Below is a press release from Governor Tate Reeves:
Governor Tate Reeves recently announced that the Mississippi Department of Education, Mississippi State University Research and Curriculum Unit, and analytics software company SAS have published a tool that shows the pandemic’s effects on student achievement and progress and how school districts are allocating federal funds to support student learning. The analysis isolates the impact of the pandemic on student groups, and a public dashboard provides results to educators and school leaders to help guide recovery.
“In Mississippi, we kept our kids in the classroom so they could receive in-person instruction, and that made all the difference in their education results,” said Governor Tate Reeves. “This new dashboard provides a great opportunity for the public to access and analyze education data and better understand the work being done to continue improving Mississippi’s education system.”
The State of Mississippi has been widely lauded for its transformative education efforts, which many have dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.” Its students have seen the largest gains in the nation in fourth grade reading and fourth grade math as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card). Recently, the National Institute for Early Education Research recognized Mississippi as one of the top five states for high-quality pre-K, and Mississippi’s high school graduation rate is currently at an all-time high and better than the national average.
The pandemic did affect student achievement and progress in Mississippi as it did in all states. The new dashboard shows that, while students were negatively impacted in 2021, they largely performed close to their pre-pandemic expectations in 2022. Mississippi is one of many states teaming with SAS to measure the impact of COVID-19 using statistical approaches proven over decades. In these approaches, students are compared to themselves. The analyses predict how students would have scored on assessments absent the pandemic. By comparing those results to the expected scores and assessing how students performed versus how they were expected to perform, one can aggregate results at the school, district, and student group levels.
The Mississippi study calculates pre-pandemic expectations using historical state assessment data through 2019 and compares both 2020-21 and 2021-22 MAAP results to those expectations.
Mississippi’s online, interactive dashboard offers insights into how different student groups fared during the pandemic. Measuring the varying amount of impact on student groups is essential to targeted recovery efforts to bridge gaps in educational achievement.
The dashboard also enables users to see how each school district in Mississippi is investing their federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. These pandemic-relief funds are intended to help students accelerate learning and can be used to improve school facilities.
Mississippians can interact with the dashboard here.
