Education officials offered differing explanations and solutions to recent student learning losses during a joint legislative interim study held amid state education funding increasing 35% in the past five years to a record $3.2 billion.

Rep. Rhonda Baker, R-Yukon, the chair of the House Common Education Committee, and Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, chair of the Senate Education Committee, held the joint study to examine student learning loss reported both before and during the pandemic.

“Despite record education funding, student performance even before the pandemic has been flat or declining,” Baker said after the study. “I appreciate all the legislators and education experts who helped study this situation. Our state’s results are distressing, so we all must work together proactively, not defensively, to do more for Oklahoma’s students.”

Baker and Pugh held the joint study to focus on solutions to help students recover.

The Oklahoma State Department of Education released statewide scores showing only 22.1% of all Oklahoma students tested are proficient in math, and 24.8% in English language arts.

“While the pandemic resulted in similar challenges in other states, the study showed Oklahoma’s are deeper,” Pugh said. “More must be done to prepare students for further education, the workforce and the world. The study confirms it is time to redouble efforts for better outcomes for our students.”

During the study, Bradley Ward with the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) and Cody Allen with the Southern Legislative Conference showed Oklahoma results in comparison to surrounding states. Ward showed that Oklahoma fared worse in performance than Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Colorado despite similar time lost to in-person instruction during the pandemic.

Allen said this will affect the job market in the future and the overall state economy.

Allen showed how several other states have addressed the learning loss. Most efforts focus on intensive tutoring, one-on-one or small-group instruction models and after-school or summer learning. One solution was to move struggling students to classrooms with a highly effective teacher. Lawmakers asked about solutions that can take place inside the classroom and questioned how some of these efforts could be undertaken given the current teacher shortage that exists nationwide.

Several presenters showed student performance on state exams improves with in-person learning vs. virtual. Presenters also reported that lack of reliable high-speed Internet or access to personal devices at the home level played a factor.

Baker said while tests don’t show a full picture of student learning, they are the best way for the state to ensure students learned at least some Oklahoma standards, are ready for the next grade, and eventually ready for graduation, higher learning and the workforce.

Baker and other lawmakers in the joint study pointed out the number of state students proficient in English language arts and math was low even prior to the pandemic. Legislators pointed specifically to the low number of elementary school students who can read on grade level and said this is a decades-long problem.

According to state officials, when the pandemic hit, statewide testing participation rates dropped amid federal testing waivers granted to Oklahoma and 35 other states. Low participation amid the waivers makes it appropriate to use spring exam results to compare between districts since participation rates were not uniform across the state. This led numerous legislators to ask why some school districts tested as few as 30% of their students while others tested more than 90%.

Several presenters showed student performance on state exams improves with in-person learning rather than virtual environments. Presenters also reported that lack of reliable high-speed Internet or access to personal devices at home can effect outcomes.

Mike Capobianco and Mary LeFebvre with ACT provided insights gleaned from the college ready assessment taken by most state high school students, showing expected learning loss on that exam, as well. LeFebvre said Oklahoma’s results were mostly consistent with the nation, but one surprise was that urban and suburban students seemed to fare worse than their rural peers. ACT does not track mode of instruction, however, so they could not postulate on whether this was because rural schools stayed open for in person learning while urban or suburban schools closed or provided virtual learning.

Funding will come from federal relief dollars, which made several lawmakers question how the programs will be continued after relief funds are gone.

They said remediation rates were high pre-pandemic and they continue to be high now. They also reported college enrollment is down with many high school seniors after the 2019-2020 school year reporting they planned to take several years off before attending college. These “gap” students are particularly concerning, college representatives said.