The following is a note from Devon Milley, the editor in chief of The Diamondback, in regard to “PGCPS sees big losses in geometry and algebra proficiency”:
On April 11, The Diamondback published “PGCPS sees big losses in geometry and algebra proficiency,” an analysis of 2019 and 2022 MCAP results from the Maryland State Department of Education.
The article contained numerous incorrect analyses due to inaccurate interpretations of the data and mathematically invalid calculations.
The Diamondback expects its articles to be factually accurate, and this article did not meet those standards. We have updated the story with the correct numbers from the education department’s website. The Github repository with our original analyses has been taken down, so other people do not use or create incorrect analyses.
We are taking steps to ensure all data stories go through a stronger editing process going forward. We regret this error.
Just 14.4 percent of Prince George’s County Public Schools high school students were proficient in geometry in 2022 — a 50.2 percentage point decrease from 2019 — according to the spring 2022 Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program results.
MCAP, the test that aims to determine the academic proficiency of Maryland public school students, showed a sharp decrease in high school math proficiency across the state since 2019. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “nation’s report card,” also indicated math test scores had their largest drop in 2022 among fourth and eighth graders nationwide.
Prince George’s County saw a four percentage point decrease in Algebra 1 proficiency since 2019. In contrast, English language arts proficiency increased about 20 percentage points in Prince George’s County, but is still among the lowest proficiency levels in the state.
David Blazar, an education policy associate professor at the University of Maryland, said the performance drop is consistent with what he has seen in the education field.
“This is likely a story about how resources were allocated to specific districts and to specific communities — Black communities — as the [COVID-19] pandemic was going on,” Blazar said. “This has to be a story about resource allocation more than it says anything about individual kids or communities.”
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Prince George’s County is 64.1 percent Black or African American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. School learning, the quality of online education and time in school could all be assets that not every community has access to, Blazar said.
Prince George’s County Council member Edward Burroughs III, the chair of the council’s education and workforce development committee, said he is concerned about the drop in scores, but acknowledged resource deficiencies between middle class families and families in poverty.
“It is just a matter of fact that social economics play a role in educational outcomes. And it’s up to the school district and the county to step up in a major way to fund programs and initiatives,” Burroughs said.
Both Blazar and Larry Washington, a mathematics professor and the mathematics department’s associate undergraduate studies chair at this university, said it is understandable that math scores plunged while English scores only slightly fluctuated in comparison.
“[Students] don’t just do math as they’re walking down the street, but you read things all the time,” Washington said.
Meanwhile, students mainly learn math in a classroom rather than in informal, out-of-classroom settings, Blazar said.
University President Darryll Pines said learning deficits — even among kindergarten to high school students — are worrying.
“It’s not just the learning deficit that we see from high schoolers who come to College Park, but I think there’s a learning deficit all across all K-12 education that we should all be worried about,” Pines said. “Because they’re all going to come up and eventually down the road, go to universities, hopefully.”
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University President Darryll Pines said learning deficits — even among kindergarten to high school students — are worrying.
“It’s not just the learning deficit that we see from high schoolers who come to College Park, but I think there’s a learning deficit all across all K-12 education that we should all be worried about,” Pines said. “Because they’re all going to come up and eventually down the road, go to universities, hopefully.”
This university is looking into math mentoring options, and it uses the math placement test to ensure freshmen are placed in appropriate math classes. Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice has been working with a team to recommend how the university can help mitigate learning loss, Pines said.
This university also delivers virtual math lessons to PGCPS on a 2020 request from the PGCPS CEO at the time, Monica Goldson, which Pines said helped foster a closer relationship between PGCPS and this university.
“It’s been one of the little jewels that have come out of the pandemic,” Pines said, “It was a way for us to do service … with our students from Prince George’s County and with the county school system in general.”
While MCAP results can signify whether a student is ready to move onto the next level in mathematics, Washington said he expects the dramatic decreases in math proficiency will level off over the next few years.
“Four years from now, the entering freshmen will have been in middle school … middle school is still a pretty formative time, but you can recover from that,” Washington said. “It’s hard to recover from 10th and 11th grade.”
Even though MCAP scores can be used to predict a student’s knowledge on specific content, whether a student will graduate high school or go to college, Blazar warns not to rely too heavily on test scores to determine learning ability.
“It tells us a lot more about the contextual factors and resource allocation that was happening at a community level and kind of a national level … more than it says that an individual kid is unable to learn,” Blazar said.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story inaccurately reported the proficiency percentages for Geometry, Algebra I and ELA 10 MCAP scores in Prince George’s County. This story, its headline and graphics have been updated.
