and with the teachers. The lack of personal contact and isolation has reportedly resulted in a lack of motivation and understanding of the material.
“We’re still going to see the impact of those 2 1/2 to 3-years where things were so irregular from an instructional standpoint,” Campbell said. “And we’ve already started to address some of those tings- we did that last year.”
According to Campbell, methods use to rank all 50 state for proficiency aren’t really a fair assessment. In the spring of 2021, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona issued guidance for all states to conduct tests, but gave each state the authority to shorten the test if there were pandemic concerns.
“If people really truly wanted to compare states and how they test across the board they could come up with some more consistancy in that process,” Campbell said. “But, that doesn’t mean we’re not looking at these numbers and saying we can’t do better.”
Campbell said the district performance at the state level has always been a point of pride for staff and faculty. When teachers arrive for their first day August 18 Campbell said work to implement the improvement plan will begin.
“We know people judge us by those numbers and we understand we want to get better and we have to get better,” Campbell said.
The first day for K through 12 students is August 23.